“Communism bad”
“Why?”
200 year old tropes so ancient they were debunked by Marx himself
Of course, you go through the motions of explaining the most basic political concepts that could be grasped by skimming the cliff notes for literally any Marxist works
“Friedrich Engels? Is he like the president of Germany or something?”
It’s like a kindergartener trying to teach you calculus.
Hard agree. My favorite definition of the field is Wilfred Sellers’: “the aim of philosophy is to study how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Some education–and experience in thinking about that stuff–is invaluable no matter what you’re doing; it’s the field of study that is (or at least can be) most laser-focused on critical thinking skills. I’d never advise anyone to get a PhD in it, but it absolutely should be part of general high school and college curricula, and it’s an extremely versatile and valuable undergraduate major.
Agree again. Teasing out relatively mundane positions from deliberately impenetrable texts isn’t super useful for most people, and while it might give you some transferrable skill in exegesis, there are better ways to spend your time. A good philosophical education should focus on clarity of expression, rigorous thought, and careful definition of the terms/groundwork of a problem. Those are all incredibly useful skills, and are invaluable in seeing exactly how fucked up our contemporary economic system is. A good philosophical education will also make you comfortable asking “why” questions about things that are, to most people, just transparent parts of the status quo: it teaches you to be bothered by ordinary things, which is the first step toward awakening from (so to speak) the dogmatic slumber of liberal indoctrination.
Yeah I actually had Sellars’ definition in mind when I said that :) Interestingly Sellars begain philosophically as a Marxist from time spent in Europe and then unfortunately moved away from this, but was always firmly on the left from what I understand. Not very different to Hilary Putnam if we’re talking about yankie analytic philosophers. Obviously the value of their work is abstract not very socially or politically relevant. You can see a Marxist/Hegelian influence in his later thought though, and he put forward a process-based metaphysics at points.
I agree that I would never recomment someone to get a philosophy PhD but that’s mainly because it will be a very stressful experience and not worth if jobs-wise unless they already feel they are getting selected by certain profs for future careers.
On the Baudrillard point I think it’s also because, given his rejection of a scientific approach to philosophy as Marxism would ideally like to establish and be based on, there’s necessarily also a rejection of concern for evidence and critically analyzing what the criteria or conditions for evidence, verification, confirmation, and systematic progress of the field are, and in Baudrillard I think this actually leads to an incoherent theory of signs. Obviously not important but it is for me a case study of the decline of critical though in many parts of academia, and which correlates strongly with the decline of Marxism in these places. I do also obvs agree that some of these (ahem, mainly French) thinkers are needlessly obscure. I’d add that they’re not necessarily less obscure in French.
Also ofc agree with your last comment. It’s a shame that there’s a tendency you sometimes see where people associate those things with ‘boring positivist analytics’, but is weird as a supposed rebuttal by itself, but also speaks to an ignorance of not only analytic thought by also the history of Marxist philosophy.