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Linguistics

lachlanm.me · 1,367 words · saved by 1 readers

When I first read Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, I was rather annoyed — he’s allegedly one of the most influential philosophers of history, and yet if I want to know what he actually thinks, first I have to wade through 120 pages of him defining nebulous terms. And it’s not like he defines them well — he mainly constructs his definitions with other similarly nebulous terms. It feels as though most philosophers do this. Even with more prosaic writers like Nietzsche, once you’re halfway through chapter 5 and start processing chapter 4, you realize that chapters 1-3 were mainly lemmaic and served solely to introduce the reader to the prerequisite terminology. I’ve recently come to appreciate how necessary this is, inconvenient though it may be (both for the reader and the writer). The underlying realization: most interesting topics can not be expressed with language. I don’t mean “we don’t have the terms to describe this experience/feeling yet,” rather, I mean it in a mor

Linguistics Linguistics, Real-Time Discourse, and Why I Don’t Like LessWrong Very Much (1301 Words) Why do Philosophers Suck at Writing? When I first read Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , I was rather annoyed — he’s allegedly one of the most influential philosophers of history, and yet if I want to know what he actually thinks, first I have to wade through 120 pages of him defining nebulous terms. And it’s not like he defines them well — he mainly constructs his definitions with other similarly nebulous terms. It feels as though most philosophers do this. Even with more prosaic

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