“While it’s true that ‘very many’ (for some values of ‘very many’) think Hegel is a fraud, he’s still both popular and influential.”
So? Those are not criteria that are useful for judging correctness—neither correctness in general, nor the correctness of the societies in question.
The site is Less Wrong, not Less Unpopular. We need to be concerned with what rightness and wrongness are, how we can distinguish between the two, and how we can recursively use the ability to tell one from the other to improve our ability to tell one from the other. Popularity / prestige not only has nothing to do with correctness, it tends to reinforce itself blindly.
Hegel is a grossly unfair example, totally unrepresentative the class “great thinkers in philosophy” and recognized as a fraud by very many within philosophy.
Basically, pointing out that Hegel is not so unrepresentative of “great thinkers in philosophy”, and the “very many” obscures a very large number of people who think he’s not a fraud.
What matters is whether Hegel was a fraud, not how many people believe that he was / wasn’t a fraud.
In terms of resolving that question, noting his popularity simply isn’t helpful. It wouldn’t matter if every single human being who had ever lived was convinced that Hegel was immensely valuable / completely worthless. All that matters is what he and his message were, how corrrect they are, and in what ways.
What matters is whether Hegel was a fraud, not how many people believe that he was / wasn’t a fraud.
I don’t believe that’s what matters to this discussion. In the article we’re talking about, Stove gives some representative examples of ‘great thinkers in philosophy’ and wonders whether we should go about revering such people, and whether we have any good way of understanding exactly what’s wrong with certain types of thinking. MichaelVassar argued that Hegel is not really a good representative of this class of people, and I was arguing that he is. I think this argument is relevant to the discussion of the article, whatever you’d rather we were discussing.
No, I don’t think that whether Hegel was a fraud has any relevance to whether he belongs in the reference class “Great thinkers in philosophy”. Whether “Great thinkers in philosophy” are frauds is relevant to whether we should revere them, which is the topic of Stove’s article, not my dispute with MichaelVassar.
“While it’s true that ‘very many’ (for some values of ‘very many’) think Hegel is a fraud, he’s still both popular and influential.”
So? Those are not criteria that are useful for judging correctness—neither correctness in general, nor the correctness of the societies in question.
The site is Less Wrong, not Less Unpopular. We need to be concerned with what rightness and wrongness are, how we can distinguish between the two, and how we can recursively use the ability to tell one from the other to improve our ability to tell one from the other. Popularity / prestige not only has nothing to do with correctness, it tends to reinforce itself blindly.
I was responding to:
Basically, pointing out that Hegel is not so unrepresentative of “great thinkers in philosophy”, and the “very many” obscures a very large number of people who think he’s not a fraud.
I wouldn’t think you’d disagree.
What matters is whether Hegel was a fraud, not how many people believe that he was / wasn’t a fraud.
In terms of resolving that question, noting his popularity simply isn’t helpful. It wouldn’t matter if every single human being who had ever lived was convinced that Hegel was immensely valuable / completely worthless. All that matters is what he and his message were, how corrrect they are, and in what ways.
I don’t believe that’s what matters to this discussion. In the article we’re talking about, Stove gives some representative examples of ‘great thinkers in philosophy’ and wonders whether we should go about revering such people, and whether we have any good way of understanding exactly what’s wrong with certain types of thinking. MichaelVassar argued that Hegel is not really a good representative of this class of people, and I was arguing that he is. I think this argument is relevant to the discussion of the article, whatever you’d rather we were discussing.
You don’t think that whether Hegel was a fraud has any relevance to whether we should revere him?
Remarkable.
No, I don’t think that whether Hegel was a fraud has any relevance to whether he belongs in the reference class “Great thinkers in philosophy”. Whether “Great thinkers in philosophy” are frauds is relevant to whether we should revere them, which is the topic of Stove’s article, not my dispute with MichaelVassar.