/lit/ - Literature

>>22980206
Let's establish some common ground.

Consider: sometimes a thing — a word, an institution — has cultural power, usually accumulated through decades of real-life success and usefulness and the competence of the people who were involved. Activists notice that a thing has cultural power, and hijack it, turning it into a tool for the activist cause, draining it of the usefulness before moving onto new sources of cultural power, while denying that anything has changed. This is the modus operandi of the various gendxr studies activists who made a nest in the academy to hijack its cultural power despite their resentment at the "white heteronormative" nature of said power. They do not practice anything resembling science, their studies do not replicate, yet the contents of feminist journals and sociology journals are wielded as ideological cudgels by the priestly classes and the chattering classes, the assorted Ta-Nehisi Coateses and Amanda Marcottes. This, while academia is steadily losing ever more of its erstwhile prestige among wide strata of the population.

If academic alchemy still existed, alchemists would be trying to leech off the cultural power of chemistry — which has yielded much of the material abundance of today's world — would be trying to claim chemistry as a subfield of alchemy or a descendant, all while rejecting the foundational precepts that had rendered chemistry a force of creation and a cultural power.

The case of philosophy and science is much the same, and we need not retrace here the tedious choreography of "mhhhm science is really a philosophy you chud ever heard of Newton ever heard of natural philosophy nail polish emoji". But if science is to philosophy as chemistry is to alchemy, where does that leave philosophy? I claim that the closest counterpart to contemporary philosophy is theology.

We thus arrive at a resolution to the original inquiry. What is the closest counterpart to analytic philosophy? That is the Talmud, and indeed yeshiva graduates, and Orthodox Jews more generally, will often be successful computer scientists, economists or mathematicians. Barry Simon, Robert Aumann to name two eminent ones, and any graduate in the sciences will know some personally. What of gender philosophy? That will be the $2-booklet theology, such as it is, of New Age, indigo children, Wicca, and others in that vein.

I shall go so far as to suggest that all branches of philosophy are in nearly a one-to-one relationship with the various theologies humanity has concocted — for neither philosophy nor theology is constrained experimentally by reality, and so there must be as many varieties as there are common personality types to whom they appeal. To each after their own fashion.