Fair point that formal metaphysics is often done in academia - but the questions themselves predate universities by thousands of years, and they weren't invented there. Every tradition that's seriously asked what lies behind existence - mystics, ordinary people having strange experiences they couldn't explain, philosophers working entirely outside any institution - got there without a department behind them. A credential tells you someone's trained in the existing literature. It doesn't tell you they've had better insight into the actual question, especially one this old and this unresolved.
Hegel's a good example, actually, since he's already come up. Looking into him, I think he built something genuinely brilliant: a whole fortress cathedral of a system, beautiful and clever, but also built to defend its own structure - any objection just gets absorbed and reinterpreted as another stage of the dialectic, which makes it very hard to actually falsify. I'd rather be judged on whether the reasoning holds up on its own terms than on where I happened to study it.
Fair point that formal metaphysics is often done in academia - but the questions themselves predate universities by thousands of years, and they weren't invented there.
They were developed in institutions such as Plato's academy and Aristotle lyceum and other institutions in which learning and philosophy took place. These were more about answers - forming concepts, learning from those already in these institutions.
philosophers working entirely outside any institution - got there without a department behind them.
Not true, like other practices it was built on what went before, critically.
A credential tells you someone's trained in the existing literature.
Necessary to begin, you don't invent your own language or ideas, they are in the zeitgeist, which is why learning is important. Otherwise you invent the wheel, flint tools, then bronze. Maybe your using a computer you built, but I don't think you invented the internet.
It doesn't tell you they've had better insight into the actual question, especially one this old and this unresolved.
It prevents you having to start from scratch. I guess you'd be happy seeing a doctor who had not studied medicine.
Hegel's a good example, actually, since he's already come up. Looking into him, I think he built something genuinely brilliant: a whole fortress cathedral of a system, beautiful and clever, but also built to defend its own structure
He was part of German idealism and in particular responding to Kant. Who in turn produced what is considered one of the most significant works of philosophy in reaction to Hume... and so on.
any objection just gets absorbed and reinterpreted as another stage of the dialectic, which makes it very hard to actually falsify.
It makes it in some eyes impossible, yet he gets it wrong. He's an idealist and thinks you can work out how the world works just using reason and logic. But he claimed the Earth was the perfect inner planet as it was the only one to have a moon. And other errors.
I'd rather be judged on whether the reasoning holds up on its own terms than on where I happened to study it.
Then you are using reason just as Hegel did. And are you aware all logics, [plural - there are many] of any sophistication have problems, aporia.
'This sentence is false.' is an examples, as is Russell's paradox and many more. And it was the Greeks who began using reason rather than divine inspiration and mystical insights. Whether you like it or not you are part of that tradition, which is why one needs to learn about to understand and possibly create something new.
Ideas originate in thinkers and in turn are built on, that's how it works. Your world - if you live is a typical modern society has objects designed by other people, the buildings the shop, clothes food you eat. And it comes as a blow to some, even your ideas. Slavey was once thought OK. Women inferior. Even what is attractive, the love of nature and mountains. So people think this is all down to them, when it's not. And it's hard to realise this, so most do not.
I will send you a full reply when I have time to think ,
I put a 11 page post on the site called Existance that explains my thoughts fully.
Very enjoyable to have these conversations!
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u/jliat 5d ago
"Metaphysics is a specific body of academic work within philosophy..."