I guess it's a reflection of the human tendency to think we are smarter than we actually are and to want everyone else to agree with that self-appraisal. Don't expect that to end anytime soon. ;)

Like @Baden says, it's common for people who aren't familiar with something to think that its practitioners are wasting their time or that they know all the answers. Sometimes it takes a bit of experience to understand what's at stake in certain debates. But of course, philosophy is supposed to break us of this habit. What, then, explains how an MA student makes this sort of grievous mistake? Surely he would not have been equally dismissive of, say, David Lewis' equally expansive metaphysics simply on the grounds that it is difficult to understand. As such, it seems relevant that this video is about Schopenhauer. Even in philosophy departments, anything considered to be outside of the analytic tradition is often considered a fair target for casual derision (unless, of course, that department does not focus on analytic philosophy). It's an unfortunate prejudice, and one that remains firmly entrenched even among many who ought to know better.

This is THE reason I have come to love philosophy, at least "good" philosophy. Outside of this, you get idiots proclaiming they know that God doesn't exist on their cheesy blog, with ten stupid little jabs at religion. Or people who assume consequentialism is just obviously true, that moral realism is obviously wrong, and that their elementary, intellectual antics are super amazeballs compared to the serious work done by philosophers in the past. This is not to say that I am immune to spouting idiotic stuff, rather just that I am fed up with the arrogance of the average person.

One problem is that it takes a pretty special person to read deeply into a philosopher that they think is completely on the wrong track. Personally I have a huge prejudice against continental philosophy and am very dismissive of your Derridas and Heideggers without picking up much by way way of an original source from either. Having said that I am unlikely to film a polemic about them and post to YouTube, I simply don't know their work well.

I suppose we are all a bit guilty of dismissing writers without giving them much of a chance. I am reasonably sure that delving into continental philosophy will not reveal anything to me, yet am profoundly annoyed when others dismiss Sam Harris without actually reading his work. I'm not sure I know of a solution, or one that doesn't result in me reading a bunch of rubbish.

I'm not sure I know of a solution — invizzy

The solution is to overcome your prejudices.

Like I say, a solution that doesn't result me in reading a bunch of rubbish. :)

That sort of isn't a problem if you are fine with reading something, whether it turns out to be rubbish or not.

If you've got a prejudice against reading anything you don't already know, on the chance you might end-up encountering some rubbish, your reading list of new material is going to be extremely small.

The solution is to overcome your prejudices — jamalrob

I more or less agree with this but I wonder how much freedom we actually have on this point. Can we really know what judgments of ours are a result of prejudices? And aren't all our judgments prejudiced to some degree just by virtue of who we are?

I'm also unsure whether I want to, or should, overcome my prejudices. The world of philosophy is a big place and with some reliability can say the vast amount of writing I would dismiss as continental I would find less pleasurable, less easy to understand, and less relevant to my academic studies than the huge amount of stuff I want to read that I consider smack bang in my wheelhouse.

He thinks some things schop thought was stupid, you think some things he thinks are stupid, and it's a big circle. Smart people say things I think are persuasive and interesting, and stupid people don't get the things I think are obvious, and disagree with the former.

There is also an ironic dismissal of the obvious, that I think is pretty dumb. Like "sure, we're highly conditioned, but we can realize what conditions us, and escape this", i.e. I'm the exception.

That all said, misunderstanding is a great source of creativity, and novelty. It isn't obvious, or necessary that a misunderstanding will be less correct, interesting, or innovative than the source, it will just not be as representative of the source, but oh well, we rarely quote barers of absolute truth,

yet am profoundly annoyed when others dismiss Sam Harris without actually reading his work. — invizzy

This is a curious example to use. You don't necessarily need to actually read his work to understand that he is spouting the same old stuff philosophers have been saying, except it's outdated by over a century. It's embarrassing to call his work philosophy. He's not a philosopher, he's a neuroscientist who dabbles in philosophy and makes a fool of himself when he tries to merge the two domains.

The only work by Schopenhauer I'm certain I read is The Wisdom of Life. I may have read other essays by him, but if so I've forgotten. If I did, it was pre-college, as the philosophy professors at the university I attended ignored him and only grudgingly taught courses on the history of philosophy. They were likely the kind of analytic philosophers (and a pragmatist) mentioned by PB. I didn't think much of The Wisdom of Life, by the way. I thought it entirely derivative.

But I think certain philosophers are subject to "dissing" by philosophy departments and apparently graduate students not merely because they're outside the analytic tradition, but also because they claim to divine, as it were, our fundamental nature and perhaps that of the universe through introspection ("Will" in Schopenhauer's case), and there is a tendency to mock those who make such grandiose claims. That kind of claim is not made anymore, it seems, so it appears antiquated and even somewhat silly. But again this may be peculiar to the Anglo-American tradition, which is the only one I have any recent knowledge of, as limited as that may be.

Claims made by analytic philosophers aren't any less sweeping or fundamental. That's a common misconception.

It certainly may be I'm simply unaware of those analytic philosophers who claim to have ascertained our fundamental nature, or that of the universe.

Which one didn't? Carnap is the analytic philosopher par excellence, and his magnum opus was The Logical Structure of the World...

I'm not sure I know of a solution, or one that doesn't result in me reading a bunch of rubbish. — invizzy

Well, you obviously can't be too offended by rubbish if you're reading Sam Harris. ;)

But I suppose the thing to keep in mind is that you can't know whether or not something is rubbish until you read it. Furthermore, the main prejudice to overcome is the idea that anything you dislike or disagree with is rubbish. When we read a work of philosophy according to the principle of charity, we should always come away with an understanding of how a reasonable person might hold the position defended therein. This is particularly true in the case of the "greats." Even if you ultimately disagree with them, failing to understand how they achieved that status is a failure in the reader and not the author. This isn't to say that all frustration will vanish. But understanding breeds at least a certain kind of appreciation.

One of the most important parts of my development as a philosopher was a class I took on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in graduate school. We read the entire work, summarized large portions of it for graded assignments (reducing 50 pages down to three is a nightmarish task that I recommend everyone try sometime), and were forbidden to disagree with Kant on our final exam or in our term paper (because it was a class in the history of philosophy; anyone can take potshots from the future). So we had to understand what Kant wrote and find something good in it (or defend it from some important criticism). Several of us were even assigned paper topics on precisely the issues where we had shown the most disagreement with Kant in class. These days, the students would revolt at this sort of imposition. I was tempted to myself. But it was wonderfully beneficial in the end.

I more or less agree with this but I wonder how much freedom we actually have on this point. Can we really know what judgments of ours are a result of prejudices? And aren't all our judgments prejudiced to some degree just by virtue of who we are? — Baden

Sure, but we don't need to adopt any sort of radical doxastic voluntarism in order to think that our prejudices can be overcome (or at least mitigated). Slow habituation can do the job, even if we are dragged kicking and screaming all the way. And of course, a good teacher can be rather helpful.

It certainly may be I'm simply unaware of those analytic philosophers who claim to have ascertained our fundamental nature, or that of the universe. — Ciceronianus the White

I realize that you were responding to @The Great Whatever, but for my own part, there's a reason I specified the analytic tradition. Thanks to how ill-defined the term is, we get to include the likes of Plato and Descartes.

Which one didn't? Carnap is the analytic philosopher par excellence, and his magnum opus was The Logical Structure of the World... — The Great Whatever

Alfred North Whitehead comes to mind as well.

You know, I've always felt Carnap was a logical positivist, a card-carrying member of the Vienna Circle. But perhaps I have a restricted idea of analytic philosophy and those I think of as analytic philosophers are merely a subset of that group. Perhaps logical positivists are also a subset. Is Russell considered an analytic philosopher? I tend to think of the later Wittgenstein and his followers, along with such as Austin, Ryle. Perhaps these are "ordinary language philosophers." Anyhow, I (wrongly?) associate analytic philosophy with quietism, and quietism as I understand it doesn't deal in the grandiose.

Yeah, I'd call them all analytic on any reasonable historical understanding of the movement. Austin maybe never made any grandiose claims, but Ryle did (they just disagreed with previous ones, is all). And Russell, like Carnap, as interested in deducing the logical structure of the entire world as well as all of math, logic & language. And Wittgenstein of course believed that he solved all philosophical problems in ~70 pages. I'm not sure any philosopher ever has made that sort of claim besides him.

Well, okay, but I think there's a difference between establishing there is no basis for great philosophical claims and making great philosophical claims. I don't think Wittgenstein thought he solved philosophical problems; rather, he thought he showed they weren't problems to begin with.

Yep. Dissolved by analysis.

I came across that stupid video recently. It follows all the common tropes of YouTube "educational" videos, wherein the goal seems to be to simulate verbal diarrhea as accurately as possible.