I can't think of any good reason to read philosophy, unless of course it's my philosophy. Socrates was the only competent pure philosopher I know of, and Plato screwed his legacy up for the next two thousand years. The competent philosophers of this generation are uniformly scientists, and lately computer programmers, who happen to mention philosophy while they're educating you about something - and even their philosophy simply doesn't come up to the standards of completeness and simplicity necessary to design personal philosophies for AIs, which is the only point at which there's some real criterion for success or failure.
Philosophy is the art of telling the simplest possible true story about
the Universe that lets us model reality and make choices. Philosophy,
by its nature, is not a human art; anthropomorphism is a legitimate
criticism of any philosophy, as much so as of a theory of physics. I
have yet to see any non-anthropomorphic philosophy other than my own,
which is also anthropomorphic. Hence my skepticism.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
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