I got positive feedback on this email to the Philosophy Now yahoogroup, so I thought I'd share it more widely:
On Saturday, November 8, 2003, at 01:27 AM, nowhere man wrote:
Can someone please explain to me why these type of discusion groups inevitably end up with people being rude and insulting? I was unaware that in order to make a comment about a subject one had to be pompous and demonstrate the very worse in psuedo-intellectual skills. Hell, I thought these discussions were simply meant to be a bit of fun.It's not so much inevitable as common. There are some generally accepted ideas in our society that say things like, "For certain subjects, if you aren't well-read, you can't say anything intelligent, or at least can't come up with any good ideas, or any new ideas." And for other subjects, you're supposed to need a PhD. Philosophy is one of the worst in this respect. Most academic philosophers spend their time worrying about dead people, and seems under the impression that even if you study the dead people extensively, it's still very difficult to come up with an actual new idea. They're also very good at sounding pompous and being hard to read, and most people seem to have accepted that's what philosophy is *supposed to be like*. So, then, untrained philosophers tend not to sound like that, and thus get dismissed. (That style is, in actuality, bad. And a few notable philosophers did rebel against it. Like Karl Popper, who was very concerned with writing clearly and understandably, and good at it too.)
Messages