Philosophy

I have an intellectual appreciation for the answers on this site, but at an emotional level I can't help but feel like vast heaps of it are nothing more than BS. Why do I feel this way? Why is philosophy so confounding?

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One thing that can happen is this. Someone asks an inchoate, perhaps rather muddled, question. A respondent -- operating in the approved housestyle of analytical philosophy -- disentangles the issues, and having separated out a crisply formulated question or two, responds briskly to them with clinical precision (well, we try!). And, it can be tempting to think, something important is lost in the process. What lay behind the question -- the depths, so to speak -- are somehow being ignored, and the response doesn't really address the posed worry. So it can seem that the questioner is being fobbed off with BS. Maybe that is your feeling?

But one of the hard lessons when you start philosophy is the realization that behind one's inchoate and confused half-formed questions is often just ... confusion. It is usually not so much a question of hidden depths as muddy shallows. And it can take some time before the penny drops that the analytical philosopher's answers are disentangling the real issues. Are not BS, in other words, but a proper way of resolving muddle.

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