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[personal profile] jack
I was just in the process of writing a philosophy-heavy post, and realised one of the problems I had is that given the number of people in the world at all, and the number of comparatively educated ones on the internet, anything you say is extremely likely to have been said before, most probably somewhere a simple google search could turn it up, and things relating to popular or long-studied topics ten times more so.

With some topics, like "wow, scene X in that film was awesome" or "wow, love really DOES feel wonderful/hurt" we accept that many people probably have similar ideas, but that's ok.

With some topics, we accept there's a lot to learn, and they're normally studied in an academic or professional context with lots of other people shuffled through successive revelations with you, ideally shepherded by someone who's learnt a lot of it already and can direct you to the best paths through already studied things, and direct you towards promising unstudied things. If you've just learnt a really cool new mathematical topic, you probably instinctively know that maths professors you know will be jaded about it, and people without mathematical training will probably not understand it at all, and people studying at the same level as you may share your enthusiasm.

But with some topics, the problem is evident. If you talk about something like philosophy or literature, where everyone feels entitled to do _some_ thinking, but there is also a large body of work on the subject with entrenched terminology which may encompass or even repudiate their revelation.

This happened when I postulated a difference between "is" statements and "ought" statements, and discovered it's generally attributed to Hume (1711-1776). Like several philosophical concepts (and UNLIKE several others) it needed a lot of thinking to come up with, but now seems to me clear, simple and useful -- something you might not have thought of before, but find irrefutably useful once it's been pointed out (not necessarily definitive, but always a helpful perspective).

So, when an interesting idea occurs to me, I don't know whether to muse about it publicly (which is interesting to some people and tedious to others) or commit either to studying philosophy seriously, or to not bothering.

ETA: Do you feel like that?

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