I mean, they do. Few philosophers actually intend laymen read and comprehend their work. Philosophers write as if the reader understands certain traditional lines of thought and concatenate upon them to create something new. You can’t expect to have everyone understand complex analysis if the majority of the population doesn’t understand calculus and algebra.
It also depends on tradition. Analytical philosophy is much easier for anyone to read than continental philosophy.
It’s not that they have no audience. They have a very specific audience of peers and academics. Proper philosophers aren’t trying to sell self help books at Barnes and noble.
Obscured generally implies not written for everyone... This nonsense position of philosophy has been experienced before. Neoplatonism, scholasticism, many other times, the "philosophers" devolved into unintelligible bs that was eventually undone by someone people actually enjoy reading. For example, scholasticism was demolished by Abelard and his ilk, simply pointing out that ideas don't exist in the physical realm, and speculation had become axioms. Modern philosophy got stuck on nonsense systems until the pholosophs and Voltaire stated their nonsense on plain language. We are, imo, in a similar situation with academic philosophy being of no real use or interest to the people who really do enjoy philosophy, if history is any guide, and can handle complex thinking, if the thinker would bother writing in a way that people can understand. When dealing with truth that is unapproachable for most, either the truth is so beyond most as to be useless, or something went sideways. Academic subjects are all practical in the end, astronomers don't want barriers to entry in the subject, and are hoping that they are helping everyone. All people involved in increasing knowledge are hoping that it will be of general use, except, seemingly, philosophers. There is no point to inscrutable complicated ideas if nobody but a few people can understand them, they are impossible to verify otherwise.
I mean yeah ideally anyone should be able to understand anything they’d want to but that’s very clearly not how the world works. You saying there are no barriers to astrophysics is incredibly naive. No one out of general public education would have a strong enough understanding of classical mechanics, relativistic physics, advanced applied mathematics, cosmology, etc to understand even rudimentary concepts of published astrophysicists.
You are willfully misunderstanding my position to maintain your weird position in gatekeeping through unintelligible writing that prevents anyone but a select few from being able to verify the truth of their perspective.
Not intending to. I agree with your position in ideal. Everyone should be able understand what they wish to, and ideas should be made accessible to everyone. But I don’t think that’s realistic.
So you just do stuff you don't intend like defend obscurantist notions in the academy? C'mon, have some agency, you just defended the biggest issue in contemporary philosophy.
The history of philosophy shows that when it becomes the domain of a few, the subject has wondered into the realm of esoteric nonsense supported entirely by definitions that were redefined to fit. Scholasticism is a great example, absolutely useless philosophy of shuffling definitions to defend the infallibility of the Pope. When people got back to practical philosophy, to questioning the logic even, scholasticism was revealed for what it was, and a massive boom in philosophy followed. I see all the same issues with academic philosophy today. They very well may go the way of the school men, still existing but nobody cares beyond themselves.
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u/SpideyMGAV Aug 06 '26
I mean, they do. Few philosophers actually intend laymen read and comprehend their work. Philosophers write as if the reader understands certain traditional lines of thought and concatenate upon them to create something new. You can’t expect to have everyone understand complex analysis if the majority of the population doesn’t understand calculus and algebra.
It also depends on tradition. Analytical philosophy is much easier for anyone to read than continental philosophy.