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View submission: what makes someone a philosopher?
You have to understand that Spinoza was writing in a very different time. Similar questions and concerns, but there has really been an explosion in academic philosophical discussion from the second half of the 18th century onwards. The questions people are concerned with are today very specific, very niche, and require a certain amount of expertise/background to really make a novel contribution to.
Nietzsche was a university professor, in fact I think he was the head of the philology department at Basel (and you can see this permeate throughout his works).
Comment by robothistorian at 27/01/2025 at 14:45 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yes, I know this. But I think you are missing the point that I was trying to make. If you want to remove Spinoza from that list then compare the works of those who were roughly contemporaries of Nietzsche - Kant, Fichte, Frege, Hegel, Schopenhauer, among others. If you compare their works to that of Nietzsche, there is a marked difference in tone and *how* they presented their arguments. And yet, we continue to acknowledge Nietzsche as a philosopher (,generally speaking). Referring to the example offered by the person I was originally responding to, Dostoevsky, however, is not.
My personal views are not reflected in any of the above in the sense that it's irrelevant whether or not I consider (or don't consider) either Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky as philosophers.