Reddit reviews The Slightest Philosophy

To quote a lifelong (and once published) philosopher and amateur [nearly anarcho-capitalist 😳] economist with whom I correspond with due to my meeting her son at school:

> I used to say “if Che looked like Mises and Mises looked like Che, we would’ve ended poverty by now.”

I’m not exactly a fan of the inherently anti-empirical Austrian economics, but I think this captures the extent to which personality and appearance skews our
political preferences — consciously or otherwise.

Rather than merely jump down your throat for the tone of your post--I think everyone else has sufficiently chastised you, and I'll say more about that in general at the end--let me make a few constructive suggestions.

>For example, when philosophers argue for the non-existence of reality or unkownableness of things I just want to shake them and say "get your head our of your fucking ass and look out the window! There is obviously a real world out there."

This sounds very much like naive realism, which is a genuine position held by some philosophers (albeit not very commonly). You might find Quee Nelson's The Slightest Philosophy interesting if you want to learn more about naive realism and its history. She's not a mainstream professional philosopher, but the book is quite a fun read.

The kinds of intuitions you're describing also suggest that you'd be inclined toward naturalism, very broadly constued. In general, naturalists see philosophy as continuous with (or even part of) science, and reject philosophical arguments that either ignore or purport to "transcend" scientific knowledge and reasoning. Naturalist (or naturalized) philosophy tends to take scientific theories very seriously, and is often aimed at excavating the foundations of various sciences. This is a significantly more popular position within professional philosophy (though certainly not a universal one). That SEP link I posted should give you a good overview. The anthology Naturalism Without Mirrors can also serve as a good survey. Richard Carrier's Sense and Goodness Without God is a less rigorous "pop-philosophy" treatment of the subject, but is a frequently cited basic introduction to some of the principles, and aimed at non-philosophers.

Now, with all that said, I strongly suspect that you're going to find understanding any of the links I posted (with the possible exception of Carrier) rather difficult to understand without some background in philosophy. Naturalism emerged as a reaction and/or successor to various movements within the history of philosophy, and without some idea of the context in which the discussion is happening, you're apt to find the going rather difficult.

I should mention that I say this as someone who shares a lot of the views you described: I have very little patience for most of the history of philosophy, and find much of what goes on in contemporary mainstream philosophy incredibly, frustratingly obtuse. However, I developed that opinion as a result of decades of rigorous study of philosophy, rather than based on my first impressions as a beginner. I can say with fairly high confidence that if you were able to dismiss what you were reading as nonsense so quickly that you can't even recall what you've read, you probably didn't really understand what you were reading. Much of historical philosophy might be misguided or wrong, but the people who wrote it were emphatically not stupid, and their ideas are worthy of honest, serious engagement even if you think they're mistaken.

It might help to look at reading the canon as something like running on a treadmill in a gym. If someone told you that they thought running on a treadmill was silly because they'd tried it for a minute and hadn't gotten anywhere, you probably would think that they'd missed the point. The point of running on a treadmill isn't to get somewhere, but rather to improve your own fitness level. One side effect of this improvement is that when you do run in order to get somewhere, you can run much faster and for much longer. If it helps, think of reading philosophy like that: as a kind of "mental workout" that helps you sharpen your critical faculties and analysis skills, so that when you encounter arguments that you're actually interested in engaging with, you'll be better able to give them serious thought.

To that end, I'd suggest that you try some of the literature that you dismissed as pointless again, but this time with the intention of reading it, understanding it, and articulating why you think it's bullshit. Reading Descartes and coming away with "well that was dumb and obviously wrong" is missing the point in the same way that telling a guy running on a treadmill "you'll never get anywhere that way" is missing the point. What exactly do you find so dumb about it? What ideas specifically are mistaken? In what way are they mistaken? What are the implications of the mistakes you noticed? I suspect that once you try to seriously answer these questions, you'll discover that it's much harder than it looks, and that (perhaps) you don't have as much of a grasp on the ideas as you thought you did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZBDUJ0yiVg

I think it's like this parable of the blind wise men and the elephant. One takes the trunk and says it's a snake, the next takes a leg and says it's a tree, another one takes the tail and says it's a horse and the last one touches the side and says it's a rock. Each has direct empirical sensory evidence for his claim, but they all have a different perspective and until they try to take in all of the evidence available they will stay with limited understanding.

That's the problem.

It's not: "We have eyes, therefore we can't see.", it's "We all have eyes and see from different perspectives. How do we put this together to learn about the world of which we all focus on different aspects?"

It's of no help to say "I have the right perspective." just as it's of no help to say that we are blind.

I think Stove is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and there is quite some degree of strawman argumentation in this and it appears to be pretty polemic.

If you like naiive realism, you may want to check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Slightest-Philosophy-Quee-Nelson/dp/1598583786/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348922628&sr=8-1&keywords=the+slightest+philosophy