Seconded, I've certainly met the sort of characters described in this post, but I don't think they're at all representative of the field.
One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment.
I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.
This reminds me of a guy I met many years ago who told me he was taking a class to learn how to debate people and break every argument by abusing logic. It turned out he was talking a philosophy class, haha. I can’t imagine how the teacher structured it, but somehow that was his takeaway. Maybe from the Socratic method, I guess.
"men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about."
At the local pubic high school. The word "rhetoric" isn't used very often anymore--so perhaps I misrepresented a little but it's what she was studying at the time and it's what she's teaching now even though they call it "11th grade IB Diploma Program"
But the IB program requirements for English are all about identifying "author's purpose" and "author's craft" for authors all over the world and relating those things to global issues, which is pretty much rhetoric.
I think they avoid the label because it has connotations of manipulation. But learning to not be duped by a propagandist is the same curriculum as learning to be a propagandist. Better to understand the fire than to be ignorant of it and then get burned by someone else's, I say.
One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment.
I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.