Aren't philosophers, who put their ideas in writing for posterity, eventually hoisted upon their own petard?
Who specifically is on their own petard? Religious figures like Mohammed and Christ are generally rewritten to preserve the legend. Moslems have for decades been backing off of Mohammed's own words, Kill the infidel! and other outrageous commands, claims, and coersions. And Catholicism has backed off the, If you're not baptized Catholic, you're going to hell, which nuns taught me in parochial school. Religions and most isms accommodate and rewrite and delete. Otherwise 'God' (man's interpretation) can be made to look stupid, querrulous and dated. Minor writers and philosophers 'without portfolio', or legends, generally fade away, perhaps merely ignored, perhaps 'petarded'.
Petard: metaphorically: self destructive if not for anything else something to think about....
Seeing that they, like we, see as if through a glass darkly, philosophers write about the world they know and perceive. Later readers or philosophers may have differing views or opinions, but they don't negate the writings of prior writers. The issues in philosophy don't change that much, though society and its interpretations do. The case of being blown up by one's own perceptions (in this instance) doesn't seem likely, considering the importance we still place on the writings of those long-ago ponderers.
Hehe- good use of idiom; you almost never hear that used in modern english. I'm not exactly sure what you mean though. The idiom carries a sense of injury. I suppose in a way you could say that, yes, someone who writes only for posterity is damned by that very fact ie. their words fall on deaf ears in their own time-- and their work could be misinterpreted in the way that language itself gets misinterpreted over the course of time. But I suppose a greater problem is wondering who exactly philosophers write for. The answer is certainly not easy. Though Hegel's phenomenology is written in such a way as to never simply *assert* a view or stance- that is, it never wants to simply *assume* a standpoint, but rather show that configurations of conciousness have a natural movement and that each stage finds within it a limit or error whereby it must change itself to move onto the next stage of consciousness. Thus, Hegel wants to show that his project is one in which the common man can find himself. But we certainly wouldn't say that the Phenomenology is a book that just anybody can pick up and read. In some sense he has to be writing for philosophers that are already well aware of the tradition. And this is a problem. As philosophy becomes more complex-- and even back as far as Plato!-- there's a sense that philosophy's audience is limited. There are only a select few who will actually listen to Socrates and put up with his behavior. So the modern's problem of who to write for, is indeed a reflection on a much longer tradition and the sense that maybe we write out into posterity because we are writing for nobody--or maybe just ourselves. There is nobody here that we can talk to, so we send the words out in the hopes that someone will read them and understand. But what does this mean?
If you mean that they're all disproven, not necessarily. In fact, Sun Tzu's Art of War, is still quoted constantly to this day.
