Against "ConPhil"

Why I Don't Like Philosophy That Communicates Poorly

In the last few weeks, Bentham's Bulldog started another discourse on philosophy substack. We’ve all read the posts, but in case you haven’t, here are like six posts associated with this discourse, from Bentham alone.

I would link to more articles that were good, but there are just so many, and I have delayed posting and lost all of them.¹

My thoughts on continental philosophy are pretty simple: I don’t really like it. As it’s presented to the public, it’s poorly argued, poorly defended, and it’s often not clear what practical use it has outside of academia.

For the sake of relative precision and clarity, I will be using the label “ConPhil” to refer to continental philosophy/philosophers that I’m being critical of.

What’s more, I agree that we shouldn’t dismiss every thinker in this tradition, because many of them (past and present) don’t replicate the style mistakes I describe and produce good work. So when I’m being critical of ConPhil, I’m not being critical of all ConPhil or your favorite obscure ConPhil philosopher who isn’t as influential as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Butler, or Zizek²

I have three arguments:

1. ConPhil is incomprehensible to read. Though poor grammar and style does not invalidate an argument or point of view, it does call it into question. Philosophers in related fields have read ConPhil and similarly question its value. Grammar and style is an acid test for ConPhil; if it can’t be explained simply, it’s likely low quality.

2. The defenses of ConPhil are bad. These thinkers rarely defend their ideas from criticism, and when they do, the defenses are worse than the original arguments, vulnerable to obvious rebuttals.

3. Given that ConPhil is incomprehensible and its justifications for incomprehensibility are bad, it’s not worth engaging.³

Part 1: Rules of Thumb For Good Written Communication

One of the biggest cons of ConPhil is that its ideas are just too sophisticated for clear communication. Defenders will gesture (but not argue clearly) at philosophical reasons for why this is the case. Calling it a “con” may sound like hyperbolic rhetoric, but it’s silly to suggest that complex ideas evade clear communication.⁴

ConPhil defenders may assert that the reason ConPhil thinkers don’t explain their ideas in simple terms is because doing so would fundamentally change those ideas and misinform the public about what their ideas are. The problem with this defense is that scientists and philosophers simplify complicated subjects to a popular audience all the time, and when they do so, they give the disclaimer that they are oversimplifying.

It’s extremely improbable that the works of Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan are more complicated than general relativity or quantum physics. After all, the idiom is “It’s not rocket science,” not “It’s not literary theory.”

To get into the specifics about why the writing is bad, you don’t have to know much about complicated philosophy, but just how basic grammar and style works.⁵ Any writer who wants to convey something complicated will abide by these rules:

1. Write in the active voice,

2. Avoid unexplained or uncommon nominalizations⁶ or concepts.

3. Don’t make your sentences maximally short, but be sensitive to your sentences being too long.

4. The same principle for #3 applies for paragraphs.

5. Try to write causally (i.e A leads to B, which leads to C)

6. Bullet points and headings are effective formatting tools to break up your point into digestible pieces. Within the text, “sign posting” is also effective.⁷

7. Avoid using adverbs unless their inclusion is fundamental to the sentence and fundamentally changes the sentence. The same can be said for adjectives, but adjectives aren’t as bad as adverbs.

To reiterate: This is not a comprehensive list and it’s not a universally applicable list; sometimes a communicator must deliberately break these rules to make their point. But as a matter of predictable consequences, if a writer or communicator repeatedly does not abide by these rules, and indeed intentionally subverts them, their ideas will be incomprehensible relative to someone who does abide by them.

It’s Relatively Easy to Decode Most Difficult Writers

ConPhil defenders may point out that, throughout history, many philosophers have written poorly, partially because they wrote in a time when language was less formalized as it is today, and so they did not understand best practices.

In that regard, someone like Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Mill, Hegel, Newton, and others may seem incomprehensible to modern readers. What’s more, scholars often write about complicated ideas, like physics or even analytic philosophy, in a non-digestible style.

Does this mean that all of these writers are bad or not worth reading? Absolutely not!

There are a few key differences;

1. Unlike the philosophers of 200 years ago, the ConPhil thinkers are more contemporary. Judith Butler is alive, writing, and teaching today, while David Hume died in 1776. Yet oddly enough, the average philosophy student has more accessibility into the thought, reasoning, and arguments of Hume than Butler because both Hume and his contemporary commenters write/wrote clearly.⁸

2. One can go to a reputable bookstore anywhere and find bookshelves of writers making complex ideas accessible for others. This is true for ancient, enlightenment, and analytic philosophy as well as complex science. Meanwhile there’s a noticeable scarcity of secondary literature about ConPhil marketed to a mass audience!

3. More presciently, if you go through primary ConPhil texts with these basic grammar and style rules in mind, you find that it’s reliant on being incomprehensible. If not every sentence or paragraph is written poorly, then every chapter and every key argument has extended passages that are written poorly.

Though not every scholar, philosopher, or intellectual wrote using the aforementioned style rules when crafting their texts, scholars and popularizers today can apply them to classic texts and make them more accessible.

For instance, a paradigmatic thinker like Charles Darwin may have written in a style that’s hard for moderately educated people in the 21st century to understand, but there are biologists like Richard Dawkins who possess the knowledge and communication skills to write books that explain his ideas clearly.

This isn’t true for much of ConPhil. There is no Richard Dawkins for the Charles Darwin of literary theory, Michele Foucault.⁹

The main takeaways here are three-fold:

1. Good style and grammar enhance education communication.

2. Complex ideas can be communicated clearly if the idea is explicable and if the person doing the communication understands the ideas.

3. The absence of popular ConPhil communicators calls to question the explicability of ConPhil, as well as its impact.

A Case Study: Nussbaum vs Butler.

The idea that bad ConPhil relies on bad writing is not new. Back in 1999 (before I could read!) Martha Nussbaum tore into post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler in the New Republic article titled The Parody of a Professor.

In that article, Nussbaum uses her philosophical expertise to point out problems with Butler’s philosophy, intentions, and style. I’m just going to quote her at length, because the points stand for themselves (emphases are mine):

In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Nussbaum continues and how this style gives “the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.”

And that:

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

And finally:

“Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims.”

Nussbaum’s Parody is an important piece of public philosophy because she uses her expertise to affirm what non-experts may suspect but lack the education and credibility to argue: That Butler’s style is vague, appealing to complicated and contradictory thinkers without elaborating on them. Butler does not consider differing interpretations of these thinkers, puts forward contested claims about them without an argument, thus making her style substantively different from other forms of complicated writing. Butler’s claims can’t be argued among experts because they’re not really arguments. At the same time, this style is too impenetrable for a popular audience, raising the question about the intended audience of her writing.

From this, Nussbaum proposes that Butler’s “argument” creates the simulation of a philosophical argument given by a deep thinker (note: those are my words, not Nussbaum’s). By being indecipherable and vague, Butler’s writing bullies non-professional readers into thinking Butler is saying something smart because they cannot understand it.

Writing Style As A Test

One common counter-argument to critics of Butler and other ConPhils is that the critics are too lazy or not smart enough to understand what Butler is saying, but Nussbaum is a clear falsification of that argument. That serious philosophers find ConPhil scholarship poor is sufficient to not take it seriously.

Still, those of us who lack a philosophy graduate degree need an evaluative tool to assess ConPhil.¹⁰

I propose a simple test to evaluate ConPhil: Is the grammar and style any good? Specifically, is the author of the text:

1. Overusing unexplained nominalizations and references?

2. Writing needlessly long sentences full of those nominalizations and references?

3. Putting in adverbs and adjectives in their sentences that either muddle the sentence’s clarity or adding unnecessary content?

4. Extending paragraphs for multiple pages, making it difficult to remember what the original thought was?

5. Failing to point out what their argument will conclude before they make it?

If the answer to most of these questions is “yes,” then you can just ignore them and wait until someone expresses those ideas in ways that are conducive to clarity. It’s entirely possible this thinker has something important and interesting to say, but as the reader or student, it is not your job to make their ideas clear and relevant, but theirs.

I’ve used this test to assess ConPhil thinkers for a few years, and no one has come close to passing them. This suggests to me that ConPhil ideas aren’t important enough to clarify. It’s bad enough that ConPhil constantly fails this test, but to make matters worse, few of their scholars seem to care.¹¹

Part 2: Their Arguments Are Bad

It’s entirely possible I’m overstating the case in Part 1. Maybe Martha Nussbaum, other philosophers, and I are wrong. What’s great about this argument is that it can be proven wrong! But unfortunately, defenders of ConPhil do not even try to do this. When they do, they give really bad arguments. Let’s talk about some of them.

A Digression On Clarity Fetish

Before I go into this section, I want to give a shout out to the philosopher and substacker Daniel Muñoz for his article posted earlier this week on this subject:

Stop making excuses for unclear writing

When drafting this post, I didn’t know how I would go about criticizing the online philosophers I saw defending ConPhil because they are certainly more educated in philosophy than I am.

I try to put forward a humble voice for my beliefs and calling out an expert for a bad argument feels off to me, even if I’m correct. What’s more, I don’t like to fight with people on the internet. I really appreciate Daniel’s post because it said things I wanted to say, sometimes better than I could, but also it validated my non-PhD-BS detector. Thank you Daniel!

For those of you who didn’t read the post (shame on you!), the philosopher Ellie Anderson put forward a defense of lack of clarity:

While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it. As Adorno notes, Hegel disavows hypotactical writing in favor of parataxis: here, the structure of sentences undermines the hierarchy of clauses, as well as subjects and predicates.[2] Instead, meaning emerges through the relation of clauses and sentences to one another. Adorno, too, employs paratactical writing in an effort to resist ‘identity thinking’ and the fetish of clarity.[3]

She also has a YouTube Video elaborating on this point.

I didn’t like this defense at all, nor did a couple of my substack followers. Daniel touched on many of the points I was going to focus on, so instead, I want to focus on the weirdness of the structure of the quote. Namely, the framing of this defense is loaded at best, and incoherent at worst.

This sentence is at least one of factually wrong, grammatically incorrect, or incoherent:

“While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it.”

First, the clause after “because” (the ideas propounded precisely rebel…) is written weirdly. Who is propounding the ideas? Continental Philosophers, I presume? This weird word choice erases continental philosophers from the sentence. You know, the people actually writing unclearly? This creates weird and nonsensical implications. How do words, which lack sentience and physical embodiment, rebel?

Second, the inclusion of the word “precisely” in that clause is likely wrong, or at least confusing. Are the ideas put forward in a precise manner? I don’t think that’s what she’s saying; if philosophers “propounded ideas precisely” we would not be having this conversation! So that leads to another nonsensical reading, that the manner of the rebellion is precise? How can a rebellion be precise?

To reiterate: I am not trying to be pedantic here. The rules of style are often guidelines, and the rules of grammar can be bent, but only to a point. ConPhils break these guidelines/rules so much that they don’t realize how their sentences necessarily lead to either nonsensical or question-begging conclusions.

Anderson put forward this explanation, presumably thinking the explanation was evident in the words. But upon critical examination, it raised more questions than answers. This is one of my problems with ConPhil: When you’re inculcated into the tradition, your standards for clarity drop, as does your ability to examine claims. You allow bad or nonsensical arguments to pass uncritically because the argument sounds smart and you expect to not find clarity.

Worse is the framing of Anderson’s argument. As Plasma Bloggin' pointed out, Anderson’s argument is like the meme where one “wins the argument” by drawing themself as the chad, and the opponent as the wojack.

Though it may not be her intention, it’s hard not to read Anderson’s comments about having a “fetish for clarity” as a weird form of name calling. Even though “fetish” has a technical definition in psychoanalysis, it still reads like rebutting someone’s argument by calling them a pervert. On top of this, it’s pretty obvious that the people desiring clarity don’t want it as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of understanding. The horror!

Contrast that with the way the word “rebel” is ham-fistedly inserted into this sentence. At its most charitable, it suggests something edgy, cool, and noble about the (unmentioned) continental philosopher; that continentals are the rebels mannnn. But a more careful reading suggests error and nonsense - that words themselves have the agency to rebel.

In this way, under a Nussbaumian lens, Anderson’s defense is bad for similar reasons as Butler’s comments on various scholars: it’s poorly written, yet sounds vaguely smart, but when you take a critical eye to what is actually said, it raises more questions (and frustrations) than it answers.

Three Species of Defense:

With that out of the way, let’s get into three forms of ConPhil defenses against criticisms of poor form and philosophy.

1. Nu-huh!

2. It’s Performance Art.

3. Just Read More Theory Bro!

The “Nu-huh!” Defense

The “Nu-huh!” Defense is not exclusive to ConPhil. You see it in all sorts of philosophy, specifically by people too lazy to express someone else’s argument. This form simply asserts “this is wrong” or “this has been rebutted” without further elaboration.

I was curious to see if anyone had ever actually rebutted Nussbaum’s criticism, and I honestly couldn’t find anything. I don’t think anyone has successfully rebutted Nussbaum’s criticisms of Butler.¹² Meanwhile, what I have found is canned responses against Nussbaum that ConPhil defenders make against all critics of continental philosophy, asserting that they’re all analytic/logical positivist philosophers and thus all vulnerable to the same argument.

Specifically, they’ll say that Nussbaum “does philosophy differently” than Butler because she presumes as a correspondence theory with language. But any serious reading of Nussbaum will show that these rebuttals are immaterial. As Munoz explained, you don’t need to be a logical positivist or hold a correspondence theory of truth to agree with Nussbaum’s criticisms.

Still, lazy ConPhil defenders will see these responses, say Nussbaum has been rebutted, and continue writing incoherently. All the while, Nussbaum’s original criticisms of Butler go unaddressed: how Butler’s bad style simulates sophistication, the factual manner of whether or not her ideas are original, or whether or not “the way Butler does philosophy” is actually good.

This is unsatisfactory. It’s not even the simulation of debate, so much as it is its denial to engage in one.

The Performance Art Defense

This is my favorite defense because it’s the easiest to point out.

This defense asserts that ConPhils aren’t doing the same kind of philosophy as everyone else and critics just aren’t smart enough to pick up on what that philosophy is.

I call this argument the Performance Art Defense because defenders are (basically) saying that ConPhil philosophy isn’t philosophy as we understand it, but a species of performance art. This would be bad enough, but to make matters worse, the defenders don’t explain what this performance art means!

When you’re trying to do something serious and someone turns it into performance art, that’s annoying. When the person doing the performance art can’t even explain what the performance art is, it’s infuriating. It’s also mean! If you’re turning a serious thing into a parody and the parody is neither funny nor coherent. At that point, it’s not parody, it’s vandalism. We’re worse off than where we started.

Anderson’s retelling of Adorno’s defense was a form of the performance art defense, but there are more I’ve heard over the years. These include, but are not limited to:

• The phallocentric explanation: This says that writing in a manner that’s direct and builds to a “climax” point is masculine because that’s how male sexuality works. And so these thinkers are actually being feminist…or something!

• The literature/poetry explanation: This says ConPhils are writing in a style that’s much like a novelist or poet, even though a cursory glance of their writing doesn’t read as a novel or poem.

• The phenomenological explanation: This one says that the ConPhil is trying to change your perspective…somehow.

Now, the specific flavors of the Performance Art Defense don’t matter, so much as you recognize that people have creative ways of describing why something isn’t clear without themselves explaining the meaning of the text.

Let me repeat that.

The formula of this defense is pointing out that ConPhils are operating differently than other philosophers without explaining what that means or using that interpretive insight to clarify the point of specific writings.

To make matters worse, the defenses don’t usually have evidence in the text to back it up! Or the explanations themselves are themselves absurd or self-undermining.

For instance, how low of a view of femininity do you have that you think it’s unfeminine to say something clearly, building through a cumulative case toward a conclusion? Why is it so normal to say these philosophers are writing like novelists when so few of them actually are?¹³

ConPhils have trained generations of left-leaning philosophy students to defend their position with a soundbite (“It’s not like other philosophy!”) without actually equipping them with the tools to properly explain the defense.

It’s silly and a little sad. It’s okay if something is performance art, or just art. It’s okay to “Do Philosophy” outside of the constraints of a syllogism or formal argument. You can learn about philosophy from TV, literature, and film (You can learn political philosophy from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica). This philosophy is not expressed in a formal argument, but in the sense and atmosphere created by language and film.

But this is different from ConPhil. Going back to clear language and explanation, we can explain the philosophies of these works of literature and film using clear language, while the ConPhils refuse elaboration and explanation.

Just Read More Theory Bro

The last cliche defense of ConPhil is to say that critics are stupid, the ideas do make sense, and that critics are just too lazy to understand it. I call this the “Just Read More Theory Bro” defense because it’s a meme for the online left that the solution to all problems is to read more theory.¹⁴

The “Just Read More Theory Bro” defense is similar to “The Performance Art” defense because defenders do not actually elaborate on the explanation. Outside of ConPhil, we’d easily identify this as bad instruction.

If someone has a question about a subject that I’m educated on and I don’t know the specific answer, I wouldn’t just tell people “read more.” Rather, I’d give my best explanation, a recommendation to a specific text that may help them understand it better, and further context about that text.

In this way, when you tell someone to read a text, it’s to understand a main idea from that text, not just to mindlessly read indecipherable texts for its own sake. As defenders just assert that critics need to read more theory without guidance, it suggests they don’t know what the point of the text is.

What’s more, the paradigmatic ConPhil philosophers are obviously indecipherable,¹⁵ and at times, defender concede this point in ways that scholars from other fields would not concede about their own paradigmatic thinkers.

For instance, I’ve seen some smart public facing philosophers on substack say something to the effect of “it’s not ConPhil’s fault that you’re too lazy to read beyond Lacan, Foucault, Butler, etc.,” and that other thinkers redeem the field, and that it’s an unfair to draw a negative inference about the field because the paradigmatic thinkers are incomprehensible.

This is an odd response for the same reason it would be odd for a biologist to say, “It’s not the biology field’s fault that you’re too lazy to read beyond Darwin. These other obscure biologists make biology worth studying.”

A biologist may concede Darwin is hard to read, but instead of calling you lazing, mocking your frustration and skepticism, they would likely recommend to you countless Darwinist communicators. What’s more, they would not imply that Darwin is wrong or not worth reading. They probably wouldn’t recommend other biologists as better affirmations of the field’s value. They’d simply help you understand Darwinism better.

Even if they would agree that it’s not essential to read or understand Darwin’s original words, they would affirm the value of his ideas, and point you in the direction of someone who can communicate them better. This is not the norm for ConPhil defenders.

The fact that the ideas of these thinkers can’t be expressed consistently and clearly, and that defenders can’t point to specific texts and passages to elucidate specific philosophical ideas as guided instruction suggests fewer people understand these texts than can defend them.

Part 3: It’s Not Worth Your Time

It’s not a wise use of time to read bad philosophy. All philosophy needs a fair hearing, but reading incomprehensible texts, that others can’t explain to you, and that has at best limited real world application is an inferior use of time relative to reading comprehensible texts, that others can explain, and does have real world application. I

If you continue down a fruitless path, despite all the negative feedback telling you to turn around, you are not behaving as a wise person, but more like an eventual victim of a con man or cult.

Calling something a cult or con certainly comes off as mean. I want to be clear here that I don’t think anyone here is a bad faith actor, being unethical, or deceptive.

Rather, I think ConPhil ideas have the same appeal as conspiracy theories. They’re “forbidden knowledge” that makes the one who “understands” them feel special, endowed with special status.

I experienced this allure firsthand. My first exposure to Foucault and other thinkers was when I was in high school on Tumblr. Their appeal wasn’t about their intellectual content, but about their vibe and coolness, and being able to dunk on cringe mainstream people (who voted for Democrats and had conventional philosophical ideas that were explicable), attracting a high volume of social media engagement.

I don’t want people to fall into the same trap I did, where I thought there was more going on intellectually in these circles than there actually was.¹⁶

My advice: Don’t waste your time. Most people who defend ConPhil do not understand it and those who allegedly understand it cannot be bothered to explain it clearly. It’s most likely nonsense, and the reason why people pretend to understand it is because it makes them feel smart.

I hedge all of these arguments with the disclaimers that I could be wrong, and I’m not an expert. But this overstates my uncertainty. Having reflected on my experience with ConPhil defenders and Hume’s argument against miracles,¹⁷ I view the credibility of ConPhil only a little bit higher than testimony for religious miracles.

As a matter fact (In Humean terms), I have not seen a single substantive defense of ConPhil that doesn’t collapse under the lightest of scrutiny. That could change, but my confidence is so low, that I simply don’t expect it to ever happen. Sure, some of these thinkers have interesting things to say, but you could commit to maybe a single philosophy class (not an entire course, but a class period) running through them. They just aren’t worth your time.

Until someone comes along and commits themselves to popularizing and communicating these ideas in a manner that isn’t vulnerable to the weaknesses I’ve outlined in this post, I have no reason to think ConPhil thinkers have anything worth saying. It would be great to be proven wrong.

But I refuse to spend more time defending and inquiring about people and ideas who can’t or won’t explain or defend themselves.

1. I put all of my links in at the end of my writing process. I want to get this post out and just do not want to spend the time to find all of them. But if we interacted during this discourse and I said nice things to you, you know who you are! The reason I’m linking to BB is because he started the discourse and he’s the easiest one to find posts. Sorry!

2. If you think I’m not being specific about the ConPhil I don’t like. FINE. There’s a list there. FINE! One may say my use of language and labeling is lazy here. Perhaps they are correct. But that’s only an issue if you have high standards of language and labeling. The defenders of these philosophers do not possess such standards, so they can’t field that argument against me without conceding defeat.

3. That’s not to say ConPhil is never ever worth engaging, just that in 2025 and beyond, you can find a non-ConPhil thinker ConPhil sympathetic arguments, but in a more defensible, rigorous and understandable way. To use an idiom: the juice is not worth the squeeze.

4. And as I write this an attribute the title as “ConPhil” I may as well lean into it. Yes, I feel like this kind of philosophy is at least kind of a con!

5. To learn more specifics, I highly recommend Stephen Pinker’s The Sense Of Style, as he goes into far more detail than I can here.

6. Ironically I’m using a nominalization here without explaining it. a nominalization is (basically) adding a stem word to a verb to turn it into a noun. A good indicator of this is if the word has the stem -ification or -ization. When you see sentences with lots of nominalizations in them, you know the writer of those sentences thinks they are super smart. But to the initiated, they come off as a try hard simpleton.

7. Signposting is simply telling the reader the structure and direction of your argument before you make it. I sign-posted at the beginning of this post when I told you my main arguments. Now you know what to expect and can evaluate if I accomplished what I said would do!

8. Hume scholars would love to have the access to Hume that we do to Butler; many of the controversies of Hume studies would be resolved if we could just ask Hume what he meant at different points of his writing.

9. And speaking from personal experience, the supposedly “basic” introductory books for thinkers like Foucault, Lacan, and others are not basic at all, but replicate the same impenetrable style.

10. Or if we’re honest, dismiss it.

11. And before anyone accuses me of punching left, I will glibly note that conservative thinkers such as Jordan Peterson also fail this test. No, I will not elaborate.

12. And as Daniel Munoz has pointed out, Butler’s own defenses were bad.

13. The only ones I know of are the Existentialists, certainly not Derrida and Butler, yet that doesn’t stop people from calling Derrida a poet or novelist.

14. Specifically, old socialist theory that was written well over 50 years ago.

15. I constantly repeat: these include but aren’t limited to Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Butler, Deleuze, and Zizek.).

16. As a teenager, I too wanted to be cool.

17. Which you should read!