Modern Philosophy and the Problem of Identity

Illustrating major theories in metaphysics today

Modern philosophy is overcomplicated and completely inaccessible. Most everyone agrees. But why?

When people read ancient philosophy, they often report it being surprisingly imprecise and wishy-washy about the ultimate nature of things, because modern philosophy by comparison is obsessed with giving specific names of actors in or aspects of the world that do specific things and have specific relationships with each other to make the world the way it is. Plato and Aristotle, greater more than their contemporaries, did things in this more precise modern way, and it was in fact this very innovation of precision that made them so lopsidedly influential in the history of philosophy.

In their own time, it set them apart by establishing exact doctrines, rather than reinterpretable parables, of how the world worked, and this forging of doctrine from philosophy gave the Platonic and Aristotelian systems the same kind of staying power that strict doctrinal religions show throughout history (that being a really long time).

Now, all of Western philosophy works with their same assumption that the agents, materials, forces and otherwise which make up the world must all be accounted for with proper names and official definitions in every “complete” philosophical system. True, “theory of everything” philosophers aren’t running as rampantly as they may have in the past (at least in academia…