I hate how he thinks making Youtube content is somehow a meaningful pedagogical activity. I know he didn’t get a terminal degree in the discipline but did he ever do any sort of TA work in his program? Rhetorical question, I don’t think Ollie did any of his assigned readings and his work was so shitty that he was basically told he wouldn’t advance at all and thus has no future in going down that avenue. The man got a degree while managing to not get an education at all, which is no easy feat.
This is apparent everytime he gives a hot analysis in video format on some topic or figure in the philosophical canon; always a rote and cliched reading from secondary sources. What this means is that his “teaching philosophy” is really nothing more than giving his audience a tertiary treatment. Bad ones at that, he prospers off doing a disservice to people and is substantially no different from the grifters who try to sell “speed reading” programs to an unsuspecting public.
This rendition of his metaphilosophy being nothing more than the activity of “taking apart an argument and figure out what it's saying” is such a deflated and unenchanting conception of philosophy I’m surprised he even has other creative interests. It is like someone getting a degree in photojournalism and then refusing to develop their portfolio because he took the pictures and already knows what they look like, so why bother?
I don’t even know why he titled this video “Logic” because it has little to do with that field at all. Everything he tried to demonstrate can pretty much be found in Aristotle’s ‘De Sophisticis Elenchis’ (On Sophistical Refutations) which is really fucking ironic since his choice was to “take apart” an argument preserved in Sallust. The fact he isn’t aware that this is an activity in rhetoric in the Hellenistic sense and not logic while dealing with a Hellenistic text is usually an amateur mistake made by someone like Destiny, but Destiny has an excuse because his literacy extends only to the quest text of Japanse RPGs and Wikipedia. Ollie has fucking graduate degree.
Here is a protip Ollie: If you are going to recite a line of Latin to showcase that elite English erudition then you shouldn’t preface it with pronouncing Cicero as “SIS-A-ROW”, it would be “KICK-A-ROW” you absolute fucking fraud. Elocution of classical languages is performance, as a troon-in-embryo I would think you could appreciate that..
What really hurt my soul was how Ollie needed to refer to Star Wars to explain the historical context of the speech. Watching PhilosophyTube is like a mental exercise of touring ecological disasters in developing countries, just long stretches of spiritual poverty checkered with monuments to the worst examples of Western pop culture.
Yet what fruits of labor do I expect from a man who subsists off Breadtube alone?
