I was going to say, I discovered a comment on that site when searching to see if it knew it was talking about phenomenology, semantics, semiotics, etc.
On the one hand, this seems to fulfill Kant's definition of genius (independently arriving at concepts that would have to be taught to most people) but on the other hand it reflects a certain naïveté that people in the sciences seem to have about the liberal arts: that meaningful (ha) questions such as these have not been properly considered in philosophy even given the fact that philosophy predates positivist Western science and the enlightenment by a few thousand years and there's like a 90% chance that Plato addressed these questions of "meaningness" somewhere and possibly even that he came to the same conclusions at one point or another.
At that point of course it's sort of a psychological question for me: why are highly intelligent people often drawn to the same questions and the same answers multiple times independently over thousands of years? I think the answer lies somewhere in sort of the "death of the author" problem in that language ceases to be useful in discussing certain questions past a certain level of abstraction and thus abstract communication is doomed to be imprecise such that we sound like we're repeating ourselves when we might not actually be. The revolutions in philosophical understanding, then, would seem to happen almost as if by chance: somebody articulates a shared meaning so successfully that its presence is evident to other people where once it was hidden. This is sort of what Wittgenstein was getting at I believe with Tractatus and the proposition that philosophical misunderstandings are shortcomings of language and thus if you can manage to simplify language enough that overloaded, idiosyncratic, and imprecise meanings are eliminated then you can formally deduce all of philosophy from a few first principles. I'm butchering him of course but this attitude is similar among lots of analytics and (as far as I know) originates with Wittgenstein and Russell. A meta-narrative so to speak of the continental approach would seem to be something along the lines of creating and articulating original ideas with universal scope which are not perhaps falsifiable but provoke thought in the subject. (somewhat Deleuzian I think)
https://meaningness.com/fixation-and-denial/comments
On the one hand, this seems to fulfill Kant's definition of genius (independently arriving at concepts that would have to be taught to most people) but on the other hand it reflects a certain naïveté that people in the sciences seem to have about the liberal arts: that meaningful (ha) questions such as these have not been properly considered in philosophy even given the fact that philosophy predates positivist Western science and the enlightenment by a few thousand years and there's like a 90% chance that Plato addressed these questions of "meaningness" somewhere and possibly even that he came to the same conclusions at one point or another.
At that point of course it's sort of a psychological question for me: why are highly intelligent people often drawn to the same questions and the same answers multiple times independently over thousands of years? I think the answer lies somewhere in sort of the "death of the author" problem in that language ceases to be useful in discussing certain questions past a certain level of abstraction and thus abstract communication is doomed to be imprecise such that we sound like we're repeating ourselves when we might not actually be. The revolutions in philosophical understanding, then, would seem to happen almost as if by chance: somebody articulates a shared meaning so successfully that its presence is evident to other people where once it was hidden. This is sort of what Wittgenstein was getting at I believe with Tractatus and the proposition that philosophical misunderstandings are shortcomings of language and thus if you can manage to simplify language enough that overloaded, idiosyncratic, and imprecise meanings are eliminated then you can formally deduce all of philosophy from a few first principles. I'm butchering him of course but this attitude is similar among lots of analytics and (as far as I know) originates with Wittgenstein and Russell. A meta-narrative so to speak of the continental approach would seem to be something along the lines of creating and articulating original ideas with universal scope which are not perhaps falsifiable but provoke thought in the subject. (somewhat Deleuzian I think)