The bureaucrat/poet axis

Years ago, Liam Kofi Bright proposed that philosophy can ultimately be boiled down to the opposition between two tendencies. From his socials, here’s a recent statement of it:

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

On his blog, Fintan Mallory uses a simple language model to digest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and situate every philosopher on the bureaucrat/poet axis. For me, the fact that Dewey comes out more poet than Freud and Kuhn more bureaucrat than Millikan calls the whole thing into question.

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