Well, the opening bits about confusion of language and what to call things are a bit... fuzzy :)<p>Yes, Wittgenstein focused a lot on language, but so did a lot of his contemporaries -- that's a large part of what positivism was all about. And the idea that coming up with correct and precise terms and categories as a first step goes at least all the way back to Aristotle in the Western tradition and Confucius in the Eastern. But pg doesn't mention any of this, he just name-drops Wittgenstein and gives you the impression that this is some sort of modern thing to do.<p>On the history of philosophy, I've got to mark pg down quite a lot for outright ignoring the pre-Socratics. Do we only have fragments of their work? Yes. Does that mean we get to write them off as "speculative cosmology"? Hell, no. Plato and Aristotle don't make sense unless you consider them in the context of the philosophers who came before them, primarily the Elean and Milesian schools. And I can't understand why someone who writes so much about entrepreneurship would willingly ignore Thales (unless it's to sweep under the rug the fact that Thales -- though he could and did apply his analytic and philosophical techniques to make money -- didn't seem to care much about practical results and in fact did more than a few things to spite and shame people who wanted such results).<p>I'm going to gloss over pg's interpretation of Aristotle and simply recommend that people actually read Aristotle, or at least well-prepared exegesis of Aristotle; that's a topic too large to tackle in a comment.<p>But talking about the next 1500 years' worth of philosophy just aping Plato and Aristotle without doing any critical thinking is, well, flat-out wrong. Aristotle was indeed highly regarded by later medieval thinkers -- after about the eleventh century AD or so -- but he was far from the only game in town until that point, and most of the regard for his work and Plato's wasn't due to slavish repetition of muddled thinking: medieval philosophers simply didn't have the kind of access to classical work that we enjoy today, and so they used what material they had.<p>From there, pg goes off into what looks like his own flight of unthinking hero-worship, but this one's centered on Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein's important, but he was far from the first person to discover "that most previous philosophy was a waste of time". One suspects that pg has never read, or has forgotten what he read in, Hume, who delivered the real kick in the pants about two centuries earlier (and quite a bit of Hume's most interesting work had been anticipated in antiquity -- the same antiquity which, pg tells us, was far too muddled and concerned with "big generalities" to produce useful or interesting work).<p>(aside: I think this, more than anything, is what bothers me about pg's summary of philosophy: you don't get to condense Western philosophy into a single essay without even mentioning Hume's name. He even goes so far as to attribute to Kant honors which -- and if you've read Kant you'll see even he felt this way -- rightly belong to Hume.)<p>Finally, pg ends up at a "proposal" which, so far as I can tell, is identical to the classical pragmatism of William James (whose name is also conspicuously absent from the essay). He rounds this up by reiterating the falsehood that everybody else was just aping Plato and Aristotle for a couple millennia (perhaps pg simply misunderstood a famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead, and took a literal interpretation).<p>So, basically, pg's spent a lot of time pouring out a "sea of words" riddled with historical inaccuracies and omissions, and used it all to advocate as new a philosophy which has been well-known for over a century. This is not something of which I can approve :)