What Is Philosophy? A survey of some answers
1000wordphilosophy.com
1000wordphilosophy.com
I think most people don't have the deep suspicion that everything they may know might be wrong, somehow, and that the phenomena they experience may be explainable in a parallel way that better describes things.
Caring about and understanding the structure of knowledge is philosophy. It always surprises me that other's have not explored these subjects beyond casually considering them during a novel or film.
I've always wondered why it's such a majority that don't have these suspicions. (It took me a long time to realize I can relate to these 'skeptics' easier and eventually become better friends.) And to drill down into this group: what's the split on whether the suspicion truly never occurs to them and whether they've chosen to ignore the suspicions and be obstinate their entire lives.
Re: casually exploring philosophy through novel or film. Sadly I do think it's just a fact that it's an angle of entertainment and the only exposure to philosophy people get in the 21st century.
Because being philosophically correct (or even philosophically consistent) offers a very small material advantage. Or sometimes a disadvantage - if the environment shifts so that individuals do very badly then questioning the local collective (historically, often a church) might end poorly.
> I've always wondered why it's such a majority that don't have these suspicions
This is entirely pejorative.
First of all, the premisses is a contradiction in terms. If knowing with certainty is a matter of definition, then doubt about it is expressly excluded. You can go down the slippery slope and deny objectivity all together to arrive at the quote popularly attributed to Sokrates, and develop platonic ideals to finally hold it with Descartes idealizing yourself, cogito ergo sum.
Yet, we fundamentally can't know what others think and feel. If we can only take a best guess, and converse to peek and poke for improving the estimate, then that's what philosophy really means in the all daily sense, our "company philosophy" and such like. It generalizes well either way, whether anthropomorphizing the environment, or objectifying people, if we always can only project from the self onto others. And esteem is actually a good analogue to philos!
Still, a notable duality remains in my philosophy above. The point I'm trying to make is, I guess, that I will have to keep that formyself and leave yours to you, because ambivalence is a feature, and a bug.
And that's usually the point you reach when you talk about politics with reasonable people whom you disagree with. You both conclude you can't really know much at all and leave the conversation with the same beliefs you both had before.
> knowledge is philosophy.
I disagree. At least, I expected the sentence to continue differently, because the study of philosophy is to a significant degree concerned with a survey of the historic development of certain traditions of thought, and ideas.
But beyond that, it's only rarely about the structure of knowledge. That's predominantly done in information science, informatics, what English call computer science for short. Of cohrse, caring about can be done in both disciplines, but also in any other field, pretty much by the definition of "study".
Except, philosophy eventually will do it with blanket terms to the point of being meaningless. Point in case: your comment.
Really though, it depends entirely on the philosophy under study.
Have you actually been exposed to any high-level contemporary philosophical research? While it is true that many philosophers do care about the history of ideas, this is quite often done in order to treat various philosophical questions systematically (for many philosophers, it's all about the questions, not about any 'philosophy' that needs to be studied). Besides, for many philosophers there is also some interest to integrate their work with the work of researchers in many other disciplines. If you work in philosophy of language, it would be ridiculous not to try to acquire some working knowledge of linguistics and cognitive science. If you work in epistemology (aka the theory of knowledge), you have to have some knowledge of cognitive science, game theory, computer science, psychology, evolutionary theory, and so on, just to know what other philosophers might be discussing.
GP's claim could be parsed in many different ways (what is 'understanding'? what is 'the structure of knowledge'?), and the suggestion that whatever that is is 'predominantly done' in computer science betrays some ignorance (or perhaps some willing obtuseness) about the alternatives. That you think that their claim was meaningless says more about you than about the claim. Why, instead of disagreeing with GP immediately, don't you ask them what they mean? You know, engage with a philosophical thought?
using blanket terms to be filled with meaning is a valid strategy.
With that in mind, I didn't specify that OP's claim was meaningless. I just handed back the ball. Provocation is maybe not the best discurs strategy (and provocation is maybe not the most precise term for it), but it worked out well for me.
Your response gave me something to think about. Alas, I won't be able to summarize it. I can only sum up that I am not going to indulge in an argument about who and what should be considered "high-level contemporary research". If that is the main concern of your comment, you are just making my point.
More over, if philosophy is eventually a blanket term that is continuously redefined, then I tried to take as much out of it as possible by marking CS and maths as a huge contrast, however not disjunct (nor independent, authark) fields, which should leave huge room for interpretation that is topical to this venue, as a counterforce to the popular view that sees all humanities emerging from the tradition of philosophy--conversely: e.g., the meme of all link trials in Wikipedia ending at the philosophy article--equivalently: philosophy subsuming all... which is a grandious claim. High-level in that sense would be philosophy of philosophy, perhaps, for which there is no authority that I'm aware of.
It's an interesting topic indeed, but in critique of OP's remark about held believes I was trying to get at something slightly different (hoping that it aligns eventually). Namely that truth is often enough that which doesn't need saying, which is however indistinguishable from void. Everything else is climbing towers of abstractions.
I'm a C-Programmer.
returnIf you surveyed the historic development, you would know that modern computer science is the product of great philosophers who solved what logic is, what information is, and what computation is. And they got it right, because you're looking at it.
> Point in case: Your comment.
What a rude and incensitive thing to say.
Maybe I'm rather criticizing CS for not paying it enough head? No, I'm pretty sure I'm disappointed with philosophy for all the quantum mumbo jumbo--which is just lip service from me, as I'm just not well read in the area, but still, it's leaking into this domain and frequently criticized for it.
I would replace knowledge with arguments. Knowledge is already "solved" in many minds and it'll be hard for philosophy to reclaim the word.
But arguments? I don't think so. No field is as deeply concerned about arguments than philosophy.
Tangible arguments are scientific arguments, which are a mere subset of philosophy. Modern philosophers have failed to market the superset.
"It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to." — Philosophical Investigations.
I think the problem with defining "philoosphy" is that any time a field becomes sufficiently well-defined, they stop calling it "philosophy". Natural philosophy is now "science". Early practitioners of economics, linguistics, and even law were called "philosophers". Fields like sociology and cognitive science still overlap a lot with philosophy departments.
What's left in philosophy is those fields that are still vague and without definitive answers even at the base level. Epistemology (structure of knowledge) and ethics are two broad headlines that encompass much of what's called "philosophy" now, but a lot of work in philosophy departments only barely fits into those categories (like those that also lump under sociology).
These fields are important, though it's easy for fans of "hard sciences" to dismiss them because they're so poorly defined. It's worth remembering that Newton and Darwin both considered themselves philosophers. They were the ones who took poorly defined fields to gave them rigorous footings, and we respect them for finding the order in what was orderless before they started.
Philosophy is ideas people come to that can't be discussed with other people who aren't also doing philosophy.
If it's taught in a university, it's dead philosophy. Alive philosophy can't be done in a classroom setting with strangers, it's highly personal and if you're lucky to find someone to do philosophy with, my, what a gift, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Of course philosophy wants to argue it's purpose. Musicians could write a symphony to explain music, if they felt the need, and astronomers could draw a detailed map of astronomy and explain how fast the different sub fields were diverging based on their red shift and parallax calculations?
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”Philosophy predates sciences and science is just a methodology.
If we take this view then interestingly the study of philosophy must also include the study of what is the meaning of the word "meaning". It must study what its own definition means. Talk about snake eating its tail
"To philosophize is to throw off apathy, to become revived."
- Novalis
The full version:
The reader in search of knock-down arguments in favor of my theories will go away disappointed. Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (Or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation—at a price. Argle has said what we accomplish in philosophical argument: we measure the price. Perhaps that is something we can settle more or less conclusively. But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ. And if all is indeed said and done, there will be no hope of discovering still further arguments to settle our differences.
It might be otherwise if, as some philosophers seem to think, we had a sharp line between “linguistic intuition,” which must be taken as unchallengeable evidence, and philosophical theory, which must at all costs fit this evidence. If that were so, conclusive refutations would be dismayingly abundant. But, whatever may be said for foundationalism in other subjects, this foundationalist theory of philosophical knowledge seems ill-founded in the extreme. Our “intuitions” are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. Our common task is to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination, but it remains for each of us to come to rest at one or another of them. If we lose our moorings in everyday common sense, our fault is not that we ignore part of our evidence. Rather, the trouble is that we settle for a very inadequate equilibrium. If our official theories disagree with what we cannot help thinking outside the philosophy room, then no real equilibrium has been reached. Unless we are doubleplusgood doublethinkers, it will not last. And it should not last, for it is safe to say that in such a case we will believe a great deal that is false.
Once the menu of well-worked-out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion. Is that to say that there is no truth to be had? Or that the truth is of our own making, and different ones of us can make it differently? Not at all! If you say flatly that there is no god, and I say that there are countless gods but none of them are our worldmates, then it may be that neither of us is making any mistake of method. We may each be bringing our opinions to equilibrium in the most careful possible way, taking account of all the arguments, distinctions, and counterexamples. But one of us, at least, is making a mistake of fact. Which one is wrong depends on what there is.”