philosophy

Some informal notes on what philosophy is like

When i took a high-level small discussion course on a topic in analytic philosophy, i found some expectations of mine about what philosophy was like, expectations drawn from intro undergrad courses as well as from pop culture, seem to be incorrect:

• Expectation: Philosophy is a bunch of people talking and talking about their personal take on 'eternal questions' which can never be settled. What i found: a lot of philosophy is rigorous. The philosophy grad students in my course already had a shared technical language for naming a large number of well-known philosophical questions, well-known "takes" on answering these questions, and well-known arguments for and against each of these positions. What they spent their time on was not mostly 'well i wonder if what if...' introduction of vague new high-level positions (eg 'time in an illusion'), but rather on a nuts-and-bolts look at the precise wording of particular definitions and arguments to see if they were consistent and valid, and if not, if they could be improved; how they could be translated into the language of a different position; and other rigorous, detail-oriented stuff like that.
  • note however that this in itself is a contentious claim: "A prominent question in metaphilosophy is that of whether philosophical progress occurs, and more so, whether such progress in philosophy is even possible. It has even been disputed, most notably by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whether genuine philosophical problems actually exist.[citation needed] The opposite has also been claimed, most notably by Karl Popper, who held that such problems do exist, that they are solvable, and that he had actually found definite solutions to some of them." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_progress
• Expectation: Sometimes famous philosophers of the past came up with ideas that seem ridiculous today; how silly of them! What i found: if you read the writing of almost any famous philosopher (rather than reading a summary of their work written by someone else), it usually seems to make a lot of sense, and often makes you question your previously-firm belief in the opposing position. Ideas that seem so ridiculous today seem so either because philosophy and language evolved to make it easy to express concepts which were difficult to express back then (and those concepts are needed to argue against the ridiculous-seeming proposition); or because the ridiculous-seeming proposition is actually wrong but the argument against it is not as easy as it seems, in fact the obvious-seeming argument against it is flawed, and the successful counterargument is very technical; or because the writing is ambiguous and the famous philosopher could be interpreted in such a way so as to be right even in view of present-day beliefs.
• Expectation: Philosophy is hopelessly and needlessly verbose. What i found: philosophy is sometimes verbose, and sometimes needlessly so, but often the verbosity is needed because our language isn't well-suited to discussing the concepts that are being discussed. In fact, i now think that some of the main products of philosophy are improvements in language that make it easier to discuss previously difficult concepts.
• Expectation: Philosophy and fiction would not have similar constructs. What i found: common themes in myth, scifi, religion, real technology, philosophy (i don't know why)

what is philosophy (and is 'philosophy' a natural kind?)? 'Philosophy' used to include all kinds of stuff that it doesn't anymore (eg the sciences used to be considered 'philosophy'). One thing i've noticed is that philosophers seem to be the ones who create new language for ideas that are difficult to put into words?

Schumacher

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed

Ethics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics :

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_ethics

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexity_of_value

ontology

Ontology is the topic concerning the nature of being.

One popular question within ontology is, what are the classes of things that exist? (incidentally, if you like to think about and collect lists of classifications, you might want to look at my collection: systemsOfClassification