RE: What does a philosopher do?

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Hi,

What do philosophers do maybe just a different way of asking what philosophy
is, and perhaps the reflexive nature of the question is a clue to the
difference between philosophy and other pursuits for 'knowledge'(does a
physicist ask what a physicist does?).  The only person I have met who was a
card carrying philosopher, that is, he actually had a business card with the
title philosopher after his name, turned out to be an objectivist
philosopher.  The title clearly meant something to him and he had studied
the doctrine and how to argue his corner.  There was something too
evangelical, promising truth, answers, and ridiculing disagreement with
pre-prepared attacks, that felt disingenuous for my tastes.  My label
'objectionable' philosopher did not sit comfortably.  Perhaps Sophist might
have been a kinder term.

My point is that philosophers can't plead to expertise in critical thinking
even though a powerful logic can be deployed.

Territory seems to have been taken (or given) from philosophy (taking the
reference to lack of progress in the last 2500 years), but how can that mean
that philosophy has not made progress?  It may be the case that by its
nature progress will not be made as there is always something else to
question and explore.  Once the ideas have been developed then, as with the
TPM article, be it physics or anthropology, some new area of study is born.

So, perhaps philosophy in the modern empirical world is about concept
formation.  I am philosophising when I am thinking about how I should
approach the way I do science, as opposed to how I am doing the science.  I
am philosophising if I am concerned with the terminology I am using - does
it capture what I mean, does it need refinement or revision?  Making
distinctions is important, although not exclusive part of philosophy, the
meta level at which such distinctions are recognised may be different in
impact.

The view from where I sit is that philosophy is about concept formation and
development.  I know (by the way how can I know what I don't know) that this
doesn't appear an exclusive domain, however, combined with methodology and
nature of argument, its lack of focus on 'progress', maintaining a meta
position is a basic position.  As for embarrassment, this is because the
label of philosopher ties in with historical figures and in modern culture
it is surface change that matters - did you appear on TV, where you famous
for 15 minutes, rather then did you have some ideas that were difficult to
understand and took time to mature to influence the world (morally good or
bad). A claim to intellectualism is a claim to be apart from then a part of
worldly ambition - no truth is present, simply a reflection of priority and
focus.  Intellectualism is dead (as is god and philosophy).

So philosophers experience existential angst, the difference is if we claim
to be philosophers we have some sense of what might mean, the arguments
against, and yet still respond authentically.

Rgds
Ausser


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com
[mailto:owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com]On Behalf Of Robert Charleston
Sent: 25 August 2005 17:25
To: bups-dis@bups.org
Subject: Re: What does a philosopher do?


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BUPS-DIS@bups.org


Hi Jeff,

That's a nice idea, but can it really work?

> You're right that philosophers "do what other people do some of the
> time." Philosophers analyze the nature of the world at levels deeper
> than most, and with methods more reliably truth-indicative than most.

I have heard people talk of philosophy being about a 'deeper level' before
- but what does it mean? There only seem to be a handful of alternatives,
and I'm not convinced by them. First it might mean that - literally -
there is a deeper level of the world, and extra layer in the ontological
strata of things, that philosophers get at, and others do not. Or at
least, paying proper respect to the way you phrased the above, *most* do
not. Well, I wouldn't want to defend this position in a tutorial on
substance dualism, let alone trying to build it into 'what a philosopher
is', being a monist. But more importantly, since I take it I can be a
monist and be a philosopher, it doesn't seem to be a good idea. So bad
interpretation.

Of course, we might also interpret the 'levels' idea as being a
reductivist one - that maybe there are more levels in the world that -
although not metaphysically separate, may still be accessed through
knowing how  things reduce into component parts, like language or semantics
and syntactics, presumably. In which case I think physicists do more
reducing than most philosophers. In fact there are plenty of
non-reductivist philosophers, who say the correct ontology of the world is
at the level of objects most people talk and think about. I think this
layered sense of levels can't be what philosophy is about, even though a
lot of philosophy uses it.

Perhaps it means 'looking at things more carefully, clearly, logically,
paying more attention to detail than others.' That would fit in with the
claim that philosophers use better 'truth indicative' methods than most.
But do they? Most philosophy papers I read skate over the detail of whole
tracts of the material they use. Scientists are regularly cited as 'now
thinking that...' or - worse - the phrase 'it turns out that...' is used
to introduce an idea taken from 'New Scientist' or a daily paper.
Philosophy does seem to pay more attention to the valid structure of
ideas. But so do speech writers. I want to know if there's anything that
philosophers do that is different from re-labelled speech writing.

And as for our techniques, well they are definitely better than most for
avoiding error, but there are a lot of people who would look at the
limited progress we have made in our subject over the last 2,500 years,
relative to - say - the progress made in physics over the last 100, and
would say that truth-indication has been sacrificed on the stone of
error-avoidance. We are not indicating very many truths in relation to the
number of errors we are pointing out. Which seems a good, but rather
limited, role?

Are we any further forward because we talk of deeper levels?

Rab.


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