Re: What does a philosopher do?

[nd603@soton.ac.uk]

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since when did philosophers have to justify themselves?most academic
subjects don't.either this is because we are viewed as being an unnecessary
waste of time (as many science students foolishly think) or cos we feel the
need to consistently examine ourselves in a manner that is both arrogant,
narcissistic and insecure.

frankly i think we should just chill and be happy telling other people how
their lives/subjects work. there's no need to examine our role. though if
we did i think it would come down to being the ones who view the general
picture - think about it, is it possible for there not to be a 'philosophy
of...' anything? it essentially means some kind of composite of
theory/analysis/pointing out the point of something or other. be it
religion, law, science or politics. philosophy has a thumb in every pie.

nick


Quoting Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>:

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> BUPS-DIS@bups.org
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>
> 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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