
Philosophy Needs a New Definition - jseliger
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-needs-a-new-definition/
======
davidhakendel
_The cresting of a wave is but its fall; the flash of a bolt of lightning is
but its fading.

Likewise, knowledge, drinking up the water of ignorance, grows so large that
it completely annihilates itself.

This absolute knowledge is like the intrinsic fullness of the moon, which is
unaffected by its apparent waxing and waning._

~Jnaneshwar

 _Knowledge that is acquired is not like this. Those who have it worry if
audiences like it or not. It 's a bait for popularity. Disputational knowing
wants customers. It has no soul... The only real customer is God. Chew quietly
your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay playfully childish._

~Rumi

 _My words are very easy to understand

And very easy to practice.

Still, no one in the world

Can understand or practice them.

My words have an origin.

My deeds have a sovereign.

Truly, because people do not understand this,

They do not understand me.

That so few understand me is why I am treasured.

Therefore, the sage wears coarse clothes, concealing jade._

~Lao Tzu

Perhaps, the article showcases a confusion between the knowledge of the world,
deemed philosophy, and the knowledge of the absolute, also called philosophy.
Hence, there is philosophy as interpretation and argument on the one hand, and
philosophy as revelation on the other. This is seen in the philosophers listed
in the article.

~~~
_h_o_d_
Robert Pirsig differentiated philosophy in a similar way: between Philosophy,
the knowledge of the world; and Philosophology, the kind of organising things
they do in Anglo-American Philosophy departments, in his classic Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

~~~
davidhakendel
Thank you.

------
meri_dian
Philosophy used to be the general designation assigned to anyone who thought
alot. This was before science and the delineation of disciplines of thought.

Physicists used to be known as natural philosophers. As the conceptual tools
and frameworks they used became so refined and distant from the sort of
thinking people normally do that the intelligent layman couldn't contribute,
it became clear the activity of the natural philosophers was not just
philosophizing, it was doing physics. Thus the physicist was born.

Basically any time a field develops, in that a specific set of related
questions is identified and pursued, the devotees to the field become
identified with the field. Biologists, linguists, psychologists, physicists,
chemists... They are all essentially philosophers, all thinking critically
about problems that concern them, but we want to be precise with our language
so we develop more specific words to describe them and their actions.

~~~
charlysl
I like Russell's definition (and his beautiful prose):

 _Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate
between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on
matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but
like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether
that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should
contend— belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge
belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man 's
Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy_

------
folksinger
Think of a triangle. At one point is "philosopher", at another "asshole", and
the third "idiot".

Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "idiot" to be "innocent love".
Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "asshole" to be "pure knowledge".

The total idiot has all the love and none of the knowledge. The total asshole
has all of the knowledge and none of the love. The total philosopher has all
the love and all of the knowledge.

Anti-philosophers fall somewhere along the "asshole-idiot" spectrum. Stock
brokers, tech bloggers, newscasters, Hollywood actors. You get the drift.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
This is exactly the kind of comment which confirms my opinion about how
useless philosophy is.

I am honestly wondering if you are trolling or actually trying to make a
point.

~~~
cgmg
Why do you think philosophy is useless?

------
jdtang13
From the headline, I thought that the article would be some materialist Sam
Harris fanboy talking about how analytic philosophy is the only real
philosophy and how science can tell us objective truths about morality. Count
me surprised! This writer has great taste.

Philosophy and poetry are closely related. Transmission of knowledge is very
difficult. People don't learn well through textbooks and diagrams; they learn
through metaphors and poetic forms. Philosophy _must_ be entangled with messy
stuff like this, otherwise pedagogy is impossible.

~~~
evanwise
For most people, yes, I'd agree. For me personally, not really. I grasp
abstractions and formal stuff almost instantly, but it takes a lot of
grappling with the text for me to come to terms with continental philosophy.
Like, I had zero trouble with Kant's Critique, but I had to read Discipline
and Punish 3 times before I felt like I "got it".

NOTE: This doesn't mean I disparage continental philosophy, just noting that
the discursive/narrative mode is not intuitive for everyone.

~~~
slazaro
I've noticed I have a similar problem myself. What other authors have you
found interesting and accessible?

~~~
evanwise
If you are interested at all in continental philosophy, I'd say Lyotard is a
really good place to start for folks coming from an analytic philosophy or
hard science background. He engages with some of the same ideas as the rest of
the continental milieu but his writing style is not nearly as dense and
allusive as the rest. For more contemporary stuff, Badiou is really
interesting. He's, among other things, trying to bridge the gap between
analytic and continental philosophy. If you want to dive deeper, I'd try to
understand the historical development of contemporary continental philosophy
from Kant through German idealism via Hegel. A lot of the stuff that is
confusing in continental philosophy is confusing because we tend to teach it
without regards to its historical development (I know my continental
philosophy class was like this at least).

------
rotrux
People tend to forget that PhD (when translated into english) means "Doctor of
Philosophy in..."

While getting my bachelor's in math, I often heard peers explain the
following: Math ==> Physics ==> Chemistry ==> Biology ...with the intended
implication that all science rests on math.

Here's the diagram I'd come back with. It wasn't exactly met with enthusiasm:
Philosophy ==> Math ==> Physics ==> Chemistry ==> Biology

~~~
mattmanser
So what? In the UK we have a bunch of old farts who get made Knights of the
Realm. Doesn't make them great fighters. It's just a name.

Philosophy today is a joke, it's all the bits which real, disciplined,
thinkers can't be bothered with yet. Philosophy is a massive con, basically
armchair thinkers who offer no practical, testable, recreatable, advice. And I
did an actual Philosophy degree!

The only bastion of Philosophy had left was moral philosophy and even that's
becoming irrelevant now neuroscience and social science are becoming grown up
sciences and giving us cold, hard facts of why our brain finds things moral or
not, and what moral rules actually work for communities.

Meanwhile, the moral philosophers all wander off and have a good old argument
about if being altruistic is _really_ being altruistic because it makes you
feel good and what is the meaning of the word 'know'. So edgy, so sexy, so
completely pointless.

~~~
igravious
> So what? In the UK we have a bunch of old farts who get made Knights of the
> Realm. Doesn't make them great fighters. It's just a name.

blatant non-sequitur

> Philosophy today is a joke, it's all the bits which real, disciplined,
> thinkers can't be bothered with yet.

a recent study shows that “Physics, Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy are
among the majors with the highest IQs in America, according to research.”
[https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-
iq-...](https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-64811) –
third on the list between the mathematical sciences and materials engineering.
would you agree that IQ is a proxy for 'real disciplined thinking'? if you do
then your assertion about philosophy is false. if you don't then you would
need to explain why philosophers uniquely exhibit high IQ but fail to be 'real
disciplined thinkers'.

> Philosophy is a massive con, basically armchair thinkers who offer no
> practical, testable, recreatable, advice. And I did an actual Philosophy
> degree!

the philosophical method is conceptual analysis. this can indeed be done in an
armchair. it can also be done through dialogue. it can be ventured into via
literature and art as the article demonstrates. it can even be performed by
computational devices. as one manipulates concepts one makes claims about
their interrelations and their relations to the world. these claims are
amenable to analysis. it's not a massive con, it's just extremely difficult
while at the same time deceptively easy because it looks like all philosophers
do is "think about a bunch of stuff". philosophy is as much about
introspection to see where our biases lie. think of your mind like a weighing
scales, if that scales is off the measurement will be incorrect. part of
philosophy is the removal of prejudices and biases from your mind and being
able to spot the flaws and fallacies of others. this takes a long time. not
everyone is able to do it well, some cannot do it at all. because of
relentlessly increasing specialisation philosophy plays a more mediating role,
it also tends towards abstraction – thus, not everyone is cut out for it. it's
not to everyone's taste. just because it's not for you there's no need to
trash the entire discipline. i never liked accounting (for instance) but i'd
never turn around then and say it was a joke or a con.

> The only bastion of Philosophy had left was moral philosophy and even that's
> becoming irrelevant now neuroscience and social science are becoming grown
> up sciences and giving us cold, hard facts of why our brain finds things
> moral or not, and what moral rules actually work for communities.

bullshit. every branch of philosophy is thriving. i would argue that it is
actually to the detriment of philosophy that moral philosophy and its various
ethical branches (business ethics, environmental ethics, bioethics,
territorial rights, human rights, and so on) secure funding over other areas
through a perception that they're more relevant. they're not.

> Meanwhile, the moral philosophers all wander off and have a good old
> argument about if being altruistic is really being altruistic because it
> makes you feel good

kindergarten stuff – i suggest reading the works of the late Derek Parfit, for
one, to see what actually concerns the contemporary moral philosopher

> and what is the meaning of the word 'know'.

wrong, that's epistemology (different branch to ethics)

> So edgy, so sexy, so completely pointless.

not an argument – you would think you might have learned that somewhere during
your philosophy degree

~~~
mattmanser
> blatant non-sequitur

1\. Grandparent claims there's something meaningful behind the _name_ of a
degree being prefixed with "Doctor of Philosophy in...".

2\. I draw parallels between a "Knight of the realm" bearing no relevance to
the martial prowess of the recipients today.

It's just a name, a tradition, it's meaningless.

~~~
igravious
I see what you mean, that is an interesting parallel. An oversight on my part.

------
jseliger
To quote AL Daily:

 _Philosophy now comes to us in one form: the peer-reviewed article, published
(preferably in English) in an academic journal. No wonder philosophy has
become so irrelevant._

~~~
empath75
The incentives in academic philosophy aren't really around finding truth, but
rather getting published so you can keep your tenure. There are a lot of
academic philosophers that have crawled so far up their own asses they don't
even know the way out any more. But they don't represent all of philosophy,
even if they get a lot of attention.

Philosophy broadly defined is as vital and important as ever, though. I can't
imagine a world in which trying to understand it is no longer important. Not
everything there is to know about the world has been systematized enough to be
considered a science, and any time you have a knowledge domain where the
boundaries are fuzzy and poorly understood, there is going to be a place for
philosophers to try and bring some order to it, even if it takes a few
thousand years.

~~~
AElsinore77
What strikes me most about philosophy is in how core it is to everything we do
— and this is something I didn’t realize for the longest time. The foundations
of the economic, social, and political systems we live in are based upon
philosophy; on theories of the nature of man laid down by thinkers such as
Rousseau, Kant, and Smith. It turns out that “self evident truths” might
actually be philosophical assertions. Philosophy is the first principle upon
which many ideas we may initially take for granted rest upon, and I wonder if
a general lack of explicit attention and examination on the subject is
partially what enables some of the "post truth" attitudes we are seeing today.
The more I learn, the more I can relate to "all I know is I know nothing."

~~~
0x4d464d48
"What strikes me most about philosophy is in how core it is to everything we
do — and this is something I didn’t realize for the longest time."

Same. I used to take strong exception to the idea that philosophy was worth
any amount of time to study... but then I realized any argument to reject it
or degrade its utility is necessarily philosophical and changed my tune.

------
fnordsensei
At this stage in life (maybe not at the time), I relate to my own education in
philosophy as "learning to think", or "learning to reason", perhaps.

You have to follow a train of thought through and address even the minutest
details for logical consistency, or another person (playing the devil's
advocate, most likely) will find the inconsistencies and use them to poke a
hole in the entire argument. This skill is not limited to debate. Debate is
just one way to exercise it.

The usefulness of being able to carry out long, cohesive trains of thought is
so general and pervasive that it's hard to describe any one situation, on the
lines of "a hammer is useful for getting nails into a board", that describes
it rather than diminishes it.

~~~
erezsh
Following this stage, there is an important realization: The details never
stop. There's always more "what if"s and more "unless"es. Always another stop
on the train of thought. I say it's important, because sometimes our ideas
seem very big or well-contained, when in fact, it's an impossibility.

------
yomritoyj
"myth, poetry, drama, mysticism, scientific thinking, political militancy, or
social activism" are all alive and well. Whether we include them in
'philosophy' or not may be of importance for those seeking prestige or
positions in these fields, but is a matter of little significance for the rest
of us.

And there is also a need in this world for formalized thinking on fundamental
questions. Not only has formal thinking often brought clarity and progress,
formalism has a poetry of its own which poets know nothing about.

------
korbonits
I love that the author quotes Kant in the context of imbuing philosophy with
storytelling. It's true!

>>> begin quote

One philosopher writes, with studied relief, of arriving to “the land of
truth,” which is “surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the region of
illusion, where many a fog-bank, many an iceberg, seems to the mariner, on his
voyage of discovery, a new country.” The quote is not from Nietzsche or
Benjamin’s work, nor from other “literary philosophers” — it’s from Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.

>>> end quote

------
vinceguidry
A good, if depressing, argument can be made for defining philosophy as "that
which happens in academic philosophy departments." Ideas have a quorum of
people that you have to convince in order to be taken seriously, when your
thoughts aspire to the philosophical, then that quorum exists solely in the
academy and related organizations grounded in the academy.

Any attempts to get outside of this mean expanding the quorum to "anyone,
really." Which means the standard publishing cycle where your idea's merits
are judged by sales figures. Which means that every single book out there is a
philosophy treatise.

Any marketplace of ideas has to have its gatekeepers. Otherwise we all drown
in a deluge of shit. Traditional literature, art, architecture, really any
serious creative endeavor has an industry of people that serves as the
gatekeepers that determine both the current status and the zeitgeist of the
art. Outsiders must build their own audiences and fight their way in, rather
than be able to tap the extant audience that the gatekeepers are the guardians
of. It's difficult to see how it could happen any other way. Otherwise you get
legions of wannabes proffering crap. Philosophy is no different.

~~~
forapurpose
Similarly, we could say that science is 'whatever studies Nature publishes',
but that doesn't tell us much and threatens to leave the mistaken impression
that Nature is merely capricious and arbitrary.

While I agree with your conclusion, we shouldn't forget that philosophy and
other marketplaces you mention have standards based mostly on what proved to
be true in the past, what can withstand argument and criticism in the idea
marketplace, and on a commitment to excellence and achievement.

------
aaimnr
Profound philosophy needs to take into account messiness, but cannot be messy
itself in its use of concepts, reasoning etc.

By being strict one can realise the limits of the very cognitive tools we use.
Godel and Quine come to mind. The concepts are limiting, but that's all we
have in philosophy.

The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different
playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical
instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

For instance Rumi composed all his verses in a specific rhythms (obviously
lost in translation) that, when sang and danced to, were meant to induce a
specific states of mind.

Buddha explicitly said that metaphysical questions are orthogonal to the
problem of suffering that he was solving (or just meaningless).

To make things even more complex, there are some similarities between
teachings of the Buddha and western pragmatists.

The main problem (or the most fun part) in such discussions, is that there's
no common ground to make such inter-paradigm comparisons. We always have to
pick one of these viewpoints as a base and compare it to another one from that
perspective.

~~~
deerpig
>The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different
playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical
instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

Is philosophy about proof or understanding? Math and the sciences are there to
look for proof. Remember that Science used to be called Natural Philosophy,
which has now become a philosophical enterprise based on conjecture and
empirical reproducible observation.

We need philosophers through their teachings to make sense of all that
messiness and let those branches of philosophy such as the sciences gradually
work out how it works in ways that can be confirmed and proven.

------
angel_j
This article must come from within academia itself, to presume that there is
any such problem with philosophy; they have confused their academic problem as
being philosophical; we all derive most of our philosophy from all kinds of
art and experience, hardly any of it from college philosophy courses; and
academic philosophy eventually admits those it is not likely to produce: there
is plenty of philosophy that does not adhere to contemporary academic
formalism, yet they teach it under the banner of philosophy just the same;
they'd look stupid if they didn't!

------
pmoriarty
_When he who hears doesn 't understand him who speaks, and when he who speaks
doesn't know what he himself means -- that is philosophy._

Voltaire

------
ThomPete
I always had a simple way to think about philosophy.

There is a world of difference between knowing about philosophy (the history
of it and what various philosophers "actually" meant) and then to be a
philosopher (a thinker).

The person who knows a lot about philosophy is often academic. They can tell
you the difference between Frege and Wittgenstein and have a million ways to
interpret Nietcshe.

In my experience though, the best philosophers come from all parts of life and
are what I would call careful thinkers. They can be well read or not it's the
way they deal with the subject they discuss that makes them great.

So sure give philosophy a new definition in academia to fight over and debate
if you'd like, it won't change much for those who know how to think.

------
Myrth
Highly recommend "My Big Toe" by Thomas Campbell

