I do not wish to post yet another, “What is Philosophy?” threads…really, I don’t…
But I’ve recently been very perplexed by a similar question. How far does philosophy really extend?
WikiPedia has gone so far to include Sex as a form of philosophy (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy). But really, is sex itself really a true form of philosophizing?
I mean, for that matter, I could say, “I’m studying the Philosophy-of-Eating” by eating this sandwich". Do you really think it is accurate to say that everything in life is a direct form of philosophy?
I’ll argree with the belief that perhaps all of life is [an] indirect form of philosophy, but not a truly direct form philosophy.
[b]If everything could be said to be a form of philosophy, this website would cover literaly every single topic/activity/etc. imaginable. This is obveously an absurd idea.
So, where then do we draw the line…or is there really a line at all? [/b]
“I’m studying the Philosophy-of-Eating” by eating this sandwich".
It’s funny but we talked about the philosophy of eating something, I think cake, in relation to a Sartre passage.
Anyway, I think that anything that requires a complex thought process is open to philosophy. The act of two dogs having sex isn’t philosophy for them because they don’t think about it. However, we think about and plan to have sex. We can also see a cause and effect from it.
If fact various threads here are about whether or not various forms of sex are philosophies or not.
Never use ‘really’ in a philosophical conversation, it just looks untidy. I’m not getting at you, please understand that, just be careful of these things slipping in when it would be clearer to leave them out.
To me, no. To others, yes. In the absence of an overarching criterion, who knows?
No, philosophy is a particular kind of language game that, for example, is usually but not always excluded from the language game called ‘literature’. Eating is eating.
I have little use for spatial metaphors like ‘direct’, I’ll say that now, but I’d simply point out that experience is experience, language is language, philosophy belongs to the latter.
Not necessarily, but that is certainly how most academic philosophers react. Hence why we now have cultural history, cultural theory, semiotics and other disciplines which are essentially philosophical but have been excluded to a great or lesser extent from philosophy. This, in the case of cultural (particularly media) theory has been its downfall - most of what has been written is absolute tosh and doesn’t conform to even the most basic logical standards.
We draw it wherever we please. For me what is philosophical is never an issue purely of subjectivity. That which is fundamentally personal is to be excluded from philosophical discussion because it is simply a non-starter or entails an infinite regress, depending on how you look at it. That, provisionally, is where I’d like to draw the line, if I were in the mood to draw one. There is a term favoured by a few of the philosophers here at ILP, ‘transsubjective’, which I don’t use but which is useful to this discussion. As such I’ll leave it to the aforementionned to define this term, though of course I believe that I understand it.
Nonetheless is it an interesting question to which I’ve given, as I say, a provisional answer. I would have thought that you’d want in on this discussion…
It’s not ‘nonetheless’, it’s fruit of the forbidden tree. The fact the article cited does not say what the author said it does means everything that follows is a red herring - take the counterexample about eating as the quintessential case-in-point. In turn, the only viable question was the simple ‘How far does philosophy really extend?’ which is precisely what the OP says it’s not: a question about the nature of philosophy.
I guess I’m sort of lost here. As best as I can tell, the most clearly-stated response I have gotten was this from someoneisathedoor:
I suppose that this answer will suffice, but at the end of the day, it seems as though there still exists some form of subconciously-known “line” that keeps us from calling everything we do a ‘philosophy’. Joseph Conrad or Nathaniel Hawthorne could better be described as novelists rather than philosophers — even if they technically could be categorized as both. Do you see what I mean? Sorry if I’m not doing a very good job at communicating my point here…
Voltaire said something along the lines of anything that’s still being argued about is philosophy but also a bit pointless.
He pointed out that something like geometry is not a philosophy because it’s provable and proven. I assume that the basics of chemistry are much the same. We still haven’t seen an atom (a philosophical proposition) but there’s no sense going back and forth about it.
So, philosophy is really anything that you can have an unverifiable opinion about. I could develop and philosophy about why onions should be used at every meal or one about how and hwy humans use language. Both of these concepts can’t be verified but they could be discussed and explored.
Do any categories exist outside of human culture and history? Is there a category of [PHILOSOPHY] that is nonhuman and ahistorical?
Accept for a moment that there isn’t a category of [PHILOSOPHY] that is nonhuman and ahistorical. The category can be described as something that we are creating. Some want to expand this category to be more inclusive at this time. Demarcation lines are always subject to revision. Is a narrower focus of the category [PHILOSOPHY] better or worse? It depends on what you are trying to do with [PHILOSOPHY].
Maybe someone is trying to make an activity sound more important.
Which of these is important?
The Science of Eating
The Philosophy of Eating
The Art of Eating
The Story of Eating
The Book of Eating
Would people 300 years ago have had the same line? Or 500 or 1000?
In 300 years will they laugh at us for calling so many things a “science”?
Yeah, you mean (?) to ask what’s the line between philosophy and not-philsophy. And you’re right, that is a formidable question - like, why is it I find some things ‘deeply philosophical’ and others merely ‘cool’ or ‘smart’?
I think the answer would probably be somewhere near the idea that we organize our mind in certain ways - filing our thoughts, as it were - and some subjects, by way of their connection to others that trigger the concept of philosophy to emerge, force us to think on this philosophical level, whereas others simply do not.
For me, that would mean it is those subjects that deal explicitly with how I go about living - dasein or Being - thereby forcing me to consider them philosophically, or philosophical.
I might buy that one. But, by this argument, it seems to me that one could fairly say that science has ended many philosophical debates in history. Something is only philosophical until science or mathemetics or whatever has successfully provided an undisputable answer.
Well, of course this is true. But that is the nature of history and humanity’s progression in time. It was not terribly unreasonable for someone to believe that the earth was flat. At that point in history, such a concept was an equally valid possibility from the amount of knowledge avalible.
