Talk:Philosophy

Got to get to work on other things now. This article obviously needs to be greatly expanded. In keeping with other CZ articles under development, this needs to be completely reworked as a readable introduction to the topic, for people who actually might need an introduction to it. This means that it needs to be not mainly a big, long list of names, theories, and concepts, and subdisciplines (some such lists are obviously appropriate), but instead mainly an introduction to the subject itself. The effect of reading the article, for someone who didn't have the first clue about what philosophy really is, should be an improved understanding (preferably through some choice examples) of what philosophical problems are like, and how philosophers generally approach them. --Larry Sanger 14:16, 28 January 2007 (CST)

It's interesting that this elderly version of a Wikipedia is better than what's there now. --Peter J. King 05:54, 11 February 2007 (CST)

How to get started in philosophy

I'm not certain that a "how to" section is a good idea in the first place, but this version starts rather oddly. Most introductions to philosophy that I've seen mention the usage of "philosophy" in "everyone has a philosophy" only to point out that that's not what the introduction is concerned with. A perfect example is the introduction to A Dictionary of Philosophy by Flew & Priest:

"'My philosophy is...' [...] It is with philosophy in a second sense that this Dictionary deals."

I'm not certain how bold "be bold" means in this new venture; I'm tempted to remove the section as inappropriate for an encyclopaedia, but it's actions like that which tend to lead to silly editing wars at Wikipedia, so I thought that I'd ask here first. --Peter J. King 17:11, 11 February 2007 (CST)

Feel free to remove it--it most definitely needs to be rewritten, at the very least. I think the sense in which "everybody has a philosophy" here is not the one mentioned in those dictionaries of philosophy. It is that there is such a thing as "folk philosophy" in about the same sense as "folk psychology": people have all sorts of views about the nature of reality (it's all relative!), the standards of knowledge (if I feel very sure, I know it!), what things are most valuable in life, and so forth. These beliefs could be "my philosophy," in a sense different from what you see in "my philosophy about fly-fishing," because they really do concern the same questions that philosophers study. The notion then is that one can view a study of philosophy as the refinement of one's own "folk (or personal) philosophy." --Larry Sanger 17:27, 11 February 2007 (CST)

I see what you mean — in which case it needs more explanation rather than removal (though the "how to" aspect is still a bit unenyclopædic).

I've tried to get some of the editors from Wikipedia to join in here; the main Philosophy article there is a mess (as are many of the other philosophy articles), and the better and more knowledgeable editors were fighting a losing battle against some indefatigable oddballs. I've just seen that one of the former has placed a copy of your PHILOS-L recuitment message (which was how I came here) at his Wikipedia User page. I don't know if that's something that you'd either foreseen or wanted; it might bring in some of the good people, but I suppose it might attract the loonies.

The main problem there probably wan't so much expertise versus non-expertise (though that played a part) as a system that fails to deal adequately with people who have no interest in co-operation or any sort of community spirit of working together on a project. I see that Citizendium hasn't entirely escaped that, but I hope that it has more success than Wikipedia. --Peter J. King 08:30, 12 February 2007 (CST)

I'm afraid we will have to deal with a few loonies in any case--you have to take bad with the good (and then eject the irremediably bad). If someone feels moved to put the note on his user page, I wouldn't stop him.

One way in which I see CZ being different from a traditional encyclopedia (on the recent conception--not on the conception encoded in, for example, Diderot's Encyclopedie) is that it does contain "how to" material. Isn't procedural knowledge just as much knowledge as declarative knowledge? That's what I always thought, anyway. Cf. choosing a dog! --Larry Sanger 10:33, 12 February 2007 (CST)