Definitions of Philosophy Return to Andy Stroble s page

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 43:

 
 

". . .philosophy is merely an elucidated experience."

Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, p. 5 [quoting Dummett]

Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and finally, that the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of language. . . . The acceptance of these three tenets is common to the entire analytical school . . . [but] it has taken nearly a half-century since his death for us to apprehend clearly what the real task of philosophy, as concieved by him, involves.

William James

"Philosophy is the unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly."

G. E. Moore, gesturing towards his bookshelves:

"It is what these are about."

Wittgenstein, Tractatus,

4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense).

4.112 Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 6:

But philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists.

McKenna, Andrew J.Violence and difference : Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction.p. 50, quoting Derrida, (Writing and Difference, 62):

"To define philosophy as the attempt-to-say-the-hyperbole is to confess-- and philosophy is perhaps this gigantic confession-- that by virtue of the historical enunciation through which philosophy tranquilizes itself and excludes madness, philosophy betrays itself (or betrays itself as thought), enters into a crisis and a forgetting of itself that are an essential and necessary period of its movement. I philosophize only in terror, in the confessed terror of going mad. The confession is simultaneously, at its present moment, oblivion and unveiling, protection and exposure: economy"

Marx, Karl, Theses on Feuerbach, #11

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern.

Heraclitus:

Philosophy is a sacred disease.

Billacois, François, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France, p. 158

For there had been a rumour that only one of them made a pious end, while his companion `died like a philosopher... because he neither moved nor spoke [as he went to his death]'. This rumour was not unlikely. Séguenot admitted that Condren had to work hard at the spiritual preparation of Bouteville, who received:

things that were said to him with the strength of his mind and his courage and behaved more like a philosopher than a Christian; for his mind was naturally of a rare and excellent cast, he was firm in his reasoning, relying on his own maxims and distanced from common and popular sentiments, and he seemed to have something of the ancient philosophers. All these are qualities that are not very favorable to that grace which is only given to the small and humble.

For the society which saw Bouteville as a paradigmatic duellist, that duellist was (except for miraculous cases of intervention by divine grace) a gentleman who placed all his confidence in his own virtue, a superbly magnanimous man, closer to Epictetus than to the Imitation of Christ.
 

Habermas (Preface to Legitimation Crisis)

. . . clarification of very general structures of hypotheses.

From Ambrose Beirce's Devil's Dictionary:

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

Bradley, F.H. Appearance and Reality: p. xii:

I see written there [his notebooks] that `Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Alasdair McIntyre :

The teaching of a method is nothing other than the teaching of a certain kind of history.

Davis, Grady Scott Warcraft and the Fragility of Virtue, p. 172:

Reading philosophy won't make someone good, it can only clarify how a person of practical reason deliberates about actions.

Edie Brickell, "What I Am" from the album shooting rubberbands at the stars, 1986 Geffen Music, ASCAP:

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box, religion is the smile on a dog;

Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks, religion is a light in the fog,

Dan Shannon

Those who either follow a rational method in their argument for discovery or who engage in the content of philosophical speculation, specifically on the question, `Whether it is possible to gain knowledge of the absolute?', would be eligible for the title `philosopher.'

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

§9 Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power.§61 The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits-- as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over-all development of man-- . . .

Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right:

To comprehend what is is the task of philosophy, for what is is reason.

Robert Ginsberg :

Philosophy is a creative art of making problems.

. . . Philosophy probes problems. It tries to show what a problem is in the sense of what is problematic about it. It explores alternative possibilities of dealing with the problem.

Hawaii Rent-All, message billboard, Honolulu, 9/95:

A philosopher has a problem for every solution.

Callicott, J. Baird. In Defense of the Land Ethic, p. 4-5

Today the need is greater than ever for philosophers to do what they once did-- to redefine the world picture in response to irretrievably transformed human experience and to the flood of new information and ideas pouring forth from the sciences; to inquire what new way we human beings might imagine our place and role in nature; and to figure out how these big new ideas might change our values and realign our sense of duty and obligation.

Dilworth, David, Translator s Preface to Nishida s Art and Morality, p. xi:

The emergence of an original, yet intrinsically coherent, interlocking vocabulary may be said to be the mark of a philosopher. (Cf. Rorty and later Wittgenstein)

From the Web Page of Peter J. King

I take 'philosophy' to be an English word referring to a certain kind of thinking, a certain kind of approach to a certain kind of problem. To explain those 'certain kind of's would take a book; the best I can do here is gesture at what it is that English-language philosophers do. In most languages there are words that are translated into English as 'philosophy' -- in European languages, those words often share the same Greek roots as the English word. The activities to which such words refer have a history shared with philosophy, but at some point after Kant there was a parting of the ways. The activities referred to by `philosophy' are different in various ways from the activities referred to by words like 'philosophie', 'Philosophie', 'filosofia', etc.

James W. Heisig, Rude Awakenings, p. 270:

The perennial task of philosophy does not consist in transmitting accumulated knowledge but in reassuring the love of truth. This demands a special relationship of mutual criticism between teacher and student for which reason and not rank provides the basis.

 

John Dewey, Quoted by Cornel West in The American Evasion of Philosophy, p. 112

When it is acknowledged that under the disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions, that it has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies, it will be seen that the task of future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become as far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts.

Aquinas, Aristoteles librum de caelo, XXII, 8: (whoops, lost it; you'll have to look it up!)

The American Philosophical Association, Statement on Outcomes Assessment (Proceeding and Addresses 69:5, p. 66)

The APA calls upon administrators to recognize that philosophy is fundamentally a matter of the cultivation and employment of analytic, interpretive, normative and critical abilities. It is less content- and technique- specific than most other academic disciplines. The basic aim of education in philosophy is not and should not be primarily to impart information. Rather it is to help students to understand various kinds of deeply difficult intellectual problems, to interpret texts regarding these problems, to analyze and criticize the arguments found in them, and to express themselves in ways that clarify and carry forward reflection upon them.

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, chapter XLII

Philosophers acquire needs and interests unknown to uneducated men; above all, philosophers do not recant in the public forum the principles that they have upheld in private, and they acquire the habit of loving truth for itself. A good selection of such men constitutes the happiness of a nation, but that hppiness will be temporary unless good laws augment their number so as to diminish the ever considerable risk of a poor choice.

Feuerbach, according to Marx in "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole"

Philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, hence equally to be condemned as another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man;

Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, p. 231:

For him (Gramsci), the aim of philosophy is not only to become worldly by imposing its elite intellectual views upon people, but to become part of a social movement by nourishing and being nourished by the philosophical views of oppressed people themselves for the aims of social change and personal meaning.

Rolf Ahlers, on hegel-l@bucknell.edu:

That is what philosophy is: Its time grasped in thought.

Wilfrid Sellars:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things
in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest
possible sense of the term.

Heidegger:  An extraordinary enquiry into the extraordinary.

Chris Nagel:

My point is this: when I teach Introduction to Philosophy, I meet a great many

students who are convinced that going to college is a matter of purchasing a
document that entitles them to certain societal benefits, and which has almost
nothing to do with what happens in classes.  They so disrespect the institution
of education (not the college, but the cultural form) that they consider my
efforts to prod them to think as quaint or insulting.  Our society rewards this
behavior.  It's odd to ask the question who is responsible, since this has
become the pervading cultural climate.

John Shand  <JShand5961@aol.com>
        Mon, 5 Jun 2000 on  PHILOS-L@LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK
 
 

Philosophy is not, I think, a body of truths, but a way of

thinking and living. It might not make you happy - but it does embody that
courageous openness and questioning that is perhaps the noblest feature of
human beings.
    Without philosophy, as far as one's basic beliefs are concerned one
will just end up believing what one is given. The duty of a philosopher is
to free people to think for themselves.
    So next time you're at a party, and someone asks you, having heard
you're a philosopher, 'So what is philosophy then?' - instead of shifting
about looking for an excuse to leave or falling back on the old classic
of  'well, that's best understood by doing it?errm, mind if I go and get
another drink?', try: philosophy is what happens when people start
thinking for
themselves.
 

Bernard Williams, in "Philosophy As a Humanistic Discipline"
 

I have already started to talk about philosophy being

this or that, and such and such being central to philosophy, and
this may already have aroused suspicions of essentialism, as though
philosophy had some entirely distinct and timeless nature from which various
consequences could be drawn. So let me say at once that I do not want to fall
back on any such idea.

 Michel Foucault 

  What is philosophy after all? If not a means of reflecting on not so much what is true or false but on our relation to truth? How, given that relation to truth, should we act? The Masked Philosopher
 

Submissions for addition to this list, with preference given to those that are less than serious, can be sent to:Andy Stroble.

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