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--but note that the point of that section is to underscore the fact that philosophy is, after all, a much more practical discipline than people might at first be inclined to take it. Also, 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, the standards of knowledge, 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. --Larry Sanger 17:27, 11 February 2007 (CST)