Felxfame's Blog

Definitions from Prominent Philosophers
by Maria Popova
‘Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical reflection
on anything you care to be interested in.’
Last week, we explored how some
of history’s greatest minds,
including Richard Feynman, Carl
Sagan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie,
and Isaac Asimov, defined science.
Kant famously considered
philosophy the “queen of the
sciences” — whether or not that is
true, philosophy seems even more
elusive than science to define.
From Philosophy Bites, the book based on the
wonderful podcast of the same name, comes an
omnibus of definitions, bound by a most
fascinating disclaimer — for, as Nigel
Warburton keenly observes in the book’s
introduction, “philosophy is an unusual subject in
that its practitioners don’t agree what it’s about.”
The following definitions are excerpted from the
first chapter of the book, which asks a number of
prominent contemporary philosophers the
seemingly simple yet, as we’ll see, awfully messy
question, “What is philosophy?”
Philosophy is thinking really hard about the
most important questions and trying to bring
analytic clarity both to the questions and the
answers.” ~ Marilyn Adams
[P]hilosophy is the study of the costs and
benefits that accrue when you take up a
certain position. For example, f you’re arguing
about free will and you’re trying to decide
whether to be a compatibilist or incompatibilist
— is free will compatible with causal
determinism? — what you’re discovering is
what problems and what benefits you get from
saying that it is compatible, and what
problems and benefits you get from saying it’s
incompatible.” ~ Peter Adamson
Philosophy is the successful love of thinking.”
~ John Armstrong
It’s a little bit like what Augustine famously
said about the concept of time. When nobody
asks me about it, I know. But whenever
somebody asks me about what the concept of
time is, I realize I don’t know.” ~ Catalin
Avramescu
(Cue in Richard Feynman’s similarly-spirited
answer to what science is.)
A few common themes begin to emerge, most
notably the idea of critical thinking:
Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical
reflection on anything you care to be
interested in.” ~ Richard Bradley
I don’t think it’s any one thing, but I think
generally it involves being critical and
reflective about things that most people take
for granted.” ~ Allen Buchanan
Philosophy is critical thinking: trying to
become aware of how one’s own thinking
works, of all the things one takes for granted,
of the way in which one’s own thinking shapes
the things one’s thinking about.” ~ Don
Cupitt
Another running theme — sensemaking:
Most simply put it’s about making sense of all
this… We find ourselves in a world that we
haven’t chosen. There are all sorts of possible
ways of interpreting it and finding meaning in
the world and in the lives that we live. So
philosophy is about making sense of that
situation that we find ourselves in.” ~ Clare
Carlisle
I think it’s thinking fundamentally clearly and
well about the nature of reality and our place
in it, so as to understand better what goes on
around us, and what our contribution is to that
reality, and its effect on us.” ~ Barry Smith
[Philosophy is] a process of reflection on the
deepest concepts, that is structures of
thought, that make up the way in which we
think about the world. So it’s concepts like
reason, causation, matter, space, time, mind,
consciousness, free will, all those big abstract
words and they make up topics, and people
have been thinking about them for two and a
half thousand years and I expect they’ll think
about them for another two and a half
thousand years if there are any of us left.” ~
Simon Blackburn
Also recurring is the notion of presuppositions:
Philosophy has always been something of a
science of presuppositions; but it shouldn’t
just expose them and say ‘there they are’. It
should say something further about them that
can help people.” ~ Tony Coady
Philosophy is the name we give to a collection
of questions which are of deep interest to us
and for which there isn’t any specialist way of
answering. The categories in terms of which
they are posed are ones which prevent
experiments being carried out to answer them,
so we’re thrown back to trying to answer them
on the basis of evidence we can accumulate.”
~ Paul Snowdon
Philosophy is what I was told as an
undergraduate women couldn’t do* — by an
eminent philosopher who had best remain
nameless. But for me it’s the gadfly image, the
Socratic gadfly: refusing to accept any
platitudes or accepted wisdom without
examining it.” ~ Donna Dickenson
I think it used to be an enquiry into what’s
true and how people should live; it’s distantly
related to that still, but I’d say the distance is
growing rather than narrowing.” ~ John
Dunn
Philosophy is conceptual engineering. That
means dealing with questions that are open to
informed reasonable disagreement by
providing new concepts that can be
superseded in the future if more economic
solutions can be found — but it’s a matter of
rational agreement.” ~ Luciano Floridi
I’m afraid I have a very unhelpful answer to
that, because it’s only a negative answer. It’s
the answer that Friedrich Schlegel gave in his
Athenaeum Fragments: philosophy is a way of
trying to be a systematic spirit without having
a system.” ~ Raymond Geuss
Philosophy is thinking as clearly as possible
about the most fundamental concepts that
reach through all the disciplines.” ~ Anthony
Kenny
[A philosopher] is a moral entrepreneur. It’s a
nice image. It’s somebody who creates new
ways of evaluating things — what’s important,
what’s worthwhile — that changes how an
entire culture or an entire people understand
those things.” ~ Brian Leiter
(A good editor, then, is also a philosopher — he or
she, too, frames for an audience what matters in
the world and why.)
I think that philosophy in the classical sense is
the love of wisdom. So the question then is
‘What is wisdom?’ And I think wisdom is
understanding what really matters in the
world.” ~ Thomas Pogge
I’m hard pressed to say, but one thing that is
certainly true is that ‘What is Philosophy?’ is
itself a strikingly philosophical question.” ~ A.
W. Moore
I can’t answer that directly. I will tell you why I
became a philosopher. I became a philosopher
because I wanted to be able to talk about
many, many things, ideally with knowledge,
but sometimes not quite the amount of
knowledge that I would need if I were to be a
specialist in them. It allows you to be many
different things. And plurality and complexity
are very, very important to me.” ~ Alexander
Nehemas
A number of philosophers are particularly
concerned with teasing out the difference
between science and philosophy:
Philosophy is thinking hard about the most
difficult problems that there are. And you
might think scientists do that too, but there’s
a certain kind of question whose difficulty
can’t be resolved by getting more empirical
evidence. It requires an untangling of
presuppositions: figuring out that our thinking
is being driven by ideas we didn’t even realize
that we had. And that’s what philosophy is.” ~
David Papineau
I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry
rather than a particular set of subjects. I
regard it as involving the kind of questions
where your’e not trying to find out how your
ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas
are true or not, in the way that science is
doing, but more about how your ideas hang
together. This means that philosophical
questions will arise in a lot of subjects.” ~
Janet Radcliffe Richards
I see philosophy as the ability to notice things going wrong and correcting them."~ Enisire Felxfame Omovie.
(Though, one might argue, some of the greatest
scientists of all time, including Albert Einstein and
Stephen Hawking to name but just two, were only
able to develop their theories because they
blended the empirical with the deeply
conceptual.)
Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way
things are. That includes reflecting critically on
social and political and economic
arrangements. It always intimates the
possibility that things could be other than they
are. And better..” ~ Michael Sandel
Well, I can tell you how philosophical problems
arise in my view, which is where two common-
sense notions push in different directions, and
then philosophy gets started. And I suppose I
also think that anything that claims to be
philosophy which can’t be related back to a
problem that arises in that way probably is
empty.” ~ Jonathan Wolff
I think the Greek term has it exactly right; it’s
a way of loving knowledge.” ~ Robert
Rowland Smith

Philosophy is the ability to create new ideas.
"~ Enisire Felxfame Omovie