Category talk:Philosophers

message: See Wikipedia:Notability (people); Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons; Wikipedia:Categorization of people
Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy recommends that:
* Biographical articles should include a infobox template: :template:Infobox Philosopher
* Biographical articles should not be included in :Category:Philosophers, at the top level, but only in the appropriate sub-categories.
For the purposes of this category, a philosopher is someone who satisfies two criteria:
1. s/he has been identified as a philosopher in several reputable encyclopedic publications (e.g. MacMillan, Stanford, Routledge, Oxford, Duden... other relevant German/French/other sources could be named here).
2. s/he has been identified as a philosopher in several articles published in reputable journals of philosophy (e.g. ...)
Notable dead philosophers should pass the test of criterion 1 to be non-controversial for inclusion in philosophical lists and categories. In the case of notable living philosophers, criterion 1 can be replaced by criterion 2.
In the case of controversy, discussion among editors and WP:CONSENSUS is encouraged. Opinions can be sought at wipipedia:wikiproject Philosophy.
----
The preceding is my suggestion. What do others think? Universitytruth 22:54, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categorization 

message: Why do we have a subcategory for British philosophers if we have separate categories for English and Scottish philosophers? Can we do away with British if we want to retain distinctions, or forget about English/Scottish/ etc? (British has the advantage of including Welsh philosophers, for which there is not yet a category, or classifying philosophers for whom the nationality is not clear.) -- Simonides 07:12, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That was probably just somebody's mistake, go ahead and dump the British category imho. Lucidish 18:54, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nationalities 

message: When Grace Hopper was living, she did not call herself a philosopher. Certainly these people have accomplished great things, and certainly many of them can be called thinkers. Is "philosopher" now an honorific for them? Ancheta Wis 07:34, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. Lucidish 21:29, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most of these "philosophers" certainly didn't call themselves that 

message: Just copy and paste it into your favourite philosopher's biography, then modify its contents to suit. Banno 21:14, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Guide for using this template

message: When an image is absent, the template looks a bit odd (see J. L. Austin). Since this is likely to happen with a large number of the biographies, a solution is needed. Creating an alternate template without the image seems a cumbersome solution.  Is there a generic single-point image that we can use in order to remove the uglies? Banno 21:32, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Images

message: This section needs some serious reorganizing.  Many philosophers need to be re-alphabetized by their last name (for example, "Howard Bloom" should not be under "H").  Then there's the matter of pruning.  "Contemporary philosophy", last I checked, was not the name of a philosopher.  noosphere 05:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going through the individual philosophers and add the sort keys to sort by last name.  Most have them now, but still more to do.  Also, I'm removing all of the individual bio articles from the main category and recategorizing them to subcategories. – Doug Bell talk•contrib 04:14, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alphabetization and pruning 

message: I propose getting rid of the proposed inclusion of the Judith Butler article in the Philosophy project. According to Martha Nussbaum, Butler is a rhetorician and a sophist, and not a philosopher. Anyone support that she is not a philosopher, in the tradition sense?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kmaguir1 (talk • contribs) .
:She is simply not an analytic philosopher like Nussbaum.  That doesn't mean she isn't a continental philosopher.  Since Heidegger, analytic philosophers have been accusing the continental tradition of not doing "proper" philosophy, while continental philosophers have accused analytic philosophers of being boring.  Wikipedia, as far as I know, doesn't privilege one tradition's claims over the other.--Agnaramasi 00:37, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: All of that "analysis" is pure POV.--Agnaramasi 19:07, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So if I find Christian sources that say C.S. Lewis is a philosopher, or G.K. Chesterton, or Jewish sources that say Salman Rushdie is a philosopher, they're a philosopher? That's not verifiability. And what if Jewish sources explicitly deny Spinoza was a philosopher and instead only claim he is a heretic? I think this is not good policy. Firstly, Butler does not hold a position in philosophy. Secondly, while she did get her degree in philosophy, that doesn't translate professionally. That is to say, even if she is a philosopher of habit, she isn't one for her profession. She uses philosophy, and forms theory. That doesn't a philosopher make. And of course historically, this is true of a number of prominent philosophers, that they didn't actually teach philosophy, but instead theology or something. And philosophy has that general history. But even then, the question is 'ok, did this person actually do what we would call philosophy today'? And for the inclusion or exclusion of Butler, I think a debate over that is valid. Of course, we don't have the ability to judge retrospectively, so we have to ask what people will view her as. I'll open this for discussion on the Butler talk page, but I wonder where this might be debated further outside of that, as to her inclusion in the Project. -Kmaguir1 06:49, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that WP policies don't always solve such problems for us. If you want, take a look at the talk page of List of German-language philosophers. After much much discussion, we have recently arrived at two criteria that seem to be acceptable for verifying who is and who is not a philosopher. The point is to agree on reputable, reliable sources from which to cite. (In our case, that's Macmillan, Routledge, Metzler (a German-language reference), and a few others, including the online Stanford one.) You see? You have to build consensus on what is okay to cite from in order to verify that someone is a philosopher. Try it and see what happens with Butler.Universitytruth 15:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: BTW, if "a Jewish source" says that Spinoza was a heretic, look at Macmillan and all the rest. Voila: it's verifiable. Spinoza is a philosopher, because Macmillan says so. That's the point of wikipedia being tertiary: we're not out to say what's true, rather, what's verifiable. See if my test works on C.S. Lewis: what do Macmillan, Stanford, etc. have to say about him? I realize that this just takes the fight to another level: you now have to discuss with people what reference works of philosophy are reputable and reliable. Why don't you try that (discussing this), and see where that takes you? I think it would be productive.Universitytruth 15:16, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

text: "...we're not out to say what's true, rather, what's verifiable." Universitytruth, that ought to be included in the wikipedia logo. Nicely done. Shaggorama 15:14, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, then I'll just go get a bunch of apologetic Christian conservatives and add them to the philosopher pool, and we'll apply universitytruth's standards. -Kmaguir1 06:14, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I hear your concerns about C. S. Lewis, etc., but I think they can be dealt with by discussing what sources are reliable and reputable, and what sources are not. For example, to determine who is a philosopher, why don't you try to build consensus around using Macmillan, Routledge, Oxford and the like? That should screen out various religious writers and others who really aren't considered philosophers. Let us know on this page how that goes. --Anthony Krupp 15:54, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

text: C.S. Lewis is usually referred to as a "novelist".  MacMillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1973) does not provide him with individual article space, but he is referred to in a couple of articles ("Immortality" and "Religion and Science") as an "apologist" and a moralist of sorts, but not as a philosopher.  Of course,  Butler does not appear at all, but she is new and in terms of the history of philosophy may not be verified as such in noteworthy publications for quite some time. Amerindianarts 08:52, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: C.S. Lewis described not as doing philosophy, but as "philosopher":
http://www.anglik.net/lewis.htm
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html
http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=3&subclassID=9&articleID=1843&class=Features&subclass=A%20conversation%20with
http://home.apu.edu/~dglyer/cslewis.htm
http://ethicscenter.nd.edu/inspires/lewis.shtml
Here's an entire class on "The Philosophy of C.S. Lewis": http://www.ivpress.com/groothuis/doug/syllabus/pr669.pdf
Here's another course that wants to talk about the contributions of C.S. Lewis to philosophy: http://faculty.concordia.edu/joel_heck/cslewis.html
Another school teaches his philosophy of religions: http://trinet.tiu.edu/sites/Syllabi/2006Syllabi/ST845Sp06WertherMad.pdf
Anything else? -Kmaguir1 09:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, there is. I made a positive suggestion for you above ("discussing what sources are reliable and reputable, and what sources are not. For example, to determine who is a philosopher, why don't you try to build consensus around using Macmillan, Routledge, Oxford and the like"), and it appears you've not done this. Let me invite you a second time to try and build consensus by identifying reliable, reputable reference wokrs. (The citations you mention are on the web, but does that make them reliable and reputable? If that's your only criterion, then Charlie Brown and Pooh are also philosophers.) Cheers,--Anthony Krupp 16:54, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, there's the verifiability question. And some might want to include both Butler and Lewis. If there's a class on the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, or the Notre Dame website refers to him as a philosopher, well, then, that's fine. But what I think is ludicrous is that just because someone is called a philosopher, I don't care if it's by MacMillan, Routledge, Oxford, Notre Dame, some professor, a bum on the side of the street: that does not a philosopher make. Routledge has actually published books of hers. Independent of attributions of her being a philosopher, there can still be a debate as to whether or not she really is. And so if it's verifiable that she is, then she is. But so is Lewis. And so I want a bit of a higher threshold. I don't agree that because a company or a reference book calls someone a philosopher, that that makes someone a philosopher. I mean, if Oxford or Macmillan or Routledge or Oxford called Aquinas a theologian, that doesn't mean that he is not also a philosopher. But Butler, call her what you will, she's not a philosopher, because by the definition of the word, apart from verifiability, she thwarts, detests, and does not believe in, wisdom, and does not love it. Thus, Nussbaum's attribution that she is really a sophist, and not a philosopher, I think is valid. So by Nussbaum, who is quite credentialed, I suggest taking her off the list. That's verifiable, too. I just want you to agree that verifiability doesn't fix the problem--you need another objective standard. Did I mention an objective standard about Butler? Wow. I should be shot. -Kmaguir1 18:26, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I take it you're new here. Please read WP:VER and other wikipedia guidelines. Of course you can hold the opinion that your assessment and Nussbaum's assessment trumps the collective wisdom of the editorial boards of reputable encyclopedias, just as you can hold the opinion that red is green. You say that "just because someone is called a philosopher, I don't care if it's by MacMillan, Routledge, Oxford, Notre Dame, some professor, a bum on the side of the street: that does not a philosopher make." On wikipedia, which is a tertiary source, someone being called a philosopher by a reliable reputable publication does indeed a philosopher make. You don't have to like that, and yes of course, that does remove the problem to another level (what is a reputable and reliable source). But then the appropriate thing to do is to discuss it at that level. Thus, I would submit that any lover of wisdom should reasonably be expected to prefer Macmillan to the bum on the side of the street. Don't you? I would submit that you cannot take someone off a list "by Nussbaum." If you do so, you could be considered as someone who is disrupting wikipedia. If you want to get blocked, that's of course your prerogative. Whether you should be shot is not a question I feel competent to address. Cheers,--Anthony Krupp 18:56, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

text: The articles in these reference books are written by philosophers, often as a synopsis or condensed version of a major work they published.  So, getting listed in these publications would seem to be to a degree peer acceptance and recognition of contribution to their discipline.  It may be true that calling Aquinas a theologian "doesn't mean that he is not also a philosopher", but being a Philosopher doesn't necessarily mean that one is a theologian, just as being a theologian does not mean you are a philosopher.Amerindianarts 18:52, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, see, you hit the nail on the head. What is a reputable and a reliable source? I think that that is open to debate. I again think that just because it's peer-reviewed and philosophers say she's a philosopher, that that's not enough--we'd have a great many philosophers in the world. I agree MacMillan is preferable to some bum on the side of the street, but also that MacMillan is not dispositive. Again, CERTAIN philosophers write CERTAIN books published by CERTAIN people that include CERTAIN people--seems like the essence of a closed community. Are there people with just one religious position (atheism) or just one political perspective (leftism) or the like represented, or is there a good variety of liberal and conservative, atheist and theist, or the like? So let's do what you say--let's discuss the reliability and the reputability of these publications from a variety of sources--given Routledge published one of Butler's books where she says "sex outside of marriage may indeed open us up to a new idea of community", I think that's a very interesting debate to have. Let's have a debate about that here, and have you call the sources that endorse this stance by publishing it REPUTABLE--that's all I want you to do. If you're going to rely on publications, bring out the big guns--but make sure they're not all leftist atheist feminists, and bring the stats from the editorial board to prove it or the like, just so we have some material to discuss about reputable, and who holds who to be reputable. The complicity of the academic community in buckling under to feminists as philosophers, this is a direct result of the academy having accepted feminism. And I reject that. Surely I can find people opposed to feminism, and thus by extension the attribution of "philosopher" to someone who works with only that focus in mind, and not larger issues of more metaphysical significance. I don't think that people should be included as philosophers whose lone attachment to the discipline of philosophy is that they're feminists, and that academics have accepted that, and so they're philosophers. If I'm a Nazi, and academics accept that, am I philosopher just by writing things surrounding my Nazi membership as a political stance? In Butler's case, the politics is greater than everything. -Kmaguir1 19:34, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Krupps' point of list criteria is the ultimate point at Wiki.  Macmillan (1973) lists Aquinas as a "theologian and philosopher", e.g. and I would have no problem verifying his status as a philosopher.  But The terms "theologian" and "philosopher" are conjunctive, distinquished, and not synonomous. Religion is not synonomous with philosophy, and religious studies is not synonomous with philosophic studies.  I hate to put it in so many words, but---being considered a philosopher within the circle of religious studies does not a philosopher make.  You need secular verification.Amerindianarts 19:38, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

text: User Kmaguir1 wrote "If you're going to rely on publications..." Again, please read WP:VER. There is no "if." That is what one does at wikipedia. Cheers, --Anthony Krupp 20:02, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Judith Butler a philosopher?? 

message: This is an utterly stupid discussion.  The category here isn't "really swell philosophers" or "philosophers universally liked by their colleagues" (the latter presumably empty).  The question is as simple as this:
*Butler received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984
*Or if you must, look at the back cover of the Gender Trouble where Routledge adds the category "Philosophy" to the title (I haven't specifically checked the other books, but I presume it is likewise).
LotLE×talk 11:29, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inanity 

message: An open question: is there a policy on having people listed in only subcategories (such as Van Til in :Category:Calvinist philosophers) as opposed to being listed in both subcategory and the main category (such as Immanuel Kant in :Category:German philosophers and :Category:Philosophers)? This just came up on a talk page, and I thought it would be good to ask.--Anthony Krupp 01:36, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In general, a subcategory membership is meant to replace membership in its parent, since the child logically implies the parent.  But this would be clearer if the category system was more sophisticated technically.  And moreover, the usage is very haphazard across WP.  Nonetheless, such is what WP policy says. LotLE×talk 04:55, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories and Subcategories