Talk:Philosophy/Archive 3

message: "Courtesy" on wikipedia includes quoting passages you have removed if they are substantial and noteworthy. -- Simonides 23:22, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed passages

message: While I appreciate that the article goes into some discussion of the "real world" uses of philosophy, I wonder if it really goes far enough. The "Applied Philosophy" section seems a little dry in this regard. I have considered adding a few sentences concerning how modern philosophers have had (and still have) great impact in femisim, the civil rights movement, issues regarding AIDS, the war in Iraq, etc. The danger, however, is in inadvertently propagating the "philosophy is mere opinion" myth. Does anyone have any thoughts on this. AdmN 01:02, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think such a paragraph would be useful; the wording simply has to be careful to avoid propagating myths. If you pasted a sample here some of us could probably respond to it before you put it up. -- Simonides 10:05, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Relevancy of Philosophy Today 

message: IMHO external Links to WWW discussion boards are not encyclopedic. Now, two of them habe been added. The mind-brain link, with the additional malice, that in the past there were attempts to add "hidden". I.e. replacing an existing link and not changing the display text. Anyway, now adding in undisguised may be seen as an improvement.
As not having contributed to the article, I won't jump on the links now. Only bring it to your attention.
Pjacobi 18:14, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links to WWW discussion boards 

message: This article has gotten messy. There is no standard structure. Also, I prepose that Western Philosophy have catagory, "Branches" or "Traditional Branches." There is plenty left out. What of empiricism, what of ontology, what of aesthetics? I am not learned enough to be as bold as editing the arcticle, but I hope my suggestions will have some encouragement to the effectiveness of the article. Dustin Asby 05:40, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Housekeeping 

message: I made several small edits to the article, the most important being:
1) Changed "is THE study of the ULTIMATE reality" to "a study of the reality" - less pretentious, less vague, more accommodating of sciences that make a similar claim.
2) Moved "(Philosophy in Greek), lover of wisdom" lower down where it was mentioned before and explained better - avoids the immediate association of Philosophy (in general) with Greek or Western tradition philosophy, and is mentioned where the translation can take more room (philosophia only roughly means love of wisdom; it can also mean friend of wisdom, for example.)
3) Removed some titles from Bibliography for beginners - the books were too slanted towards a particular point of view to be suitable for beginners looking for a comprehensive and somewhat objective approach - one might as well include "introductions" by other famous philosophers which are actually part of their respective philosophies. -- Simonides 10:17, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Various edits 

message: Wikipedia is not a place for personal prejudice.  That the word "fascist" does not appear in the Ayn Rand article is perhaps something you should take into account - if she was such then that is the place to make that point, not in a comment to an edit of philosophy.  I have reverted your deletion of the Ayn Rand quotation in philosophy not only for that reason but because, in my opinion and in the opinion of (s)he who included the quotation, what she said was worthy of inclusion.       That something is inadmissible because of who said it and not what was said I also find fundamentally distasteful:  Here you and the fascists have something in common.  Paul Beardsell 11:57, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Find room in a speaker's corner. I didn't call Ayn Rand a fascist but a neo-fascist - that you can't see the difference goes a long way in explaining anything you have to say on the matter. -- Simonides 21:18, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: I wonder when people will realise that repeating lies/ idiocy/ etc doesn't make it less so. If anyone here has an agenda to push, it's pretty clear whom. -- Simonides 22:15, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Someone else's talk page is not the best place to expound your whole philosophy of life. As I said, if you need to vent, go elsewhere; if not I will simply remove your posts from this page. Goodbye.
Non-sequiter.  Paul Beardsell 22:22, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

text: Rand has every right to be on the page as a quote. Like Paul said, criticisms of her belong on the Ayn Rand page, with citations. Heidegger is reputed to have been a genuine fascist; but we quote him all the time. To quote someone is not the same as to agree with them.Lucidish 18:58, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ayn Rand censorship 

message: The period of review on WP:FAC has ended. Unfortunately, there were some outstanding objections, so I have posted the transcript of the discussion. If you fix and objection on this list, please cross it out. Vacuum 15:28, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)
Very nicely written. Vacuum 16:01, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)
* Support. It is nicely written, (despite being at the center of frequent edit debates).  func(talk) 00:55, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Featured article candidacy

message: I removed:
:Stanley Cavell, a philosopher whose interests are neither exclusively "analytic" nor "continental",  describes this difference in approach by writing that "philosophy may be inherited either as a set of problems to be solved (as Anglo-American analysts do) or else as a set of texts to be read (as Europe does – except of course where it has accepted, or reaccepted, analysis).  You can sense how different imperatives for training, different standards for criticism and conversation, different genres of composition, different personas of authorship, will arise from this difference in modes of inheritance." ("The Philosopher in American Life," in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 45-46)
The actual content of this paragraph is mentioned elsewhere in the article; Cavell’s article in the Wiki is minor – it needs much more material – so I don’t see why he deserves a special mention in the main philosophy article…  Banno 21:06, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)
: I added this quotation not as a "special mention" of Cavell but because I think it a particularly nice, succinct, and unprejudiced two-sentence summary of the analytic-Continental split.  It's fine with me to remove it (and of course Stanley Cavell is not name number 1 that anyone would include in an article on philosophy tout court!) but the article currently doesn't do as good a job explaining the split as Cavell does. -- Rbellin|Talk 06:42, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stanley Cavell 

message: I removed this ludicrous, POV sentence: "it is often - and truly - said that all of Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato". Apart from the clumsy language of the sentence, it is not true. If it was true, then the main body of Western Philosophy would be wacky meditations in the form of contrived dialogues, and its significant contributions would be scanty, inconsequential addendums. Rintrah 08:00, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deletion 

message: Would people familiar with philosophy comment on this: ?  Thanks, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 15:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do philosophers talk about evolution? 

message: I'd thought that Pythagoras was credited with coining "philosophia" (because he couldn't claim to be engaged in wisdom, only in its pursuit).  Liddel & Scott cite him, then Plato. Is there some ground for jumping forward in time to Aristotle? --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 21:54, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  First use? 

message: The contemporary philosopher Lao Sze-Kwang has written about the failings of most definitions of philosophy to totally encapsulate all the works in the field.  He has suggested that the best way of defining philosophy is to consider it to be the “result of the operation of reflective thinking upon special subject matters.”  This creates a definition that doesn't end up excluding any works that are typically classified as philosophy.  It's not without fault but I find this to be an interesting alternative definition, does anyone else feel it would be appropriate to add this to the article?  The Way 05:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Addition to definition of philosophy? 

message: This article now suffers from a malignant introduction. Surgery is needed, before it spreads to a sixth paragraph. One should not need to scroll to find the TOC. Banno 08:26, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed, but a lot of these sections require merging too. Lucidish 15:44, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

text: Agreed here.. was quite happy with the previous version, and didn't really understand the revert. Zargulon 09:58, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: RE "speculative" and "conjecture". I really don't like either one. Amerindianarts 10:24, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

text: This is for user Mel Etitus.  You seem to have some knowledge of philosophy but nothing that would reflect twenty years of teaching.  Your editorial judgment is really deficient, and as I commented above the editorial comment you made “not philosophy but human rights” when reverting that website displays a gross misconception and lack of understanding of what philosophy really is.  True, the site in question is limited to ethics and probably belongs at the ethics page, but to say that human rights is “not philosophy” is a gross injustice to our (or rather, my) discipline.  You also stated when reverting one of my edits that you had never seen an MLA.  My question is, when it is a format required for any papers that are submitted by students to professors, or for submissions to symposiums or for publication, how can you teach philosophy and never have seen one?  Given this and your view on human rights I can only deduce that if you are as philosophically knowledgeable as you say, then you are teaching in a third world dictatorial environment, or you’re not teaching at all, or you’re God.  And Philosophy is not limited to speculation. Speculation is not even a major methodology.  I am trying to think of a categorical proposition that is speculative.  Can you help me?  True or false, but not speculative, and I am not limiting myself to the Kantian categorical.  I mean traditional logic.  Even in modern logic the hypothetical is a material implication, and you may speculate on the disjunctive, but it itself is either true or false.  Your views are very narrow (which is very not-doing-philosophy) and I think your edits are impeding the progress of this article.  You teach that Pythagoras "invented" the term philosophia. I teach that that may be the case according to the writings of his student Heraclides, but all that is certain is that Plato used it.  The rest is up to the student for growth, and I discourage them from excerpting some so called fact from a secondary source.  Maybe just a difference in methods, but I daresay if we were each others students neither one of us would get good grades.Amerindianarts 17:53, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

text: I'll skip AmerindianArts' message addressed to me; the needless personal attack wouldn't help even if it were less silly, and is better ignored.  With regard to the link, though: first, we have a policy against vanity posting (that is, if it's your site, you can't post a link).  That can be flexible, but secondly, we're not a collection of links; we try to keep lists of links to a minimum.  Thirdly, the site isn't really relevant here, as this is an article on philosophy in general, while your site is (at least according to its front page, backed up by what you say above) specifically about human rights. --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 20:54, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For example: "Your editorial judgment is really deficient, and as I commented above the editorial comment you made “not philosophy but human rights” when reverting that website displays a gross misconception and lack of understanding of what philosophy really is. True, the site in question is limited to ethics and probably belongs at the ethics page, but to say that human rights is “not philosophy” is a gross injustice to our (or rather, my) discipline."  This contains a rebuttal of something I never said, baseless impugning of my understanding of my subject, and a disagreement with me presented as a statement of my "deficiency".  Frankly, if that's thoughtful and accurate, I'd hate to see what thoughtless and inaccurate would look like. --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 22:54, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: --not philosophy but human rights-- quote, unquote, not an excerpt. Your editorial comment from "22:23, 22 September 2005 Mel Etitis" on the philosophy page.  Amerindianarts 01:55, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It was an edit summary — compressed, shortened, and explained  (as if anyone not determined to read incompetence into it needed explanation) on the Talk page. --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 11:54, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introduction 

message: Does anybody agree that the term "worldview" is misrepresented, or poorly presented, in the section on non-philosophical uses of the term "philosophy"?  There is a great disparity in the way it is presented in the intro and its presentation in the subject section. Amerindianarts 15:08, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Worldview

message: I think the article is impressive. It is long, but how could it be less so? I have no doubt future detail will be modularized. If there still is any issue about east and west, the distinction definitely should exist. Much of eastern philosophy is in support of Buddhism, which doesn't much approve of theory, and for sure doesn't love it. One minor point. I corrected a typo on the link for Oliver Wendell Holmes. But, there are two, father and son. Which do you consider the philosopher, or is it both? Ought you to say?Botteville 21:32, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: More

message: I put Pythagoras' germinal definition of philosophy in here because it seemed to fit. I did see the partial write-up under "Western Philosophy", which I thought was good. I still thought Pythagoras' definition belonged in the main article, especially the idea of theory. I would leave them both just the way they are. But, if anyone disagrees, just go ahead and change it.
By the way the dates on eastern philosophy are a little questionable. Maybe the Buddha lived that early, but the paradoxes are somewhat later. I know a scholar who has taken the theme that dialectical Buddhism is a transplant from Greek philosophy dating from the time of Alexander, who conquered Pakistan, the former home of Buddhism. It hasn't caught on. If anyone is interested I can supply the name of the book and author.Botteville 21:51, 29 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Motives Goals and Methods