Although some philosophers would disagree with the detailed implications of the following characterization, in a broad sense philosophers spend their time analyzing and clarifying ideas. This is often referred to as conceptual analysis, and it is understood as what one can do "from an armchair," i.e., by thinking about something.
If you look at what academic philosophers do these days it seems (to me) that an awful lot of it involves nit picking. One paper would be a claim about some concept X, and a responding paper argues that the author of the first didn't consider this aspect of what we normally think of when we talk about X. The points may be valid, but the important larger issues often (in my view) get lost. This happens (it seems to me) because like all academics, philosophers are under pressure to publish. Hence many papers are published more because the author needs to add to his CV than because the paper is a significant advance in its area. (But that's true of much academic writing.) One way to get a sense of what philosophers do is to look at what they write, and a good place to get an overview of that is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/> (SEP), a resource that as I understand it, is respected by philosophizers -- and contributed to by many of the best known. Here's a link to the Table of Contents <http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html>. The articles in it are intentionally written as review articles rather than as articles that propound a specific position--although many seem to include a good deal of the author's perspective. The following articles may be of interest to this list: species <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/> (what do we mean by the term and are there really any such things?), scientific realism <http://Scientific Realism> (a description of how most scientists think about what they do), emergent properties<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/>(about, of course, emergence and what that term has been used to mean), and causal processes <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/> (by an Australian philosopher who I think gets it right but who seems to have been dismissed by many academic philosophers). Another place to look for information about what philosophers do is to do a Google search for "How to write a philosphy paper<http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1&nord=1#sclient=psy&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&qscrl=1&source=hp&q=%22how+to+write+a+philosophy+paper%22&pbx=1&oq=%22how+to+write+a+philosophy+paper%22&aq=f&aqi=g-c1g4&aql=f&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=174002l175550l4l2l2l0l0l0l0l238l469l2-2l2&qscrl=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=c306e119a7d85f91&ion=1&biw=1171&bih=769>." This will yield quite a few references written by academic philosophers for their students telling them how to write papers. For example, here's one from the Dartmouth writing program about "Writing the philosophy paper<http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/humanities/philosophy.shtml> ." Having written the preceding, I'm wondering whether it scratches the itch that prompted the question in the first place. It talks about what philosophers actually do, but it probably provides less ammunition to praise or criticize it. *-- Russ * * * P.S. I write this as a computer scientist who has read quite a bit of philosophy in the past few years. But I can't claim to speak for philosophers. To find out what an academic philosopher would say that philosophers do one should really ask one. On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Roger Critchlow <[email protected]> wrote: > Philosophy should be about how to use your head, how to think and interact > with other thinking beings, and it should work even if you don't know jack > about physics, neuroscience, computation, or the history of philosophy, > though they are all rich sources of counter-examples. > > And theology should be about the consequences of believing, or not > believing, specific things that must be taken, or rejected, as articles of > faith because they cannot be established, or disestablished, by any other > means. > > What do current philosophers do? I think they're arguing theology mostly. > > -- rec -- > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
