Michael Vassar says philosophy is a field unconcerned with what people in college teach as philosophy, but I don’t know what he means.
I suspect what he means is that the general philosophy course tends to the ‘read and summarize as best you can’, with some questioning to test recall and a bit of comprehension, while philosophy in practice is more about nailing down arguments into a formally valid argument and then figuring out what to accept or reject about it.
The best philosophy course I ever took consisted basically of each class, the teacher walked in, defined some terms, wrote up a valid syllogism or propositional argument (sometimes messing it up just to test us), asking us whether we accepted the conclusion, or rejected one of the premises; which one and why? and then we debated each other.
Possibly he means philosophers now are either analytic philosophers or deconstructionists.
Doesn’t seem right to me; modern philosophy isn’t quite that simply divided. (Where does someone like Jurgen Habermas, to name someone in the news recently, fit in? He’s far from analytic, although he’s quite sharp in person (as I can attest), but also not merely deconstructing existing things.)
I suspect what he means is that the general philosophy course tends to the ‘read and summarize as best you can’, with some questioning to test recall and a bit of comprehension, while philosophy in practice is more about nailing down arguments into a formally valid argument and then figuring out what to accept or reject about it.
The best philosophy course I ever took consisted basically of each class, the teacher walked in, defined some terms, wrote up a valid syllogism or propositional argument (sometimes messing it up just to test us), asking us whether we accepted the conclusion, or rejected one of the premises; which one and why? and then we debated each other.
Doesn’t seem right to me; modern philosophy isn’t quite that simply divided. (Where does someone like Jurgen Habermas, to name someone in the news recently, fit in? He’s far from analytic, although he’s quite sharp in person (as I can attest), but also not merely deconstructing existing things.)