p-hacking isn't really like that. The damndest thing about it is that it's almost always well motivated. If you have a dataset trying to study some frontier phenomenon you're going to explore it with as many models and quantification procedures that make sense as you can; you're also going to throw a lot of scientific hypotheses and statistical sub-hypotheses at it.

The danger in p-hacking isn't an inherent feature of the p-value (which was originally proposed as an exploratory tool with no thresholding values like 0.05), it arises more from the incentives for researchers to find sexy publishable conclusions from small datasets and too much confidence in pilot studies.

So, it's not really that it's cynical (most of the time), it's just the way people treat statistical analyses; like they're literally taught p<0.05 = publishable result; and are made to by the publish or perish sexy things doctrine. Rather than pre-registered replication studies and data analysis/dataset sharing after anonymising - this robustification of science isn't incentivised at all.

So to link it back to the OP: a lot of the problems in philosophy probably also come back to asking the wrong questions. But it isn't like the wrong questions are often asked with an agenda, it's stumbling around the garden of forking paths without a map; that map's probably some knowledge of philosophical history surrounding the problem and reading it's a series creative leaps of rationality.

Philosophy also has this strange thing where asking questions makes other questions disappear.

OK, I'll look at that reference - as far as I am aware the Greeks proved there were irrational numbers, even if some of them weren't happy about it. In any case, even if there are choices in the ways of dealing with criteria (2) in the face of the proof, criteria (1) remains totally untouched. So, at a minimum, the authors of the article have made a mistake identifying the choice they are supposing the Greeks had before them. The choice you've presented the Greeks is between giving up the idea that there are irrational numbers at all (presumably by denying that there can even be squares covering an area of two square units) and retaining criteria (2), or just dropping criteria (2) in favour of something restricted to the use of whole numbers in expressing the rationals only. That makes a little more sense to me, but not much.

It ends up treating the pragmatics as mere accidents on the way to some eternal Platonic story which was there from the beginning — StreetlightX

Not really. If we are talking about a pan-semiotic metaphysics now, the goal is to divide reality into its necessities and its accidents. So pragmatism is about some finality being in play and shaping events in a contextual fashion. Things are individuated by constraints as a matter of top-down necessity. But constraints themselves are open or permissive. They only limit to the degree it matters. Beyond that, the accidental or spontaneous can be the rule. Constraints are only concerned by the differences that would make a difference.

So in terms of metaphysics, the question becomes what is the most universal goal? And one obviously sensible answer is the limitation of instability. If any kind of world is going to exist - given the primal nature of chaotic action - then it has to develop the kind of regularity that gives self-perpetuating stability.

Thus the "Platonic universals" would be an evolutionary story. The need for stability would be selected for just because stability is definitional of what we mean by existing. It would be the first necessity. And the eternality of that form would be an emergent and immanent fact. It would be what gets expressed by the end in the long run.

And then, some kind of stable world having established, this could be the ground for the development of further, more particular, states of constraint. Other more localised purposes, expressed by more complex forms, could arise - stabilising "sub-worlds".

So it would be pragmatics all the way. Constraints to limit dynamics and produce particular states of entification could keep developing in open-ended fashion. In the most universal view, they would be accidental - differences that don't make a difference to the most universal view. But locally, in being further hierarchical levels of development, they would encode the forms that are necessary to that further level of organised and individuated being.

That is the metaphysical picture. Maths then becomes the science that explores the principles of form. It seeks out the structures, the rules, that stand for the necessities - with the accidental part of reality becoming whatever measured values we might insert into some general rule.

Vagueness is for me the ultimate transcendental illusion: it takes a perfectly valid move - the step from particular to general, always motivated by a particular problem (B&C's 'decision points') - and then illegitimately extrapolates that step into what one might call an 'unmotivated generality'. — StreetlightX

I wasn't talking about vagueness in reference to mathematical notions of symmetry. I was talking about the continuity of generality quite specifically.

In Peircean logic and metaphysics, the particular and the general co-arise from the vague. So vagueness is firstness, then particularity would be secondness, and generality is thirdness.

Sure, that makes vagueness a kind of ultimate symmetry - it gets broken by that definite division into the general vs the particular. But here, for the moment, the focus is on the ontic structuralism story - the general or universal constraint that "being intelligible" has on shaping the particular or the local. That is the territory that maths is exploring by abstracting to discover the most generalised forms that limitations can intelligibly take. The question being asked is what is the most primal kind of individuation.

And given your interest in individuation and contextuality, it is odd that you don't see this immediately. The step from the particular to the general is about discovering what context of constraint is causing the particular to be what it is in the first place. From there, one can start to remove those constraints - in a most general fashion - to get down to what is most primal about individuation itself.

It is in generalising away the constraints that individuate that we arrive back at vagueness as a formless and unindividuated ground. But that vagueness is a material potential. And maths focuses on the issue of the forms that could organise that. That is why maths does not talk about energy, just organisation. That is why maths ends up talking in "Platonic fashion" about the finalities that want to be expressed.

For there to be (persistent) individuation, there needs to be (embodied) constraints. So reality has to be actually organised as a material system. But maths targets just the constraints, understood in terms of logical generalities. It imagines them having their own abstracted existence - as a ghostly organising hand. And it is healthy to do this as it is the way that it can focus on what is essential vs what is accidental in our accounts of nature. Pragmatism relies on being able to know the difference - the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't.

So basically I can agree with you up right up until the point where you invoke unmotivated generality as a Platonic bow to tie the whole developmental story together. It's this very last step that shifts a perfectly rigorous and valid methodology into a procrustean metaphysics that tries to retroactively fit concrete developments into a pre-ordained story. It's just a theological-Platonic hangover/residue that needs to be rejected. — StreetlightX

But this is just you forcing things into a framework you feel you can quickly reject. It's not the story I tell.

Remember the evolutionary principle at the heart of this. For anything to exist in persistent and individuated fashion, it must mean that some primal state of constraint managed to work. Everything else then follows naturally from the fact that instability could develop limitation.

(1) Measures of length (every number corresponds to a measurable length, like a table-leg) and
(2) Expressible as ratios ('every number can be expressed by a ratio, like x/y'). — StreetlightX

I think that the premise of B&C is a little inaccurate with (1). The basis of the number system, and the foundation for Pythagorean idealism and Platonism is that the numbers signify units, not necessarily units of length. I believe Plato describes how the Pythagoreans held that unity was the fundamental concept of mathematics, and the concept of numbers is developed from the distinction between one and many. The ordering between one and many is not a matter of choice, because we cannot count backward from an infinite number, to one.

Number is a measure, but not necessarily a measure of length, and the B&C article assumes number to be a measure of length, not a measure of the difference between one and many.

This is an important point to uphold, because the incommensurability which gives rise to the irrational numbers is only produced when the numbered units are units of measurement. This implies that the incommensurability is not a feature of the numbering system itself, but of how the numbers are applied toward measuring dimensional space. The incommensurability between the two perpendicular sides of a square (the square root of two), probably really indicates an incommensurability between the two distinct dimensions of space.

However, the B&C problem can be reintroduced in a much more comprehensive way by considering the introduction of zero into the numbering system. The zero acts to negate the unit, and all units, such that if we assume that the numbering system is based zero then it is no longer based in the distinction between one and many. Zero is more like the potential for unity, or units. From the assumption of zero we have all sorts of choices for defining unity and ordering the one and the many. The proper inquiry might be as to whether numbers should be based in zero, or in the distinction between one and many. The former giving us choice, the latter necessity. The problem with starting at zero is that we have no rational way to produce units from nothing, so zero cannot represent nothing, in any real way, for the production of a numbering system. Therefore we must determine what zero actually represents.

Further, among the points that B&C stress is that it is not at all 'discovery' that is at stake, but what they call - following Wittgenstein - concept-determination: "what is going on here is best described neither as ‘discovery’ nor as ‘invention’ of something entirely new. There are facts to be revealed, and creativity to be exhibited, but what is crucial is the opening up of different aspects of something ... which prompts a choice that sooner or later ‘catches on’... and proves fruitful." — StreetlightX

Aristotle resolves the issue of discovery/invention with the distinction between actual and potential. The act of the mind of the geometer who "discovers" the principles through constructing geometrical figures, actualizes these mathematical principles. If they exist prior to being actualized by a mind, they exist in potential only. He then uses the cosmological argument which demonstrates that nothing potential could be eternal, in his famous refutation of Pythagorean and Platonist idealism which insists that these principles existing separate from human minds, must be eternal.

OP: Philosophy, like math, subsists on choices (decisions.)

It follows: The philosophy of choices is itself an example of the thing the philosophy of choices describes.

The concepts we employ are a function of what we aim to capture with them; to employ one concept rather than another is to bring out one aspect of the world rather than another. Moreover, the deployment of our concepts is not governed by truth, but by their range of illumination — street

What is being illuminated here? To take a well-worn example: We understand & thematize the hammer only when it breaks. The implicit becomes explicit when we can no longer unthinkingly rely upon it, and so have to explain it. What's broken? What old implicit is being forced into explication?

For B&C, the important point is that the choices made, although forced by the math itself, are nonetheless grounded in what we aim to do with the math, considerations which are not dictated by the math itself ('extra-mathematical') — sx

The motivating problem, for the philosophy of choices, is the problem that we don't know what we want to do. We can't choose, we can't decide. So the moment of choice becomes the object. We show that we, non-choosers, know about choosing better than any of the people who ever chose.

@Srap Tasmaner is right to focus on the threat of relativism. The focus on frames, versus what is framed, threatens to fling us into anything-goes. How do we choose the frame?

The solution offered, the quasi-badiouan one that truth still exists, but in the problem itself - that isn't really an answer. Or another way to say it: as it answer it's function is this:

will respond tomorrow — street

This sums it up perfectly. The philosophy of choice is a hamlet philosophy. (Deleuze knew this.) It wants to do the famous monologue without avenging the crime that elicited the monologue. And it's done it for so long, now, that it doesn't even know what the crime is. "The truth is in the problem" is an IOU full stop.

The motivating problem, for the philosophy of choices, is the problem that we don't know what we want to do. — csalisbury

A problem of knowledge? No. A problem of life, a problem of living. You're missing the empiricism. I believe in tomorrow. Do you?

I agree though. 'Not knowing what you want to do' is just common usage. What I mean is: not committing to doing. A problem of life through and through, yeah, yes. The broken hammer is the broken ability to do, that was my point.

Picking a frame is choosing a line of flight.

yeahh. but I feel like there's some supplementary aspect missing.

To take a graphic example: Bimbofication, a fetish subculture involving plastic surgery and intentional self-dumbing down in order to meet a 'bimbo' ideal. It's totally a line of flight. Accept this self-modification and that self-modification and then go wild. Only it really hurts people, and also *marks* people in a way that make its difficult for them to then get out of it, and still be taken seriously as a person. (nb I'm not talking about whatever tattoos or piercings. I'm talking about body-modifications done specifically for this subculture)

So then I want to say: No, not *that* kind of line of flight. But, yes, picking a frame that fosters a (somehow spiritually or intellectually nourishing) line of flight.

But then that already is outside of frames and into *values*, which I think is what's missing here.

The major point being: I think choices/decisions involve the whole heft of your spiritual being. I don't think lines of flight always do. They can funnel you into addiction, or some kind of subculture crutch. But I think the missing element here is 'values' which is what the 'truth of problems' hints at.

Eh. Looks like frames all the way down to me. Wouldn't be so many philosophies of the event otherwise. I don't think you can escape the regress that's ultimately truncated through what you do; that's what it means to make your mark.

Should probably phrase this in terms of occupying a frame, decision's as much part of the unfolding of things in general as it is a social and symbolic thing.

Eh. Looks like frames all the way down to me. Wouldn't be so many philosophies of the event otherwise.

I think that's what I mean though. Philosophies of the event (as a sociological phenomenon) correspond exactly to the inability to unironically and sincerely hold some kind of value (related to action, not thought) that can be actually acted upon to produce an 'event'. (For example: Mao as Badiou's truth-event, but Badiou wasn't an actor in the cultural revolution. You could, cheekily, call this a kind of 'orientalism' and I think you'd be right.)

don't think you can escape the regress that's ultimately truncated through what you do; that's what it means to make your mark.

I agree!

I don't agree with the first bit. In my book perspectives accompany frames; occupying a frame is characterised by how you navigate in and out of it; moving in and out of it in any way changes the other frames; I think of it like relative motion. Though, the usual way people occupy frames constrains variation in their own frame changes by a delimitation of how the other frames are embedded perspectivally into each other. Most don't matter, some matter a lot, sometimes we're surprised by something that didn't matter becoming something (or already was something) that matters a lot.

Big D decisions are aligned with stuff already mattering a lot or stuff coming to matter a lot. First's a perturbation in stance on stuff in general; like a personality or value system, it's an island of sense demarcating what's nonsense. So it looks intrinsic, and is intrinsic to a frame for most intents and purposes. The first one is also usually accompanied by some combination of volition, permission and dedication; I choose to quit smoking as a frame (big D) every time I refuse a fag (little d). Another way of putting it is it's the conditions that naturally accompany the frame. Big D decisions in the context of little e events.

Then you get that second type, big D decisions associated with big E events. Those don't happen very often. In early Heidegger's dreams authenticity is aligned with impossibly choosing your big D and big E. In Badiou's it's events leaving subjectivities behind; the impossible for X forcing itself upon X in the big D decision of accommodating or resisting it.

Edit; so I think of people and values as somewhat multithreaded or parallelised, people generally live in the context of big D decisions living little e events consistent with them. Sometimes catastrophe or joyous novelty happens and you get a fuckoff big E to fuck with your D. What counts as a big E makes sense in the context of a big D.

Edit2: in the context of the thread, this has a lot to do with Badiou's 'fidelity to the event', when events are problems. You let that problem restructure stuff to reveal the problem's essential nature, then address it. What's the essential nature? I guess some highly active frame making waves of nonsense drown people sleeping on the beach in their islands of sense.

Edit3: underlying some of this is me working through thinking about the body, affects and sensations as aligned with e's rather than d's.

So this thread is a reattempt at 'Problems and Sense'* from @StreetlightX I reckon. Like Last Week Tonight getting people to have eloquent opinions about privacy and surveillance by priming them with 'the government can see your dick pics'.

*Edit: Problematic Natures and Philosophical Questions

Philosophy also has this strange thing where asking questions makes other questions disappear. — fdrake

In amongst the usual obfuscatory dross of yet another post desperately trying to explain the arbitrariness of philosophy in a way that makes it sound even slightly less arbitrary, I read this gem.

Questions make other questions disappear. How so? By disappear, you mean no longer require answering, or no longer interesting? Could you provide an example of a question that has 'disappeared' together with the question which dispatched it with such lethal finality?

I think it's a pretty banal point. Whether something seems like a relevant philosophical question depends a lot on from what standpoint you're doing philosophy. Have a short list of examples.

Wittgenstein thought he dissolved all (or most) philosophical problems with his Tractatus.

Husserl thought he refuted the need to answer the skeptic with his phenomenological reduction.

Heidegger thought he dissolved Cartesian views on mind and even subjects as traditionally understood.

Strawson accuses Dennet of spouting 'learned nonsense'.

Dialethic logic as Priest presents it makes a lot less sense if you take Prior's approach to the Liar.

Stove's refutation of 'worst argument in the world' alleges to refute all idealism and contained problematics.

Laruelle plays trumps with most of philosophy saying it can't think of the real without reducing it to a philosophical abstraction.

All of these people have some idea of what it means to do philosophy; what it means to address and formulate philosophical problems; and whether some of those formulations are even possible, necessarily false or even nonsense masquerading as sense. It's a very, very common 'move' to reframe most of philosophy in the way you do philosophy.

Maybe a more interesting question: do you think philosophy should be describing how natural processes work in general? Or does it merely use descriptions of natural processes to facilitate interpretations? And is the philosophical discourse circumscribed by those kind of analyses/interpretations metaphysics?

If you think it's within the ambit of philosophy to do the former, there's a lot of people that disagree with you. If you don't think the former's it's within the ambit of philosophy, there's a lot of people that disagree with you.

If you think either are relevant, you're in disagreement with Heidegger's idea of metaphysics. If you do metaphysics in broadly the same vein as Heidegger but use natural processes to inform your metaphysics, you're doing a Merleau Ponty and subverting Heidegger's methodology in an interesting way.

None of this is arbitrary, it's all well motivated theory. No matter where you situate yourself you'll draw boundaries of relevance somewhere. The position where all philosophy seems arbitrary and pointless is still a metaphilosophical position, and as the former post illustrates, to do philosophy is to do metaphilosophy; and it should be obvious that metaphilosophy is philosophical, right?

To your first post - You've provided me with a lot of Philosophers who thought they'd made previous philosophical questions redundant. I'm unsurprised that you'd think me so entirely inane that I'd be unaware the some philosophers thought they cracked something. What I was asking about was how the 'questions' dissolved other questions, not the answers. What you've provided is a list of philosophers who thought that the 'answers' to their initial questions dissolved other questions. This phenomenon then seems simply to be a feature of inquiry, not philosophy. If I decide that god doesn't exist, the question 'What colour is god's beard' obviously becomes redundant. This is no different to Physics where the discovery of photons made all questions about the nature of ether redundant. So I'm not seeing the meaning behind what you wrote yet.

Your second post is much more interesting, you say "arbitrary and pointless" when I only said "arbitrary", why the additional term? Why is arbitrary automatically assumed to also mean pointless?

The fact that meta philosophy is also doing philosophy is exactly what I'm talking about. The way in which so many posts are written explaining "the way philosophy is", when that "way" is invariably something ambiguous like 'framing' or 'asking the right question' or some such.

Philosophy seems pinned between two attacks, those who demand it reveal what 'truths' it has discovered or else be consigned to the rubbish heap, and those who claim the whole thing is nothing more than a series of works of art, you either like or you don't.

What intrigues me is the convoluted arguments used to get out from this pincer manoeuvre. Of which I should add, this thread is the latest example. It amounts to "OK, I admit philosophy does make arbitrary choices, but look so does maths so its not that bad after all"

I mistook your intentions as a usual 'what's the point in philosophy anyway' poster, albeit an articulate one.

I think you're right that it's a feature of inquiry. But it's also a feature of worldview, perspective and personality. I'm sure you'll have had arguments with people, say housemates or partners, where one of you did something completely usual and inconsequential for you but to them it's a big deal - a gripe or a blessing. The same can be said for problems in philosophy; though, problems in philosophy motivate more philosophy; some of which is developing new problematics. Which is probably related to how the philosopher (and philosophy) looks out on the world and what problems they're motivated by. Sometimes it's intimately personal and political like Bell Hooks, sometimes it's abstract generality like Kant.

Philosophy seems pinned between two attacks, those who demand it reveal what 'truths' it has discovered or else be consigned to the rubbish heap, and those who claim the whole thing is nothing more than a series of works of art, you either like or you don't.

I think you gave the conditions under which this is a non-problem in your post, ironically. All inquiry functions like that, thinking critically, rationally and creatively are all part of inquiry in general - they don't suddenly disappear or lose their general character when the inquiry is philosophical in nature.

The thing to note here is that it's pretty rare that a philosophical problem could be called 'purely philosophical'; philosophers typically care about a definite space of problems. Witty cared about doing right by language, Heidegger cared about doing right by being and subjectivity, the positivists cared about grounding science in a scientifically flavoured philosophy; doing right by science. So did Lakatos, Kuhn and Popper in related but contrary ways. Foucalt held science in something like an anthropological epoche and cared about it as a discursive practice. They all cared about something, and they inquired in the way people inquire; inventing along the way and following their noses along historically conditioned trails of expressions (islands of sense in the previous post) to do it.

I also read you as dismissing what I had to say because the vocabulary in my responses to @csalisbury was unusual. We usually have a similar perspective on things and similar philosophical tastes, so I can use a playful shorthand with him.

That the features we're talking about are also features of inquiry in general is largely the premise of this thread.

I think you gave the conditions under which this is a non-problem in your post, ironically. All inquiry functions like that, thinking critically, rationally and creatively are all part of inquiry in general - they don't suddenly disappear or lose their general character when the inquiry is philosophical in nature. — fdrake

I'm not sure I can agree with this. All inquiry certainly dissolves previous questions when a new path is chosen (very much the way maths is described here), but what separates philosophy, and singles it out for this kind of attack, is that it vacillates constantly between the two ideals seemingly in response to the attack itself. Heideggar didn't think he was just offering a work of art to world, to be hung on the wall of those that found it appealing but justly rejected by any for whom it wasn't to their taste. He thought (and wrote extensively in his notes) that he was actually discovering something real.

The thing about maths (in common with other disciplines) is that it is circumscribed entirely by the 'choices' that have been made. If I were to answer a complex equation on the presumption that irrational numbers did not exist, I would simply no longer be doing maths. If said that the answer to 2+2 is 5, because 5 looks nice (having rotational symmetry with 2), it would not be the case that I was wrong, everything in my statement is logical and true, it would be that I was no longer doing maths.

Physics has the same definitional constraint, I might describe the nature of light in terms of God's message to mankind after the great flood. Again, I would not be wrong, just no longer doing Physics.

Philosophy has no such exclusory definition. There's nothing that definatly isn't philosophy, other than it being one of the other disciplines (physics, maths), it's more like the arts in that respect (the perennial 'what is art?' question sounds suspiciously similar).

None of this is a problem in itself, I don't think. Art seems to get by quite satisfactorily without anyone having yet answered its foundational riddle. It becomes a problem for me when the ambiguity about definition is used to shut down lines of enquiry others are finding useful. Too often I hear "Logical Positivism has been disproven", "Kant showed that...", "[X, y or z] is not even proper philosophy", "you can't comment on X until you've read y". None of this has any justification without a definition.

I'm not interested in defining philosophy when the definition of philosophy would itself be a philosophical problem. Inquiry proceeds without a satisfactory definition of it, so do all of its manifestations. I'd be as well wondering how you could post without being able to give a necessary and sufficient condition for a given object to be 'part of a language'.

Even math has somewhat ambiguous boundaries - at what point does it become logic? Is set theory logic, like it is historically, or is it part of mathematics? Is it as some mathematicians treat it like 'metamathematics' - then what about model theory, is that mathematics despite sometimes being called metalogic? Where does pure mathematics end and applied mathematics begin? When does statistical physics collapse into statistics or applied statistics become statistical physics?

Those questions need answers, the continuation of every single discipline requires immediate clarification of what they're doing!

I think all of these are largely pointless questions. If you insist that something have a clear definition before we can begin talking about it, or even begin to circumscribe its sense (how are definitions made without this stage of prefiguration?), I've got no interest in continuing the discussion.

The prejudice in your first presumption (that by arbitrary, I must mean arbitrary and pointless) is clouding your interpretation of what I'm saying. Unless my exposition is considerably more suggestive than it reads back to me, I don't see anywhere in which I state, or imply, that philosophy 'must' do anything at all, merely that it hasn't, and that this absence has implications.

In fact, I'm struggling to see how anyone could read my post as saying anything except the exact opposite. That philosophy most certainly must not try to define itself so strictly because to do so just leaves behind a whole raft of thinking which then has to label itself. Philosophy is, by necessity, everything that isn't something else.

Some good discussion here! Will respond piecemeal to things...

Not really. If we are talking about a pan-semiotic metaphysics now, the goal is to divide reality into its necessities and its accidents. — apokrisis

But this isn't the goal at all. The goal is to respond to problems as they arise, and forge the necessary concepts to deal with them in situ. Taxonomy ('the division of reality'....) always comes after the fact - not too far removed from taxidermy. So I think your whole approach mistakes description for prescription, effect for cause: once you suck the life out of problems-in-duration and make the move into a higher dimension where everything can be seen from the perceptive of placing them into neatly-parsed boxes (accidents or necessities? generalities or particulars?), then and only then does development seem to proceed on that basis; but the leap into that dimension is illegitimate: it's simply retroactive ratiocination, the work of philosophical morticians.

Or put otherwise: there is no 'ultimate symmetry', the breaking of which explains individuation; it only seems that way after-the-fact, once you've illegitimately abstracted the concept from the conditions which gave rise to it; Symmetry is always-already broken in some way: there are generalities and particulars, and even stratified hierarchies of such divisions - all this can be granted - but they develop from the 'bottom-up', even if, once so developed, the higher levels attain a consistency of their own (e.g. category theory as a 'response' to problems in algebraic topology). Explanation occurs in medias res, and not sub specie aeternitatis.

I'm not going to assume the silly Socratic game of asserting power by questioning you on what you mean by terms, I'm responding in the way that I am precisely in order to try and convince you that it really doesn't matter; that is, it has no meaning for philosophy, to have a sufficient and necessary condition for what it is. Or even a more lax dictionary definition (they exist, of course).

Google/Webster gives it as:

the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.

I'm reading you as equating lack of definiteness in specification and lack of any substantive characteristics. This is suggested in:

It becomes a problem for me when the ambiguity about definition is used to shut down lines of enquiry others are finding useful. Too often I hear "Logical Positivism has been disproven", "Kant showed that...", "[X, y or z] is not even proper philosophy", "you can't comment on X until you've read y".None of this has any justification without a definition.

Philosophy is, by necessity, everything that isn't something else.

I'm pretty sure that those shut down attempts are part of the positive character of philosophy. Like what distinguishes it from rhetoric; philosophers are supposed to care about the true nature of things. A speculative realist and a correlationist are going to be at odds methodologically; some threads of ideas will see problems in other threads of ideas which aren't native to that thread of ideas... And characterising what is and isn't native (characteristic, necessary for, required by, condition for the possibility of, presupposing the material conditions of...) to a set of ideas often in novel ways is absolutely part of the analytic stock and trade of philosophy.

J.L. Austin:

Ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.

Heidegger:

Not only that. On the basis of the Greeks' initial contributions towards
an Interpretation of Being, a dogma has been developed which not only
declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but
sanctions its complete neglect. It is said that 'Being' is the most universal
and the emptiest of concepts. As such it resists every attempt at definition.
Nor does this most universal and hence indefinable concept require any
definition, for everyone uses it constantly and already understands what
he means by it. In this way, that which tP'- ancient philosophers found
continually disturbing as something obscure and hidden has taken on a
clarity and self-evidence such that if anyone continues to ask about it he
is charged with an error of method.

and it is a thoroughly excellent part.

Oh, also; I discovered a food allergy last night, got one hour's sleep and I'm running out of pile cream. I'm probably not in the best place for understanding detailed prose at the minute.

it really doesn't matter; that is, it has no meaning for philosophy, to have a sufficient and necessary condition for what it is. — fdrake

But in your previous comment you asserted that defining philosophy was itself an act of philosophy. If so, how could the absence of an agreed definition possibly have no implications for philosophy? It's opened an entire line of investigation for a start, as you yourself have suggested. Not to mention the fact that it allows Derrida and Russell to be considered as part of the same subject. Can you otherwise define what connects 'Glas' to 'Principia Matematica'?

The choice you've presented the Greeks is between giving up the idea that there are irrational numbers at all (presumably by denying that there can even be squares covering an area of two square units) and retaining criteria (2), or just dropping criteria (2) in favour of something restricted to the use of whole numbers in expressing the rationals only. That makes a little more sense to me, but not much. — MetaphysicsNow

I would fix the bolding part: it'd be a case of giving up the idea that there are irrational numbers by denying that such areas can be measured ('are amenable to measurement at all'). It's actually worth quoting Heller-Roazen in full on this point:

"The Pythagoreans, however, were no strangers to the uncountable. Although they barred numberless relations from the domain of their arithmetic, they also named them in no uncertain terms. They called them “unspeakable" (αρρητoι), “irrational" (αλoγoι), and “incommensurable" (ασνμμετρoι). From such appellations, one might infer close acquaintanceship. Yet the familiarity the classical theorists of number possessed with such relations could not be knowledge, according to any classical standards of science. Infinitely eluding the rule of unity, incommensurable quantities could not be considered to number anything that was and that remained a single thing; for this reason, they could hardly be considered to number anything at all.

Of such unspeakable relations, it could only be deduced that, like the impossible root of the single tone, they could be no collections of one. They were, quite simply, immeasurable, and as long as every definition in arithmetic and music was to be numerical and every number was to be discrete, they were unrepresentable as such. They might well have been somehow manifest to the Pythagoreans, but, being uncountable, they could be no “remainders.” Their sole place was at the limits of their art of quantity".

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It's also worth noting that our conversation so far is almost like a case study in what it means for how different categorizations commit one to different parsing-out of concepts: "it's not there there can't be squares like that; it's that they can't be measured"; In some sense, this is a 'choice' too: perhaps one can indeed deny that there are squares covering an area of two square units; but one would have to make the corresponding move of then saying something like: 'the things you thought were squares covering two square units are not squares; they are ξquares'. Wittgenstein's 'rule-following paradox' was all about this: that every move in a game can be said to accord to a previously undiscovered rule, without breaking old ones. But these new rules are not just shuffling of goal-posts: they make one see things anew - if done right.

So there's a kaleidoscopic or rubik's cube aspect to philosophizing: twisting a knob - a concept - in one way, ramifies throughout the whole series of 'possible' concepts and implications.

Oh, also; I discovered a food allergy last night, got one hour's sleep and I'm running out of pile cream. I'm probably not in the best place for understanding detailed prose at the minute. — fdrake

I'm sorry to hear that. I will await any response (or not), as and when you feel so inclined.