It might superficially seem so, but I deny this. Its core practices are unchanged since Plato, and so is its content.

It can be 'about anything' in the sense that the sophists could talk 'about anything' – that is, it has an emptiness to it that is mistaken for breadth. — Snakes Alive

As I see it the core impulse of philosophy is and always has been concern with the question of how to live. All else in philosophy is merely froth; it may be interesting (to some) or poetic froth, but remains froth nonetheless. The academicisation of philosophy has not done it any favours.

I don't think that's a historically plausible view. If I wanted to know how to live, would I read a philosopher? Why would I?

Read a philosopher? You're thinking like an academic. If you want to know how to live, you must enquire into the question. That enquiry just is the practice of philosophy. Reading other philosophers may or may not help. Much of written philosophy consists in over-intellectualizing fairly simple questions.

3. Relational - Einstein, Kantians

I think I get the first two, but it's not clear to me that we presently live in an age if relativism. — frank

This reminded me (I'm biased it's true) of this:

... that mainstream of modern philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making. — Nelson Goodman, 'Ways of Worldmaking'.

(The seventies, when relativist often meant modernist and rationalist.)

Read a philosopher? You're thinking like an academic. If you want to know how to live, you must enquire into the question. That enquiry just is the practice of philosophy. Reading other philosophers may or may not help. Much of written philosophy consists in over-intellectualizing fairly simple questions. — Janus

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.

And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant.

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.

And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant. — Snakes Alive

I don't know what you have in mind with the term "concrete questions', so I can't answer to that.

Philosophy has not always been, and is not now exclusively, or even predominately, an academic pursuit. All reflective people practice philosophy. It's not true that all or even most famous philosophers prior to the modern academic era were academics. Much of ancient philosophy consisted in what we now call science and consider to be a separate discipline.

Philosophy has not always been, and is not now exclusively, or even predominately, an academic pursuit. — Janus

This is just historically wrong. Philosophers invented Academia, literally, and philosophy was the original discipline housed therein.

You're missing the point, I am talking about academia in the modern sense. The fact that philosophers founded schools (which were more like what we would now call cults than they are like what we now call academies) I am not denying.

This is not a productive discussion. But I'll just say an account of academia that makes the Academy not academic is pointless. I'm not responding again.

I'm not responding again. — Snakes Alive

That's your prerogative. I'll just say that anyone who doesn't see the immense differences between the ancient schools and modern universities may indeed be incapable of productive discussion on this topic.

I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical account of what the heck it is and how it came to be in Greece. I'm particularly fascinated by the relation between philosophy, sophistry (something that I think may not really be distinct from philosophy, and was only thought to be so as part of a propaganda campaign that was pretty uncritically swallowed), rhetoric, and the Greek legal tradition. Looking back on it from 'outside the fly bottle,' what Socrates does is so weird, and it's an interesting historical question how such a practice comes about.

I'm particularly interested in how philosophy relates to the sophist's claim to be able to 'speak about anything,' an ability made possible by the emptiness and verbal nature of the sophist's claims and practices. Philosophers don't seem to understand that they make the same claim – to be able to 'speak about anything.' But isn't this a stupid claim! — Snakes Alive

Yes. I'd like that too. The real history, I mean. So, the conversation on the thread has since outstripped me, but I did want to respond to this.

I suppose it'd be hard to do because plato is the primary source for everything. On the other hand, I suppose that's true of the bible as well and people have done great work there.

One thought: Socrates is weird and that probably has something to do with his appeal. In Plato's account, he seems to be well-versed in the thought of the sophists (he seems well-versed in everything at the time, really) His driving force looks like a fondness for aporia. The sophists can talk about everything; Socrates can hiccup any talk about anything. You get the sense (or I get the sense) that the Platonic Canon erects itself (in later dialogues) in a space cleared by Socrates, while still using Socrates as a mouthpiece (and of course. The guy's a hit, early dialogues are at 95% on rotten tomatoes, why not keep using him?)

Socrates' daemon seemed mostly to tell him when something was bullshit. It didn't seem to do much besides that, from what I can recall of the dialogues. Of course, this is also a canny rhetorical move, but is it just that? I don't know.

If Socrates is the wound, maybe Plato is the pus and scab and scar?

:100:

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy. — Snakes Alive

Philosophy uses the tools of mathematics and the arts, logic and rhetoric, to do the job of creating the tools of the physical and ethical sciences. It is the bridge between the more abstract disciplines and the more practical ones: as described above, an inquiry stops being science and starts being philosophy when instead of using some methods that appeal to specific contingent experiences, it begins questioning and justifying the use of such methods in a more abstract way; and that activity in turn ceases to be philosophy and becomes art or math instead when that abstraction ceases to be concerned with figuring out how to practically answer questions about what is real or what is moral, but turns instead to the structure or presentation of the ideas themselves.

[...]

The characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, does not merely mean some set of correct opinions, but rather is the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

[...]


...philosophy is the lynchpin of the entire chain of activities conducted by society, and so is instrumentally useful, in some distant way at least, toward any practical end whatsoever. Every practical activity involves using some tool to do some job. At the lowest level of abstraction away from the actual use of said tools to do said jobs, technological fields exist to maintain and administrate those tools, and business fields exist to maintain and administrate those jobs. A level of abstraction higher, engineers work to create the tools that those technologists administrate, while entrepreneurs work to create the jobs that those businesspeople administrate. Those engineers in turn heavily employ the findings of the physical sciences, which could be said to be finding the "natural tools" available from which engineers can create new tools tailored to specific needs. And though this step in the chain seems overlooked in society today, the ethical sciences that I envision could be said to find the "natural jobs" that need doing, inasmuch as they identify needs that people have, which we might also frame as market demands, toward the fulfillment of which entrepreneurs can tailor the creation of new jobs. And those physical and ethical sciences each rely on philosophical underpinnings to function, thereby making philosophy, at least distantly, instrumental to any and all practical undertakings across society.

I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, they constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administration supposedly knows better and had better be listened to. But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work. Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty. I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there, to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done. — The Codex Quaerentis: Metaphilosophy

I wouldn't say a wound – I don't think it's what it claims to be, but that doesn't mean it's evil or degenerate.

The Platonic Socrates comes off to me as a disingenuous interlocutor with strong positive views. The aporia is ironic.

None of that is true.

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy.

And philosophy is an academic discipline, and always has been. Philosophers founded the actual Academy. So that distinction is not viable / historically ignorant. — Snakes Alive

Read a philosopher? You're thinking like an academic. If you want to know how to live, you must enquire into the question. That enquiry just is the practice of philosophy. Reading other philosophers may or may not help. Much of written philosophy consists in over-intellectualizing fairly simple questions. — Janus

As detailed by Socrates in the platonic dialogue "Phaedo",

Philosophy itself is, in fact, a kind of “training for dying”.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/phaedo/#SH3a

To have pure knowledge, therefore, philosophers must escape from the influence of the body as much as is possible in this life.

So, philosophical life, according to Socrates, consists in separating the body from the soul, the latter being close to, if not one, with truth. And hence, for a philosopher, academic pursuits and topics, are but a side quest, or rather a means to an end, the end and main quest being death.

So the reason I brought up the manifest image and philosophy's role in negotiating and modifying it is as follows. Say that you want to distinguish the folk practice of philosophy from how it's been professionalized over the years; seeing it as something people in general do rather than something that philosophers as a job description do. Then people outside of the academy predominantly do philosophy in response to events which happen and cultural shifts.

In a broad sense, people can respond to the open questions living raises, and other things we're confronted with, by reasoning philosophically; questions of supporting a law, a military intervention, equal rights; negotiating political terrain in the register of conception (what should we believe in response to event X?) and natural/metaphysical terrain in the register of their conception in relation to (at least) science and religion (should the laws for punishing drug addicts for their drug related conduct change given what we've learned about volition?) - these are both components of the manifest image that we play with in response to what happens.

Philosophy as a folk practice, including the conduct of philosophy outside of universities, is impossible to sever from a reactive effort to update our conceptions in response to the shifting situations we're exposed to. Though, clearly, not everyone engages in the folk tradition like literal members on a philosophy forum will.

If, and I agree that it does have, a tendency towards separation from how things are; it's a fine line to tread when the folk practice of philosophy in a large component just consists of discussions of how things are. And I find it hard to articulate the unique separation from how things are philosophical discourse has, from more general separations between concept and topic, words and what's talked about, and expression and what's expressed.

I like that idea, but it's not an accurate historical representation of philosophy. Plato had a lot of interesting quasi-religious ideas, which haven't been historically at the core of philosophy. They were also already present in religious beliefs, and have been since then, while the Socratic method is a 'new' social development.

But this idea is a representation of the so-called ascetic ideal, as it has been anayled by Nietzsche et al. Let us do a google search for "ascetic ideal" and see what gives.

Ah there,

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/genealogyofmorals/section8/
https://medium.com/@JoJoBonetto/what-is-the-meaning-of-ascetic-ideals-5110e4832cec

and others as well, and there is of course the original work from the man himself.

The ascetic ideal is certainly central to (certain varieties of) religion. Not so much to philosophy.

Say that you want to distinguish the folk practice of philosophy from how it's been professionalized over the years; — fdrake

I don't see all that much difference. What the professionals do today is not much different from what's in the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy has never been something 'people in general do.' It's a folk practice in the sense that it belongs to a parochial cultural tradition and is explicable in terms of that (and not explicable in terms of its efficacy, or something else), not in the sense that random people on the street do it.

The ascetic ideal is certainly central to (certain varieties of) religion. Not so much to philosophy. — Snakes Alive

Certainly, in religions, there are all kind of preachers. What I am saying is that in philosophy also, there are too, only that they are disguised as teachers. That, in essence, they preach, and not teach, as what they want people to believe. And that Nietzsche was among the first that unveiled their ruse.

None of that is true. — Snakes Alive

"This isn't an argument. It's just contradiction. I came here for a good argument. An argument isn't just contradiction. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. That's not just saying 'No it isn't.'"

No. Read a book.

Yes, and so we have all these preachers-teachers in philosophy, being upset, that want us to do be just like them, and not to harbour our baby, saying that we are too young or reckless. But we are going to have it anyway, won't we? Who listens to the old generation anyway?

I don't see all that much difference. What the professionals do today is not much different from what's in the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy has never been something 'people in general do.' It's a folk practice in the sense that it belongs to a parochial cultural tradition and is explicable in terms of that (and not explicable in terms of its efficacy, or something else), not in the sense that random people on the street do it. — Snakes Alive

What are the historical invariants of philosophy as a folk practice then?

I already answered that above ^

In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to.

In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to. — Snakes Alive

I don't think it's impossible, necessarily, but it does seem like you'd have to do some work to show that much later philosophy is essentially doing that. So, for instance, in Kant, there's a central thing of subsumption of particulars under a universal, but that's just one piece of the system - a major part, for sure, but a self-consciously deilmited part. I'm not defending Kant along any line, or anything here. But if you have to show that things that seem not to be 'is scenario x a case of y?' are actually that, then hasn't the tradition essentially changed because of that fact? (the fact that practioners can't see what they're doing as that, and need someone to cut through the fat? The other question lurking here is what it means to see something as a 'folk tradition'- it seems like folding that in on the tradition that underlies the idea of 'seeing something as a folk tradition' is just another way to keep it going, but with a ironic twist. Is philosophy (x) an case of y (folk tradition)? )

Isn't it more like, say, Kabbalah ?- there's a throughline, some continuity, but there are some genuine ruptures and changes that alter the core practice (like with all folk traditions?)

If philosophy is just a folk tradition, presumably that's only talking about western philosophy stemming from Thales et al. Does that mean there is no such thing as "eastern philosophy", because those are largely different traditions of different folk? "Largely" because there is some cross-over; does that not count? Why not?

And what is the field that is about what philosophy claims to be about (the "big questions" etc), if philosophy isn't "really" about that? To illustrate with a personal anecdote: since I was very young I have had very broad academic interests. Through my adolescence those broad interests were increasingly reduced toward two fundamental poles of sorts: my natural science interests boiled down to physics, and my social science interests boiled down to something in the direction of economics or political science. Always searching for ever more and more fundamental cores of those fields, I eventually realized that my interests were essentially in what I now recognize as roughly metaphysics and ethics, though I didn't know to call them that yet. When I discovered formal academic philosophy early in college and realized that those two things were, broadly speaking, what the field was all about, that's when I "got into philosophy". But if what I was interested in all that time, the fundamentals about what is real and what is moral, wasn't actually philosophy, because philosophy is just one culture's folk tradition and isn't "really" about those topics, then what was I into back when I didn't have the name "philosophy" to describe it with?

Isn't it more like, say, Kabbalah ?- there's a throughline, some continuity, but there are some genuine ruptures and changes that alter the core practice (like with all folk traditions?) — csalisbury

I don't think so. Anyone familiar with the tradition isn't going to see anything new in Kant. Remember, the 'Copernican Revolution' line is his own propaganda. We tend to see differences because we're ignorant, and read 'great figures' in isolation. Reading more always dispels the illusion.

But if what I was interested in all that time, the fundamentals about what is real and what is moral, wasn't actually philosophy, because philosophy is just one culture's folk tradition and isn't "really" about those topics, then what was I into back when I didn't have the name "philosophy" to describe it with? — Pfhorrest

You were probably expressing an adolescent malaise of some sort, which may have had genuine impulses, but got routed through the appropriate channels for your culture. Philosophy advertises itself as being about 'big questions,' so you figured, that as someone interested in that, that was what you should think about or do. If you lived in another culture, you would have done something else, or had different malaises.

Don't look at what things say they are in their marketing; look at what they are.