Philosophy Now Forum

How many philosophers don't believe philosophical answers are possible? What do they suppose they're doing with their time?

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Advocate wrote: ↑Sun Oct 18, 2020 6:23 pm How many philosophers don't believe philosophical answers are possible? What do they suppose they're doing with their time?

If a question can be answered by the mothods used by historians, physicists, zoologists and so on it is not a philosophical question. Philosophy is the study of any questions where it is not yet clear how to identify what the correct answer would even look like. Whenever a question makes that transition in type such that some method is agreed to provide a proper answer the sort of thing where an answer, a new field of study emerges.

That's why Natural philosophy dissipate, a philosopher called Bacon made the case for replacing olst Arsitotelian deductive arguments and replacing them with inductive methods we now call "science"*. The modern subject of Economics came about when a moral and political philosopher called Adam Smith decided there were certain questions of wealth and so on that needed a seperate type of treatment and his resulting work was quite popular.

Anyone labouring under the delusion that philosophy should actually answer the questions is just failing to get the point.



*you should probably get Uwot's opinion on that if you want something accurate, that's just roughly how I remember being taught that it went.