Actually, whereas the word literally means that, the use of the word philosophy to mean a disciplined investigation into questions actually predates even Plato's Academy.
The reason why academic titles have the word philosophy in them is because modern investigations have developed from the philosophical tradition.
For example, philosophers may have a question, "what is value?", or "what is the nature of the world?", born out of the philosophical tradition.
Then, after sufficient discussion and philosophical investigation, they figure out that certain methods, approaches to answering these questions, are very fertile and lead to informative answers, e.g. value as a real-valued mathematical measure, or the nature of the world as a generalization of empirical observation.
Such methods may prove to be so fertile that you may have academics spending decades or centuries investigating the implications of that method. Hence you have economics and philosophy.
Philosophy is about asking questions, which eventually lead to separate disciplines, once frameworks for answering those questions have been created. Many discrete departments at a modern university have their roots in philosophy.
I'm not arguing with your initial point, articles like this and the subsequent claims about science and philosophy are usually wrong. But I realise, from the responses to you claim that a lot of people are quite ignorant about philosophy and its history in science.
There is a great quote in a Daily Nous article, about this: "many new disciplines have sprung forth from philosophy over the years: physics, psychology, logic, linguistics, economics, and so on. In each case, these fields have sprung forth as tools have been developed to address questions more precisely and more decisively. The key thesis is that when we develop methods for conclusively answering philosophical questions, those methods come to constitute a new field and the questions are no longer deemed philosophical."
I think you demonstrate PG's point that words are unclear and this is a source of much confusion. Even today, different people use "philosophy" to mean radically different things.
> Research academic analytic philosophy as practiced in contemporary universities at post-grad level, as published in journals, has nothing to do with the "philosophy" of history which meant any "thinking systematically".
If post-grad philosophy is so thoroughly different from what is taught as "philosophy" in undergrad, it would behove them to use a different name.
The way I see it, that's basically the definition of philosophy. When some sub-discipline of philosophy becomes clear enough to define its questions, they give it some other name (cf linguistics, economics, "natural philosophy")
What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
Well sure, but I take it that the change in the way the word 'philosophy' is used is not the interesting development. That's not what people usually mean when they talk about philosophical problems becoming scientific problems.
in part this is because whenever something relevant comes up, it gets a name that is not philosophy.
Also because we're still shaking off perception of philosophers as useless navel-gazing victorians; post WWI, the field has become substantially more akin to formal math and logic.
> Philosophy is the practice of looking into questions without clear-cut answers.
Indeed, or the practice of asking questions about the nature of questions, ie. what questions are meaningful, well-formed, yield knowledge, etc. in any given subject.
When you understand the nature of the questions in a particular subject, then you're no longer practicing philosophy, you're gathering knowledge of that subject, ie. math, physics, chemistry, etc.
All that being true, "philosophy" is also the name often given to an emerging science that has no name of its own; for example, physics used to be known as "natural philosophy" (despite Aristotle having used the word long before that).
But that's just because philosophy originally meant all scholarly pursuits. All of science was called "natural philosophy" before it got its own name. That doesn't mean that what we'd call science today is the same as what we call philosophy, even if some ancients like Aristotle did both.
Philosophy may refer to the specific branch in academia and its current practice, as opposed to any philosophical inquiry. Every field already pursues their own philosophical inquiry, and yet philosophers and mathematicians are in separate departments. Such is the current practice and organization of academics.
If we were to consider mathematics and computer science as part of philosophy, then we might say that as a mode of inquiry, philosophy has had great success in achieving multidisciplinary consensus and international impact. But if we were to consider philosophy as a specific branch of academic organization, then we might be disappointed at the fruits emerging from that field.
Philosophy isn't a method of answering questions, it's a discipline. (I mean, do you really think that everyone from Thales to Quine was using a single method?)
I disagree. Classically, philosophy was about establishing truth (which is why it is called philosophy - literally love of knowledge). But establishing truth was seen as a subset of better living.
Obviously, the meaning of the word "philosophy" may have experienced a bit of a drift over more than two thousand years. Physics used to go by the name of "natural philosophy", for instance.
Personally, I do associate the word with a meaning closer to "attitude" under certain circumstances. Stoicism and the contemporary Epicurianism are practical philosophies (attitudes) for living an ordinary life, not grandiose frameworks of thought.
I'm curious, how so? I've always considered the investigation with philosophy worthless without it as a way of living. Is distinguishing between the two useful?
The term philosophy is used in the original Greek sense, "love of knowledge". As opposed to, Wikipedia tells me: theology, medicine and law. I guess it also has something to do with philosophy in the early sense of the word, before natural philosophy branched off and became what we today call the sciences.
In a historical sense, things are only called philosophy until they become a science. Not so much in modern times, but certainly during the early years of philosophy.
The reason why academic titles have the word philosophy in them is because modern investigations have developed from the philosophical tradition.
For example, philosophers may have a question, "what is value?", or "what is the nature of the world?", born out of the philosophical tradition.
Then, after sufficient discussion and philosophical investigation, they figure out that certain methods, approaches to answering these questions, are very fertile and lead to informative answers, e.g. value as a real-valued mathematical measure, or the nature of the world as a generalization of empirical observation.
Such methods may prove to be so fertile that you may have academics spending decades or centuries investigating the implications of that method. Hence you have economics and philosophy.
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