Sunday, March 28, 2010

A philosphers survey

Its common to find surveys on most things on daily life buts its very rare to find surveys on what (modern) philosophers think and believe... Here is an that rare survey and and a summary.

"... Philosophy is now a highly specialised discipline. A don working on, say, ethics, may not even know the terminology used by logicians, and vice versa. This will be grist to the mill of those who feel that analytical philosophy has given up dealing with the big questions of life and is now mired in technical minutiae. But not so fast. Even Plato was attacked in his own time for treating philosophy as if it were all mathematics. And 1,800 years ago the great doctor Galen moaned about “the over-refined linguistic quibbling of some philosophers”.
People have always wanted philosophers to provide digestible wisdom, yet it is as true now as it was in Plato’s time that disciplined thinking is hard. So next time you sit next to a philosopher on a plane, talk about the movie, not the meaning of life. "

More about this: [paper from PhilPapers.org link] & [article link]