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Philosophy

Dear sir or Madame, I have a question about patents in philosophy. I have had ideas about science and society for quite a while now (like everyone). And I have (I think) created a small philosophy. I was wondering, if I would come op with a complete new philosophy, how one could patent it. For example, Any Rand gets the credit of being the founder of Objectivism, not someone who stole her idea. In the industry and sciences, one can easily patent something, via institutions. But how does this work for a philosophy? Thank you very much and with kind regards,

Einstein gets credit for relativity, but (in spite of his having been a patent clerk) not a patent. Not all innovations are patentable, and in the sciences, philosophy, history... this is a very good thing. If something is patented, then others typically have to pay to use it. That’s not what we want for scientific or philosophical ideas. What you seem more concerned about is credit , and there the answer is usually straightforward. The person who publishes the idea first generally gets credit. What credit means is just that it will be acknowledged by others that the person getting the credit is the originator of the idea. But remember that few ideas are thoroughly original, that sometimes a larger idea can be “in the air,” so to speak, with more than one person coming up with a version, and that even if Jo Blow gets “credit,” that doesn’t mean her contribution will end up being the most important; how others develop the idea may be what ends up mattering most. If you think you have an original...
Philosophy

Do philosophers generally reject that philosophical reasoning relies on axioms? The way I've always thought that philosophy worked is that philosophers have a certain set of tools (deduction, laws of thought, [basic sources of knowledge](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#SourKnowJust)) which they use to come to reasoned answers to questions. Most importantly, these tools are taken as axiomatic. That is, they are seen as starting points from which all reasoning must proceed. To question these axioms wouldn't be possible. However, I've recently seen an attitude that has puzzled me. Many philosophers state that very rarely does reasoning in philosophy rely on axioms. Axioms are things to be avoided and go against the spirit of philosophy. What am I misunderstanding here? If philosophers don't take their tools of reasoning as axiomatic, how do they go about doing philosophy? More importantly, if philosophical reasoning is so pervasive that it questions its own tools, from what framework does...

I'm a bit puzzled about where you got the impression that philosophy works this way, Looking at the work of Spinoza, perhaps, might give this impression, but who else? Certainly not Plato. Certainly not Aristotle. Not Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, not a single philosopher active in the last 50 years that I can think of. The description you quote from your philosophy student acquaintance is pretty reasonable. I'm not quite so happy with the last part—that philosophers determine general principles and rules from their intuitions. The role of intuition in philosophy is much more complicated and also much more controversial than this allows for. There is no one method that philosophers use. Philosophers worry about consistency and inconsistency. They look for counterexamples and try to avoid them in their own work. They may begin with "intuitions," but they try to develop those intuitions into more precise, well-articulated theses, and they count it as a plus for their view if it covers a range...
Religion
Philosophy

Is theology a subset of philosophy? Even if in theory it is, in practice is it treated as a separate discipline? I notice a contradiction in thought in an organized religion and wanted to ask about it, I'm not sure if this is an appropriate forum. Thanks!

Physics
Philosophy
Language

I have recently heard that, according to physics, you can never actually touch anything. This seems clearly false and I feel it should be refuted with philosophy (if not physics). Can you comment on this? p.s. See for example https://futurism.com/why-you-can-never-actually-touch-anything which seems to claim that, according to physics, you can never actually touch anything

According to the internet, the sun rose at 6:02 this morning in Washington. I was awake and when I got around to opening the blinds I could see that the sky was blue. The sheets on the bed are blue too, though not the same blue. They're a few years old and I like the way they feel when I touch them. But the sun doesn't rise, does it? Although centuries ago, people thought it did, they were just wrong. And there isn't really a sky—no dome or roof or thing of any sort. There are sheets, but they're made of atoms, which aren't colored, nor are collections of them. And touching the sheets; don't get me started on that. Except… If someone says the sky is blue, they've said nothing false, nothing wrong. Same goes for telling you the color of their sheets; likewise for telling you they touched them. People may be mistaken about what being a blue sheet amounts to, or a blue sky, or about what's going on under the covers, so to speak, when we touch a sheet, or anything else. But that doesn't make the...
Philosophy

Can philosophy make you go crazy? If you think too much about philosophy, will you end up not being able to think properly?

If you obsess too much about more or less anything, it can be bad for you, but some of the topics that philosophy deals with can be more troublesome for some people. I have in mind especially some forms of radical skepticism. I have met people who've been obsessed with the possibility that they don't really know that there's an external world, or that there are other people. I've had them in my office, clearly distressed. I'd guess that there were already some underlying problems. I'd guess that it wasn't a case of someone who was otherwise fully functioning and then happened on Descartes' Meditations , but the skeptical questions provided something for their background issues to latch onto. When I'm talking with such folk, I tend to stress two things. The first is philosophical: the fact that something is possible in some rarified sense isn't a reason for thinking it's at all likely. Yes: in some sense of "could," it could be that what's going on in my mind is all there is. But in this sense of ...
Philosophy

Are people and businesses misusing the word philosophy when they say, for example, "My philosophy is to always tell the truth," or "Our philosophy is that the lowest price is the best price?" Isn't that closer to a creed or an ideology?

Briefly, no. Words mean what people use them to mean, and words can have multiple meanings. Expressions like "My philosophy is..." are so common that they represent one of the meanings that the word "philosophy" has come to have in English. Of course it's not what professional philosophers usually have in mind when they use the word, but professional philosophers don't get veto power over usage. A further thought or two: I can't really get bent very far out of shape by this one, but it's a bit unfortunate in at least one respect: it gives some people the impression that philosophy is all about truisms and banal principles instead of being something that calls for rigorous thought. But the cure for that is not to complain about how folks use the word; it's for philosophers to do a better job of helping people understand what we do and why it's worth doing.
Philosophy
Language

It seems to me that a lot of basic philosophy is about definitions of abstract words. So, Plato might have asked what courage or love are, Enlightenment philosophers might have been interested in what freedom is, more modern philosophers might inquire what science is. I guess I'd like to ask a two-part question. The first is what the difference is between the sort of definition a philosopher might give and the sort of definition a lexicographer might give. What are philosophers doing that lexicographers aren't? The second is, if it's fair to say that philosophers are interested in defining abstract words, well, is the task inevitably culturally and temporally specific? I mean, does the Latin word "pulchritudo" really mean the same thing as the English word "beauty"? Does the Greek "aletheia" really mean the same thing as "truth"? And couldn't the meaning of a word like "freedom" change over time?

Think about water. When a lexicographer asks what the word "water" means, s/he is asking how the word is used. It's an empirical question about people's actual linguistic behavior. If it turned out that enough people use the word "water" to refer to vodka, then "vodka" would be one of the meanings of the word "water." But when a chemist answers the question "What is water?", s/he's not telling us how the word is used. On the contrary, s/he will assume that that's settled. The question isn't about the word; it's about the stuff that we use the word to refer to. What is it? And, at least close enough for present purposes, the substance that we refer to by using the word "water" is the liquid composed (mostly) of molecules of H2O. The chemist's answer can be quite different from the lexicographer's. A lexicographer could have come up with a perfectly acceptable account of the meaning-in-use of the word "water" before we knew what water is. Many people who use the word "water" correctly don't know...
Philosophy

I do not understand how can anyone with at least a BA in philosophy relate to the world and act as people that do not have one do. And I take it that the average western person lives a better more untroubled life. Why? Well, I live with my brother and from my philosophical studies at a top ten university in the world I (without being cynical) assure you that it is perfectly reasonable to doubt many core beliefs that anyone takes for granted and that make life not liveable. I am deeply concerned about how does my mental representation of the world arise, whether a sufficient relation between the phenomenology of my conscious experience and a mind‐independent physical world can be established not only for metaphysical reasons but also for epistemic ones, hoping that it can allow me to know of the existence of an external world and make judgments of it. EXAMPLE: Sitting down eating while talking to my brother. (challenging, I know) I am thinking of the traditional philosophical questions such as the...

You write that one response of professional philosophers is "they don't let the doubts affect their lives, which is contrary to what an intellectually capable human being (i suppose philosophers are of course) should do " Here's my question: why is this what an "intellectually capable human being" should do? I don't think that's even remotely obvious. There's more or less nothing that I couldn't bring myself to doubt if I really tried. Maybe 1+2 = 3 is an exception. On the other hand, 5879+3627=9506 is something I likely could get myself to feel unsure about with a lot of effort. But so what? It's consistent to doubt any empirical proposition. And it's psychologically possible to doubt a lot of non-empirical propositions by worrying about whether one's cognitive engine has gone on the fritz. But while all of this is true, it seems to me to have no force. The best way I've ever seen anyone make the point is the way my one-time colleague Dudley Shapere used to put it: The possibility...
Philosophy

Do philosophers ever assume anything in books or journals (not including thought experiments) and wouldn't that be completely contrary to the intent of philosophy?

If by "assume," you mean "accept without argument," then the answer is yes to the first part of your question and no to the second. Yes: philosophers assume all sorts of things. They usually assume that there is a world out there and that there are people who at least potentially can read and respond to their arguments. They very often take for granted all sorts of facts, scientific and garden-variety: that there are trees; that people sometimes do things deliberately; that water is made of H2O; that the 4-color conjecture has been successfully proven. No: this isn't contrary to the intent of philosophy. Except on very eccentric views, philosophy is not the enterprise of doubting everything that can be doubted and accepting only what can be proved from indubitable premises. That may have been Descartes' project, but it's been almost no one else's. In fact, most philosophers would say that this project is deeply flawed. Philosophy, like the Odyssey begins in the middle of things. Want to think...
Philosophy

Can every philosophical word or term listed in peer-reviewed philosophy dictionaries be explained with a real-life example? If not, how can we know that it's not just BS?

A not-really-relevant aside: most philosophers don't own philosophical dictionaries, but let that pass. Here's a non-philosophical word: unicorn. It's easy to explain what it means, but there aren't any real-life examples. Whether a term can be clearly explained and whether there are actual examples are quite different questions. If it's controversial whether something exists then a philosopher shouldn't pretend otherwise, but the question of whether something exists (God, for instance) might be an interesting one. And sometimes the best way to understand a notion is a philosophical question. The notion of free will is like that. In that case, there's no one meaning for the term, but it's possible to have a perfectly reasonable discussion of what might count as free will and why some answers might be better than others. In fact that sort of discussion comes up in many disciplines. Philosophers are unusual in that they're trained to notice this kind of unclarity and to reason about it carefully.

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