Topics Philosophy

Question Is ‘philosophy’ singular, or is there room for multiple philosophies? Clearly each philosopher will respond to a question according to their own understanding, but what about schools of thought that fall outside the scope of ‘Philosophy’ as taught in Universities (and perhaps contradict it)? To what extent is ‘Philosophy’ a generally agreed upon pool of knowledge and a set of tools for a rational understanding of life, the universe and everything, as opposed to a continually shifting, subjective and relative arena of debate where alternate and opposing explanations are considered?

Accepted:
November 8, 2005

Comments

Like so many things in life and thought, many things have been called "philosophy" or "philosophies." Among academic philosophers, there remain several general approaches or "schools" of philosophy, and you're right to think that philosophers from different points of view might answer philosophical questions very differently.

There are, as well, schools of thought outside of academia that are widely known as "philosophy" or "philosophical." Some of these are more or less extensions of academic philosophy. In other cases, non-academic "philosophies" are really very different enterprises.

So I think if you put everything that is called "philosophy into a single container and then asked what is common to everything in that container...the best answer would probably be "nothing...other than they are all called 'philosophy' by someone or other.

Even granting that, I think that one of the goals of academic philosophy is to try to guarantee some degree of "quality control" through our reliance upon rigorously logical forms of reasoning, and through open and public exchange (which you can witness at any national meeting of academic philosophers--here in the US, we have three national meetings of the American Philosophical Association every year, plus innumerably many regional and state organizations and topical meetings). Most philosophy departments also have colloquia series, in which guest philosophers will present their current research and will confront the criticisms and searching questions of the members of the department sponsoring the talk. Even if philosophical ideas continue to change, I think our methodology (logic and rigorous debate) has remained much more constant--and this is the "value added" that academic philosophers provide.