Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Phi­los­o­phy hall by Pippa Killi Nova

Phi­los­o­phy is think­ing in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordi­nar­ily make at great speed — to do with our nat­ural moti­va­tions and beliefs. It then becomes evi­dent that alter­na­tives are pos­si­ble [John Camp­bell, Philoso­phers]

I see phi­los­o­phy not as a ground­work for sci­ence, but as con­tin­u­ous with sci­ence. I see phi­los­o­phy and sci­ence as in the same boat — a boat which f we can rebuild only at sea while stay­ing afloat in it. There is no exter­nal van­tage point, no first phi­los­o­phy. All sci­en­tific find­ings, all sci­en­tific con­jec­tures that are at present plau­si­ble, are there­fore in my view as wel­come for use in phi­los­o­phy as else­where [W.V.O. Quine, “Nat­ural Kinds”, Onto­log­i­cal Rel­a­tiv­ity and Other Essays]

Con­tinue read­ing ‘What is Philosophy?’