Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
A technical vocabulary is useful for technical persons to communicate efficiently and precisely, but to the layman it is a barrier. I can understand the usefulness of technical words to philosophers, and I'm willing to learn some of the vocabulary, but if philosophy becomes so technical as to be restricted to a discussion between philosophers, what's the use of it?
|
It is a barrier, which I acknowledged in my post, (maybe I'm a closet Platonist - philosophy should be left to philosophers
), but it is maybe a barrier that is worth getting over.
Again, I'm not sure the value of philosophy resides in its practical application, some things seem to be good in themselves. Art, music, philosophy, can all fulfill functional roles, and at a certain level of description can all be thought of functionally. But that they can be thought of functionally does not imply that accounting for them in that way exhausts the ways in which they are of value.
In some ways it makes no sense to talk of philosophy as such - Kant reckoned he'd wrapped up that conversation - but only to talk about "philosophy of": philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, moral philosophy, philosophy of truth, and so on. One can think about these various philosophies of from within various traditions - the analytic tradition, the continental tradition, the phenomenological tradition, the American pragmatist tradition and so on. I'm not saying you have to know all this stuff before you can engage in philosophical discussion, but at the same time I can't ignore the fact that an awful lot of people have thought an awful lot of stuff before any of this entered my head, so isn't it helpful in working out what I think about something to stand it up against what other people have thought about it? And doesn't that mean I've got to be able to engage with the technical vocabulary that these people use?