What I mean by Philosophy
This text is about the overused and misused term Philosophy, that meant something very different, when it was coined. In this first part, I just care about the role of factual knowledge in Philosophy - the next part describes the relation between philosophy and religion. And in the final part, I'll join the threads and try to formulate, what Philosophy ought to be.
When we call someone an philosopher, we refer to an act of deeper than normal reflecting or to a participant of a very specialized academic discourse. In this seeming drift of meaning are packed several cornerstones of the history of european thought.
The word itself is Greek and says lover (or beloved) of wisdom, which refers to a time, when very few people got anything that resembles education in the modern sense. On the other hand - some of who did, left behind works of astounding accomplishment. Euclidian geometry, archimedian spiral, Platonic ideals, Pythagorean scale are still well known terms for a reason. And the precision with which Erasthotenes computed the compass of the earth, just using a stick and what passed as a watch these days, demands awe.
If you start study these people, you quickly notice, none of them was just a mathematician or just an astronomer. Hence even the thinker that got best known for their philosophical work, were fluent in most of the sciences. In fact what we call today Physics, Chemistry, Math and so on were considered part of philosophy in this culture.
In great contrast, todays philosphers have seldom an above highschool understanding of todays hard or soft sciences. No matter how much I acknowledge their contribution or not - I refuse to call them philosphers. Charles Sanders Peirce and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz were philosophers. They pushed foreward the sciences as well as our philosophical tradition.
For one, you have to be on par with the knowledge of your time to make any statement, that can be taken seriously as a deep thought. At very least scientist will not take you seriously if you are ignorant discoveries that disprove your claim. This fractures the culture and in consequence slows down progress.
And secondly, you got to train your reasoning processes be become sharp. Thinking about the meaning of words just is not the same as doing math. And to be able saying something meaningful about the great questions of life you need all the skills accessible to men.
For instance every philospher should learn about Gödels incompleteness theorem. It is one of the great mathematical achievements in the last century and it tells you some about the limits of logic. That would give philosophers a more balanced outlook. It would also have the benevolent effect, that trixters that hide behind big words, but lack the brain, would not pass the exam.
When I visited an university course on logic and witnessed that it was just a soft version of what we did in computer science, I knew something is very wrong here. I mean its nice to have an debating club and exchange opinions. But Philosophy is something else. Philosophers should be a sharp thinker that can see the big picture and offer the new perspectives we need to advance as humankind. This can only happen if your up to par with the knowledge and methods of all disciplines.
Sure, thats a hard task. With todays vast mountains of data and knowledge growing by the minute and many more scientists it is way more difficult than in old greece where you could take a nip from you wine and draw you thoughts in the sand for weeks and no boss nor twitter was disturbing you. Even the hodegetic of the enlightenment is not enough today, because it just tells you how to write an paper in an intellectually honest and well founded way, not how to integrate your knowlege into what is already known, so that others can easier get an overview.
To me - that can be achieved with the right software and culture and people that would get hired to do just that. And that is why I think a new golden era of philosophy is in reach.