(March 22, 2018 at 8:41 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Seriously, though, you can call it whatever you want, but people have a lot of free time and they're going to ask questions. Those questions which aren't explicitly pragmatic, like "How do I bake a cake?" are philosophical. If you have a problem with philosophy, you have a problem with questions-- and that's the sign of a dull mind, indeed.
But we have many different specialised fields to deal with those questions. And as we learn more we become more specialised. Philosophy has to be more than asking questions which aren't explicitly pragmatic.
Take consciousness for example. You'd think that this would be ideal for philosophy but it's not going to determine what it is because it isn't set up to investigate it and to collect data about it. For that you'd need neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. Philosophy can come along afterwards collecting together all the results from the different sciences and drawing conclusions from them, but the ground work first needs to be done by fields with names which aren't 'Philosophy'.
And you need this data. You can't make any progress just by using logic. We see first hand from the religionists what happens if you try that. The example I use is granite. The lay person term used to be some coarse white / grey / pink crystalline rock but geology started to examine all the different forms of granite and came up with definitions for all the different types that it found. It then started to understand how they formed by coming up with hypotheses, testing them and then collating them into theories. The same process needs to be carried out for consciousness.
Almost all philosophy nowadays seems to be performed by specialists in other fields as part of their work.
