Talk:Philosophy

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What is simple English for Philosophy?[change source]

Just a thought but it would be good to work out what a simple english translation of Philosopher was! the main page sais 'abstract ideas' however I think that is overly vague, the study of abstract ideas perhaps, or even simpler just 'the study of ideas'. However there are actually different discplens for studying ideas, such as the history of ideas, meta philosophy or even the dread memetics of Dworkin & co which, should this encylopedia grow to cover them would probably have a better clame to the title then philosophy. A more literal translation of the word would be wisdom, but perhaps that is overly practical. I know one of the difficulties philosophy has is tht it does not have a very good definition and so it can be hard for philosophers to explain the field to non philosophers (kind of ironic really as so much philosohy is about coming up with good defintions). Any ideas? --Sim 00:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've been trying to simplefy this page a bit, how do people think I am doing, how would you feel about removing the unsimple tag? I think the only real problem with the article now is my poor spelling! --Sim 22:34, 13 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Done a fair bit of simplifying and edits for typos etc, but feel more work is needed yet before removing unsimple tag --SamuelLsamson 20:30, 14 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

yeh looking at it again I think you're right, grrr this is harder then I thought --Sim 22:37, 14 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hah! You might sighingly say-so. Philosophy was never meant to be EAS-AY! Rek-og-nize, be-yatch-es! ;)--KommunistSympathizer 00:56, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Kommunist Sympathizer, I know you don't like people reverting your edits, but I have done so and these are my reasons.

1) saying that philosophy was a greek word is unnesecary, it actually still translates into greek (philo = love and sophia = Wisdom) and has been used in the same way since Ancient Athens. Whilst you might argue that it has been made 'un greek' by being used in english for so many years I feel that for a simple english wikipedia this level of detail us unesesary and the way I wrote it is simpler. This is a simple english point and I'd like a third parties view on it. "But now it is more used as a meaning to find ways to think about the world." is anyway not a very good sentence.

2) "An example of the latter is a question asked in Anti-Reality-philosophics." is meaningless unless you state what the question is. Also anti-reality philosophy is not a word I have ever heard of whilst studying philosophy and points to a page that doesn't exist and in my opinion, is not likely to exist any time soon.

3) I have not reverted your corrections to my formatting, e.g. putting a space between the end of a line in the list and a ? or :, that seams to be the style of the page and I was wrong to have not implamented it

4) "Some people feel philosophics have a great effect to make people feel good about Themselves by discovering the meaning behind all things so it can help their everyday psyche, in other words, as a therapy to tackle reality. Such as: "Why does things have to be in this way?" And here can philosophy be a redeeming answer...but can it be absolute enough, a final-solving one?" apart from this being in unsimple english it just doesn't make sence. If you whant to say that philosophy can be good becasue it gives people answers to questions that make them unhappy (for instance what happens when you die). Then that is fair enough I guess, however if you have read any philosophy I think you would find that mostly it does not give this sort of simple and reasuring answer but mostly unsettles people and makes them challenge their views (we allready have something about that), so I just don't accept what you are saying.

5) "Other people have just a job totally unrelated to philosophics (such as a construction worker or a soldier) and just need philosophics to get their "head off the job"." I think these people fall compleatley into the category of hobby thinkers and it's pointless to mention them again.

6) "even musicans, who add philosophy to their audial work." I have added artist the the list of jobs that can turn people to philosophy as I think you are right and I missed it, however how many musicians have actually added philosophy to their work I do not know, the only one I can think of is Satie and his composition about the death of socratese.

7) "Some (but not all) philosophers" pendantic and confusing in my oppinion, it also adds unnecessary complexity.

8) "Confucius, Chinese philosopher ... Buddha, Indian philosopher." I made a decision to leave out the country where philosophers came from with the exception of the ancient Greek philosophers because there is a separate category for them as a sub category to the philosophers category. As boarders have tended to shift a lot over time often the modern country where a philosopher lives is not relevent as it's very different to the country they where born in at the time they where born. Furthermore what matters much more with philosophers is the school of philosophy that they are associated with and not the country where they wehre born/lived. Thus for instance Witgenstien was born adn lived a lot in Austria but is generally considered a british philosopher as he did most of hist work at Cambridge and his ideas where like those of other british philosophers. Similarley whilst Buddah might have been born in India his ideas are now so defused across asia and the world that it is no longer important to consider whether he was born in India or Tibet or China or wherever. Finally if you whant to give the birthplace of the asian philoosophers you should do so for the other philosophers as well I think.

So yeah I'm sorry to have reverted so many of your changes, I hope you see that I have read and considered them and will respond here rather then just re-reverting everything. I feel that as a lot of our changes where unsimple is'nt better to discuss them here and try and put them into simple english first before re adding them.

Finally just for your information the subject is called Philosophy, not Philosophics and the people who study it are called Philosophers not philosophicians and psyche is greek for mind and you should use mind instead or another word if mind isn't what you meant (psyche can also be used to mean spirit or in plato just the self, but these are far more esatoric meanings and not used very much today). --Sim 10:41, 23 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

A suggestion for evaluating "Simple English"[change source]

There is a great website, http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/, which allows one to enter text and get a word frequency profile. This means that it compares the text to special word lists: the 1000 most frequent words of English, the next 1000 most frequent (1001-2000), so-called Academic Word list words (based on a commonly accepted list established through academic research), and words which appear on none of those lists.

When I analyzed the Philosophy entry up to, but not including, the "Some Philosophers" section, I found that just over 90% of the words in the entry are among the 2000 most frequent words in English. This is a pretty good score, in my opinion (I'm a teacher of English as a Second Language with a practical interest in vocabulary learning and analysis).

Thoughts? Comments? Has anyone else used similar tools for analyzing entries in the Simple English Wikipedia?

Raymond Meredith 14:23, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

DIFFICULT[change source]

I mean..how can you explain something like existentialism in simple english??? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.253.92.226 (talk • contribs)

look at existentialism? --Eptalon (talk) 15:00, 24 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. If you can't explain something simply, you don't know it well enough. Master philosophy teachers at UCBerkeley can explain Aristotle and Plato like they were picture books; Einstein wrote his theory of relativity to become very accessible to the general population. If you truly, deeply understand existentialism, why can't you explain it in a simple way? -— Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.149.118.80 (talk • contribs)

We are not, nor are claiming to be, professional philosophers. Macdonald-ross (talk) 08:20, 27 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Are these actually philosophers[change source]

Just wondering?--Eptalon (talk) 14:59, 24 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also, what are the criteria for inclusion in the list? There are certainly much more influential philosophers who are not on the list. Perhaps "well regarded by academia" is the main criterion? — DAGwyn (talk) 21:15, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, here are some thoughts:

They should be primarily known as philosophers. That rules out Chomsky, for example, because he is primarily a linguist, and secondly a poliitcal activist. There are borderline cases like Sartre, primarily a novelist, but because he is a main source for existentialism, an important modern philosophical schema, he gets in.
We should have an article on them. I don't think lists here should become a kind of suggestion list or mention list. Readers should be able to press the button and find out about them. Obviously, En wiki will have a much more inclusive list, but we are limited in what we do.
It is more difficult with eastern philosophers who may be out of the circle of published and notable-to-western-eyes philosophers. I would encourage reasoned suggestions on the talk page; what does not help is for editors just to bang in red-linked names without discussion.
The list is not meant to be comprehensive: notice the little word "some" in the heading... If readers want the complete list on this wiki, they can look at the category. Macdonald-ross (talk) 09:45, 28 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]