User:Peter Damian (original account)

Real name: Edward Buckner

Qualifications:

• Honours degree in Philosophy, Bristol 1977
• PhD in Philosophy, Bristol 1986
• MSc in computing, Plymouth 1987

Many publications in the 1980's in the area of philosophy of language and philosophical logic. No longer teaching, I work outside academia.

Currently working on the Philosophy article. Why, you ask? I'm thinking of some reasons, and will come back to you shortly.

last reasonable version of the introduction. And Mel's comments on that version.

[User:Dbuckner/Philosophylaughingstock Why Philosophy is a laughing stock in Wikipedia]

Useful addresses:

• User_Talk:Mel Etitis
• User_Talk:Banno
• User_Talk:Lucidish
• User_Talk:KD_Tries_Again
• User talk:Peter J King
• User talk:FT2

Some splendid rants.

• The Bristol Stool scale
• Why professional philosophers don't edit the philosophy article in Wikipedia

Quinton's definition of Philosophy

A more detailed, but still uncontroversially comprehensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value). Each of the three elements in this list has a non-philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinguished by its explicitly rational and critical way of proceeding and by its systematic nature. Everyone has some general conception of the nature of the world in which they live and of their place in it. Metaphysics replaces the unargued assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organized body of beliefs about the world as a whole. Everyone has occasion to doubt and question beliefs, their own or those of others, with more or less success and without any theory of what they are doing. Epistemology seeks by argument to make explicit the rules of correct belief formation. Everyone governs their conduct by directing it to desired or valued ends. Ethics, or moral philosophy, in its most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate, in rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved. (Anthony Quinton).