For me, it’s social dancing, specifically West Coast Swing. Because while there is just social dancing, and some who only do it, there’s a bit of a culture of competition, and it has its own governing body for determining where you place in competitions, and when it does sound like a cult when described.
“who wants to study religion and metaphysics?” [everyone running for the door like i’m charles manson] no wait like we just hang out smoke weed and read stuff like the timae- [a sawed off shotgun levelled at my head]
It do be like that sometimes. What a lot of people don’t realise is that everyone has a metaphysics, the question is have you interrogated it, thought it through etc.
As always, the alternative to philosophy is not no philosophy, but instead really bad philosophy.
I feel the same way about theology and religion: whether people like it or not, the religious impulse is a cultural universal. Do we utilise it for good, or surrender the territory without a fight to religious conservatives?
Yeah this recuperative perspective on philosophy was very popular on places like the badphilosophy subreddit. It is significantly undermined by “good” philosophy largely being total dogshit. The effective altruists are what this “good” philosophy looks like.
No one likes effective altruistists, least of all most academic philosophers. They’re a punchline.
Not that this in any way undermines my point. It’s very anti intellectual to point at one shit philosophical movement and wash one’s hands of the responsibility of thinking.
But that’s the entire point, the account of philosophy you are espousing attempts to capture for itself the entire concept of thinking.
That’s… that’s always been the point, yes. I mean the word itself means love of wisdom, which is quite literally thinking well.
All specialised disciplines of inquiry are downstream of and emerge out of philosophy, and any self-reflexive internal dialogue within these disciplines is inherently philosophical.
Most languages don’t make the hard difference between Science and Philosophy like we do in English, and trying to sustain the difference in any absolute sense is basically impossible.
Philosophy is just radically open thought: the willingness to investigate seriously and update one’s views, and, as best as possible, to keep one’s ego out of what one finds.
I think that’s a very self-important account of philosophy that lends the academic practices generally associated with philosophy far, far greater relevance and weight than they should be given. Philosophers like to think of themselves as being at the base of some hierarchy of truth, beyond even mathematicians. It’s nonsense.