From a Notebook

Posted on March 13, 2004 in Journals & Notebooks Morals & Ethics Thinking

Too many people don’t get it. Philosophy is the study of how we organize our knowledge and the demonstration of its pitfalls. It seeks to describe ideas. Philosophy is one of the few fields where books explaining the work of a specific philosopher are often an improvement ovr the original writings because the follower clarifies and improves upon the original text. (Mind you, I still don’t get Hegel.) I’m with Wittgenstein on this: scientific philosophy looks at things, describes them. A philosopher should be more like an anthropologist than a theologian or a talk-show guest. Foucault stands as a better example of what the philosopher should be than all the moralists out there. These need their own departments or, rather, all departments should have one. The goal is to chart trends of thought, to reveal histories. An ethicist can then propose improvements. A philosopher can do both, but I prefer that s/he not do it in the same book. Foucault’s models of power relationships make a good deal more sense to me than many paradigms and Wittgenstein is often right on when he explains how, despite our inner definitions, we can talk to each other.