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What is the relation between philosophical questions and answers?

Psyduck

Bluelighter
Joined
Feb 24, 2008
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Some questions. :)

- What "is" a philosophical question?
- What is the specificity of philosophical questions? How does it differ from scientific questions? (hypothesis-based, induction, etc.)
- Does questioning existence/reality essentially belong to man?
- Does Joe-on-the-street ask 'philosophical' questions also -- even though he doesn't have the academic conceptual tools?
- Would there exist an universe if there was nobody to question it?
- What is the relation between questions and answers? Will their intrinsically always be a gap between both?
 
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1. A question that deals with the nature of reality. There is no universal boundary between valid/invalid philosophical thought, even though most people and academia draw a subjective line.

2. Well, thats kinda a hard question to answer. The two fields interact alot, so it can be blurry line. But usually philosophy papers in current academia usually pose a statement and then proves that statement by providing premises and then proving these premises. The tend to reaily heavily through inductive language and not just gathering statistics from a experiment. Although a philosophical premise can often be statistics from a scientific experiment, but it would only be part of the argument proving the statement.

3. haha, now that is a good question! Alot of philosophers, anthropologist, and pyschologist would like to think we are the only species to question the "nature of things".

4. Sure, but they probably suck in the eyes of academia.

5. Would there be a universe without humans? I'd say there was a universe along time before humans, so yea I think it would exist.

6. There is intrinsically a gap between question and answers because that is how basic language is constructed. Language is medium of explanation so its an inherent ontological property of modern discourse. A question doesn't always have to have a question mark at the end of it and an answers doesn't always have to have a period after it. What makes a question or an answer is totally up to you. It is subjective. We often times though try and objective it for societal ease with question marks and periods, but it isn't universal what your questions are and what answers you need.
 
A philosophical question is an entity that pops into one's mind. It hasn't yet been created into whole because it needs structure. A simple idea or imaginary code that needs to be fulfilled by allowing others to conjecture and implement into itself.
 
^thats kind of scary....


i agree though in a sense.

seems it depends on the way in which the theory behind the context came to be. a philosophical question i think is an attempt to form a relation that can be ascertained then perceived as an experience that relates to, or creates what are seen as the mysteries of life.

a response as a verbal answer, is ones own personal philosophy - for the moment, as to how it relates to an individuals honest answer through a personal theory, and motive brought to be by experience which is greatly shaped by what ones personal current out-look of life is - but that can change in an instant.


::i love this thread btw::
 
I say whenever one asks a question motivated by a desire to understand the human condition better, one is asking a philosophical question. It's the motivation for asking, not the content or format of the question, that makes it inherently philosophical. Remember that the goal of philosophizing is the cultivation of wisdom. If one comes away from a discussion wiser to the state of the world and one's place in it, then it matters not whether a final answer to the question was ever settled on. It's the process of pondering and debating, and the resultant appreciation for the depth and complexity of the issue, where the magic happens. This is not to say that one should never strive to take a stand on any philosophical issue -- if you find one side of an argument more convincing than all others, by all means hold it. But remember that solving all the mysteries of the universe isn't the point, and it's not nearly the tragedy it seems if you can't make up your mind on many philosophical issues.

Granted formal philosophical schools have rules about what subjects are worthy of consideration, and how a question should properly be asked. The Analytical school, which dominates academic philosophy in the Anglophone world, prefers narrow, specific questions composed of words with precise definitions -- a far cry from the broad-sweeping and ethereal discussions one finds in folk philosophy. These rules are codified and enforced in these schools for pragmatic reasons, for the same reason debate clubs have rules -- they allow people who don't know each other and don't agree with each other to nevertheless discuss heavy topics civilly and without talking past each other.

Whether the Analytical school is a de facto extension of science is highly debatable. It's certainly the philosophical school with the longest and most trade-friendly border with science. It defers immediately to science for all things successfully observed, measured, and tested, and agrees with science in valuing precisely defined terms and parsimonious conclusions. But it is not science, because philosophers do not run controlled tests and collect data sets on their hypotheses. Instead, they support their hypotheses with logical statements that they invite the reader to assume as given / true. These statements may or may not be supported by scientific evidence, or even testable. I think you could more easily call strict Analytical philosophy a sort of mathematics, than science.
 
The question is an uncertainty the answer or belief then frees up the mind from the uncertainty, perhaps it's all just a conscious manifestation of subconscious processes - why do we question anything ?
 
1. A question that deals with the nature of reality.

This is metaphysics, a specific sub branch of philosophy.

2. Well, thats kinda a hard question to answer. The two fields interact alot, so it can be blurry line. But usually philosophy papers in current academia usually pose a statement and then proves that statement by providing premises and then proving these premises.

Not all philosophy is propositional/premise based, for instance the existentialists explicitly rejected the analytic model.

The tend to reaily heavily through inductive language and not just gathering statistics from a experiment.

The scientific methodology is inductive, premise-based philosophy is usually deductive in nature.
 
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