Three Answers to the Question "What Is Philosophy?"

A Comedy in Three Acts

Stuart Dalton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781666775846, 9781666775853
• eBook ISBN: 9781666775860
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy is like a party that started over 2, 500 years ago and is still going strong. When you take a philosophy class, you're invited to join this party; but walking into a party 2, 500 years late can feel a little awkward. This book is meant to solve that problem. The best way to feel welcome is to focus on how funny philosophy is, simply because its ideals are so high that humans almost never manage to reach them.This book gives three answers to the question "What is philosophy?" (1) Philosophy is a conversation that has been going on for over 2, 500 years which has been full of comedy from the beginning and will continue to be funny forever if we do it right. (2) Philosophy is a very awkward business that has always been on the verge of going out of business. (3) Philosophy is something that makes almost everyone write very badly. In addition to this three-act comedy the book also contains two practical guides to being happy and successful in philosophy classes.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• How to use this book
• Part 1: Finding Your Way in a Philosophy Class
• Chapter 1: ow to be completely miserable in a philosophy class—or how to do the complete opposite
• Chapter 2: How to write philosophy papers that no one would ever want to read and create philosophy projects that no one would ever find interesting or useful—or how to do the complete opposite
• Part 2: Three answers to the question “What is philosophy?”
• Act One
• Chapter 3: Ancient philosophy
• Chapter 4: Medieval philosophy
• Chapter 5: Modern philosophy
• Chapter 6: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy
• Chapter 7: Philosophy in the future, which is completely up to you!
• Act Two
• Chapter 8: Why all philosophy professors are sophists even though Socrates—the closest thing there is to a founding father or a saint in the history of philosophy—despised sophists and declared that he would sooner die than become one himself
• Chapter 9: Ten philosophy departments reinvent themselves to make philosophy a more marketable commodity
• Act Three
• Chapter 10: Six different forms of bad philosophical writing, which clarify six important aspects of philosophy (so all this bad writing is actually a good thing!)
• Appendix: Some of the authors and texts that were left out of the four history of philosophy chapters
• Bibliography