How to make a good philosophical question.

[astrotheological]

How do you make a good philosophical question?

[Holiday20310401]

We often don't question ourselves or ask others questions. But to make a post that states something, well, you 'think' it and then you 'write' it.

[iconoclast]

astrotheological,

First, find a question that's impossible to answer and then get out your thesaurus, and translate it into the most arcane language you can find. If arcane language is insufficiently obscure, make up words for things as you go along. Write lots. It doesn't matter so much what you say, but that you are a) obscure, and b) verbose - where a is in this sense a multifactoral regularized conditional of b, if a is taken in the literal sense, and b in the intersubjective present tense particular of the non-conjunctive verb. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot, learn condescension, and soak every sentance in it. Use lots of 'obviously's' and 'of course's' - and if you can work in some algebra, super, that always helps.

iconoclast.

[astrotheological]

Originally Posted by Holiday20310401

We often don't question ourselves or ask others questions. But to make a post that states something, well, you 'think' it and then you 'write' it.

Thats why I put it on the young philosophers forum.

[jgweed]

Plato makes, in one of the early dialogues, Sokrates ask of his friends, "well, what IS justice?" Each of them proposes a definition, but they find none of them adequate, and the dialogue ends inconclusively (aporia). Yet the discussion clarifies and deepens our understanding of the problem.
Heidegger often titles his shorter works with a question (What is Called Thinking?) or begins his writing with one ("Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" in his Introduction of Metaphysics) and allows his meditations to unfold.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason asks the question, are synthetic a priori judgements possible?
Nietzsche begins Beyond Good and Evil with the question, "Suppose truth to be a woman, what then?" And Wittgenstein, in Philosphical Investigations, asks in all seriousness whether a philosophy could not consist in nothing but a series of questions, and his own favorite punction mark is the "?".

Both Plato (Theaetetus,155c-d) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 982b) agree that the origin of philosophy begins in "wonder" or "uncertainty" or "puzzlement." The latter writes that men were first led to study philosophy by wonder and this perplexity led to the belief they were ignorant, and consequently took to philosophy to escape ignorance.


"How do you make a good philosophical question?" seems on the face of it both simple and naive--- but it is the opposite, at once profound and in its questioning, is a question about what philosophy is.

[Khethil]

Originally Posted by iconoclast

First, find a question that's impossible to answer and then get out your thesaurus, and translate it into the most arcane language you can find. If arcane language is insufficiently obscure, make up words for things as you go along. Write lots. It doesn't matter so much what you say, but that you are a) obscure, and b) verbose - where a is in this sense a multifactoral regularized conditional of b, if a is taken in the literal sense, and b in the intersubjective present tense particular of the non-conjunctive verb. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot, learn condescension, and soak every sentance in it. Use lots of 'obviously's' and 'of course's' - and if you can work in some algebra, super, that always helps.

Oh... this is precious. I about fell out laughing. It seems a good number of folks I've seen here have followed this to the letter. Haha... awesome

[Arjen]

Originally Posted by Khethil

Oh... this is precious. I about fell out laughing. It seems a good number of folks I've seen here have followed this to the letter. Haha... awesome

Guilty as charged..

[Theaetetus]

I would say I am guilty as well, but I only use a thesaurus when I keep repeating a bland word over and over again. Typically I find myself using a dictionary so I know I am using words in the context I desire. On the other hand, I probably am guilty of using obscure language due to studying and examining vocabulary and its usage, and thus, some seems rather obscure to someone with limited vocabulary. There is a major difference between being too wordy and not making a point, and coming across as being wordy and making a point.

[jgweed]

In the beginning, we are told, was the word. The earliest philosophers, who bridged the difference between cosmology and poetry on the one hand, and philosophical accounts on the other, attempted to express their positions with common words. One may take the four elements as an example or Heraclitus's maxim that the soul is "fire."
But it is with Plato and Aristotle that thinking took a great leap forward. First, Socrates and Plato understood the dialectic inquiry to be about the clarification of words and concepts, and asked such questions as "what is justice?" The dialogue used words and was about words and their distinctions in meaning. Plato's use of Forms (or, Ideas) was an attempt to take a common word and give it a philosophical meaning. A second great leap, one perhaps decisive for philosophical thinking, was Aristotle's providing philosophy with its own specialised vocabulary. [Just as science and technology have found the need to employ specialised meanings for common words, so too has philosophy.]

A philosopher attempts to explain the common world in an uncommon way and his explanation cannot be a mere repetition or description of opinion, because it begins in questioning the obvious. Could it explain the obvious only remaining in the language of the obvious? Not without the greatest confusion.

Like poetry, it too is a making of a world by using words in special meanings or with unique significance, but unlike---perhaps just the opposite---poetry, philosophy wants to clarify, to make itself distinct. Both demand of their readers an effort, a thoughtful engagement with the writer's words, and a rethinking of the obvious.

[Billy]

a scientific question is one which can be answered by conducting an experiment or other empirical means.

philosophical questions have adequate and inadequate answers, but no final answer.