1. The “philosopher” in contemporary speech: In everyday speech what people understand by “a philosophy” is an sort of theory of an activity “a sales philosophy” or a “philosophy of football”. Easy to see how this has arisen, but there is also the figure of “the philosopher”.
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6. He wasn’t Wittgenstein. The same goes for Ayn Rand and I imagine even journalists like Dinesh d’Souza. This desire to call fairly ordinary men and women “philosophers” is probably a product of American democracy.
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7. It’s also the product of a definite worldview that counterposes the “common sense” American “philosopher” against the suspicious European (represented by Catholicism /Jesuits in the 19th century and Postmodernism/communism in the 20th ad 21st).
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8. In America, “every man a philosopher” and this, naturally, means they outwit those snotty and stuck up Youropean philosophers with their abstract and “totalitarian” postmodernism etc. This lies at the root of the free and easy category of “philosopher” in the US.
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9. Strictly, the philosopher pursues wisdom. I would say, as per Socrates, the true philosopher would probably deny that he knew enough to have attained wisdom. Deny he was a philosopher. At the very least, let’s say he would philosophise, not be “a philosopher”.
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