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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2. This idea of “being a philosopher” is quite an American phenomenon. Stefan Molyneux self-describes himself as a philosopher or as “doing philosophy”. His fans agree. This is silly. Molyneux is an intelligent man who produces some very good videos on complicated subjects...
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3. ...when he has the sense to interview someone halfway credible or sensible, often he doesn’t. Anyway, he is an able and fair interviewer, exponent, and explainer of views. He is halfway between being a journalist and an educator. His views on relationships are bonkers.
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4. What he isn’t is “a philosopher” or “doing philosophy”, both of these are incredibly portentous claims to make about yourself. Using a bit of logic, for example, does not make you a philosopher anymore than knowing “chopsticks” makes you a concert pianist.
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5. This isn’t unique to Molyneux. It’s common on the American right. Eric Hoffer, for example, is often described as a “philosopher”. He was a talented aphorist and observer of human nature, but lot of what he wrote was compressed Montaigne and Nietzsche.
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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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