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'What are some of your sayings?' is only ridiculous when posed to an analytic philosopher. If most people fail to conceive of philosophy as sciency conceptual analysis, is the joke really on the public?

@andrew The academic world may be uselessly arid but at least you learn to say "would HAVE" instead of "would of."

@visitor
I think you'll find that andrew did say would HAVE, he just misplaced a few commas, as in:
"a philosopher would, of course, have told the young woman.."

When everything from nutrition to experience is dispensed in real or virtual tablet form it is hardly surprising philosophy needs to be sized for quick and conspicuous consumption. How can brilliance be conveyed without quoting proper sources like a computer? (The real triumphs in AI have been on the human side.) Where would we be if everyone started developing their own ideas? We could not discern the enlightened from the functionaries; facts would be reduced to beliefs. Reality itself would be altered. As long as there are experts, ideas will be meted out in proper order and facts will be protected from the horde.

Shakespeare's Polonius captured it nicely.

There is probably nothing less palatable or digestible for the mind than philosophy. This ancient intellectual hangover, which probably only survives because men are so easily impressed by their own linguistic gymnastics, even though they accomplish nothing, and theologies need of an intellectual framework for its own self deceptions in trying to comprehend the mind of God, is, like theology, well past it's sell by date. This after the fact pretense to wisdom in hindsight is of course ass-backwards. It fails to offer any basis of sound judgment, no path to knowledge of any practical value and offers no means to infuse even what it pretends to outside its own devotees. Philosophy presupposes potential to natural reason that is itself pure vanity. Science in that respect exists because the mind cannot be trusted to know, thus it seeks objective confirmation outside the mind. Whatever philosophy believes, there is no such thing as "pure reason" within the mind of man. Philosophy: R.I.P.

'What are some of your sayings' is the correct question to pose to a philosopher. How else to assess philosophers but by what they say, and especially by what they regard as important enough to render pithily?

"those who think for a living tend"

I suspect that the author is being deliberately provocative here since many of the people who think for a living think that philosophers do no such thing. Nevertheless, an interesting article.

Traditionally, so I'm told, one set about to "be a philosopher."

Then by a subsequent linguistic turn, one merely set about to "do philosophy."

Not quite knowing what's what, at last one set about to "say [the world] philosophically."

If so, maybe the apt onboard movie to discuss is Being There.

Lapham's Quarterly has an interesting article about when A.J. Ayer died for a time:

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/an-atheist-meets-t...

He was revived but died for good eleven months later after having become quite friendly with a Catholic theologian. He did not recant the atheism that evidently is a requirement for membership in the philosopher's guild, but it seems possible his certitude was shaken. What was additionally interesting was Ayer's admission that he couldn't understand Wittgenstein. Bertrand Russell couldn't either. Are the people who say they do fibbing?

I am reminded of the scene in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where they threaten a national philosopher's strike and receive the reply "Who will that hurt?"

Philosophy is nothing but the effort to think coherently about problems. They may be large problems, and they may be small problems.

I would submit that the email versus text problem would in fact be amenable to philosophical analysis.

I have a dream, that one day all philosophers, when asked what they do, will answer "solve concrete problems". And when asked for a word of advice, reply with "what are you trying to do?".

He writes "would of course have": "of" is not here being pressed into service as an auxiliary verb.

"To an egotistical, hedonistic modern audience, Marcus Aurelius's strictures on pleasure and the indulgences of sleeping, copulating and over-eating seem neurotic, and Stoicism itself seems over-rational and joyless. Marcus still has a certain vogue, but only because his so-called modern admirers tend to cherry- pick the convenient parts of his doctrine and ignore the rest."

"Marcus Aurelius: A Life" by Frank McLynn Da Capo Press, Perseus Books, 2009

"What if Marcus Aurelius's sense of duty and resignation were, in the first place, products of his individual temperament, of the melancholic disposition, if one wants to be precise; combined perhaps with the man's aging? There are, after all, only four main humors; so at least the melancholics among us can take "Meditations" to heart and skip the bit about historical perspective nobody possesses anyhow. As for the sanguinics, cholerics, and phlegmatics, they, too, perhaps should admit that the melancholic version of ethics is accommodating enough for them to marvel at its pedigree and chronology. Perhaps short of compulsory Stoic indoctrination, society may profit by making a detectable melancholic streak a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to rule it. To this extent, a democracy can afford what an empire could. And on top of that, one shouldn't call the Stoic acceptance of the perceptible reality resignation. Serenity would be more apt, given the ratio between man and the subjects of his attention, or- as the case might be- vice versa. A grain of sand can't resign itself to the desert; and perhaps hat's ultimately good about melancholics is that they seldom get hysterical, By and large, they are quite reasonable, and, "what is reasonable," as Marcus once said, "is consequently social." Did he say this in Greek, to fit your idea of antiquity?""

Joseph Brodsky in "Homage to Marcus Aurelius"

Re: Banjo - What if the question is "Can modern philosophy be beat as a way of wasting time and thought?"

Thought is rarely wasted.

is

an

academic

philosophers

life

more

meaningless

than

everyone

else?

i

think

the

answer

is

yes

i

think

its

the

contradiction

of

not

doing

what

they

claim

to

do