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Will Kymlicka：哲学的学科划分有其偶然性。 Well I’m in a philosophy department but I’m always wondering what exactly I have in common with many of my colleagues, because, to be frank, I don’t necessarily understand the work they do in the philosophy of language or metaphysics. There’s a certain element of contingency about what remains in a philosophy department. Philosophy used to encompass economics and so on; and bits and pieces have separated themselves out and become self-standing disciplines, and what’s left is just what’s left, rather than anything coherent uniting it. I think of myself as a political philosopher; I’m interested in the normative evaluation of political life and state institutions. And that’s fairly strongly connected to moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, as Robert Nozick said, sets the boundaries of political philosophy. Brian Leiter：哲学关涉所有人类行为的基本问题。 This is a hard question. I can tell you what academic philosophy is, and it bears some relation to what philosophy has been historically. That is, philosophy is concerned with foundational or fundamental questions about the nature of everything else that human beings do: how we live, how we ought to live, what art is, what we know, whether we know anything, what science is, and so on. In that sense philosophy really is the most capacious of all the disciplines even if it isn’t, as Kant thought, the queen of the sciences. But since we’ve just been talking about Nietzsche, we can’t forget that there is a very different conception of what philosophers are. A philosopher for Nietzsche was an honorific. It refers to the person who creates or legislates value. It’s the person who, to borrow an image from one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, Judge Richard Posner, is a moral entrepreneur. It’s a nice image. It’s somebody who creates new ways of evaluating things—what’s important, what’s worthwhile—that changes how an entire culture or an entire people understand those things. Jerrold Levinson：日常思考也是哲学。 Oh, I didn’t know you were going to ask me the really hard questions. I can tell a joke that says what philosophy is. A young man is going on a date and he asks his father for advice. ‘Dad, I’m really nervous, what will I talk about in the dead spots?’ The father says, ‘Look son, there are the three Fs: there’s Food, Family, and Filosophy.’ So the son says, ‘Okay, I’ll remember that.’ So he goes on a date and he’s with the date in the car after dinner; and there’s one of these lulls, and so he thinks what am I going to say, my teeth are clattering. Ah, I’ll remember my father’s advice. ‘So Mary, do you like asparagus?’ ‘Well, no John I don’t like asparagus.’ ‘Well, Mary, do you have any brothers?’ ‘Well actually John, I don’t have any brothers.’ ‘Well, Mary, if you had a brother would he like asparagus?’ That’s philosophy. M. M. McCabe：哲学是关于思考的思考。 Thinking about thinking. Jeff McMahan：我可以笑吗？我不知道哲学是什么。 Can I just laugh? I have no idea what philosophy is. Ray Monk：哲学是理解我们自身和这个世界的尝试。 Philosophy is the attempt to understand ourselves and the world. A. W. Moore：“什么是哲学？”本身就是哲学问题。 I’m hard pressed to say, but one thing that is certainly true is that ‘What is Philosophy?’ is itself a striking philosophical question. Alexander Nehamas：我当哲学家是因为我想要能够谈论很多很多事情。 I can’t answer that directly. I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me. Alex Neill：哲学是痴迷于清晰性的思考。 Philosophy is thinking that is obsessed with clarity. David Papineau：哲学是对最困难问题的努力思考。 Philosophy is thinking hard about the most difficult problems that there are. And you might think scientists do that too, but there’s a certain kind of question whose difficulty can’t be resolved by getting more empirical evidence. It requires an untangling of presuppositions: figuring out that our thinking is being driven by ideas we didn’t even realize that we had. And that’s what philosophy is. Anne Phillips：哲学是一种思考两难困境和矛盾的方式。 Now I’m going to laugh. Philosophy for me is a way of thinking about dilemmas and contradictions. I don’t think of it in terms of having to be abstracted from the real world, or having to be about hypothetical problems, but wherever you’re dealing with something where there’s a real dilemma and there are very good reasons to go one way, and very good reasons to go another, at that point I think you need philosophy. Thomas Pogge：哲学是爱智慧。 I think that philosophy in the classical sense is the love of wisdom. So the question then is ‘What is wisdom?’ And I think wisdom is understanding what really matters in the world. And that’s how I would answer people who say what I’m doing is not really philosophy. In my view what really matters is the enormous injustice that’s being perpetrated on the poor in this world. We have just heard from the food and agricultural organization of the United Nations that for the first time in human history there are more than a billion people who are chronically malnourished. The poorest half of humankind has 3 per cent of global household income: the richest half 97 per cent. If the poorest half had 4 per cent of global household income they wouldn’t have this severe poverty. And what the philosopher can do is just to say, ‘this is something that matters’. Janet Radcliffe Richards：哲学是一种研究模式。 I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of subjects. I regard it as involving the kind of questions where you’re not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together. This means that philosophical questions will arise in a lot of subjects. And if you haven’t got philosophical training you may well misunderstand the nature of a lot of those questions. So that’s how I prefer to think of philosophy—as a method, a kind of enquiry rather than a particular set of questions. Although of course there are some questions that can only be answered by that sort of enquiry. Aaron Ridley：（笑）。 (Laughs). Ben Rogers:（笑）。我得回去干活去了。 (Laughs). I must get back to the day job. Michael Sandel：哲学是对事物存在方式的批判性反思。 Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting critically on social and political and economic arrangements. It always intimates the possibility that things could be other than they are. And better. Julian Savulescu：哲学就是通过使用理性和概念工具、先天理由和对自身与世界状态的反思来获取知识。 Philosophy is in my view gaining knowledge through the use of reason and conceptual tools, a priori reason, and by reflecting about oneself and the state of the world. It employs the empirical sciences, but it’s not a version of science. It’s gaining knowledge through rational reflection. And in my own area philosophy is about understanding what people should do, what sort of person people should be, how people should act, by rationally reflecting on the courses of action or the nature of human beings. I also think philosophy should encourage people to gain knowledge, and reflect and to try to seek to understand the world and themselves through their capacity as rational animals. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong：哲学是对融贯合理的整全世界观的寻求。 Philosophy is the search for a coherent and justified overall world-view. Philosophers should stop looking at little issues in the corner of our lives and try to see how things fit together; how psychology fits with philosophy, how the mind fits with the body, how aesthetic value relates to economic value and justice. Those are the big issues: how do we fit together the different aspects of our lives? And that’s what philosophy ought to be addressing. Barry Smith：哲学是对现实之本性以及我们在其中的位置的基本、清晰、得当的思考。 I think it’s thinking fundamentally clearly and well about the nature of reality and our place in it, so as to understand better what goes on around us, and what our contribution is to that reality, and its effect on us. Robert Rowland Smith：哲学是一种爱知识的方式。 I think the Greek term has it exactly right; it’s a way of loving knowledge. Paul Snowdon：哲学是一组问题的名字，这些问题让我们深感有趣，而且不能通过任何专门的方式被回答。 Philosophy is the name we give to a collection of questions which are of deep interest to us and for which there isn’t any specialist way of answering. The categories in terms of which they are posed are ones which prevent experiments being carried out to answer them, so we’re thrown back on trying to answer them on the basis of evidence we can accumulate. For example, ‘Does God exist?’ You can’t hand that question over to some chap in a white coat to do an experiment. The category ‘God’ isn’t a category suitable for conducting experiments to determine whether there’s something of that sort or not. How do we decide? Well we simply have to weigh up the arguments for and against the existence of this kind of entity. And that is the general character of philosophical questions. Do values exist? Does the soul exist? Do sense data exist? And so on. ‘Philosophy’ is the name for that group of deep and important questions where there is no simple experimental way of answering them, and yet we want to know the answers. Kate Soper：哲学关涉文化和历史，也关涉超越它们的真理。 I think that one of the important things that philosophy is trying to do is to respect both the cultural relativity and historicity of our ideas while at the same time tease out what might be more trans-historical, trans-cultural truths. Raymond Tallis：哲学就是试图明白较宽泛意义上的事物如何在较宽泛的意义上联系起来。 One of my favourite definitions comes from Wilfrid Sellars. It is trying to see how things in the wider sense hang together in the wider sense. And my dream of philosophy is to make the universe we live in mind-portable, so instead of being possessed by it, you possess it. Tzvetan Todorov：哲学是一种寻求智慧、过更智慧生活的方式。 Philosophy is a subject that all French students have to take in the last class of high school. And they just hate it, because they can’t understand what philosophy is about. To answer more seriously, philosophy was a way of searching for wisdom, of leading a wiser life. And I adhere to this conception of philosophy. Keith Ward：哲学就是对智慧的追求。 I have a traditional, almost Indian approach to this: I think philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and that includes spiritual wisdom. So this means asking questions about the nature of the human self and the nature of reality, and how this will affect your life in practice. And in that sense, although I have experienced Oxford philosophy at its most intense, I’m definitely not an ordinary language philosopher. Jonathan Wolff：两个常识概念往不同方向拉扯，哲学问题就出现了，哲学也就开始了。 Well, I can tell you how philosophical problems arise in my view, which is where two common-sense notions push in different directions, and then philosophy gets started. And I suppose I also think that anything that claims to be philosophy which can’t be related back to a problem that arises in that way probably is empty.
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发表于 2020-7-24 11:51
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发表于 2020-7-24 12:19