Wikipedia:WikiProject Philosophy/Article Series

Philosophy Article Series

Collecting series of articles will help link the philosophy articles together, and will also help us to review articles on the most important subjects in philosohpy.

Guidelines for articles series:

Subject: either a subfield of philosophy (epistemology, philosophy of mind) or a path through philosophy (history of philosophy, great philosophers, etc.)
Topics to include: Series should include all topics under a heading that are essential to a full understanding of it. To get an idea of this, imagine that the subject of the series were being taught as an undergraduate level class. What topics, positions, or philosophers would be essential components of that class's syllabus? What should a person who has taken a class in this subject know? These are the subjects that should be included in the series.
Try not to add the series box to articles until a consensus is reached on what articles should be included. If we wait a little bit before adding the boxes to pages, we'll probably save ourselves more work later.

History of Philosophy

Presocratic Philosophers

Medieval Philosophers

Contemporary (i.e., still living) Philosophers

(please add more!)

Perhaps we should divide this into Contemporary analytic and Contemporary Continental philosophers? It seems odd to put Derrida and Daniel Dennett in the same list when they barely interact with each other. (Yeah, I know that these labels suck, but I don't know any better ones.) — Adam Conover † 22:38, Apr 12, 2004 (UTC)

Since we have it set up as a table already, we could just put the continental philosophers on one half and the analytic philosophers on the other easily enough and label each half... -Seth Mahoney 22:54, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hm. That's not a bad idea. I do think, though, that we should pin down a format and list for the table before putting it on any more article pages. I'm open to disagreements on this, though. Does everyone else agree? — Adam Conover † 00:18, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC)

Fine with me. Pros and cons anyone? -Seth Mahoney 05:34, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've taken a stab at dividing the table into contemporary and analytic sections. I tried half on the left and half on the right, but the list we have right now is a bit lopsided toward the analytic philosophers, so it looked funny. -Seth Mahoney 18:06, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

That Derrida is a philosopher is contentious in some circles… I don’t think Quine would be happy with this list. ;-) Nore should that it looks funny be a consideration. I think we need two lists, rather than one with two sections. Banno 19:21, Apr 14, 2004 (UTC)

Its true. People do argue about whether or not Derrida is a real philosopher, but it always strikes me more as elitism or based on a specific idea of what philosophy should be (which usually would exclude a lot of Western philosophy and almost all of Eastern philosophy) than valid criticism. Regardless, he is considered by many to be a philosopher, and he seems to agree, so, as far as an encyclopedia is concerned that should probably throw him in the philosophy section. Maybe checking to see what other encyclopedias say about him could resolve that issue. The only problem I have with using two lists is that contemporary philosophy is contemporary philosophy, regardless of whether or not there are two main schools, and if we are categorizing here based on a timeline then that should be our primary concern. I think we should also consider doing something similar with major philosophical movements, but like I said elsewhere on one of Wikiproject:Philosophy these pages, I'm not sure what the best way to work that would be. -Seth Mahoney 00:25, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to add the following philosophers, but they're all dead! Some of them, like Lyotard, probably belong here, but we could maybe start a modern (20th century) collection to put the rest in. -Seth Mahoney 06:35, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Dead, put in 20th century philosophy?:

Dead, but maybe should be listed as contemporary anyway:

Jean-François Lyotard
Michel Foucault
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Gilles Deleuze
Félix Guattari
Paul de Man (yeah, he's a literary critic, but he did a lot of criticism of philosophy)
Paul Feyerabend
Donald Davidson
David Lewis (philosopher)

Alive, add to the list?:

Noam Chomsky

(Dead? Don't think so... Banno 21:42, Apr 13, 2004 (UTC))

Julia Kristeva

Oops! Yeah, Chomsky is alive, of course. He's just someone I added as an afterthought. -Seth Mahoney 17:14, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

How about:

The first two need some rewriting themselves. Also, it looks a bit odd to have Quine, Rawls and Kuhn in the 'contemporary philsophers' box when they're dead. Perhaps we should have a separate series for now-dead 20th century philosophers. You could also add:

Oh, and, er, someone seems to have added Voltaire to the Great Philosophers list rather anachronistically, possibly because 'V' comes just before 'W.V. Quine'. -phenocryst 19:24, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)