Hmm, maybe my pattern matching was too quick. My prior for “Philosophy and history of philosophy are conflated” is quite high, since most philosophy courses in French high schools basically teach us what old dead guys wrote on things like Love, Death etc. I did have an actual philosophy professor for 2 months though (he tried to teach semantic and logic).
By the way, I also strongly suspect that Philosophy is often also treated as a literary discipline (at least here in France). The two biggest clues are the obligation to read the original works, and the refusal to admit that such works could be correct or incorrect as a simple matter of fact¹.
(1) In our high school final exam, any definite answer to the philosophy question is shot down. We are mainly supposed to spit back old dead wisdom, and conclude somehow that we don’t have the answer. Even if the question is as silly as “Can opinions at odds with the facts be true?”
I guess this is one of my problems with philosophy: unlike in sciences, there is no B, only a collection of disjoint and often incompatible B’s with various asterisks.
Hmm, maybe my pattern matching was too quick. My prior for “Philosophy and history of philosophy are conflated” is quite high, since most philosophy courses in French high schools basically teach us what old dead guys wrote on things like Love, Death etc. I did have an actual philosophy professor for 2 months though (he tried to teach semantic and logic).
By the way, I also strongly suspect that Philosophy is often also treated as a literary discipline (at least here in France). The two biggest clues are the obligation to read the original works, and the refusal to admit that such works could be correct or incorrect as a simple matter of fact¹.
(1) In our high school final exam, any definite answer to the philosophy question is shot down. We are mainly supposed to spit back old dead wisdom, and conclude somehow that we don’t have the answer. Even if the question is as silly as “Can opinions at odds with the facts be true?”
I guess this is one of my problems with philosophy: unlike in sciences, there is no B, only a collection of disjoint and often incompatible B’s with various asterisks.