Template talk:Histphil
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Someone needs to discuss something someplace, and I suppose here is as good a place to do it. The current division, not very strangely, reflects the theories in private life of the authors who came up with it, including one of the wiki founders. I am going to hope, but not with much hope, that this can be done on principled grounds rather than on personal ones.
First no original work, second NPOV and third internal consistency of arbitrary namespace divisions. The division of "early modern" and the like is a rather recent academicism of the US. It isn't universally adhered to, many important works published this century adhere to others - whether better or worse is not for me to say - and finally, was neither finished nor consistenly adhered to. "early modern" was labelled "17th century in the side bar - and Kant was in that bucket. This, is patently ridiculous, Kant did not live or work in this period. Clearly there is controversy, or at least confusion. Finally most of the articles were stubs, meaning that the original authors had set their stakes in the ground, without being good enough to actually provide material, nor did they describe the other possible periodizations. Internally one article refers to "the enlightenment" in its long form, which includes 17th century philosophy, and points to an article labelled 18th century philosophy. In short, the framework was at odds with itself.
Finally many of the articles contian clear POV violations - Kant's openning paragraph has a speculation on what he "would" have approved of. Who knows, Kant might have disapproved of anything, or been amenable to being convinced by anything. He's dead, and no one here has personal knowledge of him.
Finally there is the incredibly arrogant, POV and inaccurate assertion that 21st century philosophy is "post-modern". This strains credulability (the willingess of people to be deceived) beyond the breaking point. Post-modernity, as a period, is pretty well defined to have begun in the 1960's with Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, one can even, and I have, argue that it goes back to the 1950's. Be that as it may, the normal usage does not equate the 21st century with post-modern, and ipso facto, Wiki requires we document current usage. Current usage should be "Contemporary" philosophy, and be far less, how shall we say it to be delicate... Nah, I will just be outright: judgemental about what contemporary philosophy is as period, because we don't know how it is going to shake out.
Hence, based on local usage I am doing the following, to some extent with the precedent of the music section:
Dividing more by periods of time than names, while noting the various names used.
Dividing the 17th from 18th centuries - which had already been done, I'm just dumping "early modern" which is not a standard label, the old label, still current, is "The Age of Reason". While a good argument can be made for "the long Enlightenment" - which some people who use "Early Modern" basically use as synonymous for "Enlightenment", often internally inconsistently - There is no good argument for dividing "Early Modern Philosophy" into "Early Modern Philosophy" and "The Enlightenment", which also is the long Enlightenment. It makes no sense, and doens't reflect anyones usage anywhere.
Finally nothing other than these articles links here - clearly what happened is a few people came along, wrote up their outline, imposed their terms, and did it unwiki and incorrectly. This may not be the best periodization, it certainly doesn't reflect my thinking - but that is original work and not the issue here - it does however have the virtues of:
- . Being close to the original outline.
- . Being a great deal easier to match to different practice.
- . Being based on wiki precedent.
- . Being internally consistent.
- . Being NPOV friendlier. Particularly if it is internally documented as a conventionality.
- . Being easily explainable - the periods roughly correspond to centuries, and these roughly to most common usages.
Does anyone object to this change making the series a 'history of Western philosophy' and its daughter articles? It essentially was one before, with the Western philosophy survery (summarizing the other aritcles in the series box) stuck on the top of the list and Eastern philosophy stuck randomly at the bottom. Go ahead and revert if there are objections. 172 10:57, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Huh?
Can someone explain to me why we have a bunch of Eastern philosophy links in our History of Western Philosophy box? KSchutte 02:20, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
