Nigel Warburton’s podcast, a good supplement to his Little History of Philosophy (which we are reading): https://philosophybites.com/
If you search the site for "definitions of philosophy" this comes up... including an episode from 2010 that asks numerous contemporary philosophers What is Philosophy? No two answers are the same. Philosophers do tend to think for themselves. The good ones, though, do not think by themselves. They converse and collaborate. They're Co-Philosophers, like we aim to be in this course.
My own definition of philosophy, beyond the etymological/literal "love of wisdom," is William James's: "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly," and to live in the light of that clarity.
And my own personal philosophy, if reduced to a word, is decidedly not Sally Brown's "No!" That's too much like deep pessimism or even nihilism.
No, the word I'd choose is: meliorism. You'll hear it again.
It rejects pure optimism and deep pessimism alike. It means trying to make things better. And it comes from, guess who... "Willie" James (as one of mty old Vandy mentors familiarly called my favorite philosopher who's been dead but not gone for 116+ years now. In Pragmatism-"a new name for some old ways of thinking" dedicated
To the Memory of John Stuart Mill
from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind
and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.
he writes:
...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism...
Me too.
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