Working on some inforgraphics tackling gender bias a while back, I was'accused' of producing data visualization art. I defended the intellectual rigor of my work, yet lost the argument - my 'accuser' turned out to be the curator of data visualization art at the Tate Modern. He won the argument by pointing out that the work, though based on hard data, was designed to evoke an emotional rather than an intellectual response. Ao much philosophy is taught as if it were a niche area of literary criticism, rather than as raw materials for the creation of algorithms for intentional living, it probably is fair to regard much philosophy as if art, or even art criticism.

Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences.

Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.

I think of philosophy of the art of words and ideas, just like literature is generally the art of words and stories. But, for historical reasons, many people and most philosophers claim philosophy is much more than this.

Spinoza was convinced he was "engaged in the pursuit of truth", as the article writes, and he probably thought he had built a logical proof of the existence of god. But his concepts are fuzzy, so his reasoning is unprovable, and his apparent rigorousness is not at all scientific. Many philosophers disagree with his theories, and none of them are wrong or better or worse than Spinoza, since there is no way to refute or evaluate philosophy.

Apart from these points (proof, progress, consensus), there are many indices for classifying philosophy among the arts. No one would claim to be an expert of a philosopher without reading and studying his book and articles. But, if the substance was more important than the form, it should not matter. One can master Gauss' mathematics or Einstein's physics without reading the original works.

Personally, I do "formal philosophy" at least to some extent/in some papers, i.e., lots of logic, decision theory, a bit of applied mathematics. This kind of analytic philosophy superficially looks like science, at least to people who don't know much about the STEM fields. However, in my opinion it is clearly not science.

IMHO, it's best to take philosophy as a discipline on its own. If I am pressed to decide between art and science, I'd call it an art, if not to annoy those people who erroneously believe that philosophy is a science. I personally find it hard to accept any discipline that does not follow the scientific method a science. Many other parts of the humanities in my opinion do not really qualify as science either. Or, perhaps they could be called "soft sciences" or "intellectual studies."

However, philosophy is in the same boat as mathematics in this respect, which is also traditionally not considered a science but rather a discipline of its own, pursued for its own sake and with its own evaluation criteria. Few would call mathematics an art, though, or would they? I'm not sure.

Woah, philosophy and art are two massive subjects. Historically, both have been treated as separate subjects for good reasons.

However there is some overlap, such as something which is beautiful to the senses.

But the distinction between the two is that philosophy is usually a set of distinct thought-experiment(s) and art is an observer's perspective into the mind of an artist(s).

Largely, scientists scoff at philosophy due to the intrinsic nature that most of it relies in the realm of "thought experiments." Which may be hard for some people, but I've never had an issue with wild imaginations.

Yet, I would argue the Philosopher's Stone is one of the most mythological thing known to human history. And I'm sure 99.999% of people couldn't distinguish the Philosopher's Stone from a generic looking lake rock. Right?

John Gray's NY Review articles are great.

Reading him, it's interesting how often "new ideas" are actually old ideas that have been forgotten and are now being recycled.

Philosophy is not an Art.

Deciding what to philosophize about is the real art.

I'm reminded of a story from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" where he asks a bunch of philosophy graduate students on what the definition of a certain phrase was, and everyone actually had a different idea. This ambiguity of language is why in my opinion philosophy is most certainly an art and not a science.

I always find such discussions unsatisfying and unproductive. People take a vague and ill-defined concept that changed its meaning over time and treat it as something homogenous, bonus points if they do it twice in the same question (it talks about philosophy and art).

“What if we treat philosophy as art”? Well, what if we treat it as a corpus of thoughts related only through immediate relevancy and no strict boundaries otherwise? Funny that they mention Wittgenstein but don’t bring up his idea of family resemblance ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance ).

"Everyone has to stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting to see whether it will speak and what it will say to him; and, as with the prince, so he himself must not address it, for then he would hear only himself. It follows from all this that all wisdom is certainly contained in the works of the pictorial or graphic arts, yet only virtually or implicitly. Philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to furnish the same wisdom actuality, to make it explicit: in this sense, philosophy is related to the arts as wine is to grapes" (Schopenhauer)

Since it seems everyone is giving their opinion, I'll leave mine before reading the article: The concept of philosophy predates the concept of art, it also predates science. So, if one is more fundamental than the other(and fundamental TO the other emergence), doesn't this make the question pointless?

I studied art as an option back in high school, and in College I studied it in a more "scientific" context like gestalt theory, color science, principles (proportions, perspective).

My opinion of art is that it is simply a computational resource that human beings use to store emotions.

There’s a philosophy of science and a philosophy of art, like there’s philosophy of physics and math. I think it’s more about the practice of asking the hard questions, in whatever field they may be.

I think they’re equating philosophy and psychology

Classically, philosophy is not about establishing truth. It is about better living.

Anything mediated by a mind is an artifice: art.

It may be art from an artisan or craft used in a trade. It may be intellectual such as a mathematical proof. It may arguably be non-human art or bad art--but it is art.

Yes. Art is every human product that doesn't have to function in any way, and despite that it still has potential to be appreciated by some people. Philosophy fits.

A similar question could be asked -- is mathematics a science?

Sure. We employ our aesthetic sense, for the navigation, and appreciation, of this field of ideas. Primarily.

Very hard to definite art as qm constructuinis quit an art. That is why I love the Popper Criteria can it be refuted. And may I add is that the theory is trying its best to be refuted. If it is, science. If it is not, arts.

And any good effort is an art. Unless some has to add an element of empathy, demonstrating something extra.

Philosophy feels like a sport. Is sports art?

It's certainly not a science.

Is art a philosophy?

I'd say no. But then when I think "philosophy", I think of a specific intellectual discipline, one that embraces two distinct modes of thought and exploration. But first, some history.

Once upon a time, the 3 pillars of philosophy were metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Starting with Kant and ending sometime in the late 19th or early 20th C, with the work of philosopher-mathematicians, if you will (Godel, Russell, etc.), metaphysics went by the wayside. While philosophy was once about exploring how the world might be and what might be beyond the material, prudent philosophers realized that science was now the realm of knowing the world and anything based not on science was basically religion, and not subject to knowability, sharability, falsifiability, etc.

Ethics was next: Lacking metaphysics, lacking a baseline of truth, what was the point in postulating ethics? It does sneak back in, though, more in a moment.

That leaves epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge and knowability.

Modern philosophers of science work rigorously with mathematicians and physicists, among others, to explore epistemological questions, especially those that arise from Godel's incomplete theorem, from various interpretations of quantum mechanics, and from computational complexity.

That's the first of modern philosophy's two areas of expertise: Embracing what is happening in other fields and exploring what those fields have to say about what we can usefully say about what is and is not knowable.

The second area is taking well founded ideas and exploring them fully. My favourite example is Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", which takes the basic notion of reproduction with variation to its logical and sometimes illogical extremes.

What about people who style themselves or are styled as philosophers and who write about art or sociology or religion? And explore those things in ways similar to what I describe above?

If they are doing philosophy, it is pre-20thC, maybe even pre-19thC philosophy, but I see it as critique, essayism, but not as philosophy, not in the modern sense. Occasionally, you'll encounter someone who writes with the same clarity and discipline as those modern philosophers who continue to work the hard problem (epistemology), but those writers are rare.

One of the last great ethics writers was one such: Mackey's Ethics explored the question of how to be ethical, what that meant, taken to its intellectual and living extreme, but he did not explore of the question of why: One's reason for being ethical is personal, metaphysical, subjective. Mackey provides tools and techniques for acting on a decision to live ethically, for exploring that decision.

(You could say that I fall in the old "analytic" camp, and I'd accept that. The "synthetic" camp, IMHO, was mostly emptied in the early 20th C and is now populated with people in love with their own words, with opacity and obscurity, and who have yet to admit that they really wish their science fiction and fantasy writing was taken more seriously or more popularly, or both.)

philosophy's questions and proposed answers can not be easily formalized, as such they appear as art to lesser minds

Nonsense.

Sure, if you want to spite the bullshit artists in the field by calling what they're doing "performance art", that's fine. But if you're a real philosopher, then you are ultimately interested in the truth by definition, while recognizing that it isn't always easy to get to, that it might take a lot of effort to even put together a sensible response or claim in the first place, and even more time refining the position in an engagement with other philosophers. So in that sense, the philosophical disciplines are sciences, and in fact, the highest and most general sciences. No other science can answer metaphysical questions, for example. Sure, other sciences can inform the discussion, but they cannot replace the philosophical science that draws from them.

The article is behind a paywall, so I could not read beyond the first couple pages or so, but from the comments I sense that there is some strange conviction that philosophy is ultimately an obsolete kind of wankery that the empirical sciences have long since superseded. Of course, this is rather a sign of profound ignorance and philistinism rather than a statement about how things actually are.

Relevant: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

This is sort of like the thing where

Biology is applied Chemistry

Chemistry is applied Physics

Physics is applied Mathematics

Not a perfect train of thought, but correct enough. If that is the hierarchy of the scientific world, I would argue that Philosophy is the "Mathematics" of art world. Every other art form is "applied Philosophy."

Philosophy can be thought of as a field of study akin to psuedo science. Think about it. There is a philosophy of aesthetics and religion along with a philosophy of science and logic.

Science and logic attempt to describe something central to the universe while religion and aesthetics are central to only the human experience. To place the two in the same box is a huge category error akin trying to scientifically derive creationism.

Philosophy is essentially just a mish mash of deep thoughts and ponderings of unrelated topics. There is no deeper overarching connection here. Academia came to realize later that certain deep thoughts were “better” then others and formalized those deep thoughts into math and science.

Historically things like science and math and logic comes from “philosophy” but ultimately philosophy is just an old way of thinking in the sense that we as humans now have enough information to understand that aesthetics, religion and science don’t belong in the same category. Philosophy is a outmoded concept that only is still around for the same reason technical debt in software is still around.

The inevitable philosophers response to this is that all experience is technically human in nature. We cannot experience the universe without human bias injected into the observation thus it is not a category error to place Christianity in a field side by side with number theory because it’s all human made up stuff anyway.

To which I respond that all of academia is structured around hypothetical axioms. We can’t prove anything is real but we assume it’s all real. We can’t prove that there is any other way to experience the universe outside of the human experience yet we still assume and structure our science such that the human experience is not central to the universe. Our observations of the universe lead us to believe that the human experience is just a random phenomena in the corner of some galaxy and that is the best available information we have. To discuss anything outside of what we know is like trying to ask someone who is born blind to describe color.