How to fail at Philosophy

There is no rest from now on.

My friend’s girlfriend said today¹ that it was silly for people to fail a philosophy class because it was just philosophy. “Nobody’s wrong in philosophy.” To the uninitiated, this might seem a plausible claim. But it’s not. A more accurate claim would be: “Nobody’s right in philosophy.” To illustrate how you could be wrong in philosophy, I’ve made a list of instances in which a person practicing  philosophy would fail:

1. Contradict yourself
2. Have an argument that doesn’t logically follow from the premises
3. Assume something that has not been sufficiently defended or supported
4. Appeal to intuitions that nobody but you has
5. Get the empirical facts wrong
6. Misrepresent the opposite position
7. Pick a topic/thesis nobody cares about
8. Pick a topic/thesis that has already been extensively covered +
9. Not have any new ideas
10. Miss the time-span/page-rage requested

Guess how many of those apply to me?

1. I use the word ‘today’ as a literary device. I was thinking about her saying this today, she actually said it a few months ago. It takes me half a year to process most comments. They’re not even dating anymore.  Sorry if this bothers you.[↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, 10 November, 2008 at 0:47 and is filed under thought experiment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.