philosophical history • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Area	philosophy21

	philosophical history gary e. davis	January 26, 2019

Someday, I’ll give time online to standard definitions of ‘philosophy’. Interest-ingly, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no one article on ‘philosophy’ as such. Everything is about “[modifer] philosophy” or “philosophy of [topic].”

I fondly recall that the 4-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, does have such an article, written by a well-known professor (at that time), who defined ‘philosophy’ in a phrase as “love of creative intelligence,” rather than “love of wisdom.” I love that.

Traditionally, philosophy studies the literary conceptuality of the profession’s canon. Philosophy is a philological profession, though its history proffered dreams of science (physicalistically conceived).

How else than archetropal (and anthropological) can one regard this paragraph from Encyclopedia Britannica:

... philosophy has meant...an attempt to understand the universe as a whole... an effort to fathom the divine intentions and the place of human beings with reference to them... a rigorous examination of the origin, extent, and validity of human ideas; an exploration of the place of will or consciousness in the universe;... an effort to codify the rules of human thought... [an]enterprise...of... extreme complexity and many-sidedness.”

That’s not about wisdom per se. That’s evolving creative intelligence. Also, the ellipses skip desires for ultimate science, for grounding law, etc. which have become modern specialties outside of philosophy.

“Philosophy” has been, primordially, various conceptual psychologies; and has been philosophical historiology of such conceptual psychologies. Philosophers proffered high-scale enthrall of high comprehensibility and high-scalar appreciation of Time as securely “onto-logical.” Then, the 20^th century tragically exposed the nature of such metaphysicalism (culminative onto-theological power) to entail nihilism, which had to be overcome to disclose the ultimately open appeal of Our evolving.

No philosophical school directly anticipated Our evolutionarity, though literary Postmodernism unwittingly, bricolagically troped It. (“What was post-modern about Postmodernism?” Tropologies of Our evolutionarity. “What is ‘Being’?” Our evolving.)

Now, issues that would normally (traditionally) be labeled “philosophical” belong to many other standard departments: theory (conceptualization) of various humanities, metatheory of sciences, conceptuality of arts—and any philosophy of L always imples the standard department outside of philosophy that dwells with L as part of its ownmost landscape.

The linguistic turn of philosophy still barely understands the writing-in-speech of Derrida—the dramactionality of any performance as oral text (e.g., s/p-differentiality as normal implicature of scenic articulation—self expression implied in all [inter]personal assertion)—nor Heidegger’s Ereignis, which contains philosophy —which horizons [verb] philosophy—as so many conceptual appropriations, appealing (through a rhetoric of thinking) to potentials for being audacious prospection.

The historiology of high comprehensibility and high-scalar appreciation of Time really maps historical Moments (centripetal prevalences) of evolving Ontogeny, i.e., as-if “ultimacy” of centripetal, prevailing, and thus oriental conceptuality enabling “Itself” for drawing new generations higher (across domains) and farther (across practical ranges).

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