Q: What is philosophy?
A: Attempting to answer philosophical questions?
Q: What are philosophical questions
(DRAFT: Liable to change)
Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
(Philosopher in a Computer Science department)
Installed: XXX
Last updated: XXX
This paper is
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/what-is-philosophy.html
A PDF version may be added later.
A partial index of discussion notes is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/AREADME.html
The best way to answer the question: What is Philosophy?
is to provoke the questioner into doing philosophy
Philosophical questions can grow out of other questions, including questions
that arise in the study of mathematics, physics, biology, psychology,
history, ethics, theology, music, literature, painting, sculpture, politics,
medicine, architecture, engineering, computing, ...
An example from mathematics
What's a prime number?
We stick to positive whole numbers (PWNs), e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...
Two PWNs, N1 and N2, can be multiplied, producing a PWN as result, which may be
the same as one or other of N1 or N2, or different.
Multiplying gives
2 and 3 6
4 and 3 12
3 and 3 9
The results on the right can easily be checked by testing with groups of
physical objects (e.g. buttons, stones, bananas) or items drawn on paper
e.g. circles, dots, pictures of bananas, etc.
Why does multiplying 2 and 3 give 6?
You can demonstrate with examples, where each example has 2 groups
of objects and each group contains three objects, like these two
groups:
Group Number of groups result
x x x x x * * * * * *
Some numbers can be factorised, i.e. shown to be products of smaller numbers.
REFERENCES AND LINKS
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Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham