Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

Pertaining to the language of philosophy?

Must we, necessarily, learn the specific language of philosophy in order to pursue philosophical thinking?

5 Answers

Relevance
  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    Language itself is part of philosophy. Grammar and syntax must be proper. One false comma can change entire meanings. To that end, you properly used the word "necessarily." That is a word that is part of the specific terminology of philosophy.

    Every word except proper pronouns, in every language, contains philosophical content called metaphysics. In other words, every word except proper names has metaphysical connotations.

    If you don't learn how to discern those connotations, you will not be able to carry on a philosophical discussion with the people who do know the terminology. What do you think you will do: tell her the word you use for this or that, and ask her what word she uses, then each of you use your own words?

    You would not do that in any other profession. Try being a doctor and making up your own terms.

  • Anonymous
    1 decade ago

    More important than the language are the methods, the puzzles or thought experiments, and the structures or scaffolding that can be built from them. They then allow you to climb up to your conclusions. Then you can kick the scaffolding away as you don't need it.

    If a specific language of philosophy were necessary then it would be obvious as we would not be able to do philosophy in some native languages and would have to talk in only those native languages that would allow philosophical thoughts.

    The reason why this is true is that thought is not language and language is not thought. For example this means that anyone who bases their philosophy that maintains that our thought require language, such as Ayn Rand's philosophy, is simply wrong.

    That said, there are still some jargon terms that anyone can pick up after one year of freshman philosophy. And a few old timers like to pepper their writings with obscure Latin phrases to impress everyone.

  • 1 decade ago

    It's not, no.

    Obviously such terms were developed by philosophers over time, so they were not always around. But you probably will need at least a basic knowledge of them in order to grasp the meaning of what's being discussed in many philosophical works.

  • 1 decade ago

    All academic disciplines have their jargon; its a sort of shorthand, and part of being competent in these subjects is the ability to understand this shorthand. It goes with the territory; for example, in stead of saying "the is before experience, our living in the manifest world, one can simply use the term "a prior". Chemistry has its H2Os, philosophy, any discipline. has one too. If you wan to master the disciple of philosophy, then, yes, one has to learn its specific use of language.

  • How do you think about the answers? You can sign in to vote the answer.
  • E P
    Lv 7
    1 decade ago

    No.

    But to communicate the concepts, knowledge of the language is very succinct.

Still have questions? Get your answers by asking now.