How to fail at Philosophy

By Pixel at November 10, 2008 at 12:47 am. Filed in thought experiment

There is no rest from now on.

My friend’s girlfriend said today 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?

Last Year: I am thankful for... good professors
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