What Is A Philosopher?
The academic philosophy community once had very strict and sometimes contradicting ideas about the definition and role of a philosopher. One of the clearest examples of this comes from two 20th century giants of philosophy, Rudolph Carnap and Martin Heidegger, who might as well have been writing directly to each other in a discussion of metaphysics, a philosophy mainstay.
In simplest terms, metaphysics deals with abstract concepts like space, time, and God. Arguably, it is what most people first think of when they think of philosophy: lofty, unanswerable questions about fundamental concepts.
And yet, these two German thinkers disagreed over whether metaphysics even is philosophy. On one side is Carnap, attacking the very idea of metaphysics and anyone who takes it seriously in his aptly titled essay, “The Elimination of Metaphysics.” According to Carnap, metaphysics is something separate from philosophy, and therefore metaphysicians, like Heidegger, Descartes, Kant, and more of philosophy’s heaviest hitters, are doing something other than philosophy.
“Metaphysical statements are not verifiable by man nor by any other finite being,” he says. In other words, there is no way for us to truly confirm the answers to metaphysical questions, like the existence of God or a definition of time. Importantly, this does not mean that any suggested answers are false. Instead, it deems the questions and any attempted answers meaningless. Therefore, metaphysics is essentially fancy poetry, not to be pursued in serious academic settings.
On the other side is Heidegger, who states in his lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, that the “comfort and assurance” of verifiable statements “is the opposite of philosophy.” For Heidegger, philosophers alone have the tools to deal with ambiguous, metaphysical questions, and Carnap’s philosophy—anything that needs to be proven— “carries no intrinsic weight in itself.” In other words, verifiable statements should not be a concern to philosophers.
Furthermore, Heidegger embraces Carnap’s intended malicious idea of philosophy’s similarity to poetry. “Art,” he says, “which includes poetry too, is the sister of philosophy…science is perhaps only a servant with respect to philosophy.”
This is different from a typical argument over who has the better answer to a given question. It is a disagreement of fundamentals. Carnap and Heidegger think of philosophy as two principally contradicting things, making any common ground impossible because the starting points are so far apart.
Although small factions of philosophers still endorse either Carnap or Heidegger’s strict idea of what a philosopher is, the general view is now much more lenient and less dismissive. There is the basic requirement of engaging with philosophical concepts in a serious way, but even a higher degree is not necessary to be deemed a philosopher.
What Is A News Organization?
The debate over how to define a news organization today is a lot like the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap over how to understand philosophy almost 100 years ago. It is a dispute over fundamental ideas, thwarting any hope for compromise.
What is considered news depends on what channels, sites or platforms you tune in to, and who is qualified to report the news may be as simple as who has the loudest voice and largest audience. Just like in philosophy, there needs to be at least an elementary requirement for defining news or journalism and who can report it for any agreement to be possible.
This is why any organization that hopes to be classified as journalism ought to hire a philosopher. They have experience dealing with two sides who once disagreed at the most basic level and have now found common ground.
A news organization hiring a philosopher is like hiring a conflict resolution consultant with ample experience in finding the essential connections between two hostile parties.
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