Maybe this is something that we can think about for now. What is good philosophy? What is bad philosophy? My initial idea is to simply Google the question off and see what others have said. However, maybe let us first try to see what we have learned in our last year and a half of doing our master’s in philosophy.
Let us try to answer this question in three parts, tackling the three main branches of philosophy: epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. I want to begin with epistemology because that is one of the first courses I had in my first semester of graduate school. In that course, did I learned about differentiating good versus bad philosophy specifically? Not quite. Then did I learn about good versus bad knowledge or knowing? Not exactly either. The main point of the course is to show a survey of the current field of epistemology, at least how it transformed from the classical account of knowledge to the contemporary where fields such as virtue epistemology and social epistemology have developed. There was the classical account of knowledge as justified true belief. Then Edmund Gettier walked in and questioned the sufficiency of that whole premise, leading to the Problem that birth an expansion of the field. The expansion welcomed in other ideas into knowledge, allowing for the possibility that maybe there is something more to knowing than just belief and accuracy. Perhaps epistemic agents have particular characteristics and behaviours that should be considered when we are thinking about developing knowledge. Maybe agents as collectives should also be a factor.
When I took this course, I also had two other courses: Community of Inquiry (or Seminar in Teaching Philosophy) and Environmental Ethics. In the next semester, intersession (the first summer semester of my life, actually. I had not had a single one in undergraduate, I just realised), I had Ethical Theories, Capability Approach (or Social Philosophy), and Philosophy in the City. In the semester after that, I had Aesthetics in which I learned about Paul Ricœur for the first time, Research Methods, and Advanced Reflexive Metaphysics. Then in my final semester of coursework, I had Buddhist Thought and Levinas.
How do I know something is philosophy? If I use the classical account of knowledge, then I would take a belief, see if it true, and justify that truthfulness. I can take any of those courses listed above—belief: “Is this course x philosophy?” The belief is true, but how so? To say that they are true just because I had them as a course in my master’s in philosophy program intuitively sounds like bad philosophy (or even more fundamentally, weak logic). However, for each of them, I can explain how they are philosophy and in on some level that suffices as justification.
Yet we can also try to expand that classical account to a more contemporary approach in epistemology. But how? The Gettier case might say that something maybe questionably knowledge and so some other factors might be considered. Through the perspective of virtue epistemology, perhaps we can approach it as this: do I, the epistemic agent making the justification, possess virtues that make me a more reliable epistemic agent (hence what I say about this topic becomes more likely to be truly of knowledge)? However, that would also bring up this other possibility: how much of knowledge is agent dependent? Can something be considered knowledge detached from an agent? How about from communities of a particular agent? If one community says that one of my answers is right and another says it is wrong—all with good, clear, logical justification—what does this tell us about knowledge?
What would that tell us about philosophy? About good and bad philosophy?
Let us try to move on to ethics and metaphysics. This time, I will take them as one agenda with the idea of going back to this topic later on. Perhaps simply one might view the case as this:
good philosophy = ethical
bad philosophy = unethical
However, that also contains the assumption that philosophy has real ethical consequences. But is not to say that philosophy has real ethical consequences a problem of/under philosophy? Maybe there can be a more foundational level on which to answer the question. We might say that good philosophy teaches ethics and bad philosophy confuses. I say that this is different from the ethical/unethical questioning because it is possible that a teaching of ethics can be something else other than ethical.
However, my questions are clear: what is good philosophy and what is bad philosophy? Intuitively, I would think that ethics can help guide me to understanding evaluations. On a nutshell, I understand ethics as an evaluative methodology. Some might argue how much of it is theory and how much practise, but I think either are just forms of some kind of evaluation, which all ethics is. Hence, ethics can say what is good and what is bad so from there we can ask what is good philosophy and what is bad philosophy.
Yet ethics also tells us what good and bad are in a sense that they are more than just ‘knowledge’ to be had, but something else. Hence in ethics, there is a means for scaling, but there are also a lot of scales, and more so plenty of ways to make sense of those scales.
So we skip right ahead to metaphysics instead: what is the good, then? As in the good good—that which transcends scales and differences and subjectivities?
I do not know (translation: I think that is enough of this writing for now). However, while writing this, I began to think that much like art, there is philosophy that I like and philosophy that I do not like. And if I want to make art then I have to keep making art, so maybe if I want to do philosophy, maybe it is okay to just keep making philosophy. Am I going to be making good philosophy? I would not know exactly, just as how I would not know if I am making good art in the sense of some transcendental, other-worldly understanding of good and art. But I do know that sometimes I get a sense that this one thing is good and this other thing better and that one not so much, so maybe that is one good enough way to get by doing something called ‘love of wisdom’.