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I just want to say that I love the description of this particular forum and totally agree except for the fact that you can produce a philosophy factory in an abstract sense lol. The comment about it being only a hobby excludes the tremendous social and political impacts that philosophy can have in the world. Just a pointless little rant.

Welcome to WP. BTW, you've just activated the Gateway gravitational drive aboard the USAC Event Horizon.

Hunh, the question that goes around is how much influence philosophers really have. Do philosophers cause changes in perspective, or are they brought into pre-eminence based upon how important they seem?

It seems the me that the latter has a lot of truth and yet isn't emphasized sufficiently.

If no one puts their own ideas about a philosophy into specific terms, how can people as a whole come together and agree or disagree with it? Otherwise it is just a bunch of loose abstract ideas floating around incoherently in everyone's mind.

You assume that public opinion is a matter of specific terms rather than moods. The issue is that I don't think most "philosophical revolutions" are settled by philosophy, much less revolutionary philosophy. They are settled by certain broad ideas/paradigms being seen as truer, and a broad idea/paradigm doesn't have to be coherent, or even something a person can phrase. Take, for instance, a dumb person with political views. They don't understand their views, they might not be able to really phrase what they believe, but they have beliefs, and these beliefs influence them despite how much it is for them only a mood and basic attitude towards certain questions and ideas, rather than anything coherent or intellectual.

I also tend to disagree with the notion of philosophy being nothing more than a hobby, take ethics for example, ethics is philosophy and it is definitely not just a hobby.

However, there are people who disregard most of philosophy as pure junk and state that anyone can say anything, whatever they can think of, and make it a philosophy. There is also the idea that Science triumphs over Philosophy because of consensus.

Look, your argument is way off base from my original statement. All I said was "I just want to say that I love the description of this particular forum and totally agree except for the fact that you can produce a philosophy factory in an abstract sense lol. The comment about it being only a hobby excludes the tremendous social and political impacts that philosophy can have in the world. Just a pointless little rant." This means that I am proposing that any philosophy set down in words or lived out by ANYONE whether it be revolutionary, popular, unpopular and even completely unknown, is of more value than a mere hobby. It is the stuff life is made of. It DOES effect change in the people who encounter it, whether it be only one person or many. These changes can be life altering for the people experiencing them in some cases, and that can snowball into a greater mass social change through the person to person spread of ideas. Oh and specific terms can have a very significant effect on moods. QED. I get a feeling you (AwesomelyGlorious) take personal issue with my first comment and perhaps you are the person who wrote the discussion description. If this is so, chill out hon, if not, I don't know why you're so worked up about it, but perhaps I can make an inference just from the name you have given yourself here. This is my last comment on the subject.

Indeed, though the philosophy factory part could be seen as slightly ironic as by creating this board you get a flowing production line of philosophical discussion down a page, in keeping with the other descriptions.