Engelsina Tasseva
Papers of BAS, Humanities and Social Sciences
Vol. 3, No 1, 2016
PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHIZING AD HOC – PROBLEMS WITH CONCEPTUAL APPARATUS
Engelsina Tasseva
Abstract: “Philosophizing” is naturally to be understood as a philosophical reflection including the nonprofessional philosophical reasoning and some general applied aspects of philosophy, conceived as substituting competence. The attention here is focused on a widespread type of philosophizing – the philosophizing ad hoc and the latter is taken in respect mainly to the field of scientific knowledge. Philosophizing ad hoc is a local (to a “target”) and partial (a “piece of philosophy” applies to a part of knowledge unit) application of philosophical ideas and philosophical reasoning to a fragment of knowledge and its subject, and in a sense it is the opposite of the professional and systemic philosophical reflection. In particular, the shortcomings of the conceptual “toolkit” of philosophizing ad hoc prove to be inherited by the conceptual apparatuses which are built in the process of philosophizing.
Key words: philosophizing, ad hoc, conceptual apparatus, substituting competence, philosophical culture