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Date:         Tue, 19 Oct 1993 13:57:00 EDT
Reply-To: protin@USL.COM
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From: Art Protin <protin@USL.COM>
Subject:      Re: TECH: "philosophy" (was: toldi nunsenva)
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To: Erik Rauch <rauch>
Status: RO
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X-From-Space-Date: Tue Oct 19 09:57:00 1993
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John Cowan quote someone and comments (my lojban is rusty
and I did not take the time to translate):

>> A much better term for philosophy would be "mother-of-sciences."
>
> An interesting idea: "skemamta", anyone?  Probably needs to be
> "pevskemamta", but that would meet Nick's point about philosophy
> being idiosyncratic: use a figurative lujvo rather than a Latinate
> le'avla.

While "mother-of-sciences" is an interesting description, I suspect
that other descriptions may be more enriching for our language.
Webster's New World Dictionary has six definitions for philosophy
starting with
        1. orig., love of, or the search for, wisdom and
        knowledge
and most of the definitions involve similar themes regarding collected
knowledge.  The other definitions involve a theme about the "conduct
of life".
    I am interested in the concept included in the collected knowledge
themes.  The most interesting view I was given on the subject was that
philosophy was (and here I lack a consise expression of it)
        study introspected,
        the study of study of the world,
        in a word metastudy.
This idea was that one could be caught up in the study of a detail of
human knowledge and applications of that detail to specific problem,
or one might sometimes take a view of that process of studying and
problem solving, and
        learn           \   /           learning
        generalize       \ /            generalizations
        model             X             models
        .                / \            .
        .               /   \           .
basically apply our bag of study tools to the subject of studying.

    I think this view translates into using "skesaske" for
"philosophy".

Does any one else share this view of the subject?

    thank you all,
    Art Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@usl.com>
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are strictly those of the author and
are in no way indictative of his employer, customers, or this installation.