Mother philosophy

26 November 2004

I should start to write some content on this blog soon, but actually I am still impressed with this technology I am learning here every day...

When the FOIS2004 was approaching, an Italian newspapers published this under the heading "Philosophy - finally useful for something" (or so, my Italian is based on a autodidactic half day course). I found this funny, and totally untrue.

Philosophy always had the bad luck, that every time a certain aspect of it provoced wider attention, this aspect became a discipline of its own. Physics, geometry and mathematics are the classical examples, later on theology, linguistics, anthropology, and then, in the 20th century, logic went this way too. It's like philosophy being the big incubator for new disciplines (you can see that still in the anglo-american tradition of almost all doctors actually being Ph.D.s, philosophical doctors.

Thus this misconception becomes understandable. Now, let's look around - what's the next discipline being born from philosophy? Will it be business ethics? Will it be the philosophy of science, being renamed as scientific managment?

My guess is: due to the fast growing area of the Semantic Web, it will be ontology. Today, the Wikipedia already made two articles on it, ontologies in philosophy and ontologies in computer science. This trend will gain momentum, and even though applied ontology will always feed from the fundamental work done from Socrates until today, it will become a full-fledged discipline of its own.

Originally published on Semantic Nodix

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