Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Philosophical theory

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Philosophical theory

The article is unsourced, and appears to be original research (WP:OR) - the author explains on the talk page that he "created this page and the category with the prima facie understanding of 'philosophical theory', i.e. theories about ideas, contrasted with scientific theories about observable data." In other words, he constructed the definition himself from the context in which the phrase is used.

The article title also appears to be a neologism WP:NEO, as a definition for it does not appear in any of the following publications:

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (MacMillan 2006)
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998)
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd edition)
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994)
Philosophical Dictionary (by Brugger and Baker, 1967)
Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion (by william L. Reese, 1996)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I also looked up "Theory" in the above publications. Where it appeared at all, it referred to "Scientific theory" and not to the context presented in this article.

While "philosophical theory" is used all over the place on the Web, the two words appear to be paired colloquially to describe a wide range of things (ideas or views that happen to be philosophical in nature), rather than refer to a formal classification within the field of philosophy.

WP:NEO states: "To support the use of (or an article about) a particular term we must cite reliable secondary sources such as books and papers about the term—not books and papers that use the term."

The Transhumanist 01:53, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep. Sure, it is a crappy article, but how can you say it is a neologism or non-notable if there is an entire category "Philosophical theories" with dozens of articles in it? I feel like I'm missing something of the nominator's thought process. Drawn Some (talk) 02:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. The difference between Philosophical theory and the category Philosophical theories, is that the category is theories that are philosophical in nature, which is not necessarily the topic of the article. In fact, the types of philosophical theories stated in this article page (life stance, religion, worldview, and ideology) are generally not related topics in the category Philosophical theories. In my studies of philosophy and science I've never come across the term philosophical theories. Also, as discussed on the talk page, the term philosophical theories is probably not the most common name for the material described in the brief article. At this time, I cannot suggest a better name for the article and I don't think that the article is sufficiently notable to be kept. Shanata (talk) 08:33, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. If we have Category:Philosophical theories, the category ought to have a head article, even if the head article is little more than a disambiguation page. I would approach the subject a bit differently - relating it to the head article on theory itself, and note that philosophical theories are complexes of shared beliefs and assumptions that are basic to various philosophical schools. Note that Google Scholar yields more than 10,000 hits for both "philosophical theory" and "philosophical theories". - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:29, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
~~Delete/Redirect~~ Keep In it's unsourced state, it's presumed the author created this definition him or herself. Therefore it is by definition original research. Redirect the phrase to Category:Philosophical theories. If someone can conclusively cite that there is one definition of this two-word phrase, based on scholarly work on the subject, that would be a different story. Google hits and random uses of the phrase do not make something notable or concrete. -Markeer 20:57, 29 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Changed to Keep based on significant improvement to the article, most particularly involving sourcing. The language currently being used seems to express the general, and difficult to exactly define, nature of the term while sourcing those definition statements. This seems like a good example of what should happen out of an AfD...a spur to greater quality of a wikipedia article.-Markeer 23:15, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep -- Transhumanist. I really wish we could have the discussion about what I meant about "consistent" before we get into proposing to delete articles like this one. Has anyone given any thought to the greater organizational picture here? I am open minded that we may very well delete this "philosophical theory" article at some point. However I am unclear on what the consensus is to deal with the category and the glossary and the list, as well as the organization of the "theories" category, etcetera. I had proposed to move category philosophical theories to "non-empirical theories", but there was no consensus to do that. I am a little baffled at the need to delete this in the absence of this dicussion.Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 20:50, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Well, I can't speak for Transhumanist, but to your question, I would imagine that if there is some problem with Category:Philosophical theories or Category:Theories it could be brought up on the discussion pages for those categories. This is a discussion about this one article only. From a personal perspective, I see a difference between a category about philosophical theories and an article trying to define the exact term "philosophical theory". Regardless, my suggestion to delete above is related to lack of sourcing, and until that's addressed I'm not particularly interested in other issues (although those could become important if the sourcing problem could be resolved). -Markeer 21:23, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well I added a reference and clarified the matter I hope. There still needs to be a broader discussion, and I hope you get involved there too. Be well Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 21:28, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, might not a philosophical theory be any that springs from, or contributes to, the love of knowledge? I think this article does, too, in its small way. -MBHiii (talk) 23:55, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]
~~Leaning~~Strong keep I don't believe this to be a neologism because it hasn't been recently coined. This phrase has turned up in numerous sources through searches on google books and google scholar. All that this needs for a proper article is a definition from a reliable source. Oddly enough, I haven't found a straight-forward definition of the term, perhaps because the meaning is implied by common sense. I can't imagine that this phrase hasn't been elucidated anywhere; I'll look it up in the library when I visit in around 12 hours. Them From Space 07:12, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I thought is was common sense as well. However "common sense" is also a philosophical theory.Pontiff Greg Bard (talk) 21:04, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I added some more sources and examples to the work already done on this by Gregbard and Ihcoyc. The term was discussed in several books that I found and I tried to cite the relevant material into this article. There's not a doubt in my mind that this shouldn't be in here. It now meets WP:V which clears up the original research problem, and the topic has been discussed enough to make it notable enough for inclusion. Them From Space 20:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.