[Basic] Skill of the week: Philosophy

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I'd tend to call Biblical literalism on the philosophy side - there's often quite a lot of semantic hairsplitting and subtle analogy involved in going from the actual words to a particular "literalist" interpretation.

The fact that there is analytical stuff going on does not make something philosophy. Biblical literalism seems to be more akin to History, Literature, Linguistics, and even Law in its approach to its texts. Philosophical questions about those texts don't even arise. "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it" closes the door to dialectic.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by johndallman

What have you done with Philosophy?

I once had a story of a pair of sweethearts who met as worthy opponents in a debating tournament. I also had a character whose true ambition was to be a philosopher but became a starship captain because he thought a philosopher should have a thorough grounding in the needs of concrete existence. That is just a start.

[(E)]

In my main fantasy world the elves are not governed by genetics like humans they are instead molded by their philosophy instead. The elves require a philosophy to adapt to the world and and different "races" of elves are represented by different philosophies. It seemed appropriate that a magically created unaging race had a different mechanism for evolution.

[RogerBW]

I prefer heavy metal bagpipes. (Do a youtube search. You know you want to.)

Some sorts of Philosophy seem like prime candidates for skills related to magic (see Capping Spell Skill Levels in Thaumatology pp. 40-41, and Alternative Core Skills pp. 74-75).

I think that Theology, as GURPS defines it, might be better called "religious doctrine": it's explicitly the book-learning side of being a priest-equivalent, as distinct from Religious Ritual which is the performative side. When it gets more into disputation, I'd say that works better as Philosophy - but to avoid skill bloat on character sheets it's worth just rolling that into Theology.

[ericthered]

And thats really a good question: does your game need to distinguish between theology and philosophy? Gurps CAN go that granular, but it doesn't mean that it should. At least not in every case.

There are a number of character concepts that should have philosophy. I've never done it, but now that I think about it, certain types of characters (mostly those with the word 'wise' in their character description) should be able to use it as a complementary skill to an influence skill.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ericthered

And thats really a good question: does your game need to distinguish between theology and philosophy? Gurps CAN go that granular, but it doesn't mean that it should. At least not in every case.

Well, there are clearly things that are not theology, but that give people an ethical framework for their lives: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Epicureanism, humanism, Marxism, Objectivism, utilitarianism.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, there are clearly things that are not theology, but that give people an ethical framework for their lives: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Epicureanism, humanism, Marxism, Objectivism, utilitarianism.

I'd be inclined to say that things that act as ethical frameworks are always Philosophy, or maybe Law. I'd want Theology to mostly be about stuff that changes depending on which gods you are studying (the gods are right there in the name after all). Ethics tends to be pretty similar in outline in most of them.

I suspect that's because in well thought out ethical systems, any theological component is seldom a lot deeper than replacing "it's obvious that..." with "god said..." when stating a relatively few things that are axiomatically right or wrong. Yah the Almighty is actually pretty verbose on these sorts of topics as gods go, and yet even his followers need huge collections of additional stuff - Talmud, canon law, fiqh - to sufficiently regulate human behavior.

[Fred Brackin]

Just as a note, Philosophy needs the "Comparative" option seen in Theology. Comparative Philosophy is what you get in the entry level College courses that call themselves "Philosophy".

Right now if you wanted a Skill that was about multiple philosophies and their histories, similarities and differences you'd have to create an Expert Skill.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Just as a note, Philosophy needs the "Comparative" option seen in Theology. Comparative Philosophy is what you get in the entry level College courses that call themselves "Philosophy".

Right now if you wanted a Skill that was about multiple philosophies and their histories, similarities and differences you'd have to create an Expert Skill.

I've said it before, but maybe not in the Skill of the Week threads. Skills that are basically rolls to "know something" - Philosophy, Theology, History, Literature, Connoisseur etc. - really need some way to get at how *much* coverage they have. Area Knowledge tries, not all that well. Most of the others don't even have that much.

My approach is when you buy one of these skills, you can specify whatever coverage you want. When I set a difficulty of knowing something, I'll set it for some specific coverage. If they are different, we look at about how many orders of magnitude difference there is in the amount of material covered, and apply a +/-3 per factor of 10. So if you buy Philosophy (21st Century Western Comparative), and I decide knowing something calls for a roll against, say Philosophy (Socratic) at +3, we need to decide how much of 21st Century Western Comparative philosophy consists of Socratic philosophy - it's clearly less than a tenth, so worse than -3, but Socrates is pretty essential, so probably more that a hundredth (-6), call it -5, roll against Philosophy (Western) -2 to know the same thing.

It's a pretty simple rule that seems to give reasonable looking results on the detailed end while still leaving super general skills good for something - all centuries/cultures/nations/languages/whatever tending to be in the -6 to -12 range, which is not so steep a penalty that a good skill level wouldn't leave you better off than local's pure IQ default.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I'd be inclined to say that things that act as ethical frameworks are always Philosophy, or maybe Law. I'd want Theology to mostly be about stuff that changes depending on which gods you are studying (the gods are right there in the name after all). Ethics tends to be pretty similar in outline in most of them.

I'm reluctant to agree with this, because there are religions where the ethical framework (which isn't always what I'd consider sound ethics) is just "the founder told us to behave like this, so we do." There isn't really any analysis, just rules with religious force.