Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's categories


 * 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   delete as WP:OR essay.  Sandstein  16:45, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's categories
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Delete as unnecessary WP:FORK from Category (Kant) Mayalld (talk) 14:45, 2 July 2008 (UTC) Delete because if we had articles on every philosopher's criticism of every other philosopher, Wikipedia would just become a loose mishmash. Should we have separate articles on Hegel's criticism of Kant, Marx's criticism of Hegel, Marx's criticism of Feuerbach, Feuerbach's criticism of Hegel, Marcuse's criticism of Sartre, Adorno's criticims of Husserl, Husserl's criticism of psychologism, Freud's criticism of prior dream theories, Jung's criticism of Freud? This would be crazy. And it would be in contradiction to the nature of an encyclopedia, at least not a general encyclopedia, although a case might be made for it in a highly specialized philosophy encyclopedia. For me the issue isn't about this article in particular, but about the general issue: we need a policy and set of criteria on this with regard to the Wikipedia philosophy domain, and perhaps also social thought. It seems to me that the general policy should be:1) the essence of anything that is an important criticism in the history of thought of one thinker by another should be included in capsule form, i.e. in at most one paragraph, under the article of the thinker being criticized, if it shaped subsequent thought; 2) it should also be included in capsule form in the article about the thinker doing the criticizing if that criticism was important in the development of that thinker's own thought, as was the case with Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant, Marx's of Hegel, Jung's of Freud, and so on; 3) anything over and above that should belong in references or links to specialized scholarly literature on that specialized topic. That's why there is scholarly literature and libraries.  Wikipedia can't encompass the totality of scholarly literature and libraries, it's just an encyclopedia.  Part of the point of an encyclopedia is to give the reader a general short introduction to a subject and encourage them to follow up any more specialized interest through appropriate references. That's the way all good encyclopedias operate. Any editor who is so impassioned about one philosopher's criticism of another should be submitting a paper about it to a philosophy journal -- Wikipedia can't be a cheap, easy alternative to the labor of submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal. By the way, I happen to think that the same goes for the proliferation on Wikipedia of individual articles about all of the individual works by individual philosophers. For any major thinker, there are only a few works that deserve specialized articles in a general encyclopedia. For example, in the case of Kant, it makes sense for the three Critiques and a few other works; but it doesn't make sense for every individual thing Kant wrote, especially in his pre-critical period. Even philosophy encyclopedias don't have such things. Again, that's where one goes to a library to peruse scholarly literature about Kant. Same for other thinkers. I have several books on Kant which devote short sections to some of Kant's pre-critical writings, and that's appropriate. But Wikipedia is not a scholarly study of Kant or of any other thinker. And, by the way, something similar is happening in some Wikipedia philosophy articles with regard to references, i.e. people are just inserting books that they happen to like or have read or been influenced by, and we're ending up with unwieldy bibliographies that would be useless to a general reader, because he or she wouldn't even know how to choose among all of these references. An encyclopedia bibliography should be a short list of major classic and recent works that a reader could go to to learn more and to find out about more specialized literature if they're interested. I just did a quick scan, and at this moment there are 66 books listed in the Kant reference section. Because Kant is one of the major philosophers, it is understandable that there should be a substantial number of references. But I doubt if more than two dozen are appropriate in a general encyclopedia article. So I'm in favor of deleting this article in the context of the need for a Wikipedia policy or norm about all such articles. Jjshapiro (talk) 17:06, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. The information presented goes well beyond what's contained in Category (Kant), and could not be merged into it without either undue weight issues or loss of information. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:12, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete - article would appear to run afoul of WP:SYN (maybe). (Is Jjshapiro's rationale longer than the original article? :-) )--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:25, 2 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete - This is not an encyclopedia article but an essay. As it stands now it is entirely original research and contrary to the guidance at WP:OR. ~ Alcmaeonid (talk) 20:24, 2 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Delete Eh, it appears to be more of an essay than an encyclopedia article. Happyme22 (talk) 02:38, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete as unsourced, OR essay. Apropos of nothing, however, I strongly disagree with Jjshapiro's notion that appropriately sourced and well-written articles on philosophers' opinions of other philosophers are undesirable in a general encyclopedia of the type Wikipedia aspires to be.  Ford MF (talk) 19:14, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Encyclopedic topic. Philosophy is huge and through the years wikipedia's articles can and will grow.  The article looks legit.  It's not a hoax, right?  Schopenhauer really did criticize Kant's categories?  As long as that's not in dispute, good faith makes me say keep. --Firefly322 (talk) 05:14, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * 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.