I’ve just learned that all entries in Wikipedia will eventually lead to philosophy. If you take any (or most?) entries and keep clicking on the first link in each of the pages, you will eventually and inevitably get to ‘philosophy’
I’ve tried it numerous times and it appears to be true.
My question is “WHY?”
Is this an intentionally placed function (like an ‘easter egg’)? or is it just that in a database such as this searches will naturally fall to philosophy. or could I just pick any random noun and within 10-20 clicks wind up on that random noun and nothing is special with ‘philosophy’?
This also leads to existence. then a continuous loop.
Don’t know why but it sort of in line with some of the teachings of Socrates that philosophy is suppose to be a group effort, each learning from each other, growing from each other, which is what Wiki is suppose to do.
Because the uber-nerdy webcomic XKCD said so last week, that’s why. Here’s the strip in question. If you mouse over the comic, text pops up that says, “Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parenthesis or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy’.” Fans of this comic pretty much saw this as a challenge, and went to work like busy little bees. There were countless closed loops in Wikipedia that were eventually redirected back onto the “all things lead to Philosophy” route. All hail the power of nerdom!
Ironically, this is the very question that Philosophy attempts to answer. But since I don’t really see a specific answer to your specific question on this thread or the other, I’ll tell you. You may have noticed that, due to the nature of encyclopedic prose, most articles start of by saying that TOPIC is a component or example of BROADER TOPIC, which, in keeping with Wikipedia’s philosophy ;), is almost always a link to the entry on BROADER TOPIC. And Philosophy is a pretty broad topic. Almost as broad as Existence, which is, of course, the first link from that page.
The key is that most Wikipedia articles are going to start out with a broad definition. Like Luxembourg is a country in Europe or Franklin Pierce was a President of the United States or a kangaroo is an animal that lives in Australia. Then articles like country or president or animal start with broader definitions. So you quickly reach a pretty abstract level where you’re in an article like mathematics or science or knowledge or fact or history. And these broad subjects tend to be defined in philosophical terms.
It’s interesting but not that surprising IMO.
Philosophy could be considered both the most abstract area of study, or the most fundamental.
It’s kinda like a child asking “Why?” to everything you say for a few iterations. Eventually, they’ll probably be asking a question that’s too abstract to answer trivially, and is hence philosophical in nature, or it will be something that we flat out don’t know yet…and speculation about the unknown and philosophy are closely linked.
Same reason why you can earn a PhD in all sorts of subjects: at a high enough level of study, “doctor of philosophy” is a pretty good description for what you’re doing.
