Introspection: Philosophizing the way I do

One of the things that reading World of Warcraft and Philosophy made me think about was how I examine WoW on my blog. World of Warcraft and Philosophy was an interesting read because it related various philosophical doctrines to WoW and looked at what the former said about the latter. This got me thinking about how little I mention established philosophers in my own posts. To date, I think I have only twice mentioned well-known philosophers and their beliefs in my posts. That made me ask myself: as a writer of philosophy blog, should I be mentioning more philosophers and more of their beliefs in my posts? More importantly, am I even qualified to look at WoW philosophically, having almost no academic experience with philosophy?

Upon further consideration, I realized that I am in no way obligated to discuss philosophers and their beliefs in the majority of my posts. After all, well-known philosophers didn't get that way by taking old beliefs and applying them to new things; they got that way by coming up with their own theories.* While it is interesting to look at established philosophical doctrines and see how they may apply to scenarios the person who came up with them may never have considered, it is much more interesting too look at said scenarios and come up with your own ideas about them. Besides, all of the research that would be involved in trying to find new philosophical theories to relate to WoW is more work than I'm willing to do for something I'm not being paid for, and it's probably something that most readers wouldn't be as interested in as my current format.

I also found that the answer to the second question was yes, I am qualified to look at WoW philosophically, even without academic training. Philosophy is, at its base, consideration of something at a deeper level than most people look at it. One doesn't need academic training to do that; one only needs the curiosity to look at something more deeply than others do and the critical thinking necessary to do so. Though those things can be taught (well, the latter, at least), I already posses both, which I think makes me qualified to write about WoW philosophically. It also means that other people are qualified to think about WoW philosophically, which is good for me, because if they weren't, then people wouldn't be able to leave the interesting comments on my posts that I love reading and that make me reconsider what I have written.

When I thought about how writing posts that relate existing philosophies to WoW probably wouldn't interest as many people as my own personal musings on WoW, that also helped me realize that I don't need academic training to write this blog. If this blog were a place where I spent most of my time writing posts like the chapters in World of Warcraft and Philosophy, then I would probably need to have some schooling in philosophy to write this blog, or at least be more well read about philosophy than I am. However, as I have said, no special credentials are needed to actually perform philosophy; in fact, some of my favorite philosophical works have been written by people who weren't philosophers by trade (like Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Leo Tolstoy's My Confession). Because I don't need academic training to write the kind of posts that people probably enjoy more, I am at peace with the way I write.

*Although Alfred North Whitehead once said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato," so as far original philosophy goes, your mileage may vary.