Thought vs. Philosophy

Jewish scholarship has had many great thinkers throughout the ages, many of whom have pondered and explored the standard existential and metaphysical questions of philosophy. Would it be correct to refer to them as philosophers? For example, was R. Eliyahu Dessler a Jewish philosopher or merely a Jewish thinker? (For those wondering, I have no serious answer to the question of why anyone should care other than whether one can include R. Dessler in a curriculum of philosophy.)

The answer, of course, lies in how one defines philosophy. The very first sentence of Heidegger's essay "The End of Philosophy" is: "Philosophy is metaphysics." Such a narrow definition is then used to for the author's purpose of limiting philosophy. This, in my opinion, is silly. Philosophy literally means "the love of wisdom" and until the modern era included such subjects as mathematics, economics and all of the sciences. The question, though, is what philosophy means in the modern era and, I think, metaphysics is too narrow a definition.

I would say that philosophy is the examination of the world within the Western philosophical tradition. In other words, R. Dessler could have been a Jewish philosopher without changing his worldview one iota had he subjected his thought to analysis of prior philosophers and attempted to show similarities and differences, or at least precedents. However, thinking in a vacuum, or at least outside of the Western philosophical tradition, while valuable in itself, is not philosophy. In other words, in order to philosophize you have to be a part of the world of philosophy.

I found an essay by Emil Fackenheim in his book Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy in which he says something similar. In a tribute to Pinchas Peli, Fackenheim writes "Generally, I would define a Jewish philosopher (as distinct from a Jewish thinker) as one... who exposes his Jewish commitments to general philosophy, and the latter to his Jewish commitments" (p. 107). While I see in that statement a bit of an inclination towards modifying one's worldview based on general philosophy, something of which I do not approve, I think the general idea is correct.

You cannot claim to be a philosopher if you ignore every other philosopher in history. Lots of people arrive at creative and independent ideas. However, the evaluation of those ideas, the description of them and how they relate to ideas of the past, is philosophy. Merely setting forth a worldview is thought but not philosophy.

(Note that I fully acknowledge the bias towards Western Christian-Roman-Greek culture.)