Reddit reviews Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy

Just the Arguments

Theorem. Yes, it can and it should.

Case 1. It can.

Proof.

Just the Arguments is a book which distills philosophical arguments into explicit premises, conclusions and rules of inference. You can conceive this into a theorem-proof by simply chucking all the premises into the IF part of your theorem and chucking the final conclusion into the THEN part, and chucking all intermediary conclusions and rules of inference into the PROOF.

Computational Metaphysics is a research program which axiomatises philosophy and uses automated reasoning to prove theorems, prove consistency of premises, and prove validity of arguments. We are still at the embryonic stage of philosophy being done by artificial intelligence (also envisioned by Leibniz). One day, gone with error-prone humans in philosophy!

Examples of automated philosophy.

• Anslem's Ontological Argument
  
• Leibniz's Theory of Concepts
  
• Gödel's Ontological Argument
  
  Case 2. It should.
  
  Proof.
  
  
• Philosophical ideas should be expressed clearly and precisely.
  
• Natural, non-mathematical language is full of ambiguity and reasoning with it is error-prone.
  
• Mathematical/logical language is clear and precise.
  
• Philosophy has a long history of unproductive arguments which result from people not even agreeing on the same definitions in the first place. That is just boring semantic tomfoolery! That does not happen in math since there is consensus about definitions (up to logical equivalence).
  
  Objection. "Mathematical language is overly symbolic and tedious."
  
  Reply. You get used to it. Also, you need not be completely symbolic. Most math papers are not written in logical symbols either. But that's okay for math since there's consensus over definitions and usually rules of inference are obvious. Philosophy ought to become more mathematical.
  
  Objection. "You're just gonna have a TON of premises."
  
  Reply. Good. Let's make those suckers explicit. Let's also make how and what we derive from them explicit.
  
  ​

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Hey there. I see this thread is a day old, so you may not still be active here, but your project is an interesting one (though I sincerely hope you some day find a philosopher or three who interests you enough to explore more than a surface-level caricature). That being said, you might be interested in Just the Arguments. It's a book compiling 100 of the most famous arguments in Western philosophy, giving each topic no more than a couple pages. So you aren't the first person to be interested in a stripped-down version of philosophical discourse. And reading through that book might help you round out some of your mistakes.