Philosopher

Three requirements and all of them are strict. The body of ideas must be complete, meaning it covers its subject rather than treating a corner of it. It must be coherent, meaning its parts do not contradict each other. And it must be original, meaning the person developed it rather than working within someone else's. Taken together these exclude most people the word is applied to, which is the point of defining it this way. The companion entry supplies the contrast. A philosophy is a framework for viewing and analyzing large, fundamental areas of knowledge and experience, based on foundational principles which work in diverse situations, and mechanism and animism are her examples. An ideology by comparison is a set of ideas neither complete nor consistent enough to qualify, existing within endorealities and often used to create them, lacking consistent principles and usually highly mutable, and she names psychology and economics as ideologies on those grounds. So the definition of philosopher is doing the same work as the definition of ideologue, sorting by whether the body of ideas can stand up rather than by the standing of the person holding it. Her broader complaint about the disciplines follows the same line. Where philosophy attempted to explain life, magic attempted to control it and physics carefully separates established theory from the human condition, leaving life itself marginalized as something that cannot be known.

Academic philosophy defines itself by method and by institutional membership rather than by the completeness of any individual's system, and the age of the great system builders is generally regarded as having ended, with specialization the norm. The distinction between doing philosophy and having a philosophy is often drawn, and popular usage applies the word to anyone with a considered outlook. Marsh's definition is a return to the system building standard and is unusually demanding, which functions as an argument as much as a definition, since applying it strictly to contemporary academic work would exclude most of it and applying it to her own would be the obvious test.