>>11987788Philosophy is only a useful term insofar as it allows us to uniquely characterize things. If it has an identical meaning to rigorous thinking, it's useless as a term and has no use to any rigorous thinker. I would characterize philosophy as a modern academic and cultural institution inheriting its practices and ideology from previous "philosophical" authors and teachers— and so on, back to the Greeks. A lot of the tactics and goals of philosophy are oriented around critical thinking: critical theory, critique of pure reason, phenomenology of spirit, an enquiry into human understanding are all foundational examples of this. However there are lessons from our epistemology that scientists have refined and taken as their own, and are just as much a part of the institution of science as philosophy, and reducing all of these practices to rigorous thinking is less useful for describing our present culture, and is also inaccurate to the way most people use these terms, making a wide adoption of your proposed definition deleterious to the spread and practice of rigorous thinking itself.
