Pseudophilosophy is a term applied to philosophical ideas or systems which are claimed not to meet mainstream academic standards. The term is almost always used pejorative

Pejorative

Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...

ly and is often contentious.

Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher is an American philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh. In a productive research career extending over six decades, Rescher has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style and author of a system of pragmatic idealism which weaves together threads of...

, in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy is a reference work in philosophy edited by Ted Honderich and published by Oxford University Press in 1995. A second edition was published in 2005 and included some 300 new entries. The new edition has over 2,200 entries and 291 contributors in 1,080...

, defines pseudo-philosophy as "deliberations that masquerade as philosophical but are inept, incompetent, deficient in intellectual seriousness, and reflective of an insufficient commitment to the pursuit of truth." Rescher adds that the term is particularly appropriate when applied to "those who use the resources of reason to substantiate the claim that rationality is unachievable in matters of inquiry."

Other terms used are "cod philosophy".

Schopenhauer's use of term

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...

 wrote the following about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...

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See also

• Pataphysics
• Externism
  Externism
  Externism is a fictional philosophical theory proposed by the famous fictitious Czech genius Jára Cimrman. This character appears in many plays by authors from the Jára Cimrman Theatre in Prague. The first act of the theatre performances is usually filled with a lecture on Cimrman's personality,...
  
  
• Flipism
  Flipism
  Flipism, sometimes written as "Flippism," is a pseudophilosophy under which all decisions are made by flipping a coin. It originally appeared in the Disney comic "Flip Decision" by Carl Barks, published in 1953...
  
  
• Ingsoc
  Ingsoc
  Ingsoc is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian science fiction novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.-Fictionalised origin of Ingsoc:...
  
  
• Non-philosophy
  Non-philosophy
  Non-philosophy is a concept developed by French philosopher François Laruelle . Laruelle published on non-philosophy throughout the 1980s and 1990s...
  
  
• Obscurantism
  Obscurantism
  Obscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the...
  
  
• Sophism
  Sophism
  Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and...