[burgerbrain]

I think it has more to do with how encyclopedia articles are formatted. The first sentence always describes the broader subject which the topic resides in. I view it more as zooming out from topics that matter, each time you do so you lose resolution and only see a fuzzier image.

[Retric]

I think it has more to do with where people end the chain, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature is after philosophy.

Community -> Living -> Life -> Physical body -> Physics -> Natural science -> Science -> Knowledge -> Fact -> Information -> Sequence -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy -> Reason -> Human Nature -> Thought ->... The fact that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism tends to be the last part of the chain before it repeats is just less interesting.

PS: I suspect that most articles can be reached by every other article so you can take just about anything and say it's the "root" article for the rest of Wikipedia.

[michael_dorfman]

PS: I suspect that most articles can be reached by every other article so you can take just about anything and say it's the "root" article for the rest of Wikipedia.

Most articles can be reached by every other article, but not if you are only following the first link. You can make a case that anything on the chain that leads from Philosophy back to Philosophy is the root, but anything outside of that is going to be tough to argue, in my opinion.

[Retric]

With that metric Philosophy is just one of a chain that ~99% of articles link to, looking at this graphs science or math is probably going to have a lower average chain length.

[Cushman]

Whoa. That's less interesting to people? Wikipedia is telling us it can think!

[tgrass]

This can be tested.

I assume requiring the path from the first word was only to provide an easily replicable rule. Create a rule which chooses the fifth word (and where fewer than five links are provided, choose the last). Then compare the results to the OP's.

[maeon3]

If you make a claim, then answer it, and ask "Why" and keep doing that, then you will eventually get down to the response: "Because I said so" or "because that is how we observe it to be".

"The words and values we use to describe nature are all imprecise approximations, many are wildly wrong. We observe phenomena all around us, and if you try to describe what it is, and ask "why" enough times then you get down to the discussion of what frame of reference we use to observe the universe. We have a body of knowledge, and we tack on new observations onto that body, occasionally the body reforms and the philosophy changes. Every learner has a philosophy.

Philosophy is where the rubber meets the road in figuring out what our universe is. Is matter a particle or a wave or other, it depends on your existing perspective, your philosophy.

[burgerbrain]

I think of philosophy as the point where people throw their hands into the air in despair and say "Fuck it, I can't break this down any further, figure it out yourself", at which point the famous philosophers have joyfully begun down that ill defined path without an end.

  When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless
  bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes
  plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying,
  "Behold! I've brought you a man."

I think Diogenes really may have actually "got it".

[forensic]

No one really gets it, and that's why Socrates was the smartest man in Greece. He knew that he didn't know anything.

Cynics like Diogenes are just as dogmatic as anyone, but the truth they are dogmatic about is that there is no truth. It's still a conviction. Be cynical about cynicism and Diogenes looks just as dumb as Socrates, or anyone for that matter.

We all look dumb when we answer questions. This is why Socrates preferred to be the asker.