What is the answer to the, "What is a chair?", question in philosophy?

42.

I take a pragmatic point of view. What is the purpose of a chair? To provide something to sit on. A chair then is anything convenient for sitting on that is used for that purpose.

If you want something to ponder, consider Wittgenstein’s question of what a game is.

Are you referring to the philosophical “Prove to me that the chair in front of me does or does not exist.” thing? I thought that had been debunked. The underlying premise was that sometimes a formal education can be meaningless. The professor uses a difficult question, and the student brave or flip enough to give a simple answer gets the “A”. So when the prof says “Prove that this chair doesn’t exist.”, one student turns in a paper which simply says; “What chair?” and gets an “A”.
So the story is pretty much allegorical for a couple different points; you have to be able to convince yourself before you can convince others, some people have a dim view of the philosopher – education idea, and sometimes, the simplest answer really is the best one. The story can serve to illustrate any of these points.
I never heard “What is a chair?”. I’d be interested to see what that’s all about, if you haven’t got that confused for this.

A chair is an object specifically designed and created to support the weight of a human while they relax, rest, wait, or work. In all caes that chair represents space specific to the occupyier of that char. Hence you will often here….“HEY!....That’s MY chair!! You are sitting in MY chair!!”

So no matter who owns the chair it momentarily becomes the property of the occupier and in many cases a defensible proposition easily domonstrated at any large family gathering. A chair can also serve as a tamer of chaos where a person who is nervous, aggitated, resistant or combative suddenly becomes calm, cooperative even complacent when place in a chair.

So at times a chair is many things and the bulk majority is it mere decoration waiting for that next time a weary soul sits down to eat, work, rest, watch tv, play a game, or wait in the waiting room for the next appointment. No other item created by man serves one purpose for so many reasons.

Are you referring to the identity problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_(philosophy)#Metaphysics_of_identity ?

In other words, when paint a house a different color (i.e. change it’s properties) is it still the same house? If you remove the decorations on the chair is it still the same chair? what is the most you can remove or change and have it still be a chair? Or the idea of the Platonic Heaven such that there is some flawless ideal chair floating in the cosmos, and that a chair is only a chair insomuch as it conforms with the ideal?

There is more than one answer.

Philosophy does not give you answers it just gives you more questions.

A seat.

A chair is a chair because we define it as being a chair.. It could just as easily be called a banana although a banana has already been defined thus the term for both would confuse us. Looking at the chair without recognizing it’s definition is actually what it is.. What it would be, we don’t know so we refer to it as a chair just as we could refer to it as a ‘vedar’. Think extraterrestrial alien and you would be getting the point. What we see it as and what it really is, is defined in our recognition between the object and what we call it to be. Take money, nothing but a decorated piece of metal or paper but what we use it for goes beyond it’s true nature as we create a specific name to it thus if dirt were valuable then we would express a different meaning to that word.