Philosophy

What is Philosophy?

Most disciplines can be defined by the questions they ask and seek to answer, whether they be about ‘living things’ (Biology), ‘space, time and matter’ (Physics), ‘the optimal allocation of scarce resources’ (Economics), and so on

In 1945, Bertrand Russell published his History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, New York) where he characterizes philosophical questions as a No Man’s Land between Science and Theology. Philosophical questioning and reasoning shares the stringent rational requirements that one expects of scientific thinking, but the questions that are asked are not amenable to single answers discovered by careful observation and experiment.

The questions that Philosophy is concerned with, are what many writers refer to as the big questions which human beings are prone to asking. As Robert Solomon has pointed in his Introducing Philosophy, (Oxford University Press, 2001) “we all have some opinions about God, about morality and its principles, about the nature of man and the nature of the universe”. We could also add that many times we all have some niggling doubts about these opinions that we have often received as part of our cultural history and upbringing, but that we haven’t really examined in any depth.

This is precisely what philosophy sets out to do. It helps us to ground some of our unexamined assumptions, or to reject them if found wanting, even though anyone who has engaged in this sort of questioning soon learns that it does not lead to cut-and-dried answers that provide a once-and-for-all solution to our doubts. In a world of increasing uncertainties, it becomes more and more important to develop the intellectual skills that will allow us to cope.

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, 

is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it”. (Russell, op.cit.)

What does philosophy mean?

Philosophy, both the field and the concept, is notoriously hard to define. We examine several approaches here.

One approach is to give examples of philosophy. G.E. Moore is said to have answered the question "what is philosophy?" by gesturing at his bookshelves and saying: "It is what these are all about." Similarly, a good start at defining "philosophy" would be to explain that it is the main subject of the works of Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Laozi, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger--to omit many more recent names. Any such list, though, would be of necessity partial, and would raise further questions; in the case of most of those mentioned above, for example, some of their published works are not philosophical, so that the list is only really of use if one already understands what is and what is not philosophy.

Another approach is to list the main topics discussed by philosophers: any such list would include metaphysics, logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. This has the advantage of emphasising the general and abstract nature of most of the subjects of philosophising, but again, any such list will raise further questions; any item in the list either explicitly relies upon understanding of the term "philosophy", or does so implicitly by raising the question as to what is a philosophical treatment as opposed to a non-philosophical treatment of, for example, ethics.

Another way to understand philosophy is to examine its historical development. The Greek word was philosophia (φιλοσοφία), meaning "love of wisdom". ("Philo-" comes from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and "-sophy" comes from the sophia, or wisdom.) The word philosophos (φιλόσοφος) was first used by Pythagoras to distinguish himself as a seeker of wisdom from those who thought of themselves as the wise (sophos; σοφός). By the time of Socrates the word had come to mean something more like "scientific man" or "learned man". However, the problem with this approach is that the subject itself has changed through history. Originally its scope included all fields of study, other than history, the arts, and professional disciplines such as law; as recently as the nineteenth century, what we now call "science" was called "natural philosophy." In the last two centuries in particular, however, "philosophy" has come to mean an especially abstract, nonexperimental intellectual endeavor.

A fourth approach offers more promise. Instead of a list of practitioners and their works, or of the topics that they discuss, we can describe the distinctive techniques of philosophy: what is it that Plato, Descartes, et al. do in their discussions of metaphysics, ethics, etc., which is distinctively philosophical? Very roughly, we might say it is the study of, or wise reflection about, very general things. To elaborate, we might say that philosophy is the study of the meaning and justification of beliefs about the most general, or universal, aspects of things—a study which is carried out not by experimentation or careful observation, but instead typically by formulating problems carefully, offering solutions to them, giving arguments for the solutions, and engaging in dialectic about all of the above. Philosophers study a huge range of general concepts, such as existence, goodness, knowledge, and beauty. They ask questions such as "What is the good life?" and "Is knowledge even possible?" And while philosophers do not conduct experiments, they study the methods and foundational concepts of experimental disciplines, such as the scientific method, evidence in law, and life.

Popularly, the word "philosophy" is often used to mean any form of wisdom, or any person's perspective on life (as in "philosophy of life") or basic principles behind or method of achieving something (as in "my philosophy about driving on highways"). That is different from the academic meaning, and it is the academic meaning which is used here.

A brief historical introduction to some leading problems of philosophy

The history of philosophy is vast. There is no way to make sense of it in a few paragraphs; what follows is an abbreviated narrative of a few important strands. This will perhaps give the reader some sense of who some major thinkers were, and what some important philosophical problems were like. Much has been omitted, and we make no claims that these are the most important figures and problems.

Ancient philosophy: what things are, and a focus on virtue

Western philosophy is generally said to have begun with Thales (sixth century B.C.), the first thinker on record to offer a secular answer to a very general question, "What is the first principle, or essential nature, of all things?" We might find Thales' answer, Water, to be strange or amusing, but his achievement lay in asking a general question and offering a secular answer. This began a debate--a strand of what is known as pre-Socratic philosophy, because it predates Socrates--about the ultimate nature (Gk. phusis, φυσις) of things. For instance, Anaximander held this ultimate nature to be The Indefinite; Anaximenes held it to be Air. Such one-word answers are uninformative as summaries of their views, but they show that thinkers did have competing notions of what everything is, ultimately, or in other words, what the ultimate origin and substance of things is. This tradition marked the beginnings of philosophy and of what we now call physics.

Many philosophers accord Socrates (469–399 B.C.) pride of place as the first great Western philosopher. His great achievement, like that of the pre-Socratics, lay not in any particular doctrine, but instead a type of question, and a method of answering it. Socrates reportedly made a habit of questioning the leading Athenian intellects of the day, asking them for a definition or account (the logos) of what they claimed to know about. For example, he asked a famous general, Laches, "What is courage?" Laches offered a definition, to which Socrates would offer a counterexample; the process would repeat until the expert gave up. Socrates, then, would conclude that the person lacked the knowledge that he claimed to have, because genuine knowledge of a thing required the ability to give an account of it. Thus began the central concern of philosophers with the analysis, or offering definitions, of "big" concepts such as virtue and knowledge. The idea is that if we could clarify our basic concepts, we might gain a deep understanding of the way the world really is.

Socrates was most exercised with the nature of the good life and of the virtues, such as justice, piety, temperance, and wisdom. His student Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) took up these ethical concerns. Plato's master work, The Republic, is an elaborate answer to the question, "What is justice?" In answering this question, Plato develops a theory about what goodness is. We cannot say that goodness is any particular good thing, nor is it a collection of all the good things. It seemed to Plato that goodness is something apart from all of its instances. Furthermore, when we have knowledge of goodness--the knowledge of the account or definition of goodness, which Socrates sought--we need not know any particular instance of goodness, but instead something that exists independently of the various instances. What we know is, therefore, the Form of the Good--something "abstract" or general, which has a sort of heavenly existence independent of the messy, uncertain world of particular things. "Heavenly existence" is not mere poetic license either: Plato held the Form of the Good to be God. However that might be, this brings us to one of the most difficult problems of philosophy: the Problem of Universals (see Metaphysics). There are many ways of approaching this problem, but the reader might get some sense of it by asking: "What sort of thing is goodness, anyway?"

Plato in turn was the teacher of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who had a different approach to the Problem of Universals. Whereas Plato asserted the existence of independent, heavenly Forms, Aristotle was much more oriented toward the here-and-now. For Aristotle, goodness is not something over and above what can be found in each good thing; goodness never exists apart from good things, it is merely a quality that can be found in each. This reflects Aristotle's empiricism--his focus on what can be known, through sense-perception, of the world of particular things we live in. Plato, by contrast, is regarded as the first representative of rationalism, since he thought that genuine knowledge was not of particular things, but only of abstract Forms like goodness, and could be secured only by rational reflection on our concepts of the Forms. Aristotle wrote voluminously about a vast array of subjects, from what we now call philosophy, to biology, rhetoric, and much more.

Plato and Aristotle each established schools of philosophy--Plato, the famous Academy, members of which were called Academics, and Aristotle, the Lyceum, members of which were called Peripatetics. Other schools arose as well: Epicureanism and Stoicism, which Romans embraced heartily, and which included a strand called Cynicism. These schools--collectively known as Hellenistic philosophy--flourished in Greece and Rome from the fourth century B.C. until the third century A.D.

Medieval philosophy: reason meets religion

Many of the secular philosophical interests of the Greeks fell by the wayside as intellectual life--and the story of philosophy--moved into the protected walls of medieval monasteries. Medieval philosophy included not just Christian monks, such as St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Anselm of Canterbury, and St. Thomas Aquinas, but Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon) and Gersonides (Levi ben Gershon), and Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd). These philosophers had, in fact, wide-ranging philosophical interests. But if these religiously inclined philosophers had a chief aim, it was to systematize and, to some extent, rationalize the faith of the Church.

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) lived as the Dark Ages were coming to an end. His most famous achievement was in his Proslogion, the ontological argument for the existence of God, which went like this. Anselm invites us to conceive "that than which nothing greater can be thought." In other words, imagine anything at all, from a pebble to a dog to the Milky Way Galaxy; whatever you imagine, try to imagine something greater. Then we say: the greatest thing imaginable would be "that than which nothing greater can be thought." Anselm considered that the "fool" of Psalms (14:1), who said, "There is no God," must have this concept. Even if he was an atheist, he had this concept of that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But, in fact, there is a greater concept than the atheist's, namely, the concept of a being that actually exists. We do have this concept of the greatest conceivable being, and to be really the greatest conceivable, that being must exist. This is God. Anselm thought we merely had to think about the implications of a concept, and it would be clear that the thing we conceive of--God--actually exists.

In a way, Anselm followed Plato: as we said earlier, Plato conceived of the role of philosophy as being the rational drawing out of conclusions from Ideas. By contrast, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) took his cues from the works of Aristotle, recently rediscovered to Christians (but long known to Islamic scholars).

In fact, in his Summa Theologica, Aquinas, not long after rejecting Anselm's argument, most famously offered "Five Ways" to prove the existence of God, which are, arguably, arguments from experience, or what philosophers call a posteriori arguments. For instance, he said that we observe that the world is ordered into causes and effects, with one thing causing another, which causes another--making very long chains of causes and effects. But it is impossible that there be an endless chain of causes, Aquinas said, because then there would be no ultimate (final) explanation of any "link" in the chain. So there had to be a first cause; and this is God.

Not all philosophers (or theologians) have held that the existence of God can be proven. Some of these, in fact, are atheists, and believe that there are serious problems with these and all arguments for the existence of God; but some of them are fideists (from Latin fides), meaning that they believe we cannot justify the existence of God rationally, but we are nevertheless justified by resting faith.

Modern philosophy: everything must be doubted

Modern philosophy is usually said to have begun with René Descartes, but several factors predating Descartes were instrumental in the decline of medieval philosophy. Political thinkers like Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes challenged aspects of divine right. Scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei challenged the Church-supported geocentric model of the universe. Other religious thinkers, like Desiderius Erasmus, openly criticized Church institutions. It was in this cultural mileu that Descartes began his program of radical skepticism.

In Descartes' Mediations, he examines his beliefs and discards those which it was possible to doubt. In this way, he demonstrated how our sense experience of the external world can be doubted: we could be dreaming everything up for example, or an evil demon could be deceiving our senses. However, this method also demonstrated that there is one belief that is undoubtable: that we exist, that there must be an "I" doing the doubting. Descartes then employs a version of the ontological argument to demonstrate the existence of God, and then to conclude that since God is not a deceiver, we can be certain of our beliefs in the external world.

Against Descartes, John Locke proposed the idea that all knowledge comes from sense experience.

Applied philosophy

Philosophy has applications. The most obvious applications are those in ethics, applied ethics in particular and in political philosophy. The political philosophies of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill have shaped and been used to justify governments and their actions. Philosophy of education deserves special mention, as well; progressive education as championed by John Dewey has had a profound impact on educational practices in the United States in the twentieth century.

Other important, but less immediate applications can be found in epistemology, which might help one to regulate one's notions of what knowledge, evidence, and justified belief are. Philosophy of science discusses the underpinnings of the scientific method, among other topics sometimes useful to scientists. Aesthetics can help to interpret discussions of art. Even ontology, surely the most abstract and least practical-seeming branch of philosophy, has had important consequences for logic and computer science. In general, the various "philosophies of," such as philosophy of law, can provide workers in their respective fields with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of their fields.

Moreover, recently, there has been developing a burgeoning profession devoted to applying philosophy to the problems of ordinary life: philosophical counseling.