Philosophy in the Popular Imagination
In my life nothing good has ever come of the “what do you do” question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on ethics” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance unschooled in philosophy will be almost preternaturally interested in what I have to say as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature only thought to exist on blanched parchment, or she’ll be absolutely dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well-wasted. Though, chances are, her rejoinder could go either way, in this particular case she’s lighted on the latter path. “Philosophy, it doesn’t get you anywhere,” she states, reveling in a truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that now is night.
In instances such as the one above, I’ve yet to come up with a good reply, probably because there’s no such thing. A joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t know, it certainly puts you in debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere.’”
The truth is that neither will do. For if my conversational partner is genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy, then it’s likely because she has the wrong conception of philosophy in mind or it’s for the wrong reason. If, however, she’s not at all interested in my reply, then she “can’t be bothered,” as my former English landlady was fond of saying, with listening to a full rebuttal and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample. Like many others, she has already made up her mind—or, better put, her mind has already been made up for her.
To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put on the defensive and, in most cases, to stand in the wrong. How we got to the point where philosophy has been put on all fours—either fetishized for not being a part of the real world or vilified for playing no part within it—still needs to be explained. A first, modest step would be to get straight in our minds how lay persons conceive of “philosophy,” “philosophers,” and “doing philosophy” and why this should matter to those of us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.
* * *
The place to begin is with my interlocutor’s claim that when philosophers discuss something, they only go round in circles. By this formulation, she could mean one of three things: first, that philosophers get mired in endless debate that stymies forward progress, such debate yielding nothing in the way of concrete resolution; second, that they make something out of nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental confusion; or, third, that in the game of philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These three doubts, individually and collectively, present considerable challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would have it that there can be no valid conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims, the second that no mental tranquility can be gained due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty squabbling over overnice distinctions, and the third that there can be no certain judgments concerning winners and losers. Once we enter the philosopher’s world, the lay person believes, we’re bound to soon find ourselves in a muddle.
Rather than respond to each of the three doubts in turn (we’re not going to play that game, are we?), it occurs to me that it would be wiser to ask about what assumption lies behind my interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she feels deep within herself the loss of faith in the power of reason to help us understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe that some hodgepodge of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches, friends’ advice, and expectations is better than reason at determining how we should act. By contrast, the philosopher’s belief that reason has its own set of powers (as well as its own inherent limitations) requires an attitudinal shift so profound that where once there was impatience now there is humility. The light of reason can only shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance ourselves from our “empirical self.” There is a long education of the soul, an itinerary of sorts, that leads ultimately to this state of mind, a path that the uninitiated hasn’t known or hasn’t taken and, in consequence, can’t find value in.
Still, my interlocutor might concede that if philosophy means anything, it means that everyone has his own personal philosophy. A personal philosophy, she might insist, is a fundamental set of beliefs that one lives by. Think of the book subtitle of the popular radio program “This I Believe,” “The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women,” as giving credence to this definition. In this vein, we would be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing philosophy.
I’m not so sure that this notion of personal philosophy gets us very far, for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me that the person espousing a personal philosophy is ultimately committed to this set of beliefs and not to some other. How do we know that she sets her course so that it lines up with her ownmost beliefs, or that, when the chips are down, she won’t jump ship, or that—to change metaphors—it’s not sometimes better to bend like a reed, as Haemon advises his father Creon to do, than it is to remain as rooted as an oak tree? In the end, how her beliefs line up with her actions has yet to be fully investigated. Another is that we would need to know whether the beliefs she stands by are worth standing by. Merely saying “this I believe” can’t be the end of the discussion but must be the starting point to any probing inquiry. And the last, already more than hinted at in my remarks above, is that philosophy, whatever it is and however it sets about its ultimate task of self-transformation, must be more than a doctrine; it must be a certain style of thought, a way of examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m leading amounts to anything. The question concerning whether (and why) it’s a good thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked and unconsidered as if it were enough just to purport to have one.
“All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical,’ then you’ll have to come round to agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless. After all, it has no bearing on the real world, and it’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and the kind of thing that’s done in universities: up in the clouds, I mean, not done here on earth, and nowhere else.”
“Granted, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general, become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us. And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the search for ingenious counterexamples and knockdown arguments. But, beyond these worries, I can hear in your voice the more potent criticism that philosophy is worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking. ‘Getting things done,’ you seem to imply, should be ranked much higher than ‘pie-in-the-sky thoughts.’”
Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then aren’t there times when we don’t know how to act and, what’s worse, times when we’re completely at a loss concerning how to go on and how we got to where we are, to a place we would prefer not to be? When we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no control? When our lives seem no longer to make any sense? At such times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to think our way through it in order to come to some deeper, more complete understanding of ourselves and of our place in the order of things?
It is, I want to say, at such tragic moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s question concerning what we care most about and what (and who) is worthy of our care can’t but ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to be honest with ourselves. It teaches us how to look closely at the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped or harmed ourselves and others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to assess, in the most basic terms we can fathom, how we’ve lived.
Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters of the head and heart, philosophy neither so rare as to be entirely extinct from the world we inhabit nor so common as to be readily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to our mature recognition that things aren’tas they ought to be and thanks also to our desire to reconcile ourselves with the world, self-examination will continue to have a reason for being because it promises to bring us peace of mind.
About the Author
Andrew Taggart writes on ethics and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Given the kind of thing philosophers tend to write about moral and ethical issues, ordinary people are absolutely right to ignore them, in 99% of cases. If you take what philosophers say about morality or politics seriously, you’re liable to wind up believing the most pernicious kind of nonsense. Philosophers would do better to stick to nice, safe subjects like the philosophy of mathematics, and not try to get respect they don’t deserve in areas of human life outside their competence.
IMHO the second you abandoned your responsibility to answer these clear questions with honest answers you lost all ground to your interlocutor.
I think Philosophy is mostly non-sense because no good, or at-least fully applicable method has been arrived at to fully work-out philosophical truths. Although the scientific method came out of philosophy, no successful philosophical/scientific methodology has been created.
We had Wittgenstein in the 1930’s – 1950’s and his Philosophy has been hijacked by truly worthless philosophical positions (Relativistic imperialism among others) and I personally think Wittgenstein was on the track to a Philosophy, that accounts for Philosophy it-self and develops a method for it. A Philosophy of Philosophy if you will.
Also, I think a large amount of philosophy is written in a language wholly out-dated and pointless.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Cassidy Baker, Don B. Reynolds. Don B. Reynolds said: Philosophy in the Popular Imagination – Butterflies and Wheels http://bit.ly/aiRtwK […]
Just today, I was conferring with a student entering her first year of undergraduate study. She is excited about embarking on her higher education, and expressed particular enthusiasm for philosophy. We discussed how great it is that, thanks to the internet, serious philosophical inquiry is accessible to everybody. So, when I went to B&W this evening and saw Philosophy in the Popular Imagination under Articles, I thought, How cool. I’ll forward a link to the essay.
Then I read it.
I’m not certain that she would properly appreciate being dismissed as rationally incompetent.
As a law student, I often have to deal with philosophy. When a law or a society needs to be justified, we need philosophy to do it. Calling it silly or unnecessary seems utter nonsense to me. Sure, views like solipsism have no use in everyday society, but Utilitarianism is used daily. Recently I had a talk with someone who said that, were there no free choice, we could just run around killing people without a consequence. Can’t really fight that claim without getting philosophical.
Benjaming Nelson: “IMHO the second you abandoned your responsibility to answer these clear questions with honest answers you lost all ground to your interlocutor.”
You can’t answer questions if their assumptions are wrong. He addressed the assumption and dismissed all three objections like that.
Shane: “I think Philosophy is mostly non-sense because no good, or at-least fully applicable method has been arrived at to fully work-out philosophical truths.”
Reason and logic do not count? It is very easy to evaluate a philosopher’s work simply by evaluating his or her logic. After all, above all philosophers are taught to be able to give a reasoned oppinion on a subject. That is what they are trained to do. Sure, there are differences, but they are caused by underlying assumptions and goals. The methods are sound.
“reason and logic do not count? It is very easy to evaluate a philosopher’s work simply by evaluating his or her logic. After all, above all philosophers are taught to be able to give a reasoned opinion on a subject. That is what they are trained to do. Sure, there are differences, but they are caused by underlying assumptions and goals. The methods are sound.”
I do agree but reason and logic have some-how seemed to transcend philosophy. Also logic has come under attack by the very philosophers whom use logic to attack itself. But on the whole I do agree.
Philosophy also has made me a better computer specialist – I see connections in different ways because I am able to draw upon a different (but not incompatible!) approach to things. In fact, where I work, certain aspects of computer application security are new to us, and the way some of my colleagues saw the problem was in terms of “virtuous software”. I’m not altogether unsympathetic to some aspects of the “virtue ethics” movement, so this proved interesting …
I like reading Plato and Aristotle because it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. With the gift of such a thrill it would be uncharitable and arrogant to dismiss the thinking and literature of the last 2500 years. Why would detractors (presuming to have studied philosophy) respond to a philosophic page without crediting philosophizing? Maybe logic does have its place – OK, well for the logically inclined. I submit. Allah is Great.
Ben-01, yes that would be true if we are dealing with the implicit worries of some naifs. But I encounter everyday people who agree about the usefulness of rationality but still ask those three questions about philosophy.
Have you ever thought that philosophy, or conversation about it, is not really the problem but rather that you, in human conversation at least and apparently here, too, are both immediately condescending and eventually intolerable? All of these traits are on full frontal display above. Maybe your experience in dialogue about philosophy is uniquely bad because you are uniquely unpleasant to talk to about it.
Jimmy Dean, I don’t recognize condescending above. I might be uniquely unpleasant to talk to (hard to monitor it) but no one on this blog represents such a characterization. Good voices with a genuine interest are what come across. Puzzling. “Full frontal display”?
The reason why I reject philosophy is, that since the advent of po-mo, it became a cesspool of both cognitive and moral relativism. And after I found papers on the internet that justify the scientific method from probability theory and information theory alone, I came to conclusion that philosophy as we know it, outlived its usefulness and is now an empty field of inquiry – all useful content has been outsourced to other scientific disciplines, leaving only a bloated but empty shell behind, that aims to encompass everything yet it contains nothing.
I disagree, without Epistemology (philosophical study of knowledge) we would truly be left without any basis for the scientific method. Also we would have no fusion of empiricism and rationalism which is a core foundation of skepticism, and clear-thinking.
Philosophy needs to be re-claimed by a more disciplined and knowledgeable body of people from the hands of relativistic obscurantist’s.
If mathematics can prove the convergence of the scientific method, what is the epistemology thingie good for ?
Mathematics cannot prove the convergence of the scientific method. The Philosophy of Mathematics can, which is generally the basis for all mathematics. Mathematics would be rules with no meanings without a sound basis in epistemology.You must first prove that a discipline has a sound basis in working out, and acquiring knowledge before truly trusting it. This is why divine revelation is clearly non-sense as it has no firm, and sound epistemological foundations.
Shane, you argued that philosophy was worthless because it hasn’t produced any fully applicable method. Now you’re arguing that science and mathematics have grounds in philosophy — epistemology and philosophy of mathematics. Do epistemology and meta-mathematics have fully applicable methods, then? Surely they must, or else they’ve got no good in them.
Mathematics cannot prove the convergence of the scientific method.</i>
Except it did already.
Mathematics would be rules with no meanings without a sound basis in epistemology.
Care to support that assertion ?
You must first prove that a discipline has a sound basis in working out, and acquiring knowledge before truly trusting it.
And then prove the basis of the proof and then prove the basis of the basis of the proof at infinitum. This obviously leads nowhere, just like the entire philosophy thing.
TUT, you give off the distinct impression that you haven’t read any philosophy, but just read about it. Hence you’re using some of the philosopher’s greatest hits, and trying to turn them against philosophy itself, but it doesn’t really work because there isn’t much effort put into the job.
Why do you think that “the scientific method” is something that converges? What does that even mean? It’s barely even grammatical.
You ask Shane to support his assertion about the philosophy of mathematics, but how do you think that anyone can give you any supporting answers if you haven’t presented concrete doubts?
You assert that all justification ends in infinite regress — but why should that even matter? Why should we care? That sounds like the kind of worry-wart activity that these philosopher types go on about, after all.
What does that even mean? It’s barely even grammatical.
It means that, by applying the scientific method, our theories about the internal structure of a system are with increasing probability closer to the real structure of that system. And in the limit they end up being identical with it. ( up to isomporphism, of course )
You assert that all justification ends in infinite regress
Wrong. I did not say, that all justification ends in infinite regress. I said only, that the ridiculous demand that everything to be justified by having a basis in something else, leads to the infinite regress.
but how do you think that anyone can give you any supporting answers if you haven’t presented concrete doubts?
My doubt is very concrete, I am afraid. I doubt that mathematics lacks any meaning per se, and needs it to be supplied by philosophy of mathematics or what ever.
So you’re a structural realist.
The worry that you criticize, i.e., the worry that all grounds require further grounding, is not a feature of foundationalist epistemology, or a problem for holistic epistemology. It’s a feature of skepticism.
“I doubt that mathematics lacks any meaning per se”. Maybe. But first you have to say what it means. That’s concrete.
@Benjamin Nelson: In your first reply, you suggest that I abdicate my responsibility to answer my interlocutor’s genuine doubts. If one’s interlocutor, however, begins in bad faith, then what good would a philosophical discussion be to him or her? I’m of the opinion that a better tack in this kind of case would be to grant her doubts and to try to ferret out what lies behind them. It’s, admittedly, a rather therapeutic view.
@Ken Pidcock: The reference I make in the bit you quote is undoubtedly oblique. Here, I have in mind the ancients’ view, at least as it is adumbrated by the late Hellenistic scholar Pierre Hadot, that philosophy is a “choice of life.” According to Hadot, philosophy is not a theoretical discourse about, say, the problem of other minds; it is, above all, a way of life that one down a certain path. I think that if we bracket professional philosophy (which is by and large a product of the rise of the post-WWII research institution–see. e.g., Bruce Kuklick’s excellent work), then we’re left with the thought that, in some contexts, we can’t understand someone who lives a philosophical life unless we are also willing to undertake an “education of the soul.” Otherwise, the philosopher’s life remains somehow altogether alien to ours.
I suppose the point I’m ultimately making in my reply to both of you is that conversation is not always possible, and yet for the public philosopher much can still be learned from the other’s skeptical (even nihilistic) challenges. Then too there is ultimately something that she and I can both affirm: that there is the “need for philosophy” during moments of intellectual crisis.
Andrew, I half-sympathize. I’m pretty well convinced that the people you’ve chosen as your interlocutors are either able to be convinced with a few quick examples, or they are dangerous fools who need to be overcome.
On the other hand, those questions — left unanswered — are extremely worrisome. After all, there’s certainly a fair bit to worry about when it comes to the profession of contemporary philosophy. And I find it more therapeutic to respond to those who have the strongest arguments.
Benjamin: The interlocutor, here, is what Max Weber would call an “ideal type”: a generalization (admitting of all kinds of exceptions) of an individual who begins by rejecting the philosophical life tout court. Maybe this is one (and probably only one) case where I would agree with Rorty: some people you just can’t talk with.
And yet I’m loath to give up entirely on her. Instead, I would like to imagine–less so in this short, rather thin piece–what the role of the public philosopher is, if any, in the public sphere today. What would it mean to help someone make up his mind or to get him to change his mind if it means neither looking for the kinds of “knockdown arguments” analytic philosophers seem to valorize nor the kinds of counterexamples they find so devastating? I’m particularly attracted, e.g., to Stoics such as Seneca who believed that arguments (broadly construed) had to be suited to their interlocutors much in the way that, at least in principle, therapy aims to be. In his letters of consolation, Seneca uses vivid examples, circles back time and again to the same points, provides maxims, and issues cautions all in the hope that he can put his interlocutor on the right path to peace of mind.
I agree with you–and now I’m circling back to the criticism you make on more than one occasion–that the questions I raise in the article must be answered. Without doubt, they are of vital importance. But there is also something to be said for the fact that they must be answered in the right way with the right person in the right venue. When confronted by a “nihilist” interlocutor, can something still be done apart from, Rortianly, walking away? What, after all, is the right tack? Perhaps one can make her see that philosophy comes, as it were, unbidden, that it always gets a second breather, and that–when the chips are down–she too can (or ought) to be committed to a life of reflection. Perhaps.
True, the function of the ideal-type is to create a contrived model of the world in order to highlight certain similarities and differences that hold between the fictional model and the state of affairs. It effectively involves training yourself to use metaphors in a responsible way.
Weber’s ideal-types aren’t all created equal, however. If your ideal-type is not grounded in unambiguously intelligible concepts, or is only useful for assessing an artificially narrow range of facts, then for all intents and purposes it has failed. (Sometimes these failures are intentional — i.e., when making a strawman — but I don’t believe you’re trying to do that here.)
Audience sensitivity may be very important, to some extent. But consistency across audiences and across time is also important. I raise my concern because in a parenthetical remark you refer to the answering of these questions as a “game”. That’s the last straw, regardless of your audience. Your ideally-typed layman gets what they wanted to hear — philosophy is puzzle-solving and question-mongering — and they go about the easy business of ignoring it. The philosopher feels trivialized, and walks away sadder than ever.
On the other hand, Rorty might have stuck around. But what about the rest of us?
Why philosophy? I’m in it for the money and the chicks.
AWESOME!
This was a great read. I think one thing slightly outside of this situation, but definitely related, is the view of philosophy as a major or careerfield vs. philosophy as….well, philosophy. A lot of people do fail to find the practicality in it, which I think often says something about those people.
Caseyhov – a great read? Not to me. Surely I’m not the only person who has noticed that philosophers are the only group of people who alternate between talking about how superior in insight and wisdom they are to ordinary people and complaining that ordinary people don’t pay attention to them or take them seriously? Is there a connection here?
Daniel, I study philosophy, but your comment was true enough that it made me smile.
I do think philosophy is important, in exactly the same way that education in general is important. But the proof is in the pudding.
Daniel’s comment made me laugh out loud, possibly because I don’t study philosophy (though I do read a little of it now and then). That’s not to say it’s true though – but it is funny.
Daniel is correct I must admit, most “modern philosophers” are pompous, pseudo-linguist’s with almost no brains…(*Cough) Judith B. just to name one!
There are some great philosophers/scientists also , Daniel Dennett for instance, and Peter Singer…
It seems to me to be a reasonably good philosopher in the 21st century you must also be a scientist.
What bothers me about Philosophy (capital P) is its vagueness. Just by tweaking the meanings of words (and philosophers seem to love specially defining words) you can come up with different conclusions. Philosophers claiming to address the same issues come to completely different conclusions, which suggests that the the whole structure is not as rationally sound as it claims to be. Til someone else comes along, uses differently defined words, and (surprise) comes up with wildly different conclusions. Has truth changed? I think not.
In that sense, Philosophy reminds me more of religion, where different religious leaders, using the same set of holy books, come up with radically different answers (ironically on some of the same general questions that philosophers claim to define).
I think the popular concept (mentioned negatively in the text) of ‘personal philosophy’ is actually closer to the mark. People realize they need to make internal decisions, they intuitively understand that not all of those are going to be rationally defensible (either because they are contradictory, or simply because there is not enough information available to fully flush out a solid rational decision). That is not bad. People need a personal philosophy, and the need to examine it periodically, but in doing so they are coming closer to real truth than the high minded individuals.
Science, medicine, etc. may have competing theories, but these are eventually sorted out, or at least the reasons for the different interpretations are plainly defined. That’s where science (even though it has a philosophical element) clearly steps beyond the mire that is philosophy.
jay, I’m not sure your criticism works. Scholars of philosophy regularly defend their formulations using reasons that are plain to see. That’s the stock in trade, or at least it’s supposed to be.
It is an open question as to whether or not scholars of philosophy are better suited to the task of philosophy than any other bloke.
On the one hand, there’s an argument to be made that the history of philosophy is more a story of philosophy-with-a-small-p than anything else. The guy who drank the hemlock and corrupted the youth of Athens certainly didn’t need any universities; he made them. True to form, many of the subsequent philosophers (esp. the empiricists) absolutely hated the schoolmen. And the derision that philosophers have had towards institutions is so embedded and enduring that they have even found a term of abuse to describe one who performs the function of a teacher’s assistant in professional philosophy — the “sophist”.
On the other hand, I doubt that philosophy-with-a-small-p collapses into commonsense revisions to your personal life story, simply because people are careless thinkers. Take a recent anecdote. I was discussing with an acquaintance whether or not peaceful protesters ought to have had their rights taken away from them at the G20 in Toronto. My acquaintance argued as follows: “I’m not saying that the protesters should have stayed home… but fucking stay home.” I pointed out that this argument was, among other things, incoherent. He responded by saying, “I didn’t meant to be incoherent, but…”, and continued with his asinine claims — as if he weren’t expected to be reproached for a lapse in logic. It’s his Personal Life Story, after all. He doesn’t need me to co-author.
I kinda blogged an answer to this kind of question before reading this.
You would think that we could not define a philosopher before defining the subject itself. This I think, is mistaken, for one can be a philosopher about anything, thus I explain everything and nothing. Yet, paradoxically, many claim, not least philosophers themselves that they have no special subject – that they are parasitic upon others – science, history or law for example. Nonetheless, the kinds of questions that are asked, and answers that are provided – are very different to the answers and concerns of the parent subjects studied. Philosophers of science are not scientists (though many are), they are not engaging in science. So what do they do? Therein lies the clue. Philosophy, I would assert is an activity, an attitude and a method of inquiry. It inquires into the thinking of thinking. So, where science studies objects (animals, chemicals, particles for instance) and seeks to understand how they work or what they do, Philosophers meanwhile think about how scientists think about such objects of inquiry and the assumptions implicit therein and the theories which follow from such inquiry. Subsequently philosophers attempt to determine the validity and soundness of such inquiries. To put it succinctly, philosophy is the questioning of assumptions – the assumptions that others -scientists, historians and theologians function by. Historically, or at least since Descartes, the goal of philosophy seemed to strive for indubitable foundations for the sciences and all knowledge. A perhaps more modern aim is to provide a coherent explanation and justification of our thinking and beliefs. They may suggest therefore, that philosophers are merely engaged in micro trivia, who simply fret about little problems that are of little concern to anyone. This of course overstates the issue -why therefore has philosophy been one of the oldest of intellectual subjects – if not the oldest. One that still grips all minds on some level and engages serious thinkers aswell. Subsequently, others may take a more heroic view, arguing that while in many ways they do rely on other disciplines for input, philosophy does offer substantive truths, and that they do have a particular subject – truth or the overall nature of reality. Traditionally, philosophers were seen with asking three questions: 1. What is true?2. What is good?3. What is beauty?The third question seems somewhat effete now, we could replace it with:3. How do we know what is true and good?This question (3) has more of an epistemological flavour to it. While the first two questions should be seeded to other subjects, philosophers should still rightly ask how do they know that, what justifies that. This sounds negative, an attitude that many associate with modern analytic philosophy -that its teaches people “only” to be “bullshit detectors”. Now, when we ask how do they know such and such or is such and such justified – what we are asking for is a rationally coherent answer. This is believe is the answer: philosophy seeks to know truth and the good by rational means, means that any rational or objective person would assent to.This suggest two things: firstly, that philosophers do have a subject – rationality and applying rationality to other disciplines; secondly this would suggest that the fruits of philosophic investigation can affect the epistemic practice and ontological status of other subjects. While it is true, that philosophy does not provide us with ground level facts the way other subjects do, it nonetheless can potentially bracket them, systematise and harmonise them into a rational coherent order or indeed otherwise. Philosophy can draw a line through or place question marks beside the ontological claims of science, history and religion. Many thinkers of these subject at times have tended to react negatively at this conclusion, their superficial dismissal of the subject will not do: to dismiss philosophy by say scientific positivism or religious fideism is itself to make covert philosophic claims and are inherently self-defeating. While this is true, it does not of course extend to the specific metaphysical doctrines of say realism or idealism. What does it all mean? This could be the perennial motto of philosophy. To take two examples one from the philosophy of science the second from the philosophy of religion. Much debate in the philosophy of science, focuses on how we should understand and interpret the scientific endeavour. On what terrain this dispute settles on will affect how we bracket the facts, theories and methods that comprise the sciences. An instrumentalist view, sees science as good for making predictions about things in the world, that it is an indispensable incubator of technology. Posits such as electrons, quarks or neutrinos are simply useful fictions to explain the phenomena. A cousin to this would be to take a constructivist view: the theories we have are empirically adequate, objectively arrived at but only supposing certain background criteria and assumptions which may have more to do with our cognitive capacitates endowed by evolution than with any “real” correspondence with reality. Another view, a kind of realism may state that our theories are indeed corrigible and contingent, but they are the best theories, that purport to describe real phenomena in the world. Furthermore, to state that our scientific theories are useful fictions or construction needs to be seen as a first order claim, and as such may not be a accurate account of the endeavour – which may in fact be incoherent. However we ought to think about this, it does not seem likely that we could science itself to answer such questions (though of course they play a role). The overall structure and coherent account of the endeavour and of the ontological status and epistemic practice of science will have to come from philosophers.The second example is to consider a long running dispute in philosophy of religion. In essence it boils down to this: does the fact of evolution disprove or undermine a belief in god. Many religious people claim yes, as do many atheists. Some state no, and quite a few atheist say no either. A philosopher would explore the issue by examining the beliefs of the different parties, exploring the implications of these beliefs and highlighting the conflicts and contradictions of these beliefs when conjoined. However, there are different beliefs (some of which may be more central or important than others) that can be modified or rejected, all resulting in different conclusions – or different epistemic maps of the ontological terrain. This however, is not relativism, for these conclusions themselves are going to have be scrutinised and many may hold unwelcome implications and tensions that may force revision or abandonment. A Christian may accept evolution but only at the cost of making difficult revisions to their religious beliefs. Likewise a Christian may reject evolution, and a lot of science and rational thinking to boot, or may simply reject evolution but a coherent explanation for doing so but one that is so convoluted and implausible that signals to others an embarrassment. In such situations like this one a philosopher is like an economist telling us what capital we have, what is needed for basic running of our business. He then lays out the options for cutting (what beliefs demand revision or abandonment)and the attendant consequences that follow such “cutting and harmonizing”. So, as these examples show philosophy can affect, first order disciplines and beliefs but it does so at much higher level. It does so mainly in the application of rational thought. So I would contend that philosophy is largely a matter of method, technique and application of concepts and rules. In true philosophic spirit however, these tools and methods themselves are disputed and critiqued by more basic and fundamental concepts. This endeavour is called the philosophy of philosophy.Philosophy to summarise does thus:1. To criticize: ideas, theories and practices, conceptual confusions and logical mistakes. In particular there is a focus on three areas: logical consistency, evidential superiority and practical efficacy.2. To clarify: redefine questions, pose new ones, reject old ones. Draw distinctions, suggest meaning and significance.3. Coherence: to provide systematic coherence and explanation. To achieve consistency, coherence and rational order.4. Collaborative To learn from and engage with scientists, historians, psychologists and sociologists and all other intellectuals.“ One might, in fact, define philosophy as the rational systematization of our thoughts, on basic issues – of the “basic principles” of our understanding of the world and our place in it. We become involved in philosophy in our endeavour to make systemic sense of the extra philosophical “fact” – when we try to answer those big question by systematizing what we think we know about the world, pushing our “knowledge” to its ultimate conclusions and combining items usually kept in convenient separation. Philosophy polices our thought, as it were, as the agent for maintaining law and order in our cognitive endeavours.” – Nicholas Rescher
http://theyoungcontrarian.blogspot.com/
[…] that have previously appeared in Butterflies and Wheels, “Taking Relativism Seriously” and “Philosophy in the Popular Imagination,” I considered to a greater or lesser extent the proper use of public reason. Though consistent […]