My friend Aubrey asked me to recommend to him a guide to philosophy for beginners, or at least for non-academics. I came up with a few. However, I couldn’t think of any really good ones that weren’t biased or skewed or limited purely to western style of thinking or subject to some other great defect. So after thinking for a bit I told him I would write him one. Here it is. I hope it is not too vulnerable to the same charges I just laid against other authors of similar texts.
This post is somewhat of an introduction to the piece. The whole thing will come over 5 or 6 posts. Almost everyone, at some stage in their life, has an interest in philosophy; a desire to grasp at the more fundamental questions in life. And philosophy is all around us. It shapes the way we think of ourselves, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives, and the way we think the world should be run. Funnily enough, these are the four main chapters I have divided this piece up into. Rather than have a boring chronology of the history of philosophy, I have separated out ideas into four major themes. However each theme is related. Ones philosophy should be comprehensive and consistent and so all these themes, and others, should be dealt with together.
I have tried to be independent and fair in my analysis, yet I have also occasionally expressed my own opinions where it has served to further the line of thinking. I have also, as is inevitable, provided my own interpretation of various arguments. I have tried to give famous philosophers the benefit of the doubt and provide generous interpretations. They are famous and influential not necessarily because they were right but nonetheless they are famous and influential for a reason, and one should try and understand those reasons. Anyway, let’s rock ‘n’ roll.
– What is philosophy?
Philosophy is probably the only academic discipline that cannot be easily defined by the people who study and practice it. Indeed meta-philosophy is itself a sub branch of philosophy that studies the question ‘what is philosophy?’. Originally, in ancient times, philosophy was basically the study of everything. It was extremely broad and included theology, science, maths and the like. All philosophy meant – literally in ancient Greek- was ‘love of wisdom’. But slowly areas of study have broken away and become their own. First it was sciences and then more recently disciplines which have come to be known as social sciences. The rise of science, following the renaissance, saw new knowledge that possessed groundbreaking certainty. Although some philosophies seem far more likely than others to be true, usually philosophers have been unable to appeal to any objective facts to settle their disputes and prove or disprove their ideas. So when scientists started to be able to prove their theories with seemingly mathematical precision by testing them in the real world it left philosophers feeling rather insecure that they couldn’t do the same. Who knows if there is objective non-scientific knowledge out there that we can discover if we do philosophy well enough? Probably there isn’t. Yet that doesn’t mean philosophy is not worth thinking about.
Philosophy helps us to clarify what we believe. By analysing and rationalising, we can come up with a clearer picture of the world and get a fuller and more sophisticated view. In the process we can become more consistent and rational (after all, consistency is surely a key element of rationality). This is what Socrates was trying to push his contemporaries towards. He would ask people questions about what they believed, with the aim of exposing logical inconsistencies. For example in the Euthyphro he asked the character whose name appears in the title of the dialogue, what good is. Euthyphro was a firm believer and asserted that what is good is what the gods liked. But Socrates pressed him on this. He said that according to the traditions and myths that Euthyphro believed in, there are many gods and the gods often disagree about what they like. Indeed they are frequently at war. An action which one god thinks is good and another thinks is bad, cannot be both good and bad. So what is good cannot merely be what the gods prefer. Thus Euthyphro was left to ponder his beliefs until he can come up with something better, something more sophisticated. Socrates (and philosophers ever since) have demanded that one’s conclusions follow consistently from ones premises.
A. J. Ayer and the logical positivists of the early twentieth century argued that analysing and logical rationalising is all philosophy could ever aim to do. Clarifying concepts and ruling out illogical beliefs was what philosophers should limit their time to; they could never hope to discover anything real about the world without deferring to scientists or other experts. This, though, is a very narrow view of philosophy. And if philosophy is anything it is broad. Everybody does it, and more regularly than you might think, even if not everyone does it particularly well. Everybody has a philosophy, a world view, a Weltanschauung, a particular perspective we approach things from. The American philosopher William James (brother of Henry James and god-son of Ralph Waldo Emerson) thought philosophy should be pragmatic. It should be useful and help people. For it to be useful to regular people it must be personal. Philosophy should help people be able to nut out a consistent and comprehensive world view that is going to help you function in a world full of diverse and inconsistent beliefs and ideologies. To enable us to steer through an ocean of incoherence; to balance competing demands and commitments; to combine both that which seems personally appealing and that which seems best for humanity.
Philosophy aims to discover not just what is, but what should be. Philosophy not only asks how things are, but questions whether they should be such. Biology can tell us how to clone things, but only philosophy can help us decide whether we should clone things. Economics, accountancy and the like can tell us how to make money in the easiest way, but only philosophy can help us decide whether we should make money in that way. Should we make money by promoting problem gambling or by convincing African mothers who can hardly afford it to buy baby formula rather than breast feed? Should we make money by emitting fossil fuels? Are these business practices moral? Permissible? Should a multi-national corporation care about the preservation of local culture when deciding where to expand next? These are philosophical questions which have real world consequences.
Questioning what should be done is what got Socrates in trouble and ultimately executed, but this kind of thinking is what makes philosophy so valuable. Without it, how could we ever have hope for the future? How could we dream about a better world? Philosophy seeks rational grounds for constructive criticism, of individuals as well as ideas. It challenges us. It throws our assumptions out the window because it is the only academic discipline that has no assumptions. And it is not just academic; it pervades our every thought and deed.
Stay tuned for parts 2 through 5, and there might be a 6th.
Elliot Brice's musings. 