After my “Ethics in Science” class today, one of my students asked me a question:
“What is philosophy?”
My immediate response was, “That’s a good question!”
I didn’t have a course catalogue handy from which to crib a pithy description, nor my department website (although it turns out that describes instrumental reasons one might want to study philosophy rather than pinning down what exactly it is that you’d be studying).
I could have gone the Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” route, but I have too many memories of people doing this in my graduate department — and in a way so narrow that is seemed often to put everything that was not logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, or old school philosophy of science on the “That doesn’t look like philosophy to me!” side of the line.
What I ended up saying is that philosophy tends to take things we take for granted — justice, right and wrong, friendship, time and space, knowledge, science, beauty, what have you — and interrogate what we think we know about them.
Do we have a coherent concept of (say) cause and effect? Do we have a consistent view? Is it a view that corresponds to actual stuff in the world, or just to the structures of the human mind organizing the information we can get about the stuff in the world? Do we need that concept to do other stuff we care about? Would we be better off without such a concept (and if so, how)?
What comes out of these efforts at interrogation varies. Sometimes we come away with a better understanding of the concept or practice about which we’ve been asking questions. Sometimes we come away with a lot of unanswered questions (some of which may even leave us without good strategies for trying to nail down answers). Sometimes we piss people off, upset the social order, and get handed the cup o’ hemlock.
Maybe this means that philosophy is less a unified subject matter than a set of habits of mind, “question[ing] everything … except your intelligence,” as the Philosophy Talk guys describe it in their tagline. Or maybe it means I need to be sure I have a concise answer at the ready the next time this question comes up … except that I had a real Suzanne Farrell moment* thinking about the question: I didn’t know the answer to the question, but I love that my student made me think about it again.
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* Let the record reflect that this was a Suzanne Farrell moment that did not involve an affair with the parent of one of my students.
Interesting post. I have always thought of philosophy as the analysis of what we mean when we make assertions about things.
So, philosophy of science is the analysis of what we mean when make assertions about the nature of the physical world. Philosophy of mind is the analysis of what we mean when we make assertions about the nature of thought. Ethics is the analysis of what we mean when we make assertions about right and wrong. Legal philosophy is the analysis of what we mean when we make assertions about justice.
Under this view, of course, philosophy is purely descriptive, and never normative. I’m not sure how much of actual philosophy in practice escapes my definition.
A broad and inclusive definition: An attempt to understand what it means to be reasonable and apply that to various questions.
Less broad definitions can limit what “questions” you have in mind, but being reasonable seems like the most important element to me, and many agree that natural science is still ultimately a branch of philosophy.
I’ve had to teach Intro to Philosophy in settings where it’s a required course, so I felt obliged to explain to students why their benevolent overlords thought philosophy was so important. The definition I came up with is something like `the critical examination of our fundamental commitments’, where fundamental commitments are something like the things that have to be true for the activities we care about the most to make sense: the existence of God, of objective ethical judgments, that racism is no longer a problem for our society, that science shouldn’t be influenced by values, etc. I came up with this after reading Gary Gutting’s What Philosophers Know, and I notice that it’s quite close to Janet’s definition.
A hypothesis: Different conceptions of the aim of philosophy (mine; purely descriptive linguistic or conceptual analysis; uncovering fundamental truths about the nature of existence; etc.) are tied to different conceptions of the social function of philosophy. When philosophy is isolated from social problems, it’s perfectly fine to just do linguistic analysis. When philosophy is meant to justify metaphysically the social order — this is arguably what Hegel and Aquinas and Plato were up to — then it tries to construct the appropriate metaphysics. And when philosophy is tied to social reform movements — my definition is also inspired in part by John Dewey — it tends to focus (in a critical way) on the social status quo.