The Nature of Philosophy

A. The Love of Wisdom

1. Greek Etymology

a. philo = love

b. sophia = wisdom

2. Love: Desire for, pursuit of—it is an active thing

3. Wisdom: Understanding/explanation of the world and the place of persons in it. Distinguished from mere knowledge—it is deeper, more fundamental, more personal, and more practical.

4. Wonder: The state that brings on/about philosophy—it has a nice dual meaning: part wonder in the sense of marvel and part wonder in the sense of curious questioning.

B. Philosophical Method

1. Contrast with art / religion: Both art and religion also involve the pursuit of wisdom, but they employ different methods and are governed by different norms—the criteria for what constitute adequate explanations are different.

2. The Cosmos: from mythos to logos

a. Working assumption = the world is a rationally ordered Cosmos rather than a Chaos.

b. Mythos = anthropomorphic explanations of natural phenomena

c. Logos = having to do with reason, language—root of logic.

3. Rational Pursuit

a. Beliefs require evidence/justification/argument, for which there are certain standards of adequacy

b. No contradictions/inconsistencies allowed—beliefs must hang together as a well-integrated coherent system

c. Must make beliefs and reasoning explicit, clear, and precise

4. Misconception 1: Philosophy is subjective.

It is simply not true that in philosophy every opinion or belief is as good as any other. For, as a rational pursuit, philosophy demands arguments/justification for beliefs and there are objective standards for determining when an argument or justification is adequate. Philosophy is not merely a matter of stating personal opinions or world views, it is a matter of systematically asking and answering questions about the fundamental nature of the world and persons and then attempting to adequately justify those answers in accordance with the norms of rationality.

5. The Philosophic Virtue

a. Basic rational objective: Maximize true beliefs and minimize false beliefs

b. Open-mindedness: Extreme open-mindedness will maximize true beliefs, but it will also maximize false beliefs.

c. Skepticism: Extreme skepticism will minimize false beliefs, but it will also minimize true beliefs.

d. The philosophic virtue is a mean (optimum balance) between extreme open-mindedness and extreme skepticism.

C. Philosophical Subject Matter

1. Contrast with science: Science is a rational pursuit of knowledge about the world, but it differs from philosophy with respect to its content.

2. Fundamental Understanding:

Science is broken into specific disciplines each of which operates on certain unquestioned assumptions. Philosophy seeks a more general and integrated understanding of the world as well as justification for any assumptions (or a smaller set of assumptions). Even when science asks the biggest question it can grapple with—the origin of the universe—there is still a more general more fundamental philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing? Science deals with numbers and posits various objects, properties and forces; while philosophy asks what is the nature of numbers, material objects, properties, relations, etc.

3. Subjectivity and normativity:

Science strives to be completely objective in giving a description/explanation of the world in terms that make no essential reference to how the world is perceived by particular creatures. Philosophy is especially concerned with the nature of persons and how they perceive the world and the relationship between that perception and reality. Science is also a purely descriptive endeavor attempting to tell us how things are. Philosophy is also a normative endeavor attempting to tell us how things should be.

4. From Thales to Socrates

a. Presocratic philosophers were the first scientists, attempting to give rational and impersonal explanations of phenomena.

i. elements

ii. forces

iii. atoms

iv. mathematics

b. Socrates shifted the interest from cosmology to the nature of the Good Life—an explicitly normative concern—and various notions connected with it: virtue, knowledge, justice…

c. Socrates introduced a questioning and critical method as well—dialectic. He demanded explication, precision and justification; and he used logic/argument to criticize views.

5. Misconception 2: Philosophy is useless.

If special sciences are useful, then so is philosophy; as special sciences have all grown out of philosophy. The more general and fundamental descriptive/explanatory issues that remain for philosophy are the most difficult and are necessarily consequent to success in various special sciences. Moreover, philosophy deals with aspects of world that science purposefully ignores—the subjective and the normative. But these areas are crucial to an understanding of the nature of persons and how they fit into the world, as well as to the question—which could not be more practical—of how one should live one’s life.

6. Subdivisions of Philosophy

a. Logic: What makes for good reasoning arguments?

b. Metaphysics: What in the most general and fundamental sense kinds of things are there? How does the subjective and normative relate to the objective and descriptive?

c. Epistemology: What is the scope and nature of human knowledge? What makes for a good or rational belief?

d. Ethics: What makes for the good life? What is the scope and nature of right action? What is the best social-political organization?