Philosophy as a phenomenon of culture.

Philosophy is an ancient subject. Important philosophical traditions arose in all of the major civilizations of the ancient world, from China, to India, the Near and Middle East, and the early civilizations of the Mediterranean basin. The philosophical tradition specifically in the West is traced by most scholars back to the first attempts by the ancient Greeks around 600 B.C. to provide a comprehensive account of the origin and nature of the world based on observation and reasoning. From a consideration of the nature and origin of the world, attention soon turned to human beings and their place in nature, and to the relation of people to each other. These two broad concerns, central to all philosophical traditions, still characterize philosophy today.

The word ‘philosophy’ is derived from the combination of the ancient Greek ‘philos’, which means ‘love’, and ‘sophia’, which means ‘wisdom’. In its broadest and original use, ‘philosophy’ means the systematic study of the world and our place in it. This may sound like the project that many people today associate with science, and, indeed, in some places the dividing line between philosophy as a contemporary discipline and science becomes unclear. But they are still quite distinct disciplines, as anyone who has done a bit of both will readily recognize. However, originally there was literally no line at all between the two: science and philosophy began at the same time and sprang from the same source, namely, the desire for a unified account of the whole of the world based on reason. This is reflected in the history of the term ‘philosophy’. Even up to the end of the 19th century, what we now call ‘natural science’ was known as ‘natural philosophy’; the rest of philosophy, traditionally conceived, was divided into ‘moral philosophy’, dealing with human beings and human action, and ‘metaphysical philosophy’, dealing with the ultimate origins and principles of explanation of things. This is also reflected in the title of the highest academic degrees offered at universities, the Ph.D., or Doctor of Philosophy. (The term ‘science’, too, until recently, was used more commonly in a broader sense than today; from the Latin ‘scientia’, the state of having knowledge, it was widely used to mean simply ‘knowledge’ or, more specifically, ‘a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study’.)

The terminological division between science and philosophy, then, has been recent. However, there have always been at least two different kinds of activities pursued in attempts to provide a unified account of the world and our place in it. Both of these activities have been present from the very beginning, though they have not always been clearly identified and distinguished. On the one hand, there are some things we can say about the nature of the world that are (relatively) a priori in character (before experience). What this means is that, by and large, we don’t have to investigate the world very much, if at all, to discover that these things are true. For example, no experimentation is needed to know the truth of fundamental principles of logic, such as the law of the excluded middle–that is, the principle that for any proposition p, either p is the case or it is not the case. Similarly, many people would accept a priori that it is wrong to cause harm needlessly, and that for every right someone has, there is a correlative duty. On the other hand, there are many other things we can know about the world only by observing it and perhaps formulating theories about what we observe to explain it. Such knowledge is called ‘a posteriori’ (after experience). For example, we can know the number of the planets only a posteriori. Likewise, we can know the number and natures of elementary particles, if at all, only a posteriori. This distinction allows us to give a rough characterization of the distinction between philosophy and science, as that is understood today: philosophy, by and large, is concerned with what can be known relatively a priori; science with what can be known only at least in part a posteriori. Science, even in its most abstract theoretical reaches in physics, rests ultimately on observation and experiment. Philosophy, even in its least theoretical aspects, is concerned with what can be known largely through a consideration of how our concepts structure our thinking about the world, and, if the world is a way that we can think about, with the correlative structure of the world itself.

It should be noted that this distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge is itself the subject of philosophical investigation. (It belongs to a field of philosophy known as ‘epistemology’ or ‘the theory of knowledge’.) It should be thought of here only as a rough way of characterizing the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines. There are (at least) two reasons for this. First, there are a variety of theoretical characterizations of the distinction, and many philosophers regard the distinction as better thought of as a matter of degree than a strict dichotomy. Second, while philosophy is characteristically general and is not an experimental subject, it is also not indifferent to empirical knowledge. Many areas of applied philosophy, e.g., rely heavily on empirical knowledge, and even general philosophical systems may have a variety of clearly empirical assumptions at their foundation, assumptions, for example, about human nature and its limitations.

Even apart from these qualifications, the distinction between relatively a priori and relatively a posteriori disciplines is not enough by itself enough to capture what distinguishes philosophy from other intellectual disciplines. For instance, mathematics is also a highly a priori discipline, but is not philosophical in character (though philosophical questions arise in considering the foundations of mathematics, which is also a concern of the field of philosophy known as the philosophy of mathematics). And it would also be a mistake to suppose that a priori questions of the sort which philosophy often seeks to answer are not also sometimes of crucial importance in empirical science. For example, one of the greatest theoretical advances in physics, special relativity, was accomplished by Einstein’s careful analysis of the concept of simultaneity. Philosophy is also distinguished by the kinds of relatively a priori questions it raises. Philosophical questions and problems arise when we investigate various fundamental categories of human activity and thought at the deepest level possible. We can say that philosophical questions are framework questions, in the sense that they are questions that arise about the framework of our thought about one or another fundamental area of human investigation.

Philosophy has also given rise historically to global and comprehensive accounts of the nature of the world and of the relation of human beings to it. Comprehensive philosophical systems are a natural outcome of the desire at once to exhibit the universe as ultimately intelligible and to carry out the investigation at the most general and fundamental level possible. System building on this grand scale was once the central activity of philosophy. In this more skeptical age, it is not as widely pursued as it used to be. But it tends to remain the sole province of philosophy, since other intellectual disciplines define themselves by how they limit their object of study.

These general remarks provide at best a framework for thinking about philosophy. The best way to get a real sense of the nature of philosophy is to consider some examples of the sort of questions that philosophers have attempted to answer. Many of these questions are ordinary and deceptively simple. For example, one question which every person faces is, ‘How ought I to live?’ This has been said to be the most fundamental question of ethics (from the Greek ethos, ‘character’). Since this question is not about the sort of life one does live, or even the sorts of lives most people live, it cannot be answered by describing the way one actually lives or the way others live or have lived. An answer to the question ‘How ought I to live?’ is intended to help one to guide one’s life; what we want in answer to it is a prescription, a model, or a norm or ideal to which we can compare our lives, and on the basis of which we can modify our lives to bring them into accordance with the ideal we hold up to ourselves. For this reason, this is called a ‘normative question’. A full answer to the question ‘How ought I to live?’ will involve a system of normative principles which govern one’s reasoning about what to do in various circumstances. In attempting to answer this question, philosophers have also been led to raise questions about many of the central concepts involved in practical reasoning, such as those of good, right, duty, obligation, virtue, rationality and choice, as well as second-order questions about the objectivity or subjectivity of claims made using these concepts, and whether the truth of such claims is relative to cultures or social systems, as well as questions about the extent to which we are in a position to offer well-grounded answers to normative questions.

Another, connected, traditional question of philosophy is whether our actions can be considered to be free or not. This is traditionally called ‘the problem of freedom of the will’. When a leaf falls from a tree, the time of its fall, the path it takes, and the place it comes to rest, are determined (so far as they are at all) by the laws of nature and the particular conditions present in the leaf’s environment. It does not choose to fall, and if it did, its choice would make no difference to its movements. Let us say someone moves her hand in a gesture of farewell. What distinguishes this movement from the movement of the leaf? What makes the gesture an expression of agency? What, if anything, makes it free? Is it required that she could have refrained from the gesture? If so, how could this requirement be met compatibly with recognizing ourselves as natural objects just as much subject to the reign of natural law as the leaf? And if our actions are not free, can we make sense of our practices of assigning praise and blame?

These questions illustrate some of the most important philosophical questions that arise from reflection on our nature as agents. Similarly fundamental philosophical questions arise in other areas of inquiry, and at the meta-level of theorizing about the nature of rational inquiry itself. Here are a number of examples which illustrate the broad range of philosophical questions. Consider first a subfield in the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of space and time. One of the most difficult questions is one of the most simply stated: What is time? Do points of time exist, or is this merely a convenient way of speaking? Do three-dimensional objects endure through time, or is this an illusion, and are all objects, rather, contrary to common sense, actually four-dimensional objects? Can this latter view be reconciled with our ordinary ways of thinking about ourselves and the things we interact with? Turning to the philosophy of mind, what makes some states and events mental states and events? How is it possible to think about the most distant objects in the universe, or the future or the past, or merely possible things, like a unicorn or a winged horse? How can a physical object, constructed of bone and flesh and sinew, and ultimately out of elementary particles, be conscious? In the philosophy of language: what makes the sounds one utters when one asks a question, or makes a statement, mean something, and mean what they do in particular? What distinguishes language from other sorts of organized social activity; what distinguishes speech from the dance of a bee that directs members of its hive to the location of nectar? In metaphysics: what is the nature of causation? When does one event cause another? What are the fundamental categories into which things fall (what is the correct ontology)? Are there events, as well as objects, are there states of affairs and facts? Are some kinds of things more logically fundamental than others? Aesthetics: what makes a thing beautiful? What makes something a work of art? Why is it important, if it is? Are judgements of artistic value objective? What is the relation between art and emotion? Epistemology: what is knowledge? What are we justified in believing? How do we know things about our own minds, the world around us, the past, the future, and the minds of others? Can there be a rational and objective ground for belief at all? In the philosophy of culture: what is our status as social beings? How are our most fundamental features affected or determined by our social and cultural environments? Is it possible to achieve a culture independent perspective on the nature of our natural and social environments?

It is characteristic of philosophy also, as some of these questions suggest and as noted above, that the nature of philosophy itself, its methodology, and the existence and intelligibility of the special kind of knowledge, a priori knowledge, which traditionally has been seen as the result of philosophical inquiry, are themselves subjects for philosophical inquiry and criticism. Philosophy is a peculiarly self-critical enterprise. While philosophy has traditionally presented its results as timeless truths, there has always been a skeptical strain in philosophy as well, which doubts the pretensions of philosophy to provide us with timeless, absolute truths. Both in ancient times, and since, some philosophers have wondered whether the ideal of philosophy is not simply an empty hope. Recently, some traditional philosophy has come under attack as presenting as timeless truths what were in fact theories and principles which, dressed up in the garb of reason, served merely to perpetuate contemporary social or power structures. However, that philosophy is in this way a self-critical enterprise, far from indicating any fundamental weakness, is in fact one of its strengths, since it is only by such continual reexamination of the most fundamental assumptions we make in inquiry that we can ultimately satisfy ourselves about its legitimacy–if, indeed, this is possible.

From the list of questions above, and from our earlier remarks, it is clear that philosophy is not characterized by its subject matter. Its subject matter is everything. It is rather characterized by the kinds of questions which it raises and attempts to answer. It is concerned with the most general theoretical questions that can be raised about any subject. That is why for any fundamental domain of human inquiry there is a philosophy of that subject. The most general questions are those that have to be settled (largely) prior to empirical investigation, because they are instrumental in fixing the subject matter of empirical investigation and the framework within which it takes place. Furthermore, there seem to be some subject matters the proper method of inquiry into which is necessarily a priori. Normative questions, as we have seen, seem to be of this sort, because of the independence of their answers from how people actually live or behave.