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The Nature of Philosophy
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The Nature of Philosophy
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What is philosophy?
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Some philosophical questions
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What sort of knowledge can philosophy yield?
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Three main areas of philosophy
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An explanation of the term ‘metaphysics’
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About the rest of this book
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Summary
What is philosophy?
Two answers are frequently given to the question ‘What is philosophy?’
One is that philosophy is an activity rather than a subject – in other
words, you do philosophy rather than learn about it
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Both these suggestions contain more than a germ of
truth but are unsatisfactory, giving little or no idea of the content of
philosophy
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What is common to all such questions is that they are questions
that can be answered only by reasoning
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By and large, these are what can be termed ‘empirical
investigations’
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Some philosophical questions
Let us first look at the sorts of questions philosophers have considered
and then see how they have tried to answer them:
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Do our senses, of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell, present us
with a true picture of the world around us?
Does every event have a cause2? If every event does have a cause,
is this incompatible with being able to make free choices?
We each have a body of flesh and bones, and we also have a mind;
are minds separable from bodies (could we have minds without
bodies)?; do minds and bodies interact and, if so, how?
We observe certain patterns and regularities in the world around
us
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These laws we take to be universal, applying to the
totality of objects existing in the infinity of space and the eternity of
time
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What can justify such claims?
When we judge that someone has done something morally good
(or bad), are we doing any more than expressing our own personal
views? Can morality be anything other than subjective?
Is it the duty of government to try to redress the imbalance of
wealth within society or does any government lack the legitimacy
to do this, so such attempts at redistribution are morally equivalent to slave labour?
Some initial thoughts on these questions
The reason we cannot answer these questions by making observations or doing experiments differs in each case
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In any case, if we doubt whether our
senses give sufficient evidence that objects really exist, then we must
doubt the existence of the instruments themselves
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And if it
really is the case that every event has a cause, what experiments could
be conducted to show this to be compatible with free will? Our actions
may appear to be free, but if this feeling of freedom were an illusion,
how would we ever find out?
So far, I have suggested ways in which the questions cannot be
answered
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First, and this is
why philosophy has been described as conceptual analysis, we can try
to clarify what we mean by the terms used
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For example, think how we might explore what is
meant by ‘cause’
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What do we actually observe in
such cases? Do we literally see one event causing the next or do we see
nothing more than a succession of events? This takes us back to the
question with which we started: what can the senses tell us about the
world? As well as seeing billiard balls, do we also see causes? If we do
not literally see a cause, how do we know about it? Do we infer it? If
it is a matter of inference, is such an inference justified?
Consider the question about thoughts and bodies
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But where do minds fit into such a universe?
Are minds also part of the pattern of cause and effect? Do mental
events have causes and effects? And, if so, are these causes and effects
restricted to other mental events or can they extend to physical events?
If mental interactions cannot be the same as physical interactions,
what sort of interactions are they?
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The Nature of Philosophy
It may be less obvious that questions about moral judgements or
political duties relate to questions about causation or the reliability of
our senses, but there are connections
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But how
do we find out the facts? Is our knowledge based on what we see,
hear, touch, etc
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The last two of our original set of questions also give rise to further
questions
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), through a process of reasoning, or in some other way?
Asking a philosophical question invariably leads to other philosophical questions
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Philosophy commonly questions
beliefs that we usually take for granted
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It is hard to begin to answer
a question when nothing can be taken for granted
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Scientific discoveries trigger philosophical speculation, while theoretical
confusion in science creates the demand for philosophical analyses
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This observation might provoke a deeper question: is
it possible to arrive at knowledge without relying on our senses? The
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knowledge we gain from experience is called ‘empirical knowledge’
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The knowledge that black is black is a priori knowledge;
it can be had independently of our senses telling us what things are black
or even of the experience of anything black
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(Whether we could understand the sentence that expresses
the truth that black is black without experience of the world is a
separate matter
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Three main areas of philosophy
There are many ways of dividing up the subject areas of philosophy
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None the less, we
begin to get a better idea of the scope of philosophy by considering
the following three broad areas
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This area of philosophy deals with the ultimate
nature of reality
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Here the concern is with whether and how
knowledge of reality is possible
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These areas deal
with how we conduct ourselves within the world
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(The
above scheme is based on one suggested by Anthony Quinton in the
Oxford Companion to Philosophy
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Some separate out moral and political philosophy
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A more detailed analysis would produce many more branches of philosophy, some of which are highly
specialized
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The order in which the three areas have been set out above might
suggest an order of priority: what there is, what we can know about it
and what we do about it
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For example, how can we tackle the questions as to what
there is without first investigating the limits of our knowledge? Are we
not in danger of making grandiose claims about ultimate reality only
to discover that we have no way of knowing such ultimate reality, not
even whether it exists? Coming from the other direction, we may feel
that moral and political questions are the ones that should be tackled
first since they are the most urgent
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Even so, we might feel that our answers to such questions can be no
more than provisional
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The best we can say is that the three areas are
interdependent and the answers we obtain to questions in one area
will affect answers to questions in the other areas
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The prefix ‘meta’ has the meaning of ‘after’ or ‘behind’ and is often used in
philosophy to indicate what is referred to as a second-order activity
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– an activity which, in general terms, looks at the framework within
which a first-order activity takes place
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Similarly, while ethics deals with what is right and wrong,
meta-ethics deals with what is meant by ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
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From these considerations, the term ‘metaphysics’ seems an appropriate one
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The term ‘metaphysical’ has also been used for very general,
all-encompassing systems that purport to describe a reality that is
beyond or that transcends everyday experience
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There is a much more mundane account of the meaning of ‘metaphysics’
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Aristotle divided Science (or knowledge)
into two branches, Theoretical and Practical
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A later editor of these notes placed the
section on the First Philosophy after the section on Physics, and this
section became known as the ‘Metaphysics’ simply because it came
after Physics
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In Aristotle, metaphysics encompassed the two broad areas of
ontology and epistemology
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Epistemology is concerned with knowledge:
the structure of knowledge, its origins, the attainability of knowledge and the limitations placed on it
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What is left, when
epistemology is removed from metaphysics, is a number of different topics, often connected only tenuously
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The Nature of Philosophy
When a greater emphasis came to be placed on epistemological
issues, metaphysical discussions seemed to some philosophers to be
too divorced from a knowable reality
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Hume, for example, suggests
that we commit works of metaphysics to the flames
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Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, argues that philosophers are misled into thinking that they have asked meaningful
questions and produced meaningful answers when they have used
words outside their normal context, where they become meaningless
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Despite these criticisms, both Hume and Wittgenstein
dealt with metaphysical questions, and some of the topics within
metaphysics are among the most interesting and most profound in
philosophy
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Philosophy has a long history, and philosophers of the past are still read for the contributions they make in
identifying, formulating and attempting to answer philosophical questions
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This is not an exercise in the
history of ideas, since philosophers of the past are contributors to
contemporary debates
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Although
earlier philosophers do get a mention, the next chapter looks at the
work of a particular philosopher of the seventeenth century
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The historical emphasis continues in chapters 3 and 4, which develop
the epistemological issues raised by Descartes
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Chapter 4 broadens
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the discussion to look at knowledge
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The prevailing
view is that he has not, and Descartes’ successors respond in various
ways to the challenge of scepticism
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Although the questions considered
are metaphysical ones, they serve as introductions to a number of
other subdivisions in philosophy
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The final two chapters, chapters 8 and 9, deal with those branches
of philosophy relating to the conduct of life, in particular moral
philosophy and political philosophy
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There is also a guide to further reading at the end of the book, with
entries for each chapter
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The problem for the beginner in philosophy is not
that of finding material on a particular subject but of trying to limit
this material to something that is manageable
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Most will have their own bibliographies to suggest further reading
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For those
with little or no prior knowledge of philosophy, it is probably a good
idea to begin with chapter 2
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Whatever the
order in which chapters are tackled, learning about philosophy is like
putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
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The Nature of Philosophy
Summary
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There are two short answers to the question ‘what is philosophy?’:
it is an activity and it is conceptual analysis or thinking about
thinking
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Philosophy can be divided into three main areas: metaphysics,
dealing with the nature of the world at the most abstract level;
epistemology, dealing with whether or not we can have knowledge
of this world; and moral and political philosophy, dealing with the
questions of conduct within the world