This is a short story of what philosophy is about.
In the beginning, and up to a really long time ago, there weren't a whole lot of career options available to most people. There was farming, soldiering, metalworking, woodworking, thieving, fishing, herding, pirating, and things like that. These career options were all basic activities that revolved around the necessities of life. But once in a while it happened that there would be some people who had some free time to do some non-necessity-oriented things. These things would include studying the stars at night to see if there was some pattern there to them, or breaking open rocks to see what they are made of, or pouring some water out of a pitcher from on top of a cliff to see how it disperses in the wind, or digging a hole in the ground to trace the roots of a tree to see how far they go. Most people who were engaged in necessary tasks would look askance at those who spent time with non-essential interests and would derisively call them "philosophers!" So anyone doing something useful had a legitimate profession or trade to follow, and anyone doing anything else was lumped into the category of philosopher.
Over time people began to discover that success at the necessary tasks of life had some dependence on what some of these philosopher-types were doing. For example, people who built roads started to see that the people who were breaking rocks and learning things about them had some useful information about how and where it is best to build a road. Or for example, people who transported things in ships saw that the people who gazed at stars could figure out where the stars were going to be at different times and places and thus could help with guiding the ships. So people found that there were some good practical uses for the knowledge gained by what otherwise looked like impractical activity.
When people realized the value of this seemingly non-necessary knowledge, it then happened that this specialized knowledge, which became the sciences, started building up and taking on a life of its own. Along side the bodies of knowledge were people focusing their effort on understanding the knowledge and extending it further. So the sciences appeared and split off from the big lump category of philosophy, from what was then called natural philosophy, to become pursuits of their own, and each had their specialists to carry on the work of knowledge collection and addition, these people being called scientists. Over time this spin-off of specific sciences took more and more things out of the generic category of philosophy to the point where there were just a few things left for philosophy to be about.
With this historical story as a background, there are then two ways of looking at philosophy and what it is about:
(a) One way to look at philosophy is that it is about general principles that apply across many different studies, across the many different specialized sciences. General principles applying across sciences aren't taken up whole by any science; they don't belong specially to any one of them.
(b) A second way to look at philosophy is that it is about various things that no specific science has taken up on its own, as its own. So philosophy has in it the things that no specific science has claimed for its own domain.
Consider some examples of each of these in turn.
(1) One thing that is general to many different sciences is, for example, methodology. So one way to look at philosophy is to say that it is about methodology: What methods do we use to get at what we want to know? What methods are reliable to use regardless of the subject that is being studied? In a sense philosophy is the science of methodology, concerned with the methods of addressing questions and problems, no matter what they are about.
When you are concerned with methods and methodology, you search out and evaluate different methods to compare them with each other. For an example of finding and evaluating methods, we can consider what method to use for answering a silly question that people have been known to ask: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
In one method of answering this question you are supposed to take a position one way to another yes or no, and then depending on which answer you start with, someone will raise up some problem with that answer to make you want to change your mind. After you go back and forth between different answers, the trick in the end is either to try to make you think that there really is no answer, since no answer that you give ends up being defensible, or to make you stick with one answer even if its hard to defend. So this method of addressing this question is to blurt out an intuition on one side or another and then see if you can defend it, or how well, or how long you can defend it. For simplicity just call this the method of defense.
But is that really a good method of addressing questions? A better method, instead of jumping on one horn or another and seeing what happens, is to break down the question into its parts first, so as to be clear on what the question is actually about. By breaking a question down into pieces, each piece can be considered for what kind of sense it makes, and this may give us some clearer way of answering what it asks. For simplicity call this the method of analysis.
By going into detail, we can compare the method of defense with the method of analysis. Here's a way of breaking down this question into its pieces: The question says that there is no one around to hear the tree falling. Does this mean no people, or does it mean no thing capable of perceiving a sound? If it only means no people then the answer to the question would need to be yes, the tree does make a sound, and this is true because there would still be animals around who could hear the sound just as well as people, since most animals are capable of perceiving sounds. However, if the question is supposing that there is nothing around capable of perceiving sounds, then the answer to the question must be no, since there would be no perception of sound.
Also, the question asks whether the tree makes a sound, but there is no specification as to what that involves. In the normal sense, a sound is a perception in the sensory abilities of someone or something that is capable of perceiving a sound; in other words, a sound is an experience. But clearly a physical object in motion doesn't automatically create experiences of any kind. One thing a tree does when it falls is generate sound waves, and sound waves are not the same as sound. Even if a perceiver capable of experiencing sound is present, sound waves do not necessarily create a sound, since the waves can be too high or too low in frequency to make a sound experience in a perceiver.
In the end, by using the method of analysis, the overall answer to the question is "no", but this answer only appears after we have a breakdown of the question into parts and a specification as to what exactly the parts are asking of us: If a tree falls in a forest and no one (that is, no perceiver) is around to hear it, it does not make a sound, though it does make sound waves which would make a sound if some perceiver was there and capable of detecting them.
This is an example of an evaluation of methods, and how philosophy is supposed to contribute to the knowledge process by offering or evaluating different methods and being able to help determine which method is best. Thus we have one way of looking at what philosophy is all about.
(2) If the above was an example of something (methodology) that is general across many different specialized bodies of knowledge, many sciences, there are also many subjects left out on their own. Another way of looking at philosophy is that it is about subjects that don't fit into any other specialty, things that were never “spun off” into another subject, into a specialty science.
The things left out on their own include questions about reality, in the sense of what's really real, or about knowledge, in the sense of what do we know and how do we know it, or about morality, in the sense of what is right to do, and why is it right. Traditionally these kinds of things are called “first principles” in that they are about the most basic issues, and that they have to be dealt with before you can really ultimately solve questions about any specific problem. Philosophical first principles are starting points, and you have to start somewhere. For example, to build a house you have to start with the foundation, and the foundation has to start somewhere and sit on something. Traditionally, the subject of philosophy has been divided up into these three main categories of first principles:
(a) Metaphysics: which is subdivided into ontology (what exists) and epistemology (what we know),
(b) Ethics: the basic rules of how we should behave,
(c) Logic: the basic rules of reasoning.
As an example of a philosophical issue of first principles (one of metaphysics), consider at the most basic level the fundamental raw materials we have to work with when trying to understand the world around us, materials we get from our senses. At the simplest level we have a visual field, something like a screen filled with image-series and pictures and spots; also an auditory field of sounds, some louder and some softer; also a tactile field, with feels of hot, cold, sharp, soft, and so on. Many of these experiences, which we can call "appearances," coordinate with one another in the sense that something on the visual screen will occur with a tactile feel too, and an auditory sensation in addition after an abrupt tactile feel. But some of these appearances do not have coordinates with other appearances: Some visual spots we don't have a feel for, some feels don't have “see-ings” to go with them. The fact that appearances sometimes coordinate and sometimes don't just makes harder the task that we have in dealing with appearances, namely, using them to make the best guess we can as to what is actually out there, what we call “reality.” At best we are in a situation where we collect and monitor a whole lot of appearances and make extrapolations from them, making a leap of judgment from the appearances we have to a supposition about what is out there beyond or behind them.
The basic presumption we have about the world is that there is a reality out there that is connected with the appearances we have, and maybe that this reality causes these appearances in us. The obvious problem with this presumption is that is it just that, a presumption. Now in practical terms of everyday life, this is a presumption that we almost have to make, or at least we find it very reasonable to make. But we can't give that working presumption our full and complete confidence, since there are obvious cases where there is a complete mismatch between our appearances and any reality out there. These mismatches include things like mirages (sure did see it but once we got there it wasn't) or special limitations of our vision (parallax, seeing railroad tracks converge in the distance when they don't), or disrupted senses (due to illness we can see or hear things oddly).
This is an example of a philosophical first principles issue, the distinction between our appearances and reality, the raw materials of the senses and what things out there they may or may not coordinate with. Between the two we make judgments about how much we will trust them to connect or not.
All that was a short story of what philosophy is about.
(published 5/12/19)
Reader Question: How or where does it fit in here to say something like “the philosophy of (some person)” or “the philosophy of (some subject)” or even “my philosophy about (something) is this. . .”?
Writer Response:
With the first case, to talk about the philosophy of someone is to list their theories or ideas or innovations, but this doesn’t necessarily involve a reference to any basic principles of some subject. On the example of the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, as a case in point, that would refer to the ideas that he had and how those ideas relate to each other. In rare cases, to refer to the philosophy of someone is to point out the impact that they had on the theory of the basic principles of a subject. An example of this may be referring to the philosophy of Descartes with a specific regard to the principles of geometry.
With the second case, this is just a specific and further extension of the idea of basic principles. For example, the philosophy of language is about the basic principles of how our language influences our thought, and vice versa, among other things, as an example.
In the third case, however, we get a little bit too far away from anything that may be about basic principles. In most everyday cases, when people talk about their philosophy about something they are referring to their beliefs and theories and opinions on that subject. There’s no problem with people having these thoughts about any subject; its just that beliefs and theories just by themselves are not definitive about anything.
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