What is Philosophy?

(With special attention to ethics)

I have a common-sense idea of philosophy: philosophy is the most comprehensive and most general discourse,_[1] and one which can help someone in the formation of a general personal point of view or “philosophy of life”.  A general discourse regrets leaving anything out (as it inevitably must.) Philosophy, from this point of view, talks about everything, doing the best job it can, and marking the places where guesses have had to be made. My model of a philosopher is Montaigne, though William James and John Dewey fill the bill well enough.

The target audience for philosophy would not be professional philosophers, but the educated general public. Professionalists (sic) always assume that generalism means writing down to the less-educated, but that is not true. Imagine, for example,  a Nobel physicist, a high-tech entrepreneur, a visionary statesman, and a major historian, all with high intelligence, broad-ranging interests and a good general education. The philosopher would want to write a book that all of them could read – and more to the point, one that they all would want to read.

My idea of philosophy is contrary to the professional’s idea. Professional philosophers believe that theirs is a specialized study and need not be intelligible or interesting to anyone outside the profession. Rather than regretting what they've left out, they are proud of their exclusion of certain kinds of questions (above all, the political and ethical questions of the day), considering exclusion to be a  mark of professionalism. Many of them think that philosophy is an exact,  progressive science, and that philosophers have no more need to read works from the past than physicists have to read the original text of Newton’s Principia. For them, the goal of philosophy is to answer purely-philosophical questions with absolute clarity and certainty, abstracting and formalizing the questions to the necessary necessary for the attainment of this certainty.

Now, for the sake of argument I might concede that, in itself, this philosophy that I don’t like much is perfectly valid. In that case I would only ask that there be somewhere in the university, in one department or another, for the kind of philosophy that I do like -- I would not insist that the department be called "philosophy". (Alternatively, philosophy departments might include both types of philosophers). However, my perception is that neither of these compromises would appeal to professional philosophers. This profession seems to take an inordinate pride in its specialized methods, and seems to speak of the old “world-view” philosophers with an amused condescension. It does not seem to me that they think that the philosophy I admire has any place in the university at all._[2]

I think that this professional pride is misplaced, and grounded on a grave misunderstanding of science. Their idea seems to be that if scientific methods can be shown to have been strictly followed, and that if the proposition thus produced can be verified as “true”, then you have science. My own  understanding, however, is that science is judged by of the power of its results, and that if a method comes up with results it is scientific -- but not otherwise. Truths without consequence are not valued by science (even if they are weakly scientific in some sense), and if “correct methods” do not come up with results, they are regarded as having been applied to the wrong problem. (The comparison might be made to Simple Simon fishing in a pail).

Where are the powerful results of analytic philosophy? When I look at the highly technical and difficult language of thermodynamics, for example, I have no problem with it. There are all kinds of things that people who understand thermodynamics can do, which could never be done by someone who doesn’t understand thermodynamics – and you do not have to understand thermodynamics in order to know this._[3]

But what is it that a technical philosopher can do that no one else can do?  For example, what improvements have been brought to ethics by philosophers' technical discussions of ethics?  Whenever trained philosophers enter into an ethical discussion, in my experience, they first strip it of all actual context (historical, political, or religious). They then restate the problem in terms of the most recent philosophical debate, and invent hypotheticals to illustrate their points. (“Should Algernon have eaten Aunt Augusta’s cucumber sandwiches?”)  Next they enter into the metaethical discussion mandated by their technical restatement of the problem. And finally we get  an endless metaethical debate about consequentialism and utilitarianism, or relativism and universalism Once time runs out, everyone agrees to disagree.

And we never do find out about the cucumber sandwiches.

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NOTES

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

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