One man's look at philosophy

This article by Dan Polansky looks at certain questions concerning philosophy. Some questions are for specialized articles, e.g. logic and epistemology.

I love philosophy. I am horrified and offended by the amount of writing called philosophy that to my mind are pseudophilosophy at best and pure nonsense at worst. And then, I feel philosophy needs a defense; the people who think that philosophy is a load of nonsense appear all too reasonable, given their bad experience. As an approximation, it is above all the Anglophone world that has decent philosophers. They do not necessarily get everything right (or I do not necessarily agree with all that they say), but fundamentally, they talk a lot of sense. Let us mention David Hume, John Locke, J.S.Mill and Bertrand Russell. The British even claim ownership to Popper, arguably more of an Austrian philosopher. The German and French worlds are mixed blessings. To state that German is the language dominated by pseudophilosophers would perhaps be unfair; what, if not a philosopher, is Frege, considered to be one of the greatest logicians ever? And even if one claims that Frege's work on logic is in fact mathematics, one can recall Frege's Sinn und Bedeutung. Popper and Carnap are decent German-language philosophers; some could count Kant in the bag. French is the language of Derrida and other postmodern impostors. But Descartes is fine. Let me add some praise to the two great ancients, Plato and Aristotle; a lot of what they say is obviously untrue or unconvicing, especially from the modern perspective, but their way of going about doing philosophy is worth noting. They were pioneers and got a lot of things wrong.

Let us consider some questions that belong to the field of philosophy today no less than in the ancient times (some part of what used to be called philosophy is now sciences):

What is there? What entities whose existence is implied by language in fact are not there?
What are the ultimate constituents of matter? Perhaps indestructible atoms moving in the Euclidean void?
What is knowledge and how do we know things? How can we avoid wrongly thinking something that is not true?
What distinguishes science from non-science? Is there such a thing as the scientific method?
Is induction a valid form of inference? Is there such a thing as premature generalization?
How do proper nouns refer to their referents? By means of a description or by means of rigid designation?
What is value and how do you define it? Is there something like value? Is anything worthwhile?
What is good and what is not good? What is excellence and quality? How can one reliably detect quality (if it exists) and distinguish it from mere surface appearances and first impressions?
How do definitions work? Can we really capture natural language semantics in definitions? Are definitions worth anything or are they just a passtime or certain kind of addicts?
Shall we enforce the right of freedom of speech, to what extent and why?
What is beauty? How do we know something is beautiful? Is it all subjective, in the eye of the beholder? Is it culturally relative? Is there some universal core of the concept beauty that works across different cultures?

A human hardly gets to do anything without answering at least some of these questions in some at least preliminary or naive way. Thus, as to what is worthwhile, a child could answer that it is pleasure/fun and go enjoying himself in the playground. What remains to be clarified is whether people benefit from a more rigorous inquiry that is philosophy, for some value of benefit of course.

A related question is what is philosophy, which includes a search for definition. In one sense, this metaphilosophical question is unnecessary. Philosophy is the inquiry into the kinds of questions that are being addressed by the books that we find in the philosophy rubric in the library. Conceptually, this answer is unsatisfactory, but it can be granted that to do philosophy, one does not need to clarify technical scoping questions of where exactly is the boundary between philosophy and, say, sciences and other humanities. (And then, is philosophy really properly part of humanities?) Another answer is that philosophy is the kind of inquiry exemplified by the questions above. Yet another is that philosophy is the union of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic and aesthetics and leave it open what it is that binds these fields together. Yet another answer is that philosophy is the inquiry into the kind of (relatively general) questions that are not covered by mathematics, sciences, engineering and other humanities. Yet another is that typical for philosophy is the search for definitions, detection criteria, demarcation criteria, conceptual analysis, tentative general principles, arguments and counter-arguments. Let me add that parts of what is now physics used to be called natural philosophy. What philosophy is not is love of wisdom. That is etymology, not semantics. It points to the desire of Socrates to take opposition to Ancient Greek sophists. Socrates would say: I do not inquire into wisdom to earn money; I inquire for the love of wisdom and the inquiry. The resulting name is something of an etymological trainwreck showing the traces of the origin; most other fields are called -logy, -nomy or -ics. The name philosophy would improve if we would call it sophology or sophics, but the name philosophy is traditional and we can stick to it. (Then again, a physicist may do physics for the love of it and not for profit, as I suspect many do, but the concept of love does not appear in the name physics.)

One charge is that philosophy features two kinds of statements: platitudes and absurdities. I see the appeal of the argument, but to me it's wrong. To me, Popper's falsificationism (previously called hypothetico-deductive method, I think), Kripke's rigid designation and Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions are some examples of source of statements that I feel I would not have figured out myself and that I find enriching. Even Wiennese logical positivism seems to be a valuable contribution; without it, Popper would perhaps not find a good reason to present his falsificationism.

Philosophy can do a great harm. Marx's philosophising pseudoeconomics and his philosophy of the social revolution that will necessarily come caused untold suffering. Nietszche's philosophy could have contributed to Hitler, together with a misapplication of Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. The only remedy I see against bad philosophy is good counter-philosophy. It is Mill who argues in a compelling way for extensive freedom of speech. Instead of censoring Marx and burning all his books, we should use e.g. Popper as a line of defense (and other critics, of course).

The charge that philosophy is mostly nonsense can be in part traced to Wittgenstein (a philosopher, hah). According to Wittgenstein, the task of philosophy would be something like careful analysis of proper language use to help prevent abuses of language that lead to bad philosophy, that is, most philosophy. A contrast to this is Popper, who says that he is not interested in analysis of language but of genuine philosophical problems, which according to Popper exist. Let us recall the poker incident between Wittgenstein and Popper, by which Popper was trying to show that inquiry into proper or good behavior does not need to be meaningless gibberish. Let us consider Democritos. His atomistic proposal was not empirical but rather speculative and its detail does not match modern physics (not only the physical "atoms" are not Democritean atoms, but nor are the putative quarks like Democritean atoms). Popper further argues that a certain ancient philosopher proposed the shape of the Earth to be possibly one of drum, using philosophical argument counter to experience. A step toward a drum is a step toward a sphere (or more accurately, rotational ellipsoid) and a step away from flat Earth resting on tortoise or something. These cases are not abuse of language, and therefore cannot be eliminated by careful analysis of language. They should not be eliminated in any other way either; philosophical theories or speculations are often forerunners of scientific theories.

It may turn out that philosophy is mostly passtime. That is, it may turn out that the philosophical analysis has low utility, scarce practical applications. Then, if one adopts the philosophical stance of egoistic hedonism and if one finds joy in these kinds of analysis, one may say: maybe so. But, then, at least the carbon footprint of philosophy is better than that of, say, hedonic car driving, motor racing or acrobatic flying. And then, one may say: without philosophy, there would not be Monty Python's philosopher sketch, with philosophers playing soccer. See, philosophers are good for something, after all. (Enough with this jocularity! Who is this disruptive derogator of philosophy? Sieze him!) Let us get serious again. It may turn out that large portions of pure mathematics are not much more practically useful than philosophy. But then, perhaps they are philosophy in some sense.

Let me make my bias clear, although it should be obvious by now. I am predominantly interested in Western philosophy and in its latest and most modern versions. Thus, one who wants to learn e.g. physics does not need to study ancient physics; one can study the latest physics even if one does not start with relativity and quantum mechanics, but this is to start with the easier, more accessible applications, not to proceed historically. I find the historical method of teaching philosophy suspect, while perhaps not entirely without merit. I am interested in validity or strength of ideas, concepts, arguments and counter-arguments, and much less in their historical development. Thus, I prefer 20th century philosophers and, say, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online over reading ancient texts. I also strongly prefer engaging in original deliberation, even if it turns out to be wrong. I prefer to read something that makes some sense to reading something of which I cannot make any sense. I avoid wasting my time on the latter, which may result in some loss, but that's life. To add an item against the historical method, I learned logic without recourse to Aristotle and I do not feel I lost much if anything at all. Considering Aristotle is interesting, but it does not seem to be especially valuable as far as the subject matter of logic goes.

One of the greatest and most notable currently living Anglophone philosophers is, in my estimate, Richard Dawkins. He is noted as a biologist and would perhaps deny to be a philosopher, but to my mind, there is a strong philosophical (or at least analytical as opposed to empirical in the style of physics) element in what he does, e.g. in The Selfish Gene.

One man's look at philosophy

See also

Further reading