WhatIsPhilosophy

What Is Philosophy?

To most who've never studied it, what philosophy is would seem one of life's great mysteries. Everyone knows what can be done with a degree in business, engineering, law, or medicine. But philosophy? It can't manage a factory, design an airplane, administer justice, or lower blood pressure. Presumably it can philosophize, but of what practical use is that? Philosophy is just a lot of pointless questions, asked by overeducated, amoral, idle elitists, who lack the ambition or practical skill to do anything worthwhile. At least that's how it appears to average Americans, whose educational system has never bothered to inform them what gave rise to the natural sciences, where the ideas for democracy and free markets came from, or what generated the logic that makes their phones and computers work. Philosophy? Really? Really.

Philosophy is often described simply as "thinking about thinking," and thinking is a core aspect of our identity as human beings. However, this thinking has covered a lot of territory and has evolved over many centuries. In addition, philosophy has developed differently in different parts of the world, so that what we in European-language cultures usually mean by the term is Western philosophy, which had its origins in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and which is our topic of discussion here—as contrasted with Eastern philosophy, which evolved in the more communal environments of the Orient. Western philosophy has been many things since its origin, and today it's more dynamic than ever. So, probably a more relevant question is, What is philosophy now, and what is it likely to become in the foreseeable future? And regardless of the answer to that, we should also ask, What can philosophy do for us here and now? To answer the first question, we need to get our bearings by briefly glancing over philosophy's past. To answer the second, we need to understand innovations taking place right now.

A Brief History of Philosophy's Development

Most first-year philosophy texts teach that Western philosophy originated with Thales in the sixth century BCE. However, since this was about the same time many revolutions in thinking occurred in different but interconnected places, we might be inclined to look about for a possible common cause. And indeed, we find a likely candidate dwelling in Persia, which was emerging as the East-West trading hub and military "superpower" of the eastern Mediterranean region.

Zoroaster: The seminal event that triggered a revolution in thinking in the sixth century BCE was the rise to fame of Zoroaster, a Persian mystic. Zoroaster founded a mystery religion (a cult involving secret knowledge revealed only to the duly initiated), based on a merger of pre-existing traditions of Persia (Iran) into a dualistic concept pitting forces of good and evil against each other. The cult turned out to be extremely popular, and two factors contributed to its rapid spread beyond the immediate region. (1) Persia had recently become a major military power in the region, soon to defeat mighty Babylon; and (2) Persia was situated on the Silk Road, the primary commerce route between the Mediterranean in the west and the far Orient in the east. Consequently, Zoroaster's ideas found their way to many receptive ears, which would explain many contemporaneous revolutions in thought across southern Eurasia. To the east, Buddha in India and Confucius in China both got their start over the next few decades, and the popularity of mystery cults also spread westward to Greece and Rome. Meanwhile, the Hebrews, liberated by the Persians from their captivity in Babylon, began to formulate a new demonology based on the idea of Zoroastrian dualism, which eventually provided the doctrinal seeds for Christianity six centuries later, in Roman-occupied Judea.

Thales: Mystery religions early found their way to Greece by piggybacking on Persian military campaigns through Anatolia (Turkey) and across the Aegean Sea. As elsewhere, these cults were immensely popular among the common folk, but provoked mixed reactions among the intelligentsia. In an odd stroke, Thales challenged the established Olympian gods of Greece, by positing a theory to explain the origin and content of the universe in non-mystical terms. Specifically, he proposed that all things originate from a common substance—water—which is manifested in solid, liquid, and vapor phases, and without which life itself would be impossible. Now, the only support for such a theory was the superficial resemblance of other liquids to flowing water, other solids to water ice, and air to water vapor. Indeed, it was otherwise almost pure speculation, just another mythology. Yet the pivotally innovative point with respect to thinking is that this new mythology was secular, rather than mystical. Thales had made it conceivable to envision nature in purely natural terms, without injecting unknowable supernatural elements into the discussion. Over the next century or two, others posited competing theories, based on earth, air, and fire, as well as some exotic mixtures, and even invisible "atoms," as the primal substance. However, no one of these was any more or less credible than any of the others, since there was no clear and unambiguous evidence to support any of them, and very little reasoning beyond the empty charm of rhetoric.

Socrates: In the late fifth century BCE, thinking began to be systematically organized. Socrates was famous for his dialogues, in which he challenged supposedly knowledgeable people to explain what they knew, only to trap them in their own ignorance. By the time he'd reached his seventies, Socrates's critiques had publicly bruised many Athenian egos, including some very influential ones, and he was condemned to death on trumped-up charges of atheism and corrupting the young.

Plato and Aristotle: Plato, Socrates's most famous pupil, recorded and dramatized many of his mentor's most notable dialogues, and went on to propose a mystical realm of ideal forms, of which the material objects of human experience are only imperfect reflections. Plato's own pupil, Aristotle, took a contrary view, that ultimate reality is what we can sense directly. But more importantly, he organized reasoning into a coherent system of logic, which would survive virtually intact for the next two thousand years. So confident was Aristotle in his logic that he proposed that everything about the universe could be figured out simply by applying this disciplined reason to what was already known of nature in his own time. He then went on to reason that the earth is fixed at the center of the universe, and that the sun, moon, planets, and stars are embedded in concentric hollow crystal spheres, which rotate around the earth at their common center.

The Middle Ages: In the chaos of the fall of the Roman empire, Greek philosophy disappeared from Europe. However, it was preserved in the Arabian culture until the Moorish invasions brought it across the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain, whereupon the Christian clergy translated it from Arabic into Latin, treating Aristotle's "natural philosophy" as a church-approved complement to the holy scriptures. For various reasons, the new translations were not widely circulated at the time. Instead, logic was adapted to theological "proofs" of this and that (including the existence of God). When scholasticism blossomed, Aristotle's work reemerged into the public psyche of Europe, and became a propulsive force of the Renaissance.

Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others: In the seventeenth century CE, Aristotle's 2,000-year-old vision of an earth-centered universe was finally smashed by experimenter Galileo, when he turned a new navigational gadget called a "telescope" toward the night sky, and observed for the first time four tiny moons evidently passing right through the crystal sphere supposed to be carrying the planet Jupiter. (Despite this setback, Aristotle's logic itself survived intact for the time being. Indeed, the logic had become regarded as perfect, since no significant improvement upon it had yet been presented.) Among the earliest of post-Renaissance thinkers, rationalist René Descartes proposed to transform philosophy, from an ideal-bound discipline into a dynamically practical one that would assist in the interpretation and evaluation of new observations. He was followed by a procession of others—Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and beyond—each with his own opinion of how best to accomplish Descartes' objective. Among the scientists of the same era was Isaac Newton, who was instrumental in transforming "natural philosophy" into rigorously empirical physics. In the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier did much the same for chemistry; and in the nineteenth, Charles Darwin's discoveries made unified sense of biology.

Revolution: In the late eighteenth century, another ancient Greek idea—democracy—was revived by The Enlightenment, and was subsequently developed in the form of the United States of America, newly independent from the antique tradition of monarchy and empire. (Evidently, philosophy has "real world" consequences, though they usually aren't quite so dramatically revolutionary with respect to ordinary people's lives!) In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Aristotle's logic was at first amended by John Venn, Augustus DeMorgan, and George Boole, and was later completely overhauled and expanded by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. While the logic of the ancients was still adequate for most ordinary purposes, these innovations made the discipline far more useful in an increasingly complicated world.

Recent developments: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology—philosophy of mind—began a gradual transformation, from a mystical art into an increasingly empirical social science, under the pioneering guidance of Wundt and Freud. Economic theories of Smith, Marx, and Engels have been revised and incorporated into an emerging science of economics, albeit a complicated and erratic one, insofar as social and political factors play as much a role in it as do the mathematical mechanics of supply and demand.

Long-term trends: Even in this very abbreviated history of philosophy, we can see a couple of prominent trends. One of these is a movement away from mysticism and toward naturalism. The other is a progression from pure speculation, through rationalism, to empiricism—reliance on verifiable evidence to support one's claims—which in some instances has resulted in the "calving" of some philosophical disciplines into the realm of science.

Philosophy Today and Tomorrow

What is philosophy now?

As of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, philosophy is divided among these major fields:

aesthetics: concerned with beauty, the pleasantness of sensation, perception, and illusion;

epistemology: concerned with what we can know and how we know it;

ethics: concerned with moral attitudes and behavior, motives and consequences;

logic: concerned with the structure and function of reasoning processes, and

metaphysics: concerned with being, ultimate origins, and first causes.

In addition, there are specialized fields, such as environmental and feminist philosophy, and philosophies of science and politics, concerning various groups and interests.

Philosophy used to be about many other things as well. But as we've seen, by becoming more evidence-based, natural philosophy developed into the natural sciences, and speculative theories of mind and wealth have transformed into psychology, economics, and other social sciences.

Metaphysics, the branch of philosophy most associated by the public with "pointless questions," has fallen into decline. In the twentieth century, critical analysis revealed that this ancient branch of philosophy hangs entirely on peculiarities of language. Specifically, it treats being, duty, process, purpose, quality, relationship, responsibility, state, value, and the like as if they were actual things, independent of the objects to which they relate. For example, metaphysics speaks of being as if it were an independent object that could be examined and evaluated on its own, even if there were nothing that actually (or even hypothetically) is. But when we consider that the word being has meaning only with respect to some object that exists, we see that a statement about being as something unto itself, without such a referent object, is meaningless. Likewise, the subjective quality of beauty isn't an object in itself, but rather an assessment of an object or concept that the mind interprets as pleasing. Even the objective quality of size has meaning only with respect to the dimensions of an object, either specified in units of measurement, or else compared to other larger or smaller objects. And responsibility has meaning only in terms of responsibility of someone to someone (or something) to do (or not to do) something. In the absence of appropriate referent objects, statements about such terms are nonsense. The reason philosophers still study metaphysics is that it's an interesting exercise in thinking about abstractions (including language itself), not that it generates any practically useful knowledge.

That leaves aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and logic as the main active categories of current philosophy. By "active," we mean it would be a mistake to think of them as systemically dysfunctional like metaphysics, or static and immutable, like finished artworks. Thought is a dynamic process; its domain is a growing and changing body of knowledge. It's influenced by, and in turn influences, technology and culture. Even though it seldom gets much press, modern philosophy is an active, behind-the-scenes laboratory and marketplace of ideas that shape society: Sound and cogent reasoning. Standards of evidence. Democratic government. Egalitarian justice. Free markets. Civil rights. Rational ethics. Each of these owes its existence and development in some measure to philosophy. And whatever philosophy is today, we can be assured that, as in the past, it will become something else as time passes and civilization evolves.

What will philosophy likely become?

Aside from metaphysics, which, along with alchemy and flat-earth theory, seems destined for museum status, the current fields of philosophy are still objects of serious study. They identify useful channels of inquiry, and provide consistent methods of information assessment. And the effect of the current strand of empiricism, where applicable, is to bind the conceptual world ever more closely to the material world.

In general, we can say that the fields making up active philosophy today are in various stages of transition, guided by an overall trend of empiricism (which, after all, has so far yielded marvelous results in the sciences), either toward reinforcing existing sciences or toward becoming new sciences altogether. In other words, we can expect that even parts of philosophy that aren't ultimately transformed into sciences will nonetheless be increasingly influenced by quasi-scientific methods and thinking. Still, the overall objective of philosophy has been, and remains, the pursuit of truth. Empiricism should simply provide a more verifiable measure of how close we are to that objective.

What do philosophers do?

One activity that most philosophers have in common is reading. They're thinkers by nature, and reading provides food for thought, so they do a lot of it. Since they're after information, not just entertainment, they tend to read more non-fiction than most people. They also tend to think critically about what they read, considering whether it's consistent, both in its internal reasoning and with external fact. They do a lot of comparing and contrasting of thoughts, among ancient and modern writers on the same topic, and among differing schools of thought in the current era. This part of a philosopher's work is essentially that of a historian: it's more critiquing, cataloguing, and cross-referencing the work of others than the active origination of new thought.

To be a true philosopher (in my opinion), one can't be content with the role of student or historian, but must actively philosophize. That is, one must get beyond merely reshuffling and rethinking the ideas of the past, and pioneer new (and we'd hope, better) ways of thinking about the important issues of our time. Yes, research and analysis are necessary parts of the package, but they don't complete the task by themselves. After all, one doesn't become a real baker simply by studying and eating bread and pastry; one must actually create the stuff. And one can't claim to be a real physicist simply by studying the work of Archimedes, Newton, and Einstein; such studies are necessary to understanding physics, but these are essentially the activities of the student and the historian. To be a true physicist, one must also be engaged in seeking, investigating, and testing new ways to think about the nature of the physical universe. Likewise, the true philosopher must actively speculate, hypothesize, formulate, justify, and defend original lines of thought. And, ideally, he or she should be able to show how to apply any derived principles to matters of import. In other words, the true philosopher sees his or her purpose as making a difference in the way people think and learn about their world, in the way they distinguish truth from fiction and sense from nonsense, in the way they make decisions, in the way they identify and deal with problems.

What Can Philosophy Do for Us Here and Now?

Metaphysics, as such, is now essentially obsolete; but the study of it is still useful in building robust skills of comprehension, reasoning, and communication, particularly in dense and abstract matters. Aesthetics and epistemology have importance for the present day, but so far their palpable benefits lie mainly in their relatively specialized implications to psychology and to such diverse psychology-dependent fields as art, computing, education, journalism, marketing, medicine, and conceptualization of science. But of philosophy's currently active fields, even non-philosophers might single out logic and ethics as being most obviously useful in a broadly practical sense.

Logic has undergone a transformation, from its elegantly abstract Aristotelian form, to a justice-equalizing, crime-investigating, science-governing, computer-controlling, nuts-and-bolts aspect of the modern world of human experience. Properly used, it's an indispensable, general-purpose tool for reliable information analysis, problem solving, and decision making. A good working understanding of logic is both a lever for personal success and a defense against the fallacy-ridden rhetoric of advertisers, politicians, and quacks of all sorts. Unfortunately, logic is typically taught in high school only as an adjunct to some specialized fields, not as a general-purpose skill, thus leaving non-collegiate students without a clue how to use it properly outside the limited context of math and science. If and when fundamentals of methodical reasoning, as a general skill, are incorporated into standard high-school curricula, it's no exaggeration to expect the impact on society to be comparable to the profound advances precipitated by the routine teaching of other basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In the meantime, those interested should be able to find books on logic in the Philosophy sections of public libraries; in addition, there is a free, self-paced, online course on logic basics available at 4thR.org.

Ethics, believe it or not, currently appears to be on a similar path. Leaving behind both vague whims of conscience and rule-based moralities, it's moving purposefully toward methodically rational systems. When well crafted, such ethics can be empirically tested as to whether their effects on human behavior are consistently positive, negative, or neutral with regard to clearly defined values. Moreover, by employing evidence and reason to link ethics to observable reality, and to guide and adapt behavior to new and complex situations, they represent a quantum leap beyond old, rigid moralities and trite maxims in terms of maintaining the relevance of fairness, justice, and stability in societies now evolving far faster than our natural instincts and cultural traditions can keep up. There's little doubt among the innovators that ethics itself can and will be thus transformed, inasmuch as the transformation is already well underway, with the goal not only in sight but virtually within reach. Any remaining doubt concerns whether such ethics could be incorporated into banking, business, politics, and other fields already dominated by ideologies innately hostile to any motive not associated with the acquisition of wealth and power.

Strictly by itself, philosophy isn't much good for anything except entertaining philosophers; yet we might say much the same about nearly any discipline practiced in a vacuum, solely as an end in itself. Applied to other activities, though, thinking philosophically makes us more competent as inquirers, problem-solvers, and decision-makers; which is to say, it makes for more comprehensive learners and teachers, more productive workers and managers, more insightful creators and caregivers, more analytical consumers, better citizens, and wiser leaders. Obviously, while thinking philosophically can't eliminate the possibility of failure, it can enhance intelligent application of practical knowledge, and thus improves both the probability and the degree of success. So, if you've ever wondered what philosophy really is, why it hasn't faded into oblivion over the centuries, and what possible use it might be to any sensible, practical-minded person in the computer age, now you have a sketchy idea—and perhaps an incentive to investigate further.

As for me, I don't write much about philosophy itself—this article being an obvious exception, of course. Rather, I find it most useful to apply the philosophical style of critical introspection and methodical thinking to other issues. This website is becoming a demonstration area for the practical application of philosophical thinking in other fields—politics, religion, social issues, and the like. Here one can compare my minimally philosophical writings of a decade or more ago to more recent or revised articles crafted with a consciously methodical eye toward coherent and consistent reasoning and its supporting evidence. In this way, I hope to illustrate the value of a philosophical approach to the comprehension, evaluation, synthesis, and application of ideas to the analysis and resolution of a variety of issues in the modern era.

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