Philosophy for Everyone

Matthew Chrisman, Duncan Pritchard, Guy Fletcher, Elinor Mason, Jane Suilin Lavelle, Michela Massimi, Alasdair Richmond, Dave Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367475833
• eBook ISBN: 9781315449746
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject.

Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include:

• Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior;
• Political philosophy – fundamental questions about the nature of states and their relationship to the citizens within those states
• Epistemology – what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; and whether we should form beliefs by trusting what other people tell us;
• Philosophy of mind – what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;
• Philosophy of science – foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice, such as whether scientific theories are true; and
• Metaphysics - fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as whether we have free will, or whether time travel is possible.

This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Introduction to Philosophy' MOOC (massive open online course) created by the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted by the Coursera platform (www.coursera.org/course/introphil).This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline.

1 What is philosophy?

Dave Ward

DOI: 10.4324/9781315449760-1

Introduction

What is philosophy? I once asked this question of a group of students who had just begun studying at the University of Edinburgh. After a thoughtful pause, one of the group suggested, ‘There ain’t nothing to it but to do it.’ Now, taken by itself this answer is, perhaps, not terribly informative. But nonetheless I think it’s importantly right. Philosophy, as we’ll see in this chapter and in this book, is an activity. And so to find out what it’s all about we need to do more than just try to describe it – what I’ll attempt to do in this chapter – we need to get stuck in and do it. So, if you want to find out what philosophy is, the best thing to do is to work your way through the book in your hands. By doing so you’ll get a good idea of the sorts of questions philosophers ask, both today and throughout history, and of the distinctive ways they try to answer them. More importantly, if this book does its job, you should find yourself actively engaging with those questions – puzzling over them, articulating your own thoughts about them, and considering how you might defend those thoughts in response to those who don’t agree with you.

So, philosophy is an activity, and you’ll find examples of, and invitations to, this activity within the pages of this book. What else can we say about it? The goal of this chapter is to see if we can characterize philosophy in more detail. I’m going to suggest that philosophy is the activity of working out the right way to think about things. In the rest of this chapter I’ll try to say a bit more about what this means and why I think it’s right. We’ll start by thinking about how this characterization of philosophy relates it to other subjects. Then we’ll note some features of philosophy that follow from this characterization of it and consider how philosophers go about looking for ‘the right way to think about things’. And finally we’ll consider why philosophy, as I describe it in this chapter, might be an interesting or important thing to do.

Stepping back: Philosophy and other subjects

Philosophy, I’ve just claimed, is the activity of working out the right way to think about things. But don’t people in all subjects – from astronomy to zoology – try to think about things in the right way? What makes philosophy different from these, or any other, subjects? To see what makes philosophy different, we need to distinguish between what we do when we step back and work out the right way to think about something and what we do when we get on with actually thinking about something in whatever way we’ve decided (or perhaps just uncritically accepted) is the right one. We can see this distinction, between working out the right way of thinking and getting on with thinking in that way, as corresponding to the distinction between doing some academic subject (let’s take physics as our example for now) and doing philosophy about that subject. So, when we’re doing physics, we might be interested in constructing experiments, recording data, and trying to use that data to construct a theory that adequately explains all the data that we’ve observed, and hopefully all the data we ever will observe. When we’re doing this, let’s suppose (with due apologies to physicists for my crude characterization of what they get up to) we’re engaged in the sort of thinking that’s characteristic of physics. However, we can always step back, and ask whether this way of thinking is the right one. We can ask what it is for data to confirm or refute a theory; we can ask what it is for one theory to do a better or worse job of explaining some data than another; we can even ask whether the project of trying to explain and understand physical reality by identifying fundamental constituents and processes, and laws that govern them, is the right one. When we step back in this way, we shift from asking questions about physics to asking questions within the philosophy of physics – from getting on with the way of thinking that physics recommends to working out whether (or why) that way of thinking is the right one. You’ll have the opportunity to think about such questions in the philosophy of science in more detail in Chapter 8.

Let’s take one more example to illustrate this distinction between actually doing some subject and doing the philosophy of that subject. Suppose we are medieval medics, trying to understand some disease. In keeping with the medical understanding of our time, we’ll try to understand the disease in terms of the four ‘humours’ – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – that we believe fill the human body, and whose imbalance we believe to be the cause of all disease. Our theorizing about the disease might take the form of identifying its symptoms, and then attempting to relate them to the characteristics we associate with some one of the four humours, so we can understand the disease as a lack or a surplus of that humour. In doing this, as the good medieval medics that we are, we’re simply getting on with the practice of medical theory. However, we can always step back and ask further questions about the framework and presuppositions underlying this theory: we can ask what, exactly, it is for the humours to be in or out of balance; we can ask how, exactly, the humours relate to the types of temperament and personality with which they’re supposed to be paired; and (most importantly) we can ask whether we are thinking about human disease and treatment in the right way at all – whether we might be better off stepping outside of the framework of humour theory completely, and trying to find a different one. Using the example of medieval medicine makes it clear that stepping back in this way is often an important thing to do – questioning this theoretical framework and trying to replace it with a better one has resulted in great advances in how we diagnose and treat diseases. But note that I could equally have used modern medicine as an example. It seems that in any field we can always step back from the task of getting on with our inquiry, try to get a clear view of the framework or set of presuppositions that shapes our inquiry, and question whether that framework is the best one for the job.

So, in both the above examples, physics and (medieval) medicine, we can distinguish between (i) getting on with thinking or investigating according to the rules, practices and assumptions of some theoretical discipline, and (ii) stepping back to investigate just what those rules, practices and assumptions are, and thinking about whether they are the right ones. Stepping back in this way – attempting to identify, clarify and assess the presuppositions that lie behind how we’re thinking or acting – is what we do when we engage in philosophy. Thinking about philosophy in this way lets us see a number of important things about it.

First, the boundaries between philosophy and other subjects can be fuzzy. Our second example above raised the question of how we might move from a framework that we now view as outdated and inadequate (such as the humour theory in medicine) to a better one. One way we might do so is simply by thinking about it – when we talk about humours, do we really know what we mean? When we try to think of some disease as a lack of phlegm, or a surplus of bile, do we really have a good grip on what it would mean for a disease to be one of those things? This way of trying to identify and assess the concepts and categories we’re using ‘from our armchairs’ is one way we can attempt to work out the right way to think about things. So this kind of armchair theorizing about the concepts we use and the work that we do is one way of doing philosophy – perhaps the way that people most commonly think of as doing philosophy.

But this isn’t the only way we can try to find the right way to think about things. We might come to revise the way we’re thinking about medicine as a result of getting out of our armchairs and actually trying to do it – we might, for example, notice that our humour theory suggests that certain ways of treating diseases should work, but in reality they simply don’t. Or we might notice that some other ways of treating diseases, that don’t seem to have anything to do with humours or their balance, work really well. If we come across enough observations like this, and if the observations form a neat and obvious enough pattern, then this too can prompt us to start thinking about medicine in another way. We might put this by saying that challenges to our way of thinking can either come from inside, as in cases when we realize that the framework we’re using to think about things is unstable or confused just by thinking about it, or from outside, as when the puzzles and unexplained events with which the world confronts our current way of thinking become so widespread that we’re forced to look for a new framework that makes better sense of things. We noted above that to challenge ways of thinking ‘from the inside’ (or ‘from the armchair’) is something characteristically associated with philosophy. So we can do philosophy of anthropology, biology, chemistry or zoology by trying to identify the frameworks that those subjects use to think about the world, and considering whether those frameworks involve any confusions or contradictions that we might identify and try to resolve. But in many cases (and this is where the lines between philosophy and other subjects get blurry) when we’re working out how best to revise our ways of thinking in light of the puzzles that the world has thrown up for us, we’re also doing philosophy.

Returning to the example of physics, think of what happened in the early twentieth century with the development of quantum mechanics. There was a growing body of data that, it seemed, simply couldn’t be made sense of by using the current ways of thinking about physical reality. It appeared, for example, that the natural assumption that the elements of reality must behave either like waves or like particles (but not both) might be wrong. And it seemed that the very act of observing or measuring some physical quantity could instantly change how things were in some other part of the universe – apparently violating our common-sense conception of how causation works. Now, clearly the project of working out the best way to think about all these results, and their implications for our understanding of reality, wasn’t a purely philosophical one. After all, we needed science to provide and describe the strange experimental results that posed the challenge to our current ways of thinking in the first place. And, in some cases, we needed to seek out new experimental results to test whether our attempted revisions to our thinking were on the right track. Nonetheless, in attempting to revise our ways of thinking in light of results from quantum mechanics, we are still doing philosophy. We’re stepping back from the results in question and trying to arrive at a new framework that can make the best sense of them.

For example, do we need to change how we think about what it is for one thing to cause another so that we can make sense of causation that happens at a distance? Or do these results show us that trying to use a common-sense notion of causation in our understanding of the nature of microphysical reality is simply misguided? In either case, is there a new and better way of thinking that we can employ to help us get our heads round these strange results? As just noted, whatever new framework we come up with will be informed by work done by scientists, not by philosophers, and many of the tests we’ll use to determine whether it is a good framework will also involve scientists formulating and experimentally testing the predictions it makes. But in actually coming up with that framework, we’re stepping back from the process of getting those results, and trying to work out the best way of thinking about them – the activity that I’m suggesting is characteristic of philosophy. Here, as in many places, the relationship between the findings that provide us with food for thought, and the subsequent thinking that feeds off them, is a close and intricate one – and it’s this kind of relationship that can make the boundaries between philosophy and other subjects blurry.

Philosophy: Difficult, important and everywhere

These points about the relationship between philosophy and other subjects point us towards some other important features of philosophy. They show us, for example, that philosophy is a very broad subject. It seems that no matter what subject matter we’re investigating, or how we’re investigating it, we can always step back, try to identify the presuppositions that inform our investigation, and think about whether they’re the best ones. In the examples above, we saw how stepping back can take us from doing physics, or medicine, to doing philosophy of physics or of medicine. And it seems that we can step back in a similar way no matter what subject we’re studying, or how we’re studying it. This means that, whatever we’re doing, a philosophical question – a question about whether the framework we’re using is the best one for the job – is never far away.

Think about the kind of exchange that the comedian Louis CK reports having with his daughter (lightly edited here to remove some colourful language):

You can’t answer a kid’s question – a kid never accepts any answer! A kid never goes ‘Oh, thanks, I get it’, they just keep coming with more questions: ‘Why? Why? Why?’ … this goes on for hours and hours, and at the end it gets so weird and abstract, and at the end it’s like: ‘Why?’

‘Well, because some things are, and some things are not.’

‘… Why?’

[annoyed] ‘Well because things that are not can’t be!’

‘Why?’

‘BECAUSE THEN NOTHING WOULDN’T BE! You can’t have … nothing isn’t! Everything is!!’

‘Why?’

‘Because if nothing wasn’t, there’d be all kinds of stuff that we don’t … like giant ants walking around with top hats, dancing around! There’s no room for all that stuff!’

‘Why?’

[Louis gives up.]

(Louis CK’s 2005 HBO Special ‘One Night Stand’)

What’s happening in this dialogue shows us something about what happens in philosophy. The philosopher is a lot like the daughter in the conversation – continually demanding reasons and explanations for why we think and act in the ways we do. But they also have to do Louis’s job – struggling to come up with answers to questions like these, a struggle that sometimes involves trying to explain why they’re the wrong questions to be asking. This illustrates a number of important points about philosophy.

First – the one we’ve just noted – if we keep questioning, we soon run into questions that look philosophical: above, Louis quickly gets into some deep metaphysical water over questions about existence (you’ll have the opportunity to think more about issues in metaphysics in Chapters 7, 8 and 9).

Second, philosophy is hard. Being incessantly confronted with questions by children, or by philosophers, presumably wouldn’t be such a frustrating experience if we had easy answers at the ready for each question posed to us.

Third (and closely related to the last point), it seems that philosophy is often hard precisely because it asks questions about things that we usually take for granted while we get on with our lives. Presumably part of what’s frustrating about struggling to answer questions like the ones being put to Louis is that questions like ‘Why doesn’t everything exist?’ can seem so basic as to not require answering. ‘Of course there are things that don’t exist’, we want to say: this seems so obvious to us that the question strikes us as a silly one to ask. But when it is asked, we find ourselves struggling to provide reasons for our convictions that can satisfy the questioner, and this can be an embarrassing and frustrating experience – hence (perhaps) the gradual escalation of tension in the conversation above.

Lastly, I think that all these points show us something about why philosophy can be (and, equally, can fail to be) an important thing to do. We’ve seen that the nature of philosophy, as we’ve described it in this chapter, means that philosophical questions can arise anywhere and everywhere, simply because we can always step back and ask questions about the framework from within which we’re thinking. Like Louis CK’s daughter, we can always keep asking ‘Why?’ On the one hand, we’ve seen that this can make philosophy into a difficult and frustrating activity. And, let’s face it, it also means that the space of possible philosophical inquiry will include some questions that we simply don’t feel are worth bothering with. Life is short! Some of the frustration we might feel at the child, or the philosopher, who questions everything is surely legitimate – we could spend our time pondering the best way to think about shoelaces, or carpets, or jumpers, but aren’t there more worthwhile things to do? So we should admit that a question’s being philosophical in the sense I’ve been outlining doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important. However, I think that these very same features of philosophy also help us understand how philosophical questions can often be extremely important.

At various times throughout history, the way people have gone about their business in the world has presupposed particular ways of thinking about things that, once they have been brought out into the open and examined, look clearly and disastrously wrong. For example, in the past, huge populations of people have gone along with practices of genocide, slavery and sexism. It seems to us now that as soon as we try to articulate a way of thinking about things according to which these practices look acceptable, we see that this can’t be done. It looks to us now as if anyone who wholeheartedly went along with these practices must simply never have stepped back and tried to articu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Introduction to Philosophy Free Online Course
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What is philosophy?
• 2 Morality Objective, relative or emotive?
• 3 Do we have an obligation to obey the law?
• 4 What is knowledge? Do we have any?
• 5 Should you believe what you hear?
• 6 What is it to have a mind?
• 7 Do we have free will? (And does it matter?)
• 8 Are scientific theories true?
• 9 Is time travel possible?
• Glossary of key terms
• Bibliography
• Index