Sometimes we talk as if philosophy is almost a mood, as when we say “He looked philosophically into the distance.” Or that it’s just a character trait, as in “She was the philosopher of the group, always thinking.” On top of this, there’s a wide range of images that people get when they hear the word “philosopher”:
a mystic seer, living alone in a mountaintop cave
a nitpicker who grinds every discussion to a halt by always asking people to define their terms
a maker of pointless arguments, coming up with exotic scenarios in which some reasonable principle might fail
someone who discusses very abstract topics using made-up, confusing vocabulary
In none of these cases does it sound like a subject of intellectual substance. But I think that there is intellectual substance there. I’m going to explain my idea of what it is. I’m not claiming that this is the official account. There’s no official or agreed account, partly because philosophers like to argue, and that includes arguing about what philosophy is.
Before getting to that I should say a word on philosophy’s cultural placement. Sometimes people object to what they think is an unjustified description of Ancient Greece as the “birthplace of philosophy.” A lot of their points are well taken: there were strong philosophical traditions in India and China, at least, in ancient times as well. And centuries later there was a thriving philosophical tradition in the Islamic world (due partly to their excitement at reading Aristotle).
There’s an example that introduces the point I want to make about this. A while ago I watched a great documentary about Motown Records (Hitsville: the making of Motown). A record company started by one guy, operating (for years) out of a house, was responsible for an astonishing amount of timelessly great music. Motown’s roster included Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Supremes, Diana Ross, the Jackson Five. So you have to ask: how did this happen?
In the documentary, Smokey Robinson speaks to this question. He doesn’t talk about how special the Motown people were. He insists that every city has lots of great musicians in it. What made Motown happen at that place, at that time, according to Robinson, was the system that Berry Gordy came up with when he started the company—a system for finding, training, evaluating, nurturing and marketing musical talent. That system set up the right conditions for top-flight creativity. (Believe it or not, Gordy got the idea for his system from his time working on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company—a job he had to take after his early business venture, a record-store business, failed.) The moral of the story is that external conditions matter to how much the talents people are born with get developed.
I think that potential philosophers are being born everywhere, all the time. But I also think that Ancient Greece was, in fact, the birthplace of the philosophical tradition that has proved most fruitful. The reason wasn’t that the people there were biologically special.1 The reason, I think, was that the social conditions were right. What are those conditions?
For philosophy, I think, you need a literary culture, so that what people say can be very accurately recorded, and a culture that esteems disputation and theorizing, so that what people say can be very carefully, and very openly, disputed and assessed. Together these two factors let you build carefully upon arguments and objections previously made. There have been, and are, many cultures in which these conditions do not obtain: cultures in which some one tradition, or authority, dominates and free dispute is not encouraged.
In fact, even in ancient Athens, a relatively tolerant city for its time, Socrates, one of its great philosophers, was actually condemned to death for “corrupting the youth.” It wasn’t a crazy charge—he probably did corrupt the youth. From a certain point of view, that’s what philosophy does. It corrupts by questioning, which weakens the hold that tradition and majority opinion have on people.
Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. —Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
Notice: I’m not saying that a society that supports philosophy is better than one that doesn’t. That itself is a philosophical claim, which would require a separate argument. All I’m saying is that different societies support philosophy, as an activity, to different degrees. For all I know, some societies that are less hospitable to philosophy are better, overall, than some societies that are more hospitable to it.
Back to our question: what is philosophy? To explain my view on this I need two distinctions. Together these distinctions split into four categories the various claims (statements) that people make. I think the home of philosophy is in one of the four categories that those two distinctions let us distinguish.
The first distinction is between how the world actually works, and how it should work. “Is wealth unequally distributed in Canada?” is a question about the former; “Should wealth be more equally distributed in Canada?” is a question about the latter. Claims about the former are descriptive claims; claims about the latter are normative claims. Typically a normative claim has a “should” somewhere in it, perhaps unspoken. For example, one long-debated philosophical question is: What is justice? There’s no “should” in there explicitly, but there’s one built into the meaning of the word “justice”: the way society is organized should be just. (To see this, consider how odd it would be for someone to say that society is unjust and that it should be that way. You’d wonder whether they really know what the word “justice” means.) Similarly, I’d say, the word “too” has normative content when used to say things like “Video games are too violent.” The meaning is: more violent than they should be.
The second distinction is between claims that are supported by reasons and claims that are supported by authority. When you make a claim you have a choice as to how to present it. Do you try to convince people, by giving reasons to think that the claim is true? Or, do you present yourself as an authority, asking your audience to agree to the claim because you have a certain status in society? Sometimes parents speak to their children this way: “Because I said so.” And religious authorities sometimes present their claims in this way. The Catholics even have a term for it: “ex cathedra.” They believe that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra he cannot speak falsely. He isn’t expected to give reasons for what he says, if he is speaking in this special authoritative way.
With our two distinctions we can describe four categories. Here goes.
Descriptive claims supported by authority. Under this heading would go all folk cosmologies (origin myths), and similar claims. Every traditional culture on Earth has, or had, stories about how the world began, why rain falls from the sky, why there are droughts and floods, and so on. These claims aren’t argued for; they’re always handed down as part of one’s cultural heritage. But they are descriptive: they’re claims about how the world works.
Normative claims supported by authority. Under this heading go all traditional and religious moralities. These are claims about what you should do, how you should live, and so on; but they are not presented along with reasons to believe them. They’re presented as authoritative on their own. (There’s no “Why I chose these Commandments” in the Bible.)
Descriptive claims supported by reasons. This category includes all scientific and historical claims. Scientists give reasons for their claims and their theories, even if they do argue about those reasons; and historians too present evidence in support of their historical claims.
Normative claims supported by reasons. Here finally we get to the home of philosophy. One can make a normative claim and try to support it with reasons, rather than by appeal to the authority of one’s tradition or culture or religion. There are normative claims that arise concerning every realm of human action. How should we reason, and weigh evidence? How should we treat each other? How should our society be set up? If you’re discussing a claim of this sort, and you’re open to arguments and counter-arguments, then you’re doing philosophy.
There’s an important qualification that I need to make. (J. L. Austin once said that in Philosophy, there’s “the part where you say it” and then, inevitably, “the part where you take it back.” One aims for there to be some residue.) Doing philosophy often has involved making new concepts and finding new areas of investigation; sometimes philosophers do this and then hand off further work to another discipline.
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued in the 1660s for the idea of a “universal language” in which all knowledge could be encoded. One of his goals was for disagreements to be solvable not by debate but by rigorous calculation. Only much later, in 1879, did another philosopher, Gottlob Frege, take a large step towards the realization of Leibniz’ vision. Frege invented modern symbolic logic, with was a large advance towards modern computation. He cited Leibniz as one of his inspirations in this project.
So I am definitely not saying that someone doing philosophy will make no use of, or have no impact on, work that falls under the “science” category in my fourfold scheme. My claim is just that the scheme helps us identify what is distinctive about philosophy’s treatment of its central questions.
What about the characters I mentioned at the beginning: the seer, the nitpicker, and so on? Philosophy has a place for each of them, or at least, a version of each of them. Each in their way can contribute to the enterprise. This doesn’t mean that being a nitpicker, say, is a good thing overall. But some nitpicking can, at times, help the discussion by enforcing some needed precision.
You probably don’t need any convincing about the value of science: everything we do nowadays is helped by devices and technologies that were made possible by centuries of painstaking scientific work by many thousands of intellectual heroes, sung and unsung. But you might wonder what the value is of philosophy.
Above I mentioned its interaction with non-philosophical disciplines. It continues to this day. But philosophy’s value doesn’t rest only on that. The importance of philosophy is that it is the only way for us to achieve reasoned guidance on how to live our lives and how to arrange our societies. For most of human history such guidance was not reasoned: it was the product of tradition, or of those with political power. We are, I think, in the early days of working our way towards a fully articulated alternative to that. For example, we are in the early days of thinking about justice and rights and what a good life is. On top of that, philosophical thinking on these topics has been done, until the last couple of centuries, mostly by men, moreover men who in one way or another were insulated from daily life’s struggles. Many were aristocrats (Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Russell) or monks (Nagarjuna, Thomas Aquinas and many other medieval European philosophers) or civil servants (Confucius, Mencius, Seneca, Leibniz, Locke), with an obvious interest in maintaining the social order that allowed them those special positions. Only in the last couple of centuries, with broader higher education, has philosophy been widely accessible in richer countries at least. That there are more voices in the conversation will mean more progress.
Often it is only through great intellectual labour, which can continue over centuries, that a concept is known in its purity, and stripped of foreign covering that hid it from the eye of the intellect. —Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884)
Frege was a mathematician who became a philosopher due to his interest in the nature of mathematical reasoning. He was not motivated by an interest in the normative concepts I mentioned a few sentences back. (Rather the opposite, almost: in his book the climax is a logically quite complex definition of what the number zero is.) But I think that his point is true and applies to them as well. There is literally, I think, nothing more important than for us to continue to make progress on understanding our own normative concepts.
So much for philosophy’s overall value. But there’s more. Philosophy has a value to the people doing it. Doing philosophy develops you intellectually. First, it exercises, and thereby develops, your ability to see where people are relying on assumptions that they haven’t questioned, and to explore possibilities for alternatives to those assumptions. Second, it exercises, and thereby develops, your ability to express your ideas clearly. The reason is that it makes you think about what alternatives there are to your own ideas. If you don’t even see that there are other options, then you won’t see the importance of distinguishing your view from them. But if you do see those other options, you’re going to do the extra work required to make it clear how, and why, you disagree with them. The result of that is clarity in your thinking and your communication with others.
I’ll leave it at that for now. The Philosophy Department has a web page, Why study Philosophy? which gives more on this topic, including some surprising facts about paths and incomes for Philosophy majors. (Who would have guessed that Philosophy majors do better than Business majors on the Graduate Management Admission Test? They do, by a good margin.)
Aristotle seems to have thought otherwise. He wrote that the “natural character” of the Greeks combines the best of that of the Asians, who are “intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit,” and that of the northern Europeans, who “are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill” (Politics VII, 1327b).↩︎