Whiffler’s Philosophy

The subject of philosophy has interested me for a long while, as for most of my life I totally failed to understand it and found the writings of philosophers indecipherable. But my ignorance, or the belief in my ignorance, only served to spur me on to try to understand and try to decipher, however, the necessity to earn a living allowed me little time for this until fairly recently when I put work behind me and considered how I could profitably use my leisure time.

I thought an Open University course might be the answer, but I soon found out that the course was designed to allow students to learn the subject without necessarily understanding it. My early submissions for assignments were marked down because of "unsubstantiated" statements (i.e. my own original thoughts) and I soon learnt that to get maximum marks one had to simply regurgitate the text from the course books with, of course, a precise reference to the source publication, chapter and verse (sorry page number) to satisfy academic requirements. I did not think it worthwhile to complete the course on this basis, although the reading matter did help open my eyes to some of the mysteries of the subject.

One very significant discovery I made during this course was that words which I had been familiar with could have different meanings within philosophy. For instance, the word "argument" to me had always implied a violent verbal disagreement or quarrel, but in philosophy "an argument provides reasons for believing a conclusion" ('Thinking from A to Z', Nigel Warburton, 2nd Ed, p17) and is a fundamental tool of the philosopher. I suspect this may be one of the reasons for my earlier difficulty in comprehending the subject.

So what is philosophy? No definition is given in Warburton's book quoted above and in other writings he struggles to pin it down. It is, in my opinion, a very vague subject which intrudes into many aspects of life and a dry dictionary definition of a "rational investigation of being, knowledge and right conduct" begs more questions than it answers - what is rational? - what is being? what is right conduct? Possibly the the word's Greek origins provides the best clue; "philosophos" - lover of wisdom. Certainly philosophers sometimes seem more concerned with demonstrating their wisdom for the sake of their own intellectual ego rather than attempting to show any practical application of such wisdom. But possibly that's the whole point, the philosopher provides the intellectual ammunition for others to decide how it is to be used.

So how can I contribute to this situation and possibly supply clarity to this confusion. An impossible task? It's much more likely that I will contribute to the confusion. But undeterred I will press on and try to develop through these occasional writings a kind of philosophy as I see things, without any attempt to satisfy the academic world and, who knows, it might all start to make sense to me eventually. I suppose this is really my aim, to try to put into words thoughts which have been floating around in my mind through the past decades, to share these with anyone who wishes to read and consider them and so that I can conclude what Whiffler's philosophy really is on any subject. But then I would probably change my mind later!