The word ‘philosophy’ etymologically means “the love of wisdom”; however, it is best conceived of as a practice. When someone philosophizes, whether one has been formally trained in the matter or not, one rationally interrogates the grounds for one’s beliefs and values — though note: not only one’s private beliefs and values, but also those that prevail within and inform one’s society. Put simply:

Philosophy is the practice of genuinely asking and rationally attempting to answer two related questions: “Why do we believe and value what we do, and should we believe and value those things?”

A great deal rides on the word ‘should’ in that sentence. Philosophers have never endorsed an appeal to tradition, emotion, ease of life, or psychological contentment as normative criteria. The fact that believing something makes life easier to deal with or more enjoyable doesn’t entail that the content of that belief is true.

I am tempted to say that it would be “childish” to believe things simply because it’s easier, but I have found that such intellectual laziness is more common among adults than it is children. Kids are often much more philosophical than adults. They love to ask “why” questions, and they are keen to point out lies, inconsistencies, and injustices. When they are still young, they haven’t learned to parrot accepted narratives or invest their identity and self-worth in some supposedly important Concept or Idea. Adults, by contrast, often do so. In fact, they are known to kill each other (and children) over such matters.

Children typically don’t just accept prevailing viewpoints, but are rather suspicious — something that I think is an intellectual virtue. In fact, they will sometimes ask questions that embarrass those who “know better”: their parents, priests, and teachers. After repeatedly being told by adults to stop asking “stupid” or annoying questions, many children will. This is quite tragic.

Philosophical thinking is a bit like childish thinking: it is playful, inquisitive, suspicious of authority and tradition, and it often reveals how very little “serious” adults really know.

Of course, children are immature and inexperienced. They have the right approach, but not the right tools. Training in philosophically thinking (and really any scholarly training worth its salt) is about rediscovering the passion to wonder, to suspend belief and investigate — but it is also about learning how to do that well and with the right intellectual tools.

In light of this, philosophy is often characterized as the attempt to make rational sense of all things, or to develop a rational view of our lives and our place in the world. The British philosopher, Nigel Warburton, has summarized his conception of philosophy in similar terms: “I see philosophy as an activity of thinking critically about what we are and where we stand in relation to the world,” he says. “Philosophy is concerned with how things are, the limits of what we can know, and how we should live. It is anti-dogmatic and thrives on questioning assumptions.”¹

What Warburton chiefly means when he says that philosophy is anti-dogmatic is that, to the philosopher, everything is open to rational interrogation, even — or perhaps especially — those things which are often taken for granted, assumed to be beyond question, or said to be sacrosanct. Philosophers aspire to make rational sense of reality, where that includes identifying the limits of reason (if there are such limits) and correcting beliefs that are either irrational or non-rational. This has been evident ever since the beginning of philosophy in the Western world, about 2600 years ago.

The Origins of the Western Philosophical Tradition

The Western philosophical tradition traces its origins to ancient Greece. When it first appeared, and still to this day, philosophy was an alternative to magical ways of thinking.

We can understand magic as the attempt to control the world via representations—either actual representations (as in the case of Voodoo dolls), or mental representations (as when people “picture” or “conceive” of the world as being a certain way in order to get the world to be that way). Magically minded people rely on wishes, dreams, and visions to provide guidance about how to get on with their lives and to make sense of things. For example, a magically minded person might take a dream about something bad happening to be a kind of sign that they should avoid a course of action that they were planning to take. Such people often seem to view the world as enchanted; it is oftentimes literally thought that parts of the world, or some of the things in the world, are animated or imbued with powers, spirits, and perhaps even personality (e.g., tree nymphs, water sprites, and so on).

For all intents and purposes, earlier explanations concerning the way the world worked (e.g., the causes of earthquakes and thunderstorms) tended to be supernatural explanations that were expressed through the myths.² Any of the famous creation stories that are embedded within the world’s various religious traditions may be taken as examples here. For example, the book of Genesis in the Bible contains at least two different creation stories—the first account is presented in Genesis 1:1-2:3, the second account is presented in Genesis 2:4-25. You’re probably familiar with the basic details of one or both of these creation stories: the first says that God separated the Chaos Waters, “speaking” into being everything that exists, including human beings. The Greeks had stories of their own that explained the alleged origins of the world, some of which were very similar to the Genesis stories.

From the perspective of the early philosophers, the authors of such accounts were artists or poets who aimed primarily to give expression to the embodied experience of being human and to inspire people to adopt a specific way of life or to orient people to their world. The mythopoetic accounts, we might suppose, may not have been intended to accurately depict what happened at the beginning of time. And even if they were, the question stands as to how these human authors could have possibly known whether their accounts accurately depicted such things. Myths spring from the artistic imagination, and they can productively be understood to meet or give expression to an existential need on the part of their authors or their audience. They clearly address the meaning or significance of human life, dealing with notions of fate or destiny, longing and loss, that which is inspiring within us and that which is problematic. Myths are often beautiful and deeply moving stories, which captivate us and disclose important insight into what is important in life and what is trivial. But they are artistic creations nevertheless. Even though they sometimes purport to tell the “God’s honest truth,” we can recognize that they are not rational explanations based on observation, introspection, and discursive (logical) reasoning. The authors of the various creation myths were clearly concerned with freeing people of their angst and unhappiness and with reinforcing social norms, as well as any number of other things. But, among the people we call philosophers, the suspicion arose (and continues to arise) that myths might not get the facts right. Although the Greeks had a rich mythological tradition, which provided narratives within which they could conceive of themselves in a particular way, they did not yet have a scientific tradition,³ which aimed at getting the facts right. This was the void that the early philosophers attempted to fill.

The Pre-Socratics

The first of the earliest philosophers is Thales of Miletus (c. 620 - c. 546 BCE). He is considered the grandfather of both philosophy and empirical science. Thales proved the surface of the earth was curved and accurately measured the height of the Great Pyramid using geometry. He also famously hypothesized that the earth floated on a large body of water. This hypothesis allowed Thales to develop a naturalistic explanation of earthquakes which, although in fact false, was quite interesting: he supposed that waves crashed against the earth, which then rocked to and fro, much like a boat. This has been taken by many historians of philosophy as evidence that Thales was engaged in something like early (or perhaps proto-) empirical science. He developed naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena on the basis of careful observation and rational reflection. For philosophical purposes, Thales is perhaps best known for supposing that all things were ultimately composed of water (or more accurately, liquid, or “the wet”). In other words, he speculated that water was the most basic “stuff” out of which the various things of the world somehow arose or out of which they were made.

Anaximander (c. 610 - c. 546) was another early philosopher. He was a contemporary of Thales and was also from Miletus. Like Thales, he was also concerned with the question about the fundamental nature of things. He thought Thales had to be mistaken when he said that water was the most basic stuff, since water (the wet) had an opposite (namely, the dry). Working on the principle that whatever the most basic thing was had to be simple and complete in itself, he reasoned it couldn’t have an opposite, since that would suggest that there were two most basic things. He concluded that the most basic thing (in Greek: the arche) is different in kind from the various particular things of which we are aware. The arche is that from which all these various things arose. He thus famously declared, “It is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a nature different from them and infinite, from which arise all the heavens and worlds within them.” Anaximander thus articulated, as far as we know, the first metaphysical theory, since he was speculating about the ultimate nature of things. (We will hear more about metaphysics in a bit.)

What we should notice is that both Anaximander and Thales were perfectly comfortable claiming that, at bottom, ultimate reality was not at all as it appeared. We thus have an early indication of a distinction that will prove to be important; namely, the distinction between appearance and reality. Two other early philosophers also contributed to the development of metaphysics, marking this distinction in an even more radical way: Heraclitus and Parmenides.

The work of Heraclitus (c. 535 - c. 475 BCE) — or at least the fragments that we have available — perhaps most clearly gives expression to the tension in the ancient world between the rationalistic approach of the philosophers and the non-rational (poetic and practical) views that were more popular. Heraclitus thought that most people lacked knowledge of the world as it was in itself since they made no attempt to make rational sense of the world. Instead, they just had blind faith that the world was as they commonly supposed it to be, and they invented myths that helped them make sense of things. Because Heraclitus had such a pessimistic view of humanity, he is known as “the weeping philosopher.” 

We should notice that common sense tells us that fire exists only insofar as fuel (e.g., wood) is consumed and has undergone a radical transformation. A fire is the outcome of this violent change in the fuel. This is the insight which makes Heraclitus’s metaphor of the fire work: the things that constitute the world (you and me, squirrels and trees, etc.) exist only insofar as the world-stuff (substance or matter) is subject to radical, violent change. This point is captured in a further image Heraclitus employs, namely, his rather famous metaphor of the river: “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.” You may have heard this translated as, “One cannot step into the same river twice.” Put that way, it seems that Heraclitus is just pointing out that things change. However, his point is much more profound; he means to indicate that unless things changed, nothing would ever exist! The metaphor of the river is particularly revealing in this regard since a river is what it is only insofar as its waters flow; it is only because the water that makes it up changes or flows that the river itself persists through time. If the water didn’t flow — if there wasn’t a current — the river wouldn’t really be a river anymore! At that point it would become a lake or some such thing. What Heraclitus suggests is that the same is true of all things: at their most basic level, whatever it is that things are made out of must be ever-changing, subject to constant flux. (You might notice that this is very similar to the picture of things suggested by modern physics: atoms vibrate, subatomic particles spin, cells divide and die, and so on.)

In stark contrast to Heraclitus, Parmenides (c. 515 - c. 450 BCE) thought that the cosmos was not something that was in perpetual flux. Instead, he thought the cosmos was an unchanging, solid mass of Being. Parmenides was, significantly, among the first to bolster his speculative philosophizing about the world with an explicitly and purely rational argument. In his attempt to show that “the many” (i.e., the plurality of things we think constitute reality) are, in fact, “one” (i.e., that the differences and distinctions between things was merely illusory), he employed a rather stunning and complicated argument, which can be understood more or less in this way:

Every particular thing about which we can speak either is (has Being) or is-not (lacks Being). We cannot conceive of (cannot picture in our minds or positively think about) a thing which is-not (which lacks Being). Hence, everything which can be thought is, and there is nothing that can be thought which is-not. This applies not only to discrete objects which we tend to think exist in space (e.g., tables, chairs, people, and squirrels), it also applies to space itself! Hence, there is no “nothingness”; the world is an indivisible, unchanging, undifferentiated mass of existence (Being, or “is-ness”).

What both Parmenides and Heraclitus brought attention to is what has come to be called the problem of the one and the many. The problem, in a nutshell, is that insofar as we think of things as being parts or aspects of one thing (as when we say that all things exist in the universe, or that all things are made out of the same basic stuff), the question arises as to what the one underlying thing is. Is it a material substance (like water or air), or something that we might simply call “matter,” or is it something immaterial, like an idea or a law, or something transcendent, such as God? Moreover, how do these particular things arise out of this single thing? If the many are in some sense part of or aspects of some one thing, what accounts for the distinctions we commonly make? Why do we think that the world contains a plurality of different things? How do these various things come to constitute a single whole? Does the human mind unconsciously structure our experience? Or, are the distinctions we perceive somehow independent of our minds, existing “out there,” in the world?

As I indicated a moment ago, Heraclitus and Parmenides each in their own way raised awareness of the possible tension between how things appear and how they really are. This is known as the appearance-reality distinction. At its most basic level, reality is, on Heraclitus’s view, fundamentally chaotic, ceaselessly changing, but this stands in opposition to our commonsense view that things persist more or less unchanging through time. Parmenides argued the opposite — namely, that nothing really ever changes and that the world is a undifferentiated single thing. But this also conflicts with common sense! A compromise position may be clearly preferable, but then we still need to address the questions associated with the problem of the one and the many: how is it that change and persistence are possible?

The possibility that the world is not as it seems, and the possibility that we might comprehend the world as it is in itself using our intellect (that we might move “beyond” immediate appearances) has been the wellspring from which both philosophy and science have been nourished.

The appearance-reality distinction also, however, gave rise to a view of human knowledge known as skepticism, particularly skepticism with respect to sense-perception. If we rely on our sense perceptions (i.e., those ideas delivered to our minds, so to speak, via sight, hearing, touch, and so on), we rather naturally suppose that reality ultimately contains tables, chairs, trees, squirrels, etc. After all, these are all things which we have, at least on occasion, seen or heard or felt. But if we are to believe the early philosophers, these conclusions are potentially erroneous. On their view, the senses cannot be relied upon to give us accurate (or at least complete) information about what exists in reality.

Parmenides in particular thought that the senses were deceptive: they “told” us that the world contained a plurality of things. But in fact, he argued, the world was simply one thing, not many. This, as we saw above, was a conclusion he thought we could reach using rational argumentation. Notice that his argument didn’t require that we observe the world in order to reach his conclusion; the argument contained no empirical hypotheses. Rather than heading to a laboratory or running field experiments, we can (allegedly) sit in our armchairs and just think about things carefully, coming to realize that all is One. Parmenides thus thought that the intellect rather than the senses was the faculty by which we came to know the nature of reality.

Because many philosophers share Parmenides’s view on this point (that is, they think that a least some truths are discovered by the intellect alone), philosophy is oftentimes thought of as a mode of inquiry (or at least utilizing a mode of inquiry) that is distinct from empirical science. Empirical science is premised on careful, systematic observation. Philosophers of the sort being discussed here, however, think that observation can be misleading or that it provides only limited insight into the nature of things.

The Sophists and Socrates

What we see in the pre-Socratic period is that philosophical speculation is primarily devoted to making sense of reality at its most basic or fundamental level. The study of ultimate reality (the reality “behind” the appearances) is what is known as metaphysics, and it is one of the principal branches or sub-disciplines of philosophy.

As a result of the metaphysical speculations by the pre-Socratics, a number of thinkers adopted a more radical form of skepticism. Many of these people were known as Sophists (literally, “wise person,” but sometimes used with a derogatory connotation to mean something like “wise-ass”). The Sophists thought that the speculative metaphysical theories of the pre-Socratics were all bunk. They did not have confidence in the human intellect to arrive at truths regarding the reality behind the appearances. They retained the skepticism of their forefathers, but extended it even further: the Sophists were often relativists and/or nominalists.

Relativism maintains that truths (perhaps a certain class of truths, or perhaps all truths) are contingent upon custom, social mores, or human needs. The clearest example of relativism is what is known as ethical relativism. According to an ethical relativist, there are no objective, universally true moral propositions; instead, all moral claims are true only relative to a particular culture or a particular way of life. Mutilating your child’s genitalia may be wrong in one culture, but right in another culture (e.g., it is thought to be morally acceptable in our society). Eating the flesh of another human being may be wrong here, but right somewhere else.

The Sophists were relativists with respect to many things, including morality. Unlike the pre-Socratic philosophers, they did not think that education and contemplation should aim at achieving knowledge of eternal, objective truths, but rather an understanding of how to “get on” (make a life for oneself) in a particular area, or within the particular culture and traditions in which one found oneself. 

Many of the Sophists seem to have also been nominalists. That is, they denied that abstract objects (e.g., numbers, geometrical figures, Truth, Beauty, Goodness) were real things, but instead thought that these things existed in name only (hence, nominal-ists). An example is useful: in Plato’s famous book The Republic, the Sophist named Thrasymachus (pronounced “thra-SIM-a-cuss”) suggests that there is really no such thing as moral virtue or justice. Rather, justice, he argues, is simply the name given to those character traits, habits, and rules of action, the adoption of which by the vast run of folks is in the interest of the politically and socially powerful. Justice is what is in the interest of the stronger, he says; and injustice is what is in one’s own self-interest. Rather than thinking that justice and injustice exist in some objective sense, Thrasymachus supposes that they exist in name only.

The Sophists were by and large both nominalists and relativists. On their view, concept-terms do not pick out or refer to abstract entities but are really just handy labels we developed to make communication easier (that is the nominalism), and there really are no objective truths; all claims are true or false in relation to some context or subject (that is the relativism). A quote from one of the major Sophists, Protagoras, succinctly captures the gist of the Sophists’ views: “Man is the measure of all things; of that which is, that it is, and of that which is not, that it is not.”

What we see going on here is that the philosophy of the Sophists shifts from speculative metaphysics (which they think is bunk) to more practical affairs. Rather than speculating as to the nature of the cosmos, the Sophists concerned themselves with such down-to-earth questions as, “What do I need to know in order to be successful?” and “How can I persuade people to believe what I want them to believe?” 

Many people nowadays share the values and basic outlook of Sophists. A lot of people think that philosophy, theology, or theoretical science are hoity-toity disciplines at best, and really just a bunch of speculative nonsense. The only thing that really matters is learning the skills necessary to make a lot of money so that one can get what one wants. A former Republican presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, provoked the ire of professional philosophers by saying that the world doesn’t need more philosophers; rather, it needs welders and other people who do “real” work. The Sophists would be very much at home in our highly technical, specialized society, which emphasizes individualism and downplays the life of the mind and the importance of intellectual pursuits.

Socrates (469 - 399 BCE) was similar to the Sophists in certain respects, but he was also a harsh critic of the Sophists; he was an anti-Sophist. Like the Sophists, Socrates was concerned with practical matters, and like the Sophists, he thought that much of the speculative philosophizing undertaken by the pre-Socratics was misleading. Unlike the Sophists, however, he was neither a relativist nor a nominalist. From Socrates’s perspective, the Sophists were so obsessed with material wealth and the acquisition of power that they had neglected to ask what he thought to be the most important philosophical question any person can ask: namely, “What would it amount to live a good life? In what would a good life consist?”

The Sophists didn’t seem to think that Socrates’s question was worth pursuing—or at the very least, they doubted that there was an objective answer to that question. The good life, on their view, was getting whatever it was that one happened to want; hence, one’s intellectual endeavors should be focused on learning how to get what one wanted. On this point, Socrates adamantly disagreed: he did not think that we could, with any sort of intellectual honesty, simply assume that the good life involved getting whatever it was that we happened to want. One might think of Charles Manson, a cult leader who orchestrated a series of murders: would a situation in which he  satisfied all of his evil desires really be the achievement of the good life? To be sure, he might take it to be so, but is he correct? Socrates would find this doubtful.

Under Socrates’ guidance, philosophy came to incorporate and emphasize questions of value: the nature of justice and moral rightness and wrongness, the essence of piety, the nature of the moral virtues, etc. And indeed, ethics (the study of morality), or what I prefer to call axiology (literally, the theory of value), becomes the third major branch of philosophy.

To summarize so far, the pre-Socratics conceived of philosophy as the attempt to make rational sense of the cosmos. The Sophists conceived of philosophy as more or less useless in its own right, though they thought that rational argumentation could be very useful in persuading people, and hence they thought of it as a useful skill. Socrates, however, thinks of philosophizing as an essential component of the well-lived life. The attempt to become wise, the pursuit of wisdom, is an end in itself, something that is to be pursued for its own sake. Plato tells us that Socrates thus said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates conceived of philosophical self-examination as essential to living a properly human life. The highest and most divine thing that we, as intelligent beings, can do is to examine our beliefs and values and ask, “What reasons do I have for believing or valuing what I do, and are these good reasons?”

For Socrates, to be a philosopher did not mean that one possessed secret knowledge—it did not mean that one was, in fact, an expert or an authority on certain matters (which is, in some cases, what is implied when we say of someone that he or she is very wise). Instead, he was clearly among those who viewed philosophers as “friends of knowledge” or lovers of wisdom. Remember, the word ‘philosophy’ comes to us from the ancient Greek word which means, “the love of wisdom.” The philosopher’s task was to root out false claims to knowledge and to seriously scrutinize any alleged “truths” that were put forth. This led Socrates to live a somewhat peculiar kind of life. Rather than making money and caring for his family, he spent all of his time wandering around the Athenian marketplace (the agora) quizzing people about those subjects in regards to which they claimed to be experts.

Since the Sophists claimed to be experts on how to live a good life, Socrates questioned them about their viewpoints, oftentimes exposing them as frauds, as incapable of adequately explaining what goodness consisted in. He examined poets and artists about the nature of beauty, again often finding that they couldn’t adequately explain what beauty consisted in. He examined generals and military experts in matters of justice. He examined fellow philosophers about their views of what truth and knowledge consisted in and how we arrive at it. And he examined religious experts about the nature of piety and the will of the gods. In all of these cases he often left thinking that these supposed experts really didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. And he told them as much.

The Oracle at Delphi (the alleged spokesperson for the god Apollo) famously claimed that Socrates was the wisest person in all of Greece. This was truly surprising, since Socrates claimed to not know anything! After a while, however, Socrates concluded that he was wiser than the Sophists, poets, artists, and political leaders for this simple reason: whereas they claimed to know things when in fact they didn't, he never claimed to know anything (other than the fact that he didn’t know anything). Socrates’s wisdom consisted in the fact that he exhibited a sort of intellectual humility and a lack of hubris: Socrates didn’t claim to know anything; instead, he supposed that only God was wise.

Plato (429 - 327 BCE) is by far the most famous student who enjoyed the company of Socrates. Plato would become the more or less official father of Western philosophy. Unlike Socrates, who never wrote anything that we know of, Plato wrote extensively on all areas of philosophy. Indeed, most of what we know about Socrates comes to us from Plato’s writings. It is often said that the whole history of Western philosophy ever since Plato’s time is a series of “footnotes” regarding the topics and arguments which he dealt with or explored in his various books. Moreover, Plato would establish the first formal institution of higher education: he named his school the Academy, and we continue to use this term, both to refer to particular institutions and to refer to the whole discipline of rational and empirical investigation of the world. (Professors of all sorts considered themselves to be “members of the academy” insofar as they are professional researches and educators.)

Plato is well-known as a harsh critic of democracy (literally: “rule by the many”), which isn’t surprising since the Athenian democrats killed Socrates, his beloved teacher. Against democracy, Plato defended the idea that society should be administered and ruled by experts who oversee a bureaucratic meritocracy. He was thus a defender of aristocracy (literally: “rule by the best”).

One of the significant things that happened under Plato or as a result of his influence is that philosophy came to be seen as a formal discipline that requires training. Plato thought of philosophy as the contemplation of the most fundamental truths, including the nature of truth itself. We will discuss his ideas as we move forward. It must suffice to say that whereas Socrates viewed philosophy as self-examination, something that really anyone can and should do, Plato conceived of philosophy as the study of reality in its most abstract forms. And this wasn’t something that just anyone could do: it required a lifetime of education, the careful training of one’s mind in such a way that one could be freed from the prejudices of tradition, habit, common sense, and juvenile desires. But for both Socrates and Plato, philosophy was a way of life; namely, it required disciplining oneself to care about the truth — tradition, politics, social pressure, and psychological contentment be damned!