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Why Philosophy? Five Views

Selection from: (2018) “Why Philosophy? Five views," In The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd edition, eds. Gideon Rosen, Alex Byrne, Joshua Cohen, Elizabeth Harman, Seana Valentine Shiffrin (W.W. Norton).

*Instructor note: These are all professional academic philosophers, from different backgrounds, giving their perspective on why philosophy is worth studying.

ALEX BYRNE

What is knowledge, and why is it valuable? These are characteristic philosophical questions, treated in Plato’s Meno. And, as Socrates says in another of Plato’s dialogues, the Theaetetus, wonder is where philosophy begins. Philosophers take something that seems of central importance—knowledge, justice, truth, religion, mind, matter—and ask what it is. They then go on to ask other questions about it. Why is knowledge valuable? Is any religion true? How should a just society be organized? Naturally, we can do the same with philosophy, too: What is philosophy, and why is it valuable?

Take the first question first. Philosophers love asking “What is X?” The problem is that they very rarely answer it correctly. They are very good at telling us what X isn’t—Socrates, in Meno, explains why knowledge is not “true opinion.” They often say helpful things about X—Socrates in effect points out that one can’t know something that is false. But their attempts to say what X is—to give a definition of X—almost invariably fail. There is unlikely to be an exception when X = philosophy. Is philosophy, perhaps, the study of fundamental and general problems that relies on logic and argument? But there are fundamental and general problems in, for example, mathematics, history, and biology; and mathematicians, historians, and biologists certainly rely on logic and argument. Is it, then, the study of fundamental and general philosophical problems? Well, yes, but this is almost entirely unenlightening and so not the sort of answer that counts as a definition. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t say anything helpful about philosophy. That is my rather disappointing nonanswer to the first question. What about the second question? What’s the value in philosophy? (You might get this from a hostile relative, so it’s good to be prepared.)

Will philosophy help you get into law school? True, philosophy majors have very high average LSAT scores, but that probably says more about the kind of person who chooses to major in philosophy than about any intellectual health benefits of the subject itself.

Does philosophy make you a better person? Some years ago, a philosopher with a spare afternoon crunched some data and concluded that ethicists (philosophers who study right and wrong) were more likely to steal library books than other philosophers. Even if that’s mistaken, there is no evidence that ethicists are especially ethical. And similarly for philosophers in general: the philosophers I know are mostly fine and admirable people, but I cannot say that they exemplify the good life for humans more than hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, and everyone else.

In his 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that a person “who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.” Philosophy, he continued, “removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.”

Is this at least part of the answer to the second question? You might not be persuaded if you don’t find doubt particularly liberating and prefer the comfort provided by conventional wisdom. If you’re determined to resist the appeal of philosophy, then the forces of logic are powerless to change your mind. But I hope you do see some value in keeping alive your sense of wonder. And if you do, then you are on your way to becoming a philosopher.

JOSHUA COHEN

Because you are reading these words, I know something about you. I know you have a very long book in front of you, with roughly half a million words: a book that is long in words and large in scope, with topics ranging from God and consciousness to knowledge and justice.

I do not know that you are reading it for an introductory philosophy course. But I assume you are. So you probably do not know much about philosophy. If you are like most people encountering philosophy for the first time, you are unsure what you will get from it. I took my first philosophy course in 1969, in the fall of my freshman year in college. The professor was a philosopher of science named Paul Feyerabend. I liked the course but was as uncertain about what to expect from philosophy when the course ended as I was when it started.

One thing is clear: what you get from reading philosophy depends on how hard you work at it. But how hard you work at it depends on what you expect to get from it. So what should you expect? Or more exactly, what can you reasonably expect to get from it, on the assumption that you work hard?

Four things.

First, philosophers think carefully. They simplify problems and address them one step at a time. That does not mean they get things right. But it does mean that if you work hard at the reading, you will get a better sense of how to wrestle with questions in an intellectually careful way.

Second, philosophers think deeply. When a philosopher hears that keeping promises is the right thing to do, he or she wants to know why. And not only why, but what does it mean that it is right? What is rightness? Why does rightness matter? And how does it fit into the world? Work hard at the readings, then, and you will get a better sense of how to think about fundamentals.

Third, philosophers think critically. As you will see, philosophers disagree with one another, and they sometimes disagree with received wisdom. But they do not simply disagree. They give reasons for their disagreement. Work hard at the readings, then, and you will get a better sense of how to rationally challenge settled assumptions and views you disagree with—and how to challenge yourself.

Fourth, philosophers think ambitiously. Look at the table of contents of this anthology. It does not cover every philosophical issue, but we have selected topics that are important—starting with God and ending with equality—and challenging. Work hard at the readings, and you will get a better sense of how to think about large, difficult topics.

That is a lot to expect. But that is the promise of philosophy: to think more carefully, deeply, and critically about issues that are genuinely worth thinking about. We have invested lots of time and energy in this book to deliver on that ambitious promise. We hope you get as much from it as we have given to it.

ELIZABETH HARMAN

I loved philosophy before I knew that the thing I loved was philosophy. What I loved were surprising questions and arguments for surprising conclusions. For me, these questions included: Is a red car in a dark garage still red? If the only way to save your daughter’s life is to steal some medicine, is it okay to steal the medicine? If a man who’s a barber shaves all and only those men who don’t shave themselves, does he shave himself?

There are certain questions that philosophers have tended to think about—many of these questions are posed as the titles of chapters in this book—but philosophy can be about anything. Some philosophical questions are not surprising: Is there a God? How should people treat each other? When is a person blameworthy for her actions? What do we know? But within these questions—questions that are basic and central to ordinary human life—we may find surprising further questions: Should I believe in God because that’s a safe bet? Must I give almost all my money away to fight famine and suffering in faraway places? If someone is wrong about what his moral duties are, is he thereby blameless when he does terrible things? Do we know we are not mere brains in vats, manipulated to have certain experiences by sophisticated neuroscientists?

A philosophical argument may blow your mind by convincing you of a shocking conclusion. Or it may almost convince you, leaving you wondering whether the argument has gone wrong, and if so, where? Thinking it through for yourself, exploring objections, thinking of how the author might respond, and talking all of this through with your friends, classmates, and teachers—in doing all these things, you are doing philosophy. You are a philosopher.

The best thing about philosophy is that, whoever you are, and how much or how little you know of philosophy up to now, the burden is on the authors you are reading to convince you. Your reactions to the arguments matter. If the argument has not convinced you, then it has failed in something it was trying to do. By probing that failure—taking your own reaction seriously, and seeing what you can say to resist the argument at the crucial point that it loses you—you can stake out the next step forward in examination of the issues at stake. Sometimes one reads a book or an academic paper simply to learn what the author has figured out about the world: one might learn the history of the Japanese samurai; or the basic principles of biochemistry; or why the Pythagorean theorem is true. One cannot read philosophy in this way. The answers to many basic and central philosophical questions are not settled. As you will see, it would be impossible to simply adopt all the views of the authors you will read, because they disagree with each other. In reading philosophy, we are not just taking in information: we are not condemned to passively accept what we read, but nor are we allowed to do so. We must examine each argument and challenge it, and some times we learn the most from the arguments that succeed the least in convincing us.

GIDEON ROSEN

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates famously says that “the unexamined life”—by which he means the unphilosophical life—“is not worth living.” This is of course obviously false. Most people manage to lead excellent lives without philosophy. Still, there is a grain of truth nearby. Philosophy can make life better. It can make our individual lives better, and it can make our collective lives better. Indeed for some of us—those of us with a philosophical cast of mind—philosophy can be an indispensable ingredient in the mix of things that make our lives worth living. No doubt Socrates was such a person. Maybe you are, too, though you can’t know until you’ve tried to live a life with philosophy in the mix.

What do I mean by philosophy? It is maddeningly hard to say. Philosophy does not have a distinctive subject matter. Botany is about plants; philosophy is about, well, almost anything. Philosophy does not have a distinctive method. Mathematics, the sciences, and technical disciplines such as law and medicine all have many distinctive methods for solving problems. But philosophy is a magpie: any method from any discipline can be of service, and it is hard to point to a proprietary method that distinguishes philosophy from other subjects. It is common to say that philosophy is defined by the questions it asks, and there is something to that. The chapters in this book are all headed by questions—“What is consciousness?” “Do we possess free will?” “What is the right thing to do?”—all of which are clearly philosophical. And yet it is quite hard to say what they have in common that makes them philosophical.

I think of philosophy, first and foremost, as an intellectual orientation to the (mostly nonphilosophical) problems of life. Human beings inevitably find themselves with problem after problem. Some are practical: Where should we have lunch? Should we launch a revolution? Some are theoretical: Why is the sky blue? What are the laws of nature? In many cases, the problem is clear and the way forward is to take the tools one already has and explore solutions. But it is always possible to pause to reflect on the problem and its presuppositions. You want to know why the sky is blue? Well, what exactly is the sky and what is it for something to be blue? You want to know whether you should launch a revolution? You wouldn’t be asking unless you thought that the current system was unjust. But what is injustice, and what are the morally permissible responses to it? You don’t have to ask these reflective questions. But when the problem is difficult, it sometimes helps to ask them. And for some of us, the new questions that emerge from this sort of reflection turn out to be fascinating in their own right.

Over its long history, philosophy has cultivated this habit of reflecting on the terms in which our problems are posed and on the unspoken presuppositions we take for granted as we go about our business. This has occasionally changed the world. It is arguable, for example, that every progressive development in the history of politics—from democracy itself to universal suffrage to the egalitarian ideal of a society without pernicious hierarchies of esteem and power—has been fueled in part by the philosophical reflection on what a just society would be like. But even when it is not immediately useful, it can be worth doing. The scientist takes it for granted that nature is governed by laws and sets out to find them. The philosopher pauses to ask what it could possibly mean to say that nature—a world of mostly mindless things—is “governed” by anything, and how it is that human beings confined to a tiny corner of the universe can possibly know what does the governing. Those of us with a philosophical cast of mind cultivate the habit of asking these questions, both for the pleasure it brings—it deepens the experience of life to know that enormous abstract questions always hover in the background—and because doing so opens up new possibilities. But of course, I don’t expect you to take my word for any of this. The only way to know the charms of the examined, philosophical life is to live it, at least for a while, as an experiment. This book is designed to help you do just that.

SEANA SHIFFRIN

Why study philosophy? In short, to have it all: a more successful, fulfilling career; closer friendships; and a fascinating, meaningful life.

How does philosophy work this magic? As a start, philosophical study instills crucial skills useful in all walks and aspects of life. It directs you to pay strict attention to the words an author uses, to investigate their meaning closely, and to pay the same critical attention to what arguments are given (or are missing) and exactly what they establish. You then must devote the same level of care to your own speech and argumentation. In a fairly short time, this practice will lead you to speak and write with greater precision and clarity.

The critical stance philosophical inquiry encourages can be illuminating. Philosophical training inclines you to keep asking and answering the question “why” and “how” with increasing sophistication and ever deepening humility as satisfying answers evade easy efforts. The challenging process helps you identify what you value. When you stop taking the way things are for granted and ask for justifications and explanations, you come to understand yourself and your circumstances better. In some cases, you come to cherish how things are. In other cases, you come to see that things could be different. That realization may be profoundly liberating.

Alongside developing a critical eye, philosophical study also demands that you learn to read and think charitably. When an author’s argument appears to fall short of its ambition, it is not enough to identify the failure. You are trained to identify the author’s aims, how you could read her effort in its best light, and what contribution you could make to her success. If her argument cannot succeed, there is pressure on you to show another approach that could supply better answers. The practice of charitable interpretation builds skills of mutual understanding and encourages creative and imaginative solutions.

The combination of critical and cooperative perspectives is a powerful cocktail, whether for an advocate, a planner, a counselor, a friend, a citizen, or for one’s personal life. Honing your analytical abilities to make critical assessments, to communicate carefully, and to interpret others fairly will improve almost every aspect of your life, including your sense of comedy and your relationships with other people.

These priceless skills work a permanent, transformative effect on one’s life. So does the exposure to philosophy’s subject matter. The basic issues philosophy tackles involve questions that occur, in one form or another, to most people as early as childhood, such as: What is the connection between your mind and your body? What exists outside your mind, and is it possible to know you perceive it accurately? What makes for a good and meaningful life? How should I relate to other people? How should we live together?

These questions persist throughout one’s life. Philosophical study offers structured, articulate ways to grapple with them. In learning how others have answered them, you are connected to other thinkers across history and geography. By elaborating your own answers, you construct and express your character and sense of the meaning of life. Perhaps philosophy’s greatest contribution is to offer ideas absorbing and important enough to return to repeatedly over a lifetime of thought.