by Maria Popova
‘Philosophy is 99 per cent about critical
reflection on anything you care to be interested in.’
Last week, we explored how
some of history’s greatest minds, including Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Albert
Einstein, Marie Curie, and Isaac Asimov, defined science. Kant
famously considered philosophy the “queen of the sciences” — whether or not
that is true, philosophy seems even more elusive than science to define.
From Philosophy Bites, the book based on thewonderful podcast of the same name, comes an omnibus of definitions, bound by a most
fascinating disclaimer — for, as Nigel Warburtonkeenly observes in
the book’s introduction, “philosophy is an unusual subject in that its
practitioners don’t agree what it’s about.”
The following definitions are excerpted from the first chapter of the
book, which asks a number of prominent contemporary philosophers the seemingly
simple yet, as we’ll see, awfully messy question, “What is philosophy?”
Philosophy
is thinking really hard about the most important questions and trying to bring
analytic clarity both to the questions and the answers.” ~ Marilyn
Adams
[P]hilosophy
is the study of the costs and benefits that accrue when you take up a certain
position. For example, f you’re arguing about free will and you’re trying to
decide whether to be a compatibilist or incompatibilist — is free will
compatible with causal determinism? — what you’re discovering is what problems
and what benefits you get from saying that it is compatible, and what problems
and benefits you get from saying it’s incompatible.” ~ Peter Adamson
Philosophy
is the successful love of thinking.” ~ John Armstrong
It’s
a little bit like what Augustine famously said about the concept of time. When
nobody asks me about it, I know. But whenever somebody asks me about what the
concept of time is, I realize I don’t know.” ~ Catalin Avramescu
Philosophy
is 99 per cent about critical reflection on anything you care to be interested
in.” ~ Richard Bradley
I
don’t think it’s any one thing, but I think generally it involves being
critical and reflective about things that most people take for granted.” ~ Allen
Buchanan
Philosophy
is critical thinking: trying to become aware of how one’s own thinking works,
of all the things one takes for granted, of the way in which one’s own thinking
shapes the things one’s thinking about.” ~ Don Cupitt
Another running theme — sensemaking:
Most
simply put it’s about making sense of all this… We find ourselves in a world
that we haven’t chosen. There are all sorts of possible ways of interpreting it
and finding meaning in the world and in the lives that we live. So philosophy
is about making sense of that situation that we find ourselves in.” ~ Clare
Carlisle
I
think it’s thinking fundamentally clearly and well about the nature of reality
and our place in it, so as to understand better what goes on around us, and
what our contribution is to that reality, and its effect on us.” ~ Barry
Smith
[Philosophy
is] a process of reflection on the deepest concepts, that is structures of
thought, that make up the way in which we think about the world. So it’s
concepts like reason, causation, matter, space, time, mind, consciousness, free
will, all those big abstract words and they make up topics, and people have
been thinking about them for two and a half thousand years and I expect they’ll
think about them for another two and a half thousand years if there are any of
us left.” ~ Simon Blackburn
Also recurring is the notion of presuppositions:
Philosophy
has always been something of a science of presuppositions; but it shouldn’t
just expose them and say ‘there they are’. It should say something further
about them that can help people.” ~ Tony Coady
Philosophy
is the name we give to a collection of questions which are of deep interest to
us and for which there isn’t any specialist way of answering. The categories in
terms of which they are posed are ones which prevent experiments being carried
out to answer them, so we’re thrown back to trying to answer them on the basis
of evidence we can accumulate.” ~ Paul Snowdon
Philosophy
is what I was told as an undergraduate women couldn’t do* — by an eminent philosopher who had best
remain nameless. But for me it’s the gadfly image, the Socratic gadfly:
refusing to accept any platitudes or accepted wisdom without examining it.” ~ Donna
Dickenson
I
think it used to be an enquiry into what’s true and how people should live;
it’s distantly related to that still, but I’d say the distance is growing
rather than narrowing.” ~ John Dunn
Philosophy
is conceptual engineering. That means dealing with questions that are open to
informed reasonable disagreement by providing new concepts that can be
superseded in the future if more economic solutions can be found — but it’s a
matter of rational agreement.” ~ Luciano Floridi
I’m
afraid I have a very unhelpful answer to that, because it’s only a negative
answer. It’s the answer that Friedrich Schlegel gave in his Athenaeum
Fragments: philosophy is a way of trying to be a systematic spirit without
having a system.” ~ Raymond Geuss
Philosophy
is thinking as clearly as possible about the most fundamental concepts that
reach through all the disciplines.” ~ Anthony Kenny
[A
philosopher] is a moral entrepreneur. It’s a nice image. It’s somebody who
creates new ways of evaluating things — what’s important, what’s worthwhile —
that changes how an entire culture or an entire people understand those
things.” ~ Brian Leiter
(A good editor, then, is also a philosopher — he or she, too, frames for
an audience what matters in the world and why.)
I
think that philosophy in the classical sense is the love of wisdom. So the
question then is ‘What is wisdom?’ And I think wisdom is understanding what
really matters in the world.” ~ Thomas Pogge
I’m
hard pressed to say, but one thing that is certainly true is that ‘What is
Philosophy?’ is itself a strikingly philosophical question.” ~ A. W.
Moore
I
can’t answer that directly. I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I
became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many
things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge
that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be
many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to
me.” ~ Alexander Nehemas
A number of philosophers are particularly concerned with teasing out the
difference between science and philosophy:
Philosophy
is thinking hard about the most difficult problems that there are. And you
might think scientists do that too, but there’s a certain kind of question
whose difficulty can’t be resolved by getting more empirical evidence. It
requires an untangling of presuppositions: figuring out that our thinking is
being driven by ideas we didn’t even realize that we had. And that’s what
philosophy is.” ~ David Papineau
I
regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of
subjects. I regard it as involving the kind of questions where your’e not
trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are
true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas
hang together. This means that philosophical questions will arise in a lot of
subjects.” ~ Janet Radcliffe Richards
(Though, one might argue, some of the greatest scientists of all time,
including Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking to name but just two, were only
able to develop their theories because they blended the empirical with the
deeply conceptual.)
Philosophy
is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting
critically on social and political and economic arrangements. It always
intimates the possibility that things could be other than they are. And
better..” ~Michael Sandel
Well,
I can tell you how philosophical problems arise in my view, which is where two
common-sense notions push in different directions, and then philosophy gets
started. And I suppose I also think that anything that claims to be philosophy
which can’t be related back to a problem that arises in that way probably is
empty.” ~ Jonathan Wolff
I
think the Greek term has it exactly right; it’s a way of loving knowledge.” ~ Robert
Rowland Smith
Philosophy Bites is excellent in its entirety, examining such diverse facets of
philosophy as ethics, politics, metaphysics and the mind, aesthetics, religion
and atheism, and the meaning of life.
* The complete selection of
answers in Philosophy Bites features 44 male philosophers and 8 female ones — it seems, sadly,
many women took, and perhaps continue to take, the words of that token
old-order “eminent philosopher” at face value. What might Einstein say?
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