Re: What is Philosophy?

[Keith Wilson <kw503@york.ac.uk>]

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Hi Paul,

There's definitely some truth in what you said about philosophy consisting 
of all the left over questions that don't fit into any other subject. 
However, I think it's more the other way round: i.e. that most subjects 
start off as philosophy and then, once the main principles and abstractions 
are discovered and they become amenable to scientific study, they are spun 
off as separate disciplines. This is certainly true of the natural 
sciences, physics, chemistry and so on (once known as natural philosophy), 
and one can imagine the same thing happening if, say, the problem of 
consciousness were solved, paving the way for a science of consciousness to 
replace the existing philosophy of mind. (Of course, many philosophers 
would say that this is impossible, but let's not get into that one right 
now!)

In a sense, maybe philosophy consists of all the 'hard problems' that 
haven't made sufficient progress to be considered a science. This may go 
some way towards explaining why philosophy itself never seems to make much 
progress, because as soon as a philosophical problem is conclusively 
solved, then it's no longer considered to be part of philosophy! It then 
either becomes a science or is absorbed into our language or general way of 
thinking. If this is true, then perhaps we can define philosophy as a kind 
of Überscience that formulates the basic assumptions and working methods of 
science, language and rational thought. (I'm not sure whether this is a 
good definition, but then perhaps definitions are overrated in any case...)

I really like the idea of philosophy as 'love of wisdom', as this is 
something that seems to be in rather short supply (as opposed to 
cleverness, of which we have plenty). However, I think it's also important 
to differentiate between the most general sense of philosophy as an 
activity, and philosophy as an academic discipline. Academic philosophy, at 
least as it's practised in the Anglo-American or analytic tradition, is 
primarily concerned with logic, argument, and conceptual analysis. I tend 
to think of it as being the 'science of argument', but this seems to be a 
fairly narrow and unsatisfactory definition that arguably limits the kinds 
of problems that can be addressed. I suspect that the continental tradition 
may have a broader and perhaps (dare I say it) more authentic definition of 
what philosophy is about that takes into account the sort of 'speculative 
philosophy' that seeks to question the basis of logic, thought and 
rationality itself (although of course many analytic philosophers do this 
too).

I'd be interested to hear what some of the continental philosophers on 
BUPS-DIS have to say on the subject...

Merry Christmas,
Keith.


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