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RE: Philosophical Problems at home: Explaining "what the hell you're doing" to your skeptical sibling/mother/father/cat...

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The philosophy student is almost unique in having to justify her subject to countless individuals, stranger and friend alike. From the taxi driver and milkman to close friends and family, she is continually asked to justify her academic pursuit.

 

The public's stereotype of the philosopher is one who ponders the 'meaning' of life, anguishes over moral choices, sips copious amounts of coffee, makes the odd reference to Marx, Plato and so on. 'Philosophy' is associated in people's minds with 'nonsense', just as 'Conservative' is associated with 'nasty' and so on. 

 

With family and friends we just need to be patient, carefully explaining to them what philosophy is. To strangers - such as the taxi driver or a person at a party - the best approach, given limited time, is to use the descriptive adjective 'analytic' when describing yourself as a philosopher.

 

More seriously is how members of government departments and other academic disciplines view philosophy. Philosophy is usually lumped as a humanity, ranked next to - or combined with - religion (could be worse: bookstores these days lump philosophy with 'new age\mysticism\self-help').

 

Why do those who should know better refuse to accord philosophy with the respect it deserves? The problem is that when philosophy becomes successful it becomes a science and graduates from the domain of philosophy.

 

Human motivation and society -> psychology and sociology -> social science. 

 

Experimentation and empirical data -> natural philosophy -> natural science.

 

The subdivisions of philosophy that became successful - or too complex to remain a subdivision - ceased to be classified as philosophy. Philosophy becomes defined as that set of questions for which science has yet - or cannot - provide an answer. Since these questions have yet to be answered - or cannot be answered - and have been around for thousands of years, people associate philosophy with dead questions debated between dead individuals repeated ad infinitum by their successors. 

 

Does it matter that philosophy is viewed as useless, irrelevant, airy-fairy? Is it merely a case of wounded pride?

 

That philosophy is viewed with such disdain is dangerous for society. Philosophy is not a set of unanswerable, historical questions. It is an activity; a vital activity. I think the early Wittgenstein captures a lot of what philosophy is about with the following:

 

'Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.' 

- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.112

 

British society suffers from a lack of clear thinking. It's not only in the student newspaper rag that invalid arguments, inferences, and nonsensical claims are made in abundance; muddled, confused thinking is endemic in social, political, and legal discourse.

It doesn't help when we find philosophers themselves making comments that suggest that the domain of philosophy is restricted to footnotes of Plato (the infamous Whitehead quote) or to language (the later Wittgenstein). 

 

With the rise of religious ideology, pseudo-science, governments unrestrained by any principles of what the limits of government should be, the need for analytic philosophers actively engaged in society is greater than ever. The philosopher need not become king; but she needs to be respected, listened to. Until that respect appears, public policy will continue to be dominated by rhetoric and muddled thinking. 

 

- Andrew Goldfinch

 

 


________________________________

From: owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com on behalf of Edward Grefenstette
Sent: Mon 21/08/2006 21:46
To: bupS-DIS@bups.org
Subject: Philosophical Problems at home: Explaining "what the hell you're doing" to your skeptical sibling/mother/father/cat...



To reply to this message or start a new topic please email: BUPS-DIS@bups.org


Has anyone here enjoyed the experience of having to explain what a
philosophy student/professor/research does to an inquisitive family
member? I'm sure that, to some degree or other, it has. I personally
don't mind discussing my areas of interest for a few minutes here and
there, but sometimes you run into someone with a certain idea about
philosophers (yet not about philosophy) who is going to ask the
ironically philosophical question "Okay, I know what you do, but why
do you do it? What's the point?".

I found myself in such a situation just the other day, when my sister
and her friends, unsatisfied with my already subservient behaviour
(have you ever tried to taxi 4 teenage girls around shopping centres
all day? It's not the most fulfilling pastime...) set out to torment
me with the invalidation of my (or I should say 'our', since you most
certainly are targeted by proxy, by their cruel endeavour) academic
field. I tried in vain to present philosophy as a sort of "mother of
all sciences" (Jon Lowe's BUPC '05 keynote, anyone?) only to be
countered with the predictable "every academic says that about their
field". I commented upon how philosophical investigation was perhaps
the modern day computer, due to Babbage's will to create an analytical
machine that could compute logic rather than just quantities, I
discussed the rebirth of democracy and right of state through the
ethical and political discussions of the Enlightenment, and about how
rational philosophical thought had always walked hand in hand with
scientific progress in the dispelling of absurd old world concepts of
a flat earth, orderly heaven, and miraculous events, only to be told
that I wasn't talking about philosophy at all. I was merely talking
about science, about psychology and politics, about human nature...

I was in some way reminded of the example in philosophy of language of
the foreigner who is being shown around oxford, visiting college after
college, the library, the exam hall, only to ask "Yes, but where is
the university?". Kids these days seem to be asking in parallel "Yes,
but where is the philosophy?". And really, you can't blame them. The
modern day concept of the philosopher lives in the minds of the masses
as some toga-draped bearded old man walking along olive-lined dusty
paths, or perhaps some 19th century existentialist, garbed in black
with a frilly mustache, but people have a pretty poor idea about what
a philosopher is today, about what philosophy is today. When I was
younger (in other words, pre-university) I met a french philosopher by
the name of Michel Fattal who for all his interesting things to say
about philosophical thought in the middle east contributing to the
preservation of Aristotelean thought during the middle ages, could not
describe philosophy without using vague poetic sentences such as
"Philosophy... why philosophy is nothing, it is nothing and
everything". With models like this, no wonder the lay public put forth
such challenging queries. Not challenging in that they are difficult
to answer (although they can be as well), but in that they challenge
our vary subject's right to exist.

At a time where physicists and chemists struggle to woo the younger
masses into a university formation in these subjects, we too must ask
ourselves what image philosophy has in the public's mind. We too must
arm ourselves with tools to seduce, interest and explain. We don't
have flashy lasers or crystalline arrays of bubbles, so we can only
rely on words to explain what we do, why we do it, and why others
should give a damn.

So I turn to the certainly-more-verbose-than-I mass that is BUPS-DIS
to ask you all: how do you explain these things to your skeptical
sibling? How do you plan on helping keep the subject alive? (For
reference in France more and more universities are closing down
humanities departments do to lack of funding, lack of dynamic
research, and lack of popular interest. Anthropology is going fast...
who's next?)

- Edward.


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