What Is Philosophy?
A new school year is about to get underway, which means I will soon, once again, be attempting to convey to my students, most of whom will have no prior exposire to philosophy, what the discipline consists in. I have nothing especially groundbreaking to say about this matter, but what follows is a brief summary of my standard spiel.
What is philosophy? That is itself a contentious philosophical question, and just about every philosopher would answer it somewhat differently. Providing anything approaching a complete answer would require a book-length treatment; here, I will aim only to say a few things to help make sense of how one might go about distinguishing philosophy from the innumerable other fields of human inquiry.
We might begin by saying that philosophy is concerned with the most fundamental questions, and that each of these questions is associated with a particular subfield of the discipline: what is there? (metaphysics); how do we know? (epistemology); what should we do? (ethics); what is beautiful? (aesthetics); and what are the principles of correct reasoning? (logic). These questions are interrelated in various ways, and each is associated with further questions inviting more fine-grained distinctions. But this way of setting things out gets at something deep, and true: namely, that philosophy is, in essence, the discipline that concerns itself with the deepest questions that a person can ask.
One of the goals of philosophy is simply to clarify and refine our concepts – and what, precisely, are the right questions to ask about the world in which we find ourselves. Often, when our concepts and questions are sorted out, we can simply outsource philosophical questions to one or other of the empirical sciences – which themselves, historically, developed out of philosophy (only a few centuries ago, no one would have recognized a distinction between philosophy and science at all). A common feature of questions that can be outsourced in this way is that they are empirical by nature, and thus can be settled through observation, broadly construed.
However, some philosophical questions seem destined to remain within the purview of philosophy alone. Examples of such questions include those concerning value, normativity (i.e., “oughtness”), and the fundamental nature (or essence) of things (e.g., what is consciousness?), what is time?, etc.). In setting out to answer such questions, the only tools we have are reason (our capacity to use logic, respond to evidence, and make sense of things in the broadest sense), reflection, and conversation.
The point about conversation being one of the philosopher’s tools is crucial: philosophy is a cooperative enterprise; the end goal is always to communicate with other minds. This means making arguments and invoking reasons that are persuasive to others, not simply to ourselves.
Thus, philosophizing is not simply a matter of thinking deep thoughts (contrary to the stereotype of the out-of-touch, head-in-the-clouds philosopher): it is about developing those thoughts in a way that facilitates clear communication and advances a collective, ancient endeavor to better understand reality. In this way, philosophy is indispensable, inescapable - and imminently practical, insofar as one must have an accurate model of reality if one hopes to live well and impact the world positively.