Philosophyactivity

Blue Sky Thinking…
Philosophy as an Activity:
a selection of approaches
Tony Stuart 2010

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Contents
Alastair MacIntyre on Philosophy and Social Theory………………………… 3
Analysis……………………………………………………………………………5
Argument – an example from John Searle…………………………………….. 7
Aristotle and his Philosophy…………………………………………………….. 9
Austin’s Approach to Philosophy………………………………………………. 11
On Baruch Spinoza (1632-77)……………………………………………………12
Kant’s Freedom and Reason……………………………………………………. 13
Philosophy?!............................................................................................................ 14
What is Philosophy For?........................................................................................ 15
Definitions………………………………………………………………………… 16
John Dewey (1859 – 1952)……………………………………………………….. 18
Foucault: Words and Power…………………………………………………….. 20
What is a Philosopher?............................................................................................21
Philosophy as an exercise in freedom…………………………………………….22
Janet Radcliffe Richards………………………………………………………… 23
The Philosophers Moore and Austin……………………………………………. 25
On Bertrand Russell and Philosophy…………………………………………… 26
On Karl Popper ………………………………………………………………….. 27
Plato ………………………………………………………………………………. 30
Reduction ………………………………………………………………………… 33
Universities and Philosophy ……………………………………………………. 34
Philosophy and Tradition ………………………………………………………. 35
Philosophy as Therapeutic ……………………………………………………… 36
Philosophy as an Activity – comments from William James…………………. 38
Dialogue in Philosophy 1. Berkeley ……………………………………… 39
2. Hume ………………………………………… 40
3. Socratic Dialogue – Meno …………………... 42
4. Plato’s Socrates ………………………………. 43
Dialectic ……………………………………………………………………………45
Nietzsche 1. Genealogy as a philosophical method ………………………. 47
2. Of the Three Metamorphoses ………………………………… 48
3. On Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) ………………………… 50
Scepticism 1 ……………………………………………………………………… 52
Scepticism 2 – an example of its positive use…………………………………… 54
Scepticism 3 – a positive example from Radcliffe Richards ………………….. 57

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Alasdair MacIntyre on Philosophy and Social Theory
In the mid-1950s, political philosophy was declared dead by a number of professional
philosophers. Since that time, there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in
the area which has come about for three main reasons.
The first is probably still unrecognized by many people. One of the most important
aspects of British philosophy when it was strongly influenced by positivism1
was a
belief that the history of philosophy was a mere addendum, a source-book of
problems. It held that although knowledge of the history of philosophy might be quite
useful, one could be a very good philosopher indeed without knowing very much
about the history of philosophy. When British writers do write about the history of
philosophy their method is customarily to treat the historical figure concerned as
much like one of their contemporaries as possible and to debate with him as they
would with a colleague at the Aristotelian Society. One of the influences in reviving
philosophical thought on political and social matters has been the number of excellent
histories which have been produced, studies of the works of Hobbes or of Locke or of
Mill, in which the relationship between epistemology and political philosophy of a
particular thinker has become so clear that the attempt to separate these, or to treat
them in a way that the positivists did, becomes very implausible. When we
understand how closely Hobbes’ political philosophy is linked to epistemology, or
when we realize how systematic a thinker Mill is, then we come to realize that in our
own time the notion that we can pursue philosophy as primarily an epistemological
subject without worrying about its implications for political and social affairs begins
to seem bizarre. Why should we in our time be so different from Hobbes and Mill?
It’s at least worth taking seriously the hypothesis that we are not.
Secondly, an extremely important influence on reviving political philosophy has been
the impact on philosophy of actual political concerns. Examples of this are the
concepts of freedom and equality discussed by Berlin and Wollheim respectively.
Freedom and equality are extremely important terms because we use them both to
evaluate and to characterize societies. They are precisely expressions which are not
going to be easily disposed of by approaching them with a neat factual-evaluative
dichotomy, and trying to find factual elements and evaluative elements and separating
them out (as the positivists claim we should do). Indeed, when we characterize
societies as more or less free, or as free in one respect and not in another, and when
we characterize some society as providing quality of opportunity but not other kinds
of equality, then the question of the precise criteria employed in making these
judgments, and the relationship between meaning and criteria, and all the other
epistemological questions, become central to political and social philosophy.
Furthermore, if our epistemological analyses and our conceptual analyses do not
provide us with an apparatus which will enable us to understand our use of these
terms, then this puts a question-mark against our epistemology and our analysis of
concepts. This is the kind of area in which political and social philosophy is a source
of epistemological thought and not a mere postscript to it.
1
Positivism holds that the highest or only form of knowledge is the description of sensory phenomena.
In the 20th
century the logical positivists used this doctrine to cut away as meaningless many of the
traditional metaphysical questions of philosophy since they could not be examined or resolved through
experience. Thus, for example, whether God exists is meaningless.

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If one pursues still further the question about what kinds of concept and what kinds of
judgement are involved when we speak about freedom and equality in characterizing
and evaluating societies, then one comes to a third important influence. Thus, the
work of the later Wittgenstein and the work of Austin, bring out the need for patient
descriptive labour in answering the question of how concepts of different kinds are
used, of how the widely ranging vocabulary of political and social life is deployed.
Austin showed us how what some have taken for minute differences between
negligence, inadvertence and irresponsibility of other kinds, can be extremely
important in characterizing the way in which an agent’s intention was or was not
embodied in his actions on a particular occasion. These descriptive labours result, of
course, in reports of how people do actually use discourse and therefore they have an
empirical basis. They provide some of the data which we need if we are to return to
the problems of classical political philosophy. At the core of such enquiries is the
large general question of how we do and how we ought to characterize what a man is
doing when he does something. How do we distinguish between his action and its
effects, consequences and results? This whole family of questions raises the issue of
how we understand the actions of ourselves and others in our social relationships.
Thus what contemporary philosophy has brought us to is a realization that we do not
as yet understand how to understand what we are doing in those elementary social
relationships which are relationships of everyday action and everyday conversation,
just because we have not adequately clarified yet our basic concepts.
from Modern British Philosophy ed. Bryan Magee (OUP 1971)
[822 words]

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Analysis
This is the philosophical method, or set of methods, characteristic of much twentieth-
century Anglophone philosophy. It expresses allegiance to rigour and precision,
science, logical techniques and – perhaps most distinctive of all – careful
investigation of language as the best means of investigating concepts.
Analysis is pre-eminently a style, not a body of doctrine. It is piecemeal and
particular in its interests. Some practitioners have expressed open hostility to the sort
of system-building efforts of philosophers such as Spinoza and Hegel. In sharp
contrast to such efforts, philosophical analysis is best understood by analogy with
analysis in chemistry, as being a process of investigation into the structure,
functioning, and connections of a particular matter under scrutiny.
Although analytical philosophers look back to Aristotle and the British Empiricists,
especially Hume, as major influences on their tradition, it is the work of Bertrand
Russell and G E Moore at the beginning of the twentieth century which is the
proximate source of analysis so called.
Moore conceived the philosopher’s task to be a quest for definitions as a way of
clarifying philosophical claims. This involves finding a definition of the concept or
proposition (not merely the words used to express them) under discussion. Russell’s
conception of analysis, on the other hand, derived from his work on logic. On his
view, the surface forms of language can mislead us philosophically and we must
penetrate to the underlying logical structure to clarify what is being said. His classic
example is the assertion ‘The present King of France is wise’. This seems to be
meaningful as a sentence but is it true or false, or neither? Russell argued that it is a
concealed three-part conjunction asserting: a) there is a king of France; b) that there is
only one such thing (‘the’ implies uniqueness); and c) that it is wise. Since the first
conjunct is false, the whole is so.
These early techniques of analysis were soon extended and varied into practices not
restricted either to the giving of definitions or to the attempt to unearth underlying
logical structure. Some philosophers who would standardly be classified as belonging
to the analytic tradition – a broad church – have explicitly repudiated both the claim
that language has a hidden logical structure (the later Wittgenstein) and the idea that
the chief task of philosophy is to state definitions.
Analysis has sometimes been claimed to involve reduction of one kind of item to
items of another kind. For example, phenomenalists argue that statements about
physical objects are to be analysed into (translated into) statements about sense-data.
In the philosophy of mind, physicalists claim that mental phenomena can be
exhaustively analysed in terms of physical phenomena in central nervous systems.
Other concepts of analysis have been influential. On Michael Dummett’s view,
analysis consists in elucidating the nature of thought by investigation of language.
The idea is that to get a philosophical understanding of the world, we have to proceed
by way of what we think about these matters; but our chief and perhaps only access to
what we think is what we say; so analysis comes down to the philosophical study of
meaning. For P F Strawson analysis is the descriptive task of tracing connections

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between the concepts in our scheme of thought, with a view among other things to
seeing what order of dependence obtains among them, thereby helping us to see why,
for example, various forms of scepticism need not bother us.
These remarks show that the concept of analysis is not univocal; there is no one
method or set of methods which can be claimed to be definitive of it. Philosophers in
the analytic tradition have in practice agreed with the celebrated dictum of Deng
Xiaoping concerning methodology, that ‘it does not matter if the cat is black or white
so long as it catches mice’. But although there is no defining method of analysis,
there can be said to be a defining manner, embodied in the ideal of any careful,
detailed, and rigorous approach which throws light on the nature and implications of
our concepts, characteristically revealed by the way we employ them in discourse.
Entry in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy submitted by A C Grayling.

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Argument – an example from John Searle
Besides setting out an argument in a particularly clear way, Searle provides us with a
short commentary to help us follow his argument to the inescapable conclusions.
Taken from ‘Can Computers Think?’ in ‘Minds, Brains and Science’ (1984)
The argument has a very simple logical structure so that you can see whether it is
valid or invalid. The first premise is:
1. Brains cause minds.
Now, of course, that is really too crude. What we mean by that is that mental
processes that we consider to constitute the mind are caused, entirely caused, by
processes going on inside the brain. That’s just a fact about the way the world works.
Now for proposition number two:
2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.
That proposition is a conceptual truth. It just articulates our distinction between the
notion of what is purely formal and what has content. Now, to these two propositions,
let’s add a third and a fourth:
3. Computer programmes are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical,
structure.
That proposition, I take it, is true by definition; it is part of what we mean by the
notion of a computer program.
4. Minds have mental contents; specifically, they have semantic contents.
And that, I take it, is just an obvious fact about how our mind works. My thoughts,
and beliefs, and desires are about something, or they refer to something, or they
concern states of affairs in the world; and they do that because their content directs
them at these states of the world. Now, from these four premises, we can draw our
first conclusion; and it follows obviously from premises 2, 3 and 4:
Conclusion 1. No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a system a mind.
Programs, in short, are not minds, and they are not by themselves sufficient for
having minds.
Now, this is a very powerful conclusion, because it means that the project of trying to
create minds solely by designing programs is doomed from the start. And it is
important to re-emphasise that this has nothing to do with any particular state of
technology, or any particular state of the complexity of the program. This is a purely
formal, or logical, result from a set of axioms which are agreed to by all (or nearly all)
of the disputants concerned. Hence, the project of ‘strong Artificial Intelligence’
[getting computers with minds] is incapable of fulfilment.

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However, once we have these axioms, we can derive a second conclusion:
Conclusion 2. The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely in virtue of
running a computer program.
And this second conclusion follows from conjoining the first premise together with
our first conclusion. That is, from the fact that brains cause minds and that programs
are not enough to do the job, it follows that the way that brains cause minds can’t be
solely by running a computer program. Now that also I think is an important result,
because it has the consequence that the brain is not, or at least not just, a digital
computer. … [A]nything can trivially be described as if it were a digital computer,
and brains are no exception. But the importance of this conclusion is that the
computational properties of the brain are simply not enough to explain its functioning
to produce mental states. And indeed, that ought to seem a commonsense scientific
conclusion to us anyway because all it does is remind us of the fact that brains are
biological engines; their biology matters. It is not, as several people in artificial
intelligence have claimed, just an irrelevant fact about the mind that it happens to be
realised in human brains.
Now, from our first premise, we can also derive a third conclusion:
Conclusion 3. Anything else that caused minds would have to have causal powers at
least equivalent to those of the brain.
And this third conclusion is a trivial consequence of our first premise. It is a bit like
saying that if my petrol engine drives my car at 75mph, then any diesel engine that
was capable of doing that would have to have a power output at least equivalent to
that of my petrol engine. Of course, some other system might cause mental processes
using entirely different chemical or biochemical features from those that the brain in
fact uses. It might turn out that there are beings on other planets, or in other solar
systems, that have mental states and use an entirely different biochemistry from ours.
[…] But now, from our first conclusion and our third conclusion, our fourth
conclusion follows immediately:
Conclusion 4. For any artefact that we might build which had mental states
equivalent to human mental states, the implementation of a computer program would
not by itself be sufficient. Rather the artefact would have to have powers equivalent
to the powers of the human brain.
The upshot of all this is it reminds us that mental events are biological phenomena.
Consciousness, intentionality, subjectivity and mental causation are all a part of our
biological life history, along with growth, reproduction, the secretion of bile, and
digestion.

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Aristotle and his Philosophy
Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his
powers: a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his
philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the
brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent
world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had
contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his
achievements.
Though biographical information is sketchy, one thing about him can be said with
reasonable confidence: throughout his life Aristotle was driven by one overmastering
desire – the desire for knowledge. His whole career and his every known activity
testify to the fact: he was concerned before all else to promote the discovery of the
truth and to increase the sum of human knowledge.
He did not think himself singular in possessing such a desire, even if he pursued his
object with singular devotion; for he affirmed that ‘all men by nature desire to know’,
and he claimed that each one of us is, most properly speaking, to be identified with his
mind, so that life – a fully human life – is ‘the activity of the mind’. In an early work,
the Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy, Aristotle announced that ‘the
acquisition of wisdom is pleasant; all men feel at home in philosophy and wish to
spend time in it, leaving all other things aside’. The word ‘philosophy’ designates,
etymologically, the love of wisdom; and a philosopher, in Aristotle’s book is not a
cloistered academic engaged in remote and abstract speculation – he is someone who
searches for ‘knowledge of things human and divine. In one of his later works, the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that ‘happiness’ – that state of mind in which
men realize themselves and flourish best – consists in a life of intellectual activity. Is
not such a life too god-like for mere mortals to sustain? No; for ‘we must not listen to
those who urge us to think human thoughts since we are human, and mortal thoughts
since we are mortal; rather, we should as far as possible immortalize ourselves and do
all we can to live by the finest element in us – for if in bulk it is small, in power and
worth it is far greater than anything else’.
One of Aristotle’s ancient biographers remarks that ‘he wrote a large number of books
which I have thought it appropriate to list because of the man’s excellence in every
field’: there follows a list of some 150 items which, taken together and published in
the modern style, would amount to perhaps fifty volumes of print. Choose a field of
research and Aristotle laboured in it; pick an area of human endeavour, and Aristotle
discoursed upon it.
Most of the surviving writings were perhaps never intended to be read; for it seems
likely that the treatises which we possess were made up from Aristotle’s lecture notes.
In the light of this, it will hardly be a surprise to find that the style of his works is
often rugged. Plato’s dialogues are finished literary artefacts, the subtleties of their
thought matched by the elegance of the language. Aristotle’s writings for the most
part are terse. His arguments are concise. There are abrupt transitions, ugly
repetitions, obscure allusions. Paragraphs of continuous exposition are set among
staccato jottings. The language is spare and sinewy. This is due in part to his attitude
to the written word – he was not enamoured of overly-polished sentences, favouring

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simplicity: ‘In every form of instruction there is some small need to pay attention to
language; for it makes a difference with regard to making things clear whether we
speak this or that way. But it does not make much of a difference: all these things are
show and directed at the hearer – which is why no-one teaches geometry this way’.
The reader who opens his Aristotle and expects to find a systematic disquisition on
some philosophical subject, or an orderly textbook of scientific instruction, will be
brought up short: Aristotle’s treatises are not like that. But reading the treatises is not
a dull slog. Aristotle has a vigour which is more attractive the better it is known; and
the treatises, which have none of the camouflage of Plato’s dialogues, reveal their
author’s thoughts – or at least appear to do so – in a direct and stark fashion. It is easy
to imagine you can hear Aristotle talking to himself.
Above all, Aristotle is tough. Not only is he tough, he can be vexing. Whatever does
he mean here? How on earth is the conclusion to follow from these premises?
Aristotle’s treatises offer a peculiar challenge to their readers; and once you have
taken up the challenge, you would not have the treatises in any other form.
Abstracted from Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Barnes (2000)
[808 words]

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Austin’s Approach to Philosophy
Austin took the highly unusual view that philosophy could be – even ought to be – a
group activity. He thought the job of philosophy was to get things really settled. To
that end, it should employ the more scientific approach of having a team of people
working in an organised way on small points – though perhaps collectively on a large
problem – combining their results, criticizing each other’s work, and really coming up
with some agreed, solid conclusions at the end. An example would be a time when he
was concerned about the notion of a rule – a notion important in all sorts of fields.
Austin parcelled out the problem to people who regularly attended his so-called
‘Saturday mornings’ (weekly meetings held in Oxford during term time in Austin’s
rooms). One would look in detail at the rules of bridge, another the rules of cricket,
another the rules of evidence, and so on. Then they would discuss what they’d come
up with and, it was hoped, from this a clearer idea of the notion of rule would emerge
which would be more satisfactory than before.
This emphasis on ‘getting things settled’, i.e. eliminating open-ended questions might
seem to make philosophy a suicidal subject – one which eliminates itself. Austin did
see it this way, but not in the negative way that might be implied in ‘suicidal’. He
thought that the most one could say for philosophy was that it consisted of a great
mass of unclear issues of all sorts of shapes and sizes, and that one thing one could
hope for in the way of philosophical advance, was that bits of this great confused
mass should from time to time detach themselves and set up on their own. In this way
he thought that logic, for instance, had started life as a more or less confused part of
philosophy, and had then become detached and set up on its own, with its own
criteria, standards and so on. Psychology similarly had become in due course an
independent discipline, distinguished from philosophy, and one might say that
linguistics by now has also made good a very flourishing independence. He certainly
thought this was not in any way a bad thing, but should be seen as the natural way
things went – the clearer one became about what one was discussing and how
questions of a certain sort might be settled, the more there would be a tendency for
those questions, so to speak, to float away from the residual gaseous mass of
philosophy and be recognized as a discipline in their own right.
Abstracted from Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee - his conversation with Geoffrey
Warnock.
(429 words)

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On Baruch Spinoza (1632-77)
Spinoza subscribed to a modified form of Descartes’ method, and drew the standard
philosophical conclusion. He became convinced that the fundamental premises of
human knowledge must be established not by experience but by reason, since reason
alone can provide insight into the essence of things – an essence being precisely that
which is captured in a ‘clear and distinct idea’. […]
Scientific knowledge, therefore, must begin from self-evident axioms, which treat of
essences. And it must proceed therefrom by the method of clear and distinct ideas: in
other words, by deduction.
The 17th
-century philosopher had a paradigm of such a rational science in the
geometry of Euclid, which seemed precisely to begin from self-evident premises and
to proceed by chains of clear and distinct reasoning to conclusions which were as
compelling and as universally valid as the premises from which they were derived.
The ambition therefore arose to generalize the geometric method: that is, to find, for
each science, a set of axioms and definitions that would contain the clear and
exhaustive statement of its basic postulates. […]
In his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663) Spinoza provided a paradigm of the
geometrical method by reducing Descartes’ philosophy to a set of axioms and
definitions, and deriving therefrom the main Cartesian conclusions. This system,
which seemed both to have completed the Cartesian system, and to have shown its
fundamental points of error, greatly enhanced the authority of the geometric method.
Spinoza’s own Ethics was therefore conceived entirely in geometric terms, each of its
five parts beginning from axioms and definitions and proceeding by mathematical
proof towards its conclusions. As the title indicates the book was not intended simply
as a treatise of metaphysics. Of equal importance for Spinoza were the problems of
human nature, human conduct, and human destiny. These too, he believed, could be
treated in a geometrical fashion, and the resulting answers would have the certainty,
necessity and universality of the basic laws of mathematics. His system, therefore,
endeavours to move with equal mathematical rigour towards the proposition that ‘a
substance is prior in nature to its modifications’, and towards the proposition that
‘there cannot be too much merriment, for it is always good; but on the other hand,
melancholy is always bad’. (The proof of the second proposition involves, when
traced back to its original axioms, something like 100 steps; this idea of a
mathematics of laughter seems less strange when set beside Spinoza’s view that
merriment is more easily conceived than observed.)
from Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (pp. 32-3) by Roger Scruton OUP 2002.

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Kant’s Freedom and Reason
The placing of normativity* at the centre of philosophical concern is the reason
behind another of Kant’s signal innovations: the pride of place he accords to
judgment. In a sharp break with traditions, he takes it that the smallest unit of
experience, and hence of awareness, is the judgment. This is because judgments, the
application of concepts, are the smallest unit for which knowers can be responsible.
Concepts by themselves don’t express commitments; they only determine what
commitments would be undertaken if they were applied.
I think that philosophy is the study of us as creatures who judge and act – that is, as
discursive*, concept-using creatures. And I think that Kant is right to emphasize that
understanding what we do in these terms is attributing to us various kinds of
normative status, taking us to be subject to distinctive sorts of normative appraisal.
So a central philosophical task is understanding this fundamental normative
dimension within which we dwell. Kant’s own approach to this issue is based on the
thought that genuine normative authority (constraint by norms) is distinguished from
causal power (constraint by facts) in that it binds only those who acknowledge it is
binding. Because one is subject only to that authority one subjects oneself to, the
normative realm can be understood equally as the realm of freedom. So being
constrained by norms is not only compatible with freedom – properly understood, it
can be seen to be what freedom consists in. I don’t know of a thought that is deeper,
more difficult, or more important than this.
Kant’s most basic idea is that judgement and action are things we are in a distinctive
way responsible for. What does it mean to be responsible for them? I think the kind
of responsibility in question should be understood to be task responsibility: the
responsibility to do something. What (else) do judging and acting oblige us to do?
The commitments we undertake by applying concepts in particular circumstances –
by judging and acting – are ones we may or may not be entitled to, according to the
rules (norms) implicit in those concepts. Showing that we are entitled by the rules to
apply the concept in a particular place is justifying the commitment we undertake
thereby, offering reasons for it. That is what we are responsible for, the practical
content of our conceptual commitments. In undertaking a conceptual commitment,
one renders oneself in principle liable to demands for reasons. The normative
appraisal to which we subject ourselves in judging and acting is appraisal of our
reasons. Further, offering a reason for the application of a concept is always applying
another concept: making or rehearsing another judgment or undertaking or
acknowledging another practical commitment (Kant’s ‘adopting a maxim’).
Conceptual commitments both serve as and stand in need of reasons. The normative
realm inhabited by creatures who can judge and act is not only the realm of freedom,
it is the realm of reason.
*Discursive – proceeding by argument or reasoning, not intuitive.
*Normativity – concerned with the grounds for requirements or standards of
behaviour. (Norms are rules for behaviour, signalled by ‘ought’ and ‘should’.)
From Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise by Robert Brandom in What is Philosophy?
(eds Ragland and Heidt)
(488 words)

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Philosophy?!
As a so-called activity, philosophy is a waste of time. Of course, a good number of
those clever philosophers will immediately object that this is nonsense, that what
philosophy has discovered has lasting value and influence. I say: show us the
evidence. Anything more than a cursory glance at philosophy shows that it settles
nothing; that it has established no truths; that it has made no difference to the world.
It has all been as big a waste of time as, say, football: entertaining enough in its way
(and even providing some meaning to life for many benighted fools) but hardly a
thing that can be respected as worthy of humanity.
All philosophers are good at is arguing about things that make no difference. Who
cares if ‘soft compatibilism’ is or is not an answer to the ‘free will problem’? Get a
life and then get on and live it! Poring over musty books and bleating on and on
about ‘fundamental questions’ is a life I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. (Well,
perhaps I would just to keep him out of the way.)
They can’t even agree about what philosophy is all about – and yet they want to claim
that ‘everything is philosophy and everyone is a philosopher’! Any fool can say
something like that – indeed, only a fool would say that because, obviously, it is
totally meaningless. It’s only because they dress up the nonsense with a lot of big
words like ‘epistemological necessity’, ‘noetic modulus’ and ‘felicific calculus’ that
they have got away with it for all these years.
If you’re looking at a philosopher, you’re looking at a pseud. Run a mile is my
advice.
Short extract from Thinking Big by Jeremy Clarkson
[287 words]

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What is Philosophy For?
There is far too much philosophy, composed under far too wide a range of conditions,
for there to be a general answer to that question. But it can certainly be said that a
great deal of philosophy has been intended as (understanding the words very broadly)
a means to salvation, though what we are to understand by salvation, and salvation
from what, has varied as widely as the philosophies themselves. A Buddhist will tell
you that the purpose of philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainment
of ‘enlightenment’; a Hindu will say something similar, if in slightly different
terminology; both will speak of escape from a supposed cycle of death and rebirth in
which one’s moral deserts determine one’s future forms. An Epicurean (if you can
find one nowadays) will pooh-pooh all the stuff about rebirth, but offer you a recipe
for maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering in this your one and only life.
Not all philosophy has sprung out of a need for a comprehensive way of living and
dying. But most of the philosophy that has lasted has arisen from some pressing
motivation or deeply felt belief – seeing truth and wisdom purely for their own sakes
may be a nice idea, but history suggests that a nice idea is pretty much all it is. Thus
classical Indian philosophy represents the internal struggle between the schools of
Hinduism, and between them all and the Buddhists, for intellectual supremacy; the
battle for the preferred balance between human reason and scriptural revelation has
been fought in many cultures, and in some is still going on; Thomas Hobbes’ famous
political theory tries to teach us the lessons he felt had to be learned in the aftermath
of the English Civil War; Descartes and many of his contemporaries wanted medieval
views, rooted nearly two thousand years back in the work of Aristotle, to move aside
and make room for a modern conception of science; Kant sought to advance the
autonomy of the individual in the face of illiberal and autocratic regimes, Marx to
liberate the working classes from poverty and drudgery, feminists of all epochs to
improve the status of women. None of these people were just solving little puzzles
(though they did sometimes have to solve little puzzles on the way); they entered into
debate in order to change the course of civilization.
From Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Edward Craig
[394 words]

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Definitions
It is crucial that everyone knows what they are talking about when arguing. Without a
definition of the terms involved, it is easy to argue at cross-purposes. So, for instance,
if a question of ethics hinges on whether or not a particular president ‘had sex’ with a
particular intern, it pays to make sure everyone agrees what ‘having sex’ means.
Much of our language is inherently ambiguous and so, to discuss things as precisely
as possible (as philosophy aims to do), adequate definitions are required.
Clarity
A well-known example of how a definition of terms helps resolve a disagreement is
provided by the philosopher William James who, in a walking party, came across two
people arguing. The disagreement concerned a squirrel. These two people had been
walking towards a tree and a squirrel was clinging to the trunk at about eye-level. As
they approached, the squirrel scurried around to the other side of the tree, out of sight.
The two people walked around the tree catching sight of the squirrel but it too was
moving away from them, trying to keep the tree between itself and the people. The
two of them walked right around the tree, then stopped and the argument began: one
maintained that they had ‘walked round the squirrel’; the other maintained they had
not ‘walked round the squirrel’. Relieved by the arrival of a third party, they appealed
to James for judgement. James pointed out that they were both right depending on
their definition of ‘walk round’. True, if ‘walk round’ means to completely circle
something, then the two people had walked round the squirrel. True, if ‘walk round’
means to pass in front of, to the side of, to the back of, then the two people had not
walked round the squirrel. The argument dissolved. Though this was a rather trivial
matter, it exemplifies an important point. For the contentious concepts that arise in
philosophy, definition is necessary.
Constraint
A further point is that once a definition has been given, the conclusions drawn from it
only apply to the term as defined. Thus, if free trade is defined as ‘trade that is not
hindered by national or international law’ any conclusions reached apply only to that
definition. If someone else has a different (perhaps better) definition, then such
conclusions may well not apply. Thus, a clear definition both helps but also
constrains discussion.
Breadth of definition
It is important to choose a definition that is going to be able to do the work asked of it.
Choosing a definition that is too narrow might mean that one’s conclusions will have
to be equally narrow. Defining ‘man’ as “male, adult, bearded” and using this in an
argument which concluded that ‘men are sexual predators’ would mean that whole
swathes of what most people would regard as ‘men’ would be eliminated from this
conclusion. On the other hand, too broad a definition may lead to misleading, even
wrong, conclusions. For example, if you define it as ‘wrong’ to “deliberately inflict
pain on another person” then an inoculating medic must be doing ‘wrong’.
From this, another way to criticize someone’s argument is to show that a particular
case fits the definition but is not one that the other person would wish to include in it.

17
Rule of Thumb
Generally, it is better if your definition corresponds as closely as possible to the way
the term is ordinarily used. That said, given that ‘everyday usage’ might be regarded
as positively misleading, sometimes a new usage must be coined2
, even a new term
introduced. In discussion of memory, for instance, philosophers feel that it is
important to distinguish between memories which have actually been experienced by
the subject (such as a memory of having been in C4 before) and memories that appear
to the subject to have actually been experienced, but have not. The latter are referred
to as ‘quasi-memories’ or ‘q-memories’.
A long tradition
Historically, many philosophical questions are, in effect, quests for definitions. What
is knowledge? Beauty? Good? Here it is not enough to merely define the term as in
a dictionary. Rather, it is the search for definition that best articulates the concept in
question. ‘Pen’ might easily be defined as ‘writing instrument’ but an exploration of
types of pen (to discover what such an ‘instrument’ might include) and their usage
(what does ‘writing’ include?) as well as asking what might be excluded (why is a
pencil not a pen since it is used as a ‘writing instrument’?) will be really informative
about what the term means.
Much of philosophical work along these lines has involved conceptual analysis or the
attempt to unpack and clarify the meanings of important concepts. What is to count
as the best articulation, however, requires a great deal of debate. Indeed, it is a viable
philosophical question as to whether concepts such as ‘beauty’ can be defined. Many
ancient and medieval thinkers (eg Plato, Aquinas) adequate definitions meant giving
verbal expression to the ‘essence’ of things – essences that exist separate from us.
Many more recent thinkers (pragmatists like James, post-structuralists like Foucault)
have held that definitions are nothing more that conceptual instruments that organize
our interactions with each other and the world, but in no way reflect the nature of
independent reality. Some thinkers (eg Wittgenstein) have gone so far as to argue that
all philosophical puzzles are essentially rooted in a failure to understand how ordinary
language functions.
From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl (2003) Blackwell
2
This requires caution. For example, Descartes’ ‘ideas’ are quite carefully defined in his Meditations
but are often confused because people thinks he means the usual ‘thoughts in general’, or even Plato’s
‘ideas’. Schopenhauer made a huge mistake in calling his driving force in the Universe ‘will’ since this
has led many to find his philosophy confusing or erroneous on the grounds that ‘will’ usually means
something quite different.

18
John Dewey (1859 – 1952)
Dewey was one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th
century and
is associated with what is known as the pragmatic school of philosophy.
Darwin’s theory of evolution was very influential in the structuring of Dewey’s
thought, particularly the notion that organisms are not immutable and perfect, but
rather that, like the natural world in which they live, they are fluid and dynamic. This
notion of continuous change Dewey applied to the concept of human nature: he
rejected the idea that we have a fundamental essence and argued instead that human
beings are constituted in their interaction with multiple aspects of their environment.
Humans are through and through the product of a lived practice.
At the centre of Dewey’s approach to philosophy is his theory of enquiry. This aimed
to show how though emerges as people interact with their environments, and how the
measure of true belief – or belief for which there is warranted assertability – is that it
facilitates satisfactory responses to the circumstances which people confront. To put
this another way, it provides successful rules for conduct.
The best way to understand this idea is first to consider what Dewey meant by the
notion of ‘habit’. As we have seen, he did not think that humans have a fixed,
determinate nature. However, it is nevertheless the case that people tend to behave in
fairly predictable ways. This is because they have learnt, via the process of
socialization, particular socially sanctioned habits. It is in this fashion that people are
able to get by in their lives; they have adopted the modes of behaviour which function
to achieve specific goals in certain circumstances.
However, sometimes these habits break down; the actions and responses people can
draw upon prove inadequate in terms of the situations they confront, and they cannot
go on. It is as this point there appears the kind of genuine doubt which necessitates
inquiry. In How We Think Dewey emphasized that this sort of doubt is not purely
cognitive, not the doubt of a sceptical philosopher, it is felt doubt: ‘In cases of striking
novelty or unusual perplexity, the difficulty…is likely to present itself at first as a
shock, as emotional disturbance, as a more or less vague feeling of the unexpected, of
something queer, strange, funny, or disconcerting. In such instances, there are
necessary observations deliberately calculated to bring to light just what is the trouble,
or to make clear the specific character of the problem’.
Having identified that there is a difficulty which needs addressing, in order to avoid
the fairly ad hoc construction of possible solutions, the next stage in the process of
inquiry is to identify the significant elements of the problematic situation. Once this
is achieved, then it is necessary to determine a number of hypotheses in order to solve
the difficulty. This is a creative, imaginative process, and it involves going beyond
what is given in the situation ‘…it is more or less speculative, adventurous…it
involves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which cannot be absolutely warranted in
advance, no matter what precautions be taken’ (How We Think).
The final stages in the process involve working through the implications of the
various hypotheses which are being entertained, and then, critically, testing them
experimentally: ‘Reasoning shows that if the idea be adopted, certain consequences

19
follow. So far the conclusion is hypothetical or conditional. If we look and find
present all the conditions demanded by the theory, and if we find the characteristic
traits called for by rival alternatives to be lacking, the tendency to believe, to accept,
is almost irresistible’ (How We Think).
The resolution of this process involves the incorporation of new beliefs into the
framework of habits which allows people to act in concert with the events in their
lives. Truth is what works. What counts is whether our beliefs provide us with rules
of conduct which help us to interact with the world.
For Dewey, ‘true beliefs’ are better described as ‘warranted assertions’ – ‘knowledge’
consists in beliefs confirmed by a community of genuine enquirers. However, then
extent of the warrant varies, and all beliefs are subject to revision. This includes our
value judgements which underpin our aesthetic and moral beliefs.
from The Great Philosophers by J.Stangroom and J.Garvey (Arcturus, 2005)
[703 words]

20
Foucault: Words and Power
Do you use language, or does language use you? If you are at all suspicious that language
might be in the driving seat, you may be sympathetic to an enormously influential form of
criticism that developed over the past 30 years on the basis of the work of the French
philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (1926-84).
Foucault undertook to show how our words and concepts have fitted into historical layers of
thinking and acting (what he calls ‘discursive formations’) that in many ways order our lives
and thinking. This challenges those who believe that it is we who consciously order and
control these things. In short, Foucault’s theory diminishes the importance (perhaps the very
existence) of the individual, human agent and self.
His view has also been controversial in its claim that it is through these multifarious
discursive formations that power is exercised. Hence, through the concept of ‘madness’,
seventeenth and eighteenth-century social formations laying claim to ‘rationality’ excluded
those who didn’t fit into them. In the nineteenth century the concept of ‘madness’ was also
deployed against those who did not adhere to the norms of bourgeois morality such as the
promiscuous.
Foucault tried to show (in Discipline and Punish) how concepts clustering around criminality
and the techniques of managing those called ‘criminal’ have changed over time. In this
tracing out the ‘genealogy’ of a concept he was following a method used by Nietzsche. This
method is not merely historical but also subversive. It aims to uncover the trivial, petty,
arbitrary, and sometimes nasty, purposes and effects of what it investigates. While, for
example, many have seen the changes in the criminal justice system as efforts to become
more humane, Foucault argues that the changes have, instead, been organized around
developing new, more effective techniques of social control.
Unlike other forms of social critique (such as Marxism), Foucault maintains that there is no
comprehensive system of social order. Rather, he argues that there are many different power
systems interweaving and operating simultaneously. Among the most famous objects of
Foucault’s scrutiny was Bentham’s plan for a model prison called a ‘panopticon’. (One has
actually been built and put to use in Cuba.) The prison does not have cells with barred doors.
Instead, it is constructed so that the prisoners come to believe that they are always under
surveillance of the guards – and so they come to discipline themselves. Foucault challenges
us to ask ourselves in what ways we live in panopticons of our own making. Do credit cards,
mobile phones, government and company records, computers, security cameras place us
under constant surveillance (including self-surveillance) or fear of constant surveillance? If
so, will this not affect the way we act, feel and think?
Another powerful tool of Foucault’s critique is his analysis of normalization. He argues that
in various ways orders of power seek to diminish the range of human possibility by
privileging certain beliefs and practices as ‘normal’. Hence sexual practices, family
structures, religions, ways of speaking and acting that differ from the ‘normal’ are called
‘deviant’ and through various oppressive techniques are quashed, reducing individuals to
‘docile bodies’ needed to serve the rising industrial society.
From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl (2003) Blackwell.

21
What is a Philosopher?
Simply having a degree or a title is not enough to be called a philosopher: a degree in
physics doesn’t make you a physicist any more than a teacher of history is a historian.
Rescher defines a philosopher as one who ‘actively contributes to the intellectual
resource of the discipline’.
This definition suggests an institutional theory to answer the question of ‘what is
philosophy?’ This institutional theory is parallel to Danto and Dickie’s institutional
theory of art: something is a work of art when decreed to be such by a loose
constellation of individuals who are defined by their institutional identities to be with
something called the ‘art world’: curators, art writers, collectors, dealers, and, of
course, artists themselves. By analogy then, philosophy is what is recognised as such
by those in the ‘philosophy world’: university administrators, book reviewers and
journal referees, editors, students and, of course, philosophers themselves. Just as the
institutional theory of art belongs with an art no longer committed to some master
narrative of what art has been and should be, so the institutional theory of philosophy
is no longer united by a substantive understanding of what philosophy has been and
should be.
This should not be a worry. The production of art is not limited by a lack of
agreement about an answer to the question ‘what is art?’ and hence philosophy can
continue to flourish despite our inability to give it much definition. Indeed, not
having the constraints of definition encourages philosophical exploration of a much
greater diversity of subjects than the traditional ones that crop up time and again in
philosophy books and classes. New subjects include Society for Machines and
Mentality, Informal Logic, Ethics and Animals, Analytical Feminism, the Philosophy
of Sex and Love. Such diversity is probably the reason for more and more people
being drawn to philosophy – and then, of course, as contributors ‘to the intellectual
resources to the discipline’ we get more and more philosophers.
Adapted from Philosophy in Search of Itself by Karsten Harries in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland
and Heidt)
(326 words)

22
Philosophy as an exercise in freedom
Aristotle turns his account of the origin of philosophy into a celebration of free
enquiry:
‘It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to
philosophize; they wondered originally at obvious difficulties, then advanced little by
little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. the phenomena of the moon
and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.’
Thus, the origin of philosophy is in those familiar dislocations and derailments that
are part of everyday experience: we find ourselves stuck in some place; or we have
lost our way; or we cannot find something we need to complete some task. We all run
into difficulties that prevent us from just going on with whatever we were doing – that
force us to pause, take a step back in order to determine just where we have come
from, where we are, what possibilities are open to us, and what should be done. Note
how such derailments open to us possibilities that remain unconsidered as long as life
is on track. By opening up possibilities, they also open us to our freedom.
Dislocation, freedom and wonder belong together. To say philosophy has its origin in
wonder is to say also that its beginning is the awakening of freedom. Only a free
being is capable of wonder.
There is, of course, a decisive difference between such ‘obvious difficulties’ and the
‘greater matters’ that Aristotle has as occupying the philosopher. While these
‘obvious difficulties’ receive their significance from projects that are part of life,
Aristotle’s ‘greater matters’ are pursued only to escape from ignorance, only for the
sake of truth. A philosopher’s irrevocable commitment to the truth implies a leave-
taking from the everyday world and its concerns; there is a sense in which the
philosopher stands in this world as an outsider, as Plato took pains to show with his
description of Socrates: although placed in Athens, belonging to it by birth and
upbringing, Socrates yet transcends such belonging, transcends himself as the
Athenian he knows himself to be, just because he is a philosopher. Such self-
transcendence is inseparable from the freedom that defined philosophy and its search
for truth. Philosophy is an exercise in freedom.
Adapted from Philosophy in Search of Itself by Karsten Harries in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland
and Heidt)
(374 words)

23
Janet Radcliffe Richards
The Sceptical Feminist is a book which exemplifies Radcliffe Richards’ approach to
philosophy. Rather like a modern-day Aristotle, her starting point is often arguments
and ideas that enjoy widespread support in contemporary society, rather than arcane
positions held only by professional philosophers. This ensures that her work always
has a practical resonance and is of interest to people beyond her profession.
‘I began to notice after some years that all the most striking arguments I was
producing in moral and political contexts took a particular form, which I am trying to
get more and more systematic,’ she explains. ‘Essentially it depends on first
establishing the direction of onus of proof and then issuing a challenge on the basis of
it. So if you can show that some policy has some clearly bad aspect, you take that as
providing a prima facie case for rejecting it. You then challenge its supporters to
produce an argument that defeats that assumption.
‘It’s amazing how many familiar views you can dispose of in this way, because most
argument in ordinary life seems to work on the basis of starting with the conclusion
you want to defend and then inventing a justification for it. This gives philosophers a
potential field day because arguments constructed this way round frequently contain
mistakes of logic.’
The method’s strength is also its simplicity. ‘In a sense, I take myself to be doing
baby-level philosophy,’ she says. ‘I’m not very interested in the kind of ethics which
consists of manipulating high level theoretical counters: if you have to get the meta-
ethical framework in place before you have serious discussions of ground-level,
practical problems, you might as well give up. The challenge is to see how many
practical moral conclusions can be reached without settling the fundamentals of
ethical theory – say Kantian or utilitarian ones.’
But why should this method be so effective, when it is by its own lights so simple?
‘The thing which gives so much scope for getting the philosophical needle in, is that
people’s real reasons for reaching their practical conclusions are rarely the ones they
give in their arguments. I’m particularly interested in what happens when there are
widespread intellectual changes – in world view, or political and moral principles –
but people have deep convictions about the way things ought to be left over from
previous frameworks. When this happens people try to fudge a justification for the
old convictions in terms of the new principles – and it hardly ever works. This is
what happened with feminism. After the Enlightenment, the idea that people were
born to a particular place in life gradually became unacceptable, but most people were
still convinced of traditional ideas about the natural position of men and women. So
they tried to justify these old beliefs in terms of new political ideas – and ran straight
into logical absurdities that they didn’t even notice, because they were so convinced
of both the old conclusion and the new premises. Exposing these absurdities forces
into the open the unacceptable moral views that are really doing the work.’
One unforeseen consequence revealed by her approach is that it produces
psychological predictions. An illustration of this came from her investigation of the
ethics of abortion. ‘Essentially, the argument as I saw it was this: if you are going to

24
recommend a policy with one intrinsically bad element – in this case forcing a woman
to have a child she does not want – what good reason do you have?
‘Of course, it sounds easy to find a reason – you mustn’t kill human beings and a
foetus is a human being – but this is not a reason that can be used by people who
allow some abortions but not others. After much searching, the only coherent
principle that I could find that might provide a distinction between allowable and
prohibited abortions was punishing women for sex. It sounds preposterous but it just
seemed the only principle that came anywhere near fitting the practice.
‘Then what was interesting was the amount of empirical evidence that supported it,
like the original policy of not giving anaesthetics during abortions. And there does
seem to be a high correlation between opposition to abortion and disapproval of
sexual freedom. It astonished me: I was not expecting to find philosophical argument
generating psychological hypotheses in this way. But I find it happens a lot. It
happened with the euthanasia debate, for instance. It takes some argument to show it,
but I think the details of most anti-euthanasia attitudes can be coherently justified only
by a deep assumption that suicide is wrong – probably because life belongs to God.’
Adapted from Darwin, Nature and Hubris in What Philosophers Think
edited by J Baggini and J Stangroom (2003) published by Continuum

25
The Philosophers Moore and Austin
Both G.E.Moore and J.L.Austin are little-known outside the world of English-
speaking philosophy. Moore published some books but his influence was most
greatly felt through personal contact in teaching and conversation, discussion,
seminars and lectures. This is even more outstandingly true of Austin who published
no books at all and who was probably the most influential philosopher in Oxford since
the second world war.
What the two have in common is that they were both exceptionally clever men – even
among philosophers of reputation – and in their temperament: they insisted that
philosophy should as plain as possible in expression; they liked extreme exactness and
explicitness of argument. Both had an extreme distaste for eloquence, rhetoric,
looseness and rapidity in philosophical writing. They were also both very impressive
men – people you took notice of, people who were not to be disregarded or treated
lightly – both were rather formidable men, and simply by the force of their
personalities made a considerable impression, quite apart from the merits or content
of what they actually said.
Moore’s book on ethics, according to Keynes, influenced a whole generation of
younger men at Cambridge and was taken almost as a Bible by the Bloomsbury
Group of writers and artists. This was surprising given the extremely dry, intensely
academic, nature of the book. One can guess that few read it, fewer still understood
it. The influence lies rather in these peoples’ acquaintance with Moore’s powerful
personality.
Austin was sympathetic to Moore – indeed, as mentioned above, they were very
similar in many ways. Whether Austin’s way of doing philosophy merely copied
Moore, or whether he would have gone this way if he’d never met him, is a moot
point. Certainly he liked Moore’s approach – and certainly he disliked Bertrand
Russell’s later philosophy in which he dealt with huge problems at very high speed,
using writing that was beautifully smooth and swiftly-flowing. Austin thought that
crucial points and distinctions were constantly whizzing by too quick for the eye to
catch. He was always very distrusting of that way of operating.
Many would criticize Austin’s analytical style as pedantic, scholastic and boring. Of
course, this way of approaching philosophy actually can be boring and unproductive –
but then, is there a way of doing philosophy that can’t be? If one is asked to take
more than usual care over details, its being boring or otherwise depends on whether or
not this care turns out to be illuminating or not. Austin always objected to asking in
advance if what was doing was important and illuminating. He thought you could
only tell afterwards whether a detail was worth struggling with.
Abstracted from Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee - his conversation with Geoffrey
Warnock.
(435 words)

26
On Bertrand Russell and Philosophy
Many people, including some great philosophers of the past, have come to the subject hoping
it will solve major metaphysical questions about the ultimate nature of reality, right and
wrong, beauty and so forth, but, Russell says, this is a vain hope. Philosophy doesn’t give
simple answers. Philosophers ask questions; often they cannot answer those questions.
Indeed, Russell acknowledges that philosophy has not been particularly successful in
answering with any certainty most of the questions that philosophers ask. But that does not
mean that philosophy is a waste of time. By asking deep questions we make life more
interesting and reveal that a little below the surface of our comfortable assumptions lies a
much stranger world.
So anyone coming to philosophy expecting it to provide knowledge of reality is likely to be
disappointed. What philosophy can provide, however, is the possibility of ordering our less
than certain beliefs and getting some insights into ways in which we acquire them. Even if it
can’t provide us with certainties, philosophy can make us less likely to be wrong about our
basic beliefs than if we had left them unexamined.
There is a clear distinction between philosophy and science, though historically many of the
problems of philosophy have later become scientific questions. Science can be extremely
useful to us even if we never study it: all of us have the potential to benefit from medical
science, science-based technology and so on, whether or not we understand the science
underpinning the inventions. Philosophy differs from this. Studying philosophy can have a
profound effect on the student who thinks through the issues; but those who don’t study the
subject are only likely to benefit from the effects on the student of philosophy. There are no
direct benefits from philosophy for those who don’t actually study it themselves.
The real value of philosophy, however, Russell declares, lies in its uncertainty. If you never
question your beliefs, then you can cling to prejudices that need never be subjected to critical
assessment. If, however, you begin to question beliefs that have previously seemed
uncontroversial, with the help of a philosophical approach you will free yourself from the
‘tyranny of custom’ and awaken a less dogmatic sense of wonder at the strangeness of the
world and our position in it. This opening up of possibilities enriches our imaginations.
Philosophical contemplation takes us away from the purely individual concerns of our lives,
moving us towards becoming ‘citizens of the universe’. Our minds become great by
contemplating greatness in this impartial spirit. In the combination of these factors lies
philosophy’s value to humanity.
One traditional approach to philosophy (usually known as rationalism) has been to attempt to
prove truths about the nature of reality a priori, that is independently of any experience, by
pure reason alone. In place of this Russell offers something much closer to Locke’s account
of the philosopher as ‘underlabourer’ to science. For Russell, philosophy is the activity of
investigating the principles that we use both in science and in everyday life, and subjecting
them to a critical scrutiny that reveals any inconsistencies. This, Russell believed, shouldn’t
result in a destructive scepticism that leaves everything in doubt. Indeed, one theme of The
Problems of Philosophy is that there are beliefs, such as that our perceptual experiences exist,
that are beyond doubt. In contrast, the belief that physical objects are really as they appear to
us, is open to philosophical doubt.
From Philosophy: The Classics by Nigel Warburton (3rd
edition 2006)
[572 words]

27
On Karl Popper
Magee: The orthodoxy explaining scientific advancement since Bacon was that
scientists accumulated data from observation and experiment until general features
emerge, then frame hypotheses about this particular aspect of the world. They then
try to confirm these hypotheses with further observation and experiment. Where
these attempts are successful, the hypothesis becomes established as a law – and lo,
another Secret of Nature has been unlocked. This process of generalising laws from
observed particulars is called induction. Why do you say that this is not the way
science advances, why there is no such thing as induction in science?
Popper: According to my view, animals and men are born with a great store of
instinctive knowledge – of ways of reacting to situations, of expectations. Such
inborn knowledge may be disappointed – thus it is conjectural. The way we learn is
not by observation but by trying to solve problems. A problem arises whenever our
conjectures or our expectations fail. We try to solve our problems by modifying our
conjectures. These new tentative conjectures are our trial balloons – our trial
solutions. This leads to new behaviour which may succeed or may fail. The point is
that we learn by trial and error: by tentative solutions and by their elimination if they
prove erroneous. This method is one used by all creatures, down to the Amoeba.
The distinction between this pre-scientific method and that used by Einstein is this.
On the pre-scientific level we hate the very idea that we might be mistaken so we
cling dogmatically to our conjectures as long as possible. On the scientific level, we
systematically search for our mistakes, for our errors. This is the great thing: we are
consciously critical in order to detect our errors. Thus, on the pre-scientific level, we
are often ourselves destroyed, eliminated, with our false theories; we perish with our
false theories. On the scientific level, we systematically try to eliminate our false
theories – we try to let our false theories die in our stead. This is the critical method
of error elimination. It is the method of science. It presupposes that we can look at
our theories critically – as something outside ourselves. They are no longer our
subjective beliefs – they are our objective conjectures.
Thus, the general picture of science is: we choose some interesting problem. We
propose a bold theory as a tentative solution. We try our very best to criticize the
theory; and this means that we try to refute it. If we succeed in our refutation, then we
try to produce a new theory, which we shall again criticize; and so on. In this way,
even if we do not succeed in producing a satisfactory theory, we shall have learned a
great deal: we shall have learned something about the problem. We shall know where
the difficulties lie. The whole procedure can be summed up by the words: bold
conjectures, controlled by severe criticism which includes severe tests. And criticism,
and tests, are attempted refutations.
Magee: And, since it is only at this second stage that observation and experiment
comes in, induction is not a part of the scientific process.
Popper: Yes.

28
Magee: And, from your point of view it follows that we never really know anything –
that there are only differing degrees of uncertainty…
Popper: There are various senses of the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ but in the
sense of ‘I know and cannot be mistaken about what it is that I know’ you are right:
there is always the possibility of mistake. But I think this is trivial and unimportant.
What is important is the distinction between knowledge in the subjective sense and
knowledge in the objective sense.
Magee: Perhaps you’d better explain that distinction.
Popper: Knowledge in the subjective sense consists of dispositions to act in certain
ways, or to believe certain things, or to say certain things. Knowledge in the objective
sense consists of spoken, or written, or printed statements. Both kinds of knowledge
are uncertain or conjectural or hypothetical.
Magee: But is there really all that crucial a difference in logical status between the
knowledge I have in my head and the same knowledge written down?
Popper: Yes. Putting our ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an
important difference. For in this way they become criticizable.
Magee: But if we never actually know anything, what are the grounds for our
criticism? On what grounds would a scientist accept some hypotheses and reject
others?
Popper: The grounds are provided by our critical discussion of the various
competing theories. In these discussions we try to compare them by asking which of
them appears to come nearest to the truth.
Magee: But if there’s no certainty, no knowledge, what do you mean by ‘the truth’?
Popper: Correspondence to the facts. We know what it means for a theory to
correspond to the facts even if you can’t decide whether it does correspond to the
facts or not. I use the term ‘verisimilitude’ for this approximation to the truth. What
we do in our discussion of competing theories is to found out which has the greatest
verisimilitude. We may find good reasons for preferring one theory to any of the
others: the theory to prefer, the one with greatest verisimilitude, is the one for which
we can provide the best rational defence.
Magee: Doesn’t this introduce a note of relativism – that our preferred theories are
merely our current cultural ones?
Popper: No. It does introduce a historical element; but not an element of relativism.
Every unambiguously formulated theory is either true or false: there is no third
possibility. But one false theory may be nearer to the truth than another. Also, one
theory may contain more truth than another: it’s ‘truth content’, as I call it, may be
greater. Thus, for example, if the time is truly 12 o’clock then the statement ‘it is five
to twelve’ is false, but nearer the truth than the statement ‘it is ten to twelve’. Also,
the false statement ‘it is five to twelve’ has a greater truth content than a vague true

29
statement such as ‘the time is between eleven and one o’clock’ because a larger class
of true statements follows from it.
Magee: And what is it that separates science as an enterprise from other ways of
claiming knowledge?
Popper: A theory belongs to science if it is in principle capable of being refuted.
This does not mean that theories outside science are untrue, or that they are
meaningless, simply that they are not scientific.
From Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee (OUP 1971)

30
Plato
The jury’s problem
Imagine that you are on a jury, listening to Smith describe how he was set upon and
robbed. The details are striking, the account hangs together, and you are completely
convinced; you believe that Smith was the victim of a violent crime. This is a true
belief; Smith was, in fact, attacked.
Do you know Smith was attacked? This might at first seem like an odd thing to worry
about. What better evidence could you have? But you might reflect that this is, after
all, a courtroom, and that Smith is making a case which his alleged attacker will then
try to counter. Can you be sure that you are convinced because Smith is telling the
truth, or might it be the way that the case is presented that is persuading you? If it is
the latter, then you might be worried; for then you might have been convinced even if
Smith had not been telling the truth. Besides, even if he is telling the truth, is his
evidence conclusive as to his being attacked? For all you know, he might have been
part of a set-up, and it’s not as though you had been there and seen it for yourself.
And so it can seem quite natural to conclude that you don’t actually know that Smith
was attacked, though you have a belief about it which is true, and no actual reason to
doubt its truth.
In his dialogue Theaetetus Plato raises this issue [of the possible difference between
knowledge and true belief]. What can knowledge be, young Theaetetus asks, other
than true belief? After all, if you have a true belief you are not making any mistakes.
But Theaetetus is talking to Socrates and, as often, the older man finds a problem.
For persuading people in public is something that can be skilfully done. He means the
skill of what we would call lawyers, although he is talking about a system in which
there were no professional lawyers. The victim had to present his own case, though
many people hired professional speech-writers, especially since they had to convince
a jury of not 12 but 501 members.
Socrates continues:
SOCRATES: These men, at any rate, persuade by means of their expertise, and they
don’t teach people, but get them to have whatever beliefs they wish. Or do you think
that there are any teachers so clever as the teach the truth about what happened
adequately, in the short time allowed, to people who weren’t there when others were
robbed of their property or violently attacked?
THEAETETUS: No, I don’t think they could at all, but I think they could persuade
them.
SOCRATES: And by persuading them don’t you mean getting them to have a belief?
THEAETETUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: Well, when a jury has been persuaded fairly about something about
which you could only have knowledge if you were an eyewitness, not otherwise,
while they judge from what they’ve heard and get a true belief, haven’t they then
judged without knowledge, though they were persuaded of what’s correct, since they
made a good judgement?
THEAETETUS: Absolutely.
SOCRATES: But look, if true belief and knowledge were the same thing, then an
excellent juryman wouldn’t have a correct belief without knowledge. As it is, the two
seem distinct.

31
This sounds convincing, indeed perhaps blindingly obvious. But, like the jury, we
can raise the question of whether we should be convinced. Why don’t the jury know
that Smith was robbed?
What is required for knowledge?
One reason put forward by Plato for the claim that the jury lack knowledge is that
they have been persuaded, by someone whose main aim is to get them to believe what
he wants them to believe. In this case he has persuaded them of the truth, but we may
think that he would have been able to persuade them even if his story wasn’t true. At
first, this worry might seem far-fetched: if you have acquired a true belief in a certain
way, why worry that you might have been persuaded of something false in the same
way? How can what didn’t happen cast doubt on what did? But, in fact, this worry
about the power of persuasion is serious, because it casts doubt on the route by which
the belief is acquired. If it is a route by which I can acquire false beliefs as readily as
true ones, then it cannot guarantee me only true beliefs. And this does raise a doubt in
most people’s minds that a belief that I have acquired by that route could amount to
knowledge.
Another reason put forward in the passage is that the sort of fact the jury have been
persuaded of, namely that Smith was attacked, is not the sort of fact that you could
have knowledge of anyway unless you had been there and seen it for yourself.
However convinced we are that Smith is telling the truth, all we are getting is a
version that is second-hand, and conveyed by an entirely different kind of route from
Smith’s own. He experienced and saw the robbery; we are only being told about it.
However vivid the telling, it’s still just a telling; only someone who was there and saw
it can have knowledge of it. Again, this may at first seem far-fetched. If we limit
knowledge to what we can actually experience first-hand for ourselves, then there
won’t be much that we can know; nothing we read or hear second-hand will count.
Yet there is a powerful thought being appealed to here, one that can be expressed by
saying that nobody else can know things for you or on your behalf. Knowledge
requires that you acquire the relevant belief for yourself. What it is to acquire a belief
for yourself will differ depending on the kind of belief it is, but with the belief that
Smith was robbed the only way you can acquire it for yourself with no intermediary
is, it seems, to be there yourself and actually see it.
A problem for us
Plato has given us two kinds of reason for rejecting the idea that the jury’s true belief
could amount to knowledge. Both are strong, but how well do they go together? The
problem with persuasion was that it turned out to be a route that could not guarantee
that the beliefs we acquired from someone else could be true. But for this to be a
problem with persuasion there has to be the possibility of a route of this kind that did
have such a guarantee. Socrates complains that the victim has to convince the jury in
too short a time, and in circumstances that are too emotional and fraught, for their
acquisition of beliefs to be the right kind for knowledge. This complaint is pointless
unless there could be a way of acquiring beliefs that didn’t have these disadvantages –
say, one where there were no time constraints, and each member of the jury could
examine witnesses and victim as much as they required to satisfy every last scruple.
So it looks as though we are assuming that there is a way of conveying beliefs that
could amount to knowledge, though it isn’t persuasion.

32
The second point, however, suggested that no way of conveying beliefs, however
careful and scrupulous, could amount to knowledge, since any belief conveyed to you
from another will be second-hand, and thus something that you cannot know, because
you cannot know it for yourself. Relying on someone else’s testimony, however
sound, is never the same as experiencing the fact for yourself.
The problem now is that the second objection seems to conflict with the first. The
second supposes that knowledge cannot be conveyed, but must be acquired by each
person in their own case; but the first found fault with persuasion in a way suggesting
that there could be a way of acquiring a belief from someone else which would
amount to knowledge, so that knowledge is conveyable.
The reader comes in
At this point the reader is forced to think for herself about the passage, and what Plato
is doing. The simplest response would be to conclude the Plato has given Socrates
mutually conflicting demands on knowledge because Plato himself is confused; he
just hasn’t noticed that he is requiring knowledge to be both conveyable and not
conveyable. Unsympathetic readers may stop at this point.
We might probe a little further, however. For one thing, Socrates in this dialogue
repeatedly stresses that his is not putting forward positions of his own, only arguing
against those of others. He produces two objections to Theaetetus’ suggestion that
true belief might amount to knowledge. Each is powerful against that suggestion. Do
we have to suppose that Plato, the author, was unaware that these objections run up
against each other? Not necessarily (and if we do not have to suppose the author
unaware of this, we also do not have to suppose that he intended to portray Socrates
as unaware of this problem – though this is a further matter on which readers may
disagree). And given the sophisticated level of argument in Theaetetus, the
reasonable course is to suppose that Plato was aware of how these two objections are
related.
Why then does Plato not appear to think that it matters? Here we have to take
seriously Socrates’ stress in the dialogue that he is only arguing against the views of
others. This does not mean he has no ideas on the subject himself, but it does mean
that the point of the dialogue is not to put these forward. The problem we find when
we reflect on Socrates’ two grounds for rejecting Theaetetus’ suggestion don’t
undermine the conclusion that that suggestion won’t do; they do show that when we,
or Plato, are working on a positive account of knowledge we need to be aware of this
problem.
[…]
In many ways, the jury passage from Theaetetus provides a good introduction to
Plato’s way of writing. We find right away that it is important to pay attention to the
way in which Plato writes, particularly to the role of argument in supporting one’s
own position or attacking those of others. We find also that the reader is drawn into
the argument herself, needing to challenge Plato’s arguments even where Socrates in
the dialogue easily wins.
From: Julia Annas Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003) OUP

33
Reduction
‘Reductionism’ is often employed as a term of abuse. A reductionist is seen as someone who
takes what is complex, nuanced and sophisticated and breaks it down into something
simplistic, sterile and empty. This is unfair. Reductionism is simply the process of
explaining one kind of phenomenon in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena.
This approach lies at the heart of science (put there by Descartes in his Discourse on Method).
A useful illustration is that in order to understand why water boils you need to understand the
underlying phenomenon: that water consists of particles in motion and that this motion is
affected by heat energy. The phenomenon of boiling is less fundamental than the underlying
phenomenon of particles in motion because it depends on the latter. Not only does the
phenomenon of particles in motion explain boiling of water (and other liquids), it also
explains pressure changes in gases and expansions in solids. The particle explanation is
fundamental in that it explains the other phenomena whereas the other phenomena (such as
boiling) cannot explain the particle motion.
Reductionism has proved successful in science and there are many examples of the
reductionist approach offering solutions to major philosophical questions. One example is the
question of what knowledge is. This has been reduced to three simpler terms: belief, truth,
justification. Here, the single, amorphous concept of knowledge is explained in terms of three
simpler features: knowledge comprises a belief that is both justified and true. The
reductionist can take these further by giving reductive accounts of what justification, belief
and truth each in turn comprise.
Philosophy and science are often said to have begun in a reductionist moment – when Thales
of Miletus (c.620 – c. 555BC) asserted that ‘all is water’. He reduced the vast multiplicity of
natural phenomena (sky, earth, sea, animals, fire, etc.) to a single principle.
Reductionist accounts can be found in ethics where a term like ‘goodness’ might be analysed
into something simpler. A utilitarian, for example, explains goodness in terms of what
increases happiness and/or decreases suffering – notice that ‘increasing happiness’ is much
more precise than ‘being good’.
Reductionism is opposed because, to many, it is not at all obvious why all questions in
philosophy should be answered reductively. Maybe you get nowhere by trying to break down
a concept into ‘its parts’. So, for instance, Wittgenstein argued that words like ‘knowledge’
are to be understood in terms of the way in which they function in communities of competent
language-users. One cannot describe this activity in reductionist terms.
It is worth pointing out that you don’t have to choose between a reductive and a non-reductive
approach. One could use reductionism as a heuristic device (a device where no agreed rule
applies). Thus, one could try the reduction not because you think that there is an underlying,
more fundamental phenomenon which will explain something more comprehensively, but that
the reduction might reveal interesting things from which one can learn.
From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and PS Fosl (2003) Blackwell.

34
Universities and Philosophy
The university now is the place where philosophy thrives. This strikes me as both a
good and a bad thing. It is bad because, as the university becomes increasingly
professionalized, it has increasingly professionalized philosophy. This, in my
opinion, has rendered much more of philosophy sterile, empty and boring. What
institutions demand from individuals, institutions get. And what universities, even the
best universities, now demand from individual professors, on the whole, is quantity of
publication, frequency of citation in the professional literature, widely certified
distinction in the profession, and other quantifiable measures of an impressive
resume. And that is what professors of philosophy are on the whole providing – to
the detriment of philosophy as I see it.
But the connection between philosophy and the university is a good thing, too. It
provides a place in which philosophy can be done, and with wise leadership can be
done in conditions in which it can thrive. It requires teaching: the need to say clear
things in public, and to make them accessible to others and subject to critical
assessment. And teaching is what passes on the subject, or the tradition, if only in the
form in which it is received by those now entering it. The university also provides a
freedom to think about something for a long time, and in new ways that might show
no beneficial social effects. Philosophical work (even work that seems to go
nowhere) is officially supported by the university, and so by the society at large, and
not for any of the specific conclusions it is expected to reach. It is regarded as more
important that the activity should go on than that it should have this or that specified
outcome. Results, in the form of conclusions reached, or propositions established, are
not what matters.
This is a good thing, as I see it, because I do not regard philosophy as a set of results
or doctrines, in the sense of conclusions reached, or propositions established. It may
well be that every society or culture needs ideas or beliefs or doctrines to give sense
and direction to the lives of its members. And accepting a belief or doctrine, or
espousing an ideology, is a form of thought, of thinking. But it is not the kind of
thought that philosophy is. Or rather, that kind of thought is compatible with the
absence of philosophy, or of what is valuable about philosophy at its best.
Professor Barry Stroud in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt)
(418 words)

35
Philosophy and Tradition
The need for a past, for a tradition to start from, is a commonplace in the history of
painting. Painters paint as they do in response to the painting that precedes them.
André Malraux dramatized the familiar point this way:
It is a revealing fact that, when explaining how his vocation came to him, every great
artist traces it back to the emotion he experienced at his contact with some specific
work of art…An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw
the shepherd-boy Giotto sketching sheep. But, in true biographies, it is never the
sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting; but, rather, his first sight of the
paintings of a man like Cimabue. What makes the artist is that in his youth he was
more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things
they represent.
Something like this is no less true, I believe, of philosophy. G.E.Moore reports in his
autobiography that he thinks “the main stimulus to philosophize” for him was “certain
philosophical statements which [he] heard made in conversation.” He says, “I do not
think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any
philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things
which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences.” This is often
cited as a defect or limitation of G.E.Moore and his philosophy, and indeed,
sometimes, of so-called analytic or linguistic philosophy in general. It is thought to
reveal the superficial and derivative, even parasitic, character of that philosophy, its
dry academic or professional sources, and its distance from “real” problems that the
world presents to any thoughtful, sensitive human being who is directly and
passionately engaged with it. I think rather that this observation shows Moore’s
acuteness and his honesty. Whatever one might think of Moore’s limitations, perhaps
even his blindnesses, as a philosopher, he was not blind or limited in this case. What
he reports about himself is something I believe to be true of philosophy in general. I
find it interesting that many philosophers would deny it, and would regard it as
demeaning or indicative of shallowness to acknowledge that it is true of them.
Professor Barry Stroud in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt)
(389 words)

36
Philosophy as Therapeutic
We need to see where philosophical problems come from in order to understand the
special character of what is said in attempts to solve them.
One word sometimes applied to the kind of philosophical attitude or curiosity I am
recommending is therapeutic. The term is unfortunate, and does not capture what I
have in mind. Wittgenstein does say that there are different methods in philosophy,
‘like different therapies.’ But that might mean, allowing for the bad grammar, only
that there are different methods in philosophy, just as there are different therapies in
psychotherapy. That does not imply that the different ways of doing things in
philosophy are therapies. On that reading, the remark means only the equivalent of
‘There is more than one way to skin a cat.’
With a cat there is no obscurity or uncertainty about the goal: you either end up with a
fully skinned cat or you don’t. But what is the analogue, even in psychotherapy, of
the skinned cat? And if you think in that case that you can identify in advance a clear
goal what could be reached by several different therapeutic means, what is the parallel
in philosophy? What goal are different methods in philosophy all designed to
achieve? Therapeutic as a term puts too much weight on an identifiable outcome. I
prefer the word diagnostic. What philosophers need now is a diagnosis or uncovering
of what they regard as their problems or their questions, and some understanding of
the nature and sources of the kinds of things they think philosophy should account for.
Wittgenstein also says, as translated by Elizabeth Anscombe: ‘The philosopher’s
treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’ This suggests that the
philosopher, or the philosopher Wittgenstein approves of, treats a philosophical
question like an illness – or even that he thinks a philosophical question is an illness.
I think that is an unfortunate suggestion. The thing to do with an illness, after all, is to
get rid of it. Hence the idea of therapy or cure. But, as we have just seen,
Wittgenstein also says there are many different therapies, and you can get rid of
something in lots of different ways. Why should ‘philosophical methods’, if there are
any, be any better that anything else that works? Best of all would be not to get the
thing in the first place. And with philosophical questions, that can be arranged. So on
this reading, Wittgenstein would be suggesting that nothing would be lost without
philosophy.
I think Wittgenstein’s remarks should be taken another way, which puts it much
closer to the conception of philosophy or philosophical activity I think we now need –
or need to resuscitate. It makes a place for philosophy. What Wittgenstein writes, in
the German, is ‘Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage: wie eine Krankheit’, which
could be put something like this: ‘The philosopher treats a question: as an illness (is
treated).’ The stress is on the verb. The philosopher treats a question; the doctor
treats an illness. The parallel is with what is done, not necessarily with what it is
done to.
Well, how is an illness treated? First of all, and crucially, it has to be identified.
‘What have we got here exactly,’ we ask, ‘and how does it differ from other things
that are very similar but different?’ These symptoms must then be diagnosed. What
are they indications of? What lies behind them? How did things develop so that these

37
symptoms show up in this form here and now? The time for therapy and cure come
only after these questions have been answered. The point is that treatment begins
with identification and understanding, and an illness to be treated is understood in
terms of its origins or causes. We understand what it is in terms of how is came to be.
Treating a question is not the same as answering it. Answering it may be the worst
thing to do with it. I believe that happens in philosophy. Answering a question
before understanding what it is and where it comes from is like applying a cure for an
illness without having identified what illness it is. It can make things worse, and
certainly harder to identify and understand. To understand what philosophical theses
or theories are, we have to understand the nature and source of the problems to which
they are answers. And to understand those problems we have to identify and
understand their sources.
I do mean we must always seek their temporal or historical sources. We need to
identify the assumptions, the demands, the preconceptions, and the aspirations that
lead to a question’s having the particular significance it now has for us, but that need
not mean going back to earlier stages of the philosophical tradition. The particular
frame of mind what is responsible for the question is something we are in right now.
That does not mean it is therefore easy to identify. But given that philosophy is
always in part a response to previous philosophy, we can be pretty sure that the source
of questions that now lie within us, and to that extent seem uncontroversial, are the
products of earlier philosophizing or earlier ways of thinking about the world. That is
why I think philosophy is inseparable from the history of philosophy. But not every
particular attempt to plumb the sources of a philosophical problem must take us
backward in time. The important thing is to gain some understanding of the origin
and special character of the problem or issue right now, whatever that takes.
Professor Barry Stroud from What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt)
(929 words)

38
Philosophy as an Activity – comments from William James
I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I
mean by this last reproach [that rationalistic philosophy ‘keeps out of all definite
touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows’], so I will dwell a little longer on that
unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to
feel repelled.
I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me
a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I cannot read
them to you now. This young man, who was a graduate of some Western college,
began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a
philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from
the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so
little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them
at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street
belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed.
The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and
noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic.
Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and
dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill.
In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built
upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the
intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no
explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it,
a remedy, a way of escape.
Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the
temperament of existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our
intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object
of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all
seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful
bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and
then to tell me whether ‘refined’ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that
springs to your lips.
Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out
nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem
rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their
backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical
men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.
[from Pragmatism by William James, 1906, Dover Publications]
[492 words]

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