What Is Philosophy?

How is philosophy different from the other academic disciplines? What makes it worth funding as an academic department? Here, I'll check my email for a minute while you think about your answer....

We could go sociological: We could say that philosophy is whatever it is that people who call themselves "philosophers" do. Or we could say that it is whatever it is that fits best into an integrated tradition arising from the canonical works of canonical figures like Plato and Kant. While neat in a way, this sort of sociological definition seems to me at best a fallback, if no more substantive definition succeeds -- and it strains to accommodate ancient Chinese and Indian philosophers and the possibility of philosophy on other planets or in the distant future when all memory of us has been lost.

Method or content seems the better hope. But is there a distinctively philosophical method or a set of distinctly philosophical topics?

Philosophy cannot, I think, be defined methodologically as an a priori discipline distinguished from the sciences by its focus on truths discoverable from an armchair and immune to empirical refutation. There are, in my view, no such truths. (I know that's contentious.) Speaking more moderately, it doesn't seem that philosophy is limited to such truths. Philosophers of science take stands on the nature of spacetime and natural selection, stands presumably empirically grounded and open to empirical refutation. Atheists and religious philosophers appeal to the appearance, or not, of benevolent design. Philosophers of mind connect their views with those in empirical psychology. Is there then some other method constitutive of philosophy? What could it be? Philosophy seems, if anything, methodologically pluralistic (especially with the rise of experimental philosophy).

A topical characterization of philosophy is more inviting: Philosophers consider such questions as the fundamental nature of reality, the nature of mind and knowledge and reason, general questions about moral right and wrong. But physicists and psychologists and religious leaders also consider these questions. Are they being philosophers when they do so? And what about the possibility of new philosophical questions? Also, a laundry list of questions is not very theoretically appealing. What we want to know is what those sorts of questions have in common that makes them philosophical.

Here's my view: To practice philosophy is to articulate argumentatively broad features of one's worldview, or -- derivatively -- to reflect on subsidiary points crucial to disputes about worldview, with an eye to how they feed into those disputes.

On this view, the empirical is no threat to philosophy. In fact, it would be nuts to develop a broad worldview without one's eyes open to the world. And although the empirical is deeply relevant to philosophy, no set of experiments could ever replace philosophy because no set of experiments could ever settle the most general questions of worldview (including, for example, the extent to which we should allow our beliefs to be governed by the results of scientific experiments). No science or set of sciences could aim at the broad vision of philosophy without thereby becoming philosophy -- becoming either bad philosophy (simplistic naturalized epistemology or cosmology, with substantial philosophical commitments simply assumed without argument and masked behind a web of scientific technicalities) or good, subtle, empirically-informed philosophy, philosophy recognizable to philosophers as philosophy.

This view of philosophy also, I think, properly highlights its importance and its centrality in academia.

I have been accused of aiming to destroy philosophy -- especially metaphysics and ethics -- replacing it with something empirical. However, philosophy is indestructible. People will always argumentatively articulate broad features of worldview. And I myself, even in my most empirical inquiries, aim to do nothing else.

Update, Oct. 2: Joachim Horvath points out in the comments section that important aspects of our worldview include the evolution of human beings from earlier primates and the falsity of geocentrism. But should exploring such questions count as philosophy? My own view is that their being empirical questions doesn't make them unphilosophical, and I would count Darwin and Huxley, Copernicus and Galileo, as doing philosophy when they put forward and defend such broad theses about the position of human beings in the universe. Likewise now, when we know so little about consciousness, the empirical study of basic facts about consciousness -- facts basic enough to count as central to a broad worldview -- should count as philosophy. Of course, later biologists, astronomers, and maybe consciousness scientists who get into narrower questions not involving broad features of our worldview are no longer doing philosophy on my conception. Thus, on my view, doing biology, or astronomy, or psychology can be way of doing philosophy. Perhaps in this respect my view of philosophy diverges more from the mainstream than may be evident on its face from the original post.