Why Philosophy? has published a brief interview of me on the nature and practice of philosophy. I figured I'd cross-post here.
What is philosophy to you?
My graduate advisor Alison Gopnik once characterized philosophy as just “very theoretical anything.” Take any issue you want and plunge deep enough, and you’re doing philosophy.
Philosophy is not a subject area. It is an approach, a style of thinking, a willingness to dive in and consider the deepest ontological, normative, conceptual, and broadly theoretical questions regarding anything. Any topic – the mind, language, physics, ethics, hair, Barbie dolls, carpentry, auto racing – can be approached philosophically. For all X, there is a philosophy of X.
How were you first introduced to philosophy?
That question seems to presuppose that philosophy is a formal discipline of some sort that one needs to be introduced to. But already in middle school my friends and I had opinions – and were willing to argue at length about them – about what makes a teacher good or bad, about whether when and why it’s okay and not okay to use swear words, why what we thought of as “modern art” sucked, and under what conditions it’s reasonable for a game master to do a total-party-kill in Dungeons & Dragons. Isn’t that already philosophy?
How do you practice philosophy today?
In living life thoughtfully, we are always already practicing philosophy.
What is a philosophical issue that is important to you?
Discovering and rediscovering awe in the wondrous, incomprehensible complexity of the world. Here we are, basically just bags of mostly water, and we can look up at the sky and wonder about the origin of the stars, we can look back into the past and wonder about the origins of morality, we can create art, we can cooperate on multi-year, multi-million-person projects. Pretty good for bags of water! But the intractable complexity of reality will always exceed our simple comprehension.
What books, podcasts, or other media have stood out to you as a philosopher?
One of my favorite philosophers, Helen De Cruz, died this year, far too young. Check out her Substack, her book Wonderstruck, and her article on friendship with the ancients.
11 comments:
Are you more or less aligned with "West/Mediterranean (Greece) - Pre-Socratic Philosophy
In ancient Greece, thinkers (the Pre-Socratics) were shifting away from mythological explanations to more rational and naturalistic inquiries about the physical world.
.Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BCE): Claimed that change is the essence of life ("You cannot step into the same river twice") and that the world is governed by Logos (an underlying, divine order).
.Parmenides (c. 515–450 BCE): Argued the exact opposite, that true reality is unchanging, eternal, and indivisible, and that change is an illusion.
.Democritus (c. 460–370 BCE): Developed Atomism, positing that reality is composed of indivisible particles called atoms.
.Xenophanes (c. 570–478 BCE) began to critically challenge the traditional anthropomorphic (human-like) depiction of the gods found in Homer and Hesiod, suggesting a single, non-human-like God.
...In summary, the thought world around 500 BC was defined by a shift from simple mythological explanations to a deeper, more systematic, and often ethical or political inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality and the best way to live a human life.
Well. Broadly construed, the realms of human experience encompass art, science and mathematics. As I best get it, science and math are empirical; while art is, largely, esoteric---if, and only if, we accept its' extreme subjectivity, and, beauty as in the eye of the beholder. Ahem. Anyway, stream-of-consciousness wise, it is troubling to meld art with science with mathematics. Max Escher played with it with his ironic art work. Clever, to the nth degree, yet, still, only clever. Physics and math are (maybe) matters-of-fact, until we learn something we did not know, and, can empirically demonstrate. Art is not superior to math and physics. But, life would be boring without it.Likewise, life would be lifeless, without philosophy....don'cha think?
Pleased to read of your work-in-progress! Figured you would get to it. Looks sorta, kinda like we fell from the same tree? Did you know John Searle? Scepticism is healthy---the Chinese Room demonstrated that...I think so.
I'm always puzzled by descriptions of philosophy as concerned with the "deepest questions" (or fundamental questions, etc.), as it means that so much of what people who everyone takes to be philosophers do isn't philosophy. I have a PhD in philosophy, work at a university, publish in philosophy journals, and get called a philosopher, but have never done any work on the deepest question about anything.
I don't think that's uncommon, either. Say someone is working on whether it's morally permissible to eat eggs. They could do that as a professional philosopher and publish their work in a philosophy journal, and it's hard to imagine many people thinking that they're not doing philosophy, but whether it's morally permissible to eat eggs is not one of the *deepest* questions about ethics.
In fact, it's reasonable to think that metaethics deals with more fundamental questions in ethics than normative ethics does, in which case if philosophy is considering the deepest questions about an area, the whole field of normative ethics is not philosophy. Other broad areas of philosophy (philosophy of language, of mind, logic, epistemology, etc.) are similar: a huge amount, perhaps most, of what the people we think of as professional philosophers call "philosophy" without any hesitation isn't about the deepest questions in that area. (E.g., the question of what epistemic injustice is isn't as fundamental as the question of what injustice is, or the question of what knowledge or being a knower are, but I don't think anyone thinks it's a question that's outside philosophy.)
Thanks for the comments, all!
Arnold: The ancient Greeks aren't as interesting to me as the ancient Chinese, actually!
Paul: Yes, I knew Searle, but not well. I don't think we ever had a one-on-one conversation for more than 10 minutes. I'd show up to talk about a dissertation chapter I'd drafted and after about 5 minutes, a little alarm bell would go off in his head and he'd say "Well, good stuff, just keep working, keep working!" and kind of usher me out of his office.
Nicholas: I kind of agree, kind of disagree. I think professional philosophers are generally motivated by big questions and keep them in view even if their actual published work is narrow, and narrow work can contribute a piece of understanding on bigger issues. That said, I wish there were more room in the field for broad-visioned explorations of big questions by great thinkers and writers, unconstrained by the strictures of publishability as analytic philosophy. It's just *so* hard to do that well. Nietzsche and Plato could pull it off....
As Wilber was wont to say: and just so. Or, as others, sharper than he, or me, So have implied: philosophy is an ongoing WIP (work-in-progress)...which is part of why obsessive-compulsives thrive on it. Generalizing a lot: philosophers are an obsessive-compulsive lot...a lot. You get this, right? So, WIP it, WIP it good! OK. I was having fun. D'autrement, that too is classically obsessive-compulsive. A lot...
Just wanted to ask as a reader a question to Professor Drake:
Would it be possible to answer the small applied question concerning the morality of eating eggs without taking a stance on any issue of general moral philosophical significance? Or, if not taking a stance oneself, answering the question informed by such stances? Go broad/universal enough and you can also find depth, the fundaments...
(Not a professor, thank you though. :) I’m just Dr Drake, but Nicholas is fine.)
I don’t think it’s possible to answer any question about anything without taking a stance on an issue of general philosophical significance. It doesn't follow, though, that philosophy is just the study of the deepest questions.
Firstly, taking a stance on a question in an area is not the same thing as studying that question. As I mentioned above, to assume an answer to a question - or to simply take a stance on a question - is generally not the best way to answer that question; that's why philosophy and science don't just consist of claims, but also include reasons and evidence. So, it’s not plausible to think that people are *studying* a question when they assume an answer to it.
Secondly, even aside from the fact that taking a stance on a question isn’t the same thing as studying that question, if it followed from the fact that practical philosophy requires taking a stance on some deepest philosophical questions that practical philosophy is just the study of those questions, philosophy would include just about everything, as doing just about anything requires taking a stance on an issue of general philosophical significance. To stick to academic areas, doing physics or doing public health both require taking stances on issues of general philosophical significance, so physics and public health would both be philosophy. (I think just functioning at all in the world requires taking stances on issues of general philosophical significance, so almost all human activity would count as philosophy too, but leave that aside.) If the term “philosophy” includes all academic areas, it’s no longer of any use.
I’m not sure how “Go broad/universal enough and you can also find depth, the fundaments” fits into your argument. I expect the idea is that philosophy is the study of the deepest questions, even when philosophers are not studying the deepest questions, because they could go broader. But that doesn’t work because we can as easily say the opposite: “Go narrow/particular enough and you can find shallowness, the particulars. So, philosophy is the study of narrow, practical questions, even when philosophers are not studying practical questions, because they could go narrower.” Hopefully that shows the argument doesn’t work.
Thank you, that helps to clarify your stance!
I think I intended the last claim about broadness to help because it would depend on the earlier claim that you need to rely on some understanding of deep issues, which often are reflected in philosophically broad concepts like goodness or rightness generally, to make intelligible assessments of applied practical issues. So there would be an asymmetry - philosophy may in its pursuit find itself pursuing increasingly narrow questions, but it cannot do without considerations of the broadest questions like "what is the good?", "what should I do?", "what is right?", and so on. Philosophers have to investigate the deeper questions because these questions about the nature, knowledge, and significance of our most primitive notions are part and parcel of the investigation that makes up Philosophy, and an investigation into a more particular claim that didn't take these investigations or what is illuminated by them into account wouldn't really rise to the level of Philosophy. I think that's more what I was trying to get at.
So like for our example, we could give answers to a similar question like "should we eat eggs?" like "well if they're healthy", "if they're unspoiled", "as long as we aren't eating too many of them", "as long as we don't think they taste bad", etc... that aren't getting at the philosophically significant way of asking the question which I'm guessing rises to the level of a moral investigation about whether we have any collective responsibility to refrain from eating eggs on moral grounds where this now will implicate all the more fundamental concepts of moral investigation and questions of what is right and good and ultimately true, or whether such an answer is impossible, etc... my comment was sort of a (maybe too strong!) claim about what is unavoidable in trying to provide a philosophical response to a moral question. I was thinking it's not possible to do it without thinking about and taking into consideration responses to investigations into deeper more general philosophical questions about morals. And can I really understand those views without thinking through the investigations into those questions that lead us to those general moral philosophical conclusions?
This all might be besides the point ultimately - but something doesn't sit well with the idea that we can understand more local problems without understanding the assumptions we might be drawing on based on our understanding of more fundamental concepts or questions that are involved.
Those are good points. I don’t think they give good reason to think, though, that philosophy is just the study of the deepest questions.
It’s true that that you need to rely on some understanding of deep issues to make intelligible assessments of applied practical issues. But the reverse is also true; you need to rely on some understanding of practical issues to make intelligible assessments of issues in metaethics. Say you’re looking at a deep issue about moral judgements, whether they express beliefs or non-belief attitudes. You can’t do that well without an understanding of practical moral judgements that people actually make. In fact, the importance of practical issues is so great that it’s common for metaethicists to argue that there must be objective moral properties because, e.g., it’s bad to hurt kittens for fun. Similarly, those working on a fundamental question in philosophy of language, like “What is meaning?”, rely on some understanding of actual speech. Likewise for every area of philosophy. So, the dependence doesn’t just run one way. So, that isn't a reason to think that philosophy is just the study of the deepest questions.
Secondly, even if it were true that you need to understand the deepest questions in order to have answers to practical questions but don’t need to understand practical questions in order to have answers to the deepest questions, it wouldn’t follow that philosophy is just the study of the deepest questions. You have to understand some mathematics in order to do economics, but it doesn’t follow that economics is just the study of numbers.
You can see in the sciences as a whole that that line of reasoning (if your field of study relies on assumptions about something, your field of study is just the study of that thing) doesn’t work. The social sciences rely on assumptions about psychology, which rely on assumptions about biology, which rely on assumptions about chemistry, which rely on assumptions about physics. So, if it were true that if a field of study relies on assumptions about something then it is just the study of that thing, then there would only be one science, physics, as chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences would be just the study of the fundamental laws of matter, energy, space, and time. But physics isn't the only science, and the social sciences aren't just the study of the fundamental laws of matter, energy, space, and time.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean by “the idea that we can understand more local problems without understanding the assumptions we might be drawing on” (though I think I get the gist). If by “understand” you mean be *aware* of the assumptions, that’s very helpful and important with some assumptions, and not at all with others, and it all depends on what work you’re doing, exactly. If I’m working on whether it’s morally permissible to eat eggs, I really don’t need to have in mind at all the question of whether the physical world exists — it really is reasonable for me, for that purpose, to assume that it does, discussing the question in my work will make the work much weaker, and trying to answer the question before I do the work will mean that it never gets written.
If you’re not talking about Eric’s definition of philosophy and just mean that it’s good for those doing practical philosophy to be aware of some deeper questions, I agree. (It’s worth noting, though, that it’s also important for those working on fundamental philosophy to be aware of practical issues. As a reviewer, I’ve twice recommended rejection of papers in the last couple of weeks because the papers, on fairly fundamental questions in their areas, relied on assumptions about empirical matters that were completely wrong, and which in both cases would have been easy enough for the authors to check. In both cases, though, a decent familiarity with the practical world would have meant checking wasn’t necessary—they both relied on assumptions that are well-known to be false.)
Yes, the influence of ancient Chinese culture actually is still around...for help in processing-between-inner-outer-living today...
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