NATURE AND DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
The
philosophy considered in this book arose in ancient Greece. The very word ‘philosophy’ is of
Greek origin, literally meaning love (philos)
of wisdom (sophia). On the origin of
the name, legend has it that, asked what he was, the Greek philosopher
Pythagoras would humbly answer that he was not a sage, but only a person in
search of wisdom, namely, a philosopher. As we shall see, this answer is
illustrative of the difference between the philosopher and the scientist: the
philosopher is someone looking for knowledge; the scientist is someone who has sufficient reasons to believe he has found it, to the extent that it makes sense
to speak of “finding” knowledge.
1. Philosophy and science
One way to
try to understand the nature of philosophy is to consider the origin of Western
philosophy in ancient Greece around the sixth century B.C. It is well-known
that philosophy was conceived as an alternative to mythological and religious
explanations of natural phenomena. Rather than continue accepting the
explanation of the foundation and origin of our world exclusively by appealing
to gods, early Greek philosophers speculatively suggested natural explanatory
principles such as water (Thales), fire (Heraclitus), air (Anaximenes), atoms
(Democritus), or even abstract principles such as the undefined (Anaximander)
and Being (Parmenides). What was the reason for such an extraordinary change in ways of thinking about the world?
The most plausible explanation is that after
earlier Greek thinkers imported scientific knowledge (geometrical,
arithmetical, physical, astronomical…) from other cultures, mainly from Egypt,
they were the first to consider the nature of such knowledge in itself, as
generalizations, in complete abstraction from any
conceivable practical
applications.[1] The best example is the axiomatization of
geometry by Euclid. Although the Egyptians already used geometry in their
engineering projects, notably their pyramids, temples
and monuments, only the
Greeks had the idea of constructing a deductive system of geometry apart from
any application. Another example was the development of physical and astronomical laws and
explanations. Although Archimedes’ principle of the lever was practically
useful, Aristarchus’ genial heliocentric hypothesis, according to which the
earth rotates about its axis once a day and revolves around the Sun in a year, the
fixed stars being celestial bodies similar to the Sun, although much more distant… was
surely useless in his time. And possibly the most striking example of an empirical
scientific achievement without any practical application
at the time was Eratosthenes’
measurement of the diameter of the earth by by means of triangulation.
This curiosity going far beyond practical
aims can very well explain the birth of speculative philosophy in the thinking
of pre-Socratic philosophers. They were also scientists. Thales of Miletus, identified by
tradition as the first Greek philosopher, was also an astronomer who once
predicted a solar eclipse. This means that these philosophers had already
achieved an understanding of the procedures of the sciences, both formal and
empirical, that is, they already had a well-formed conception of science.
This makes it plausible that Greek philosophy was born from the
application of this already incorporated conception of science to speculative
issues which were previously addressed exclusively by religion and mythology,
such as the question of the ultimate nature of all things or of the origins and
fate of the universe. Even if these issues were far from being concretely
addressed and explained by the science of their time, they could still be
speculatively addressed using the resources of vague ideas like “natural
powers”, “abstract entities”, and “personified abstractions”, to borrow some
terms of Auguste Comte. Proposing first principles such as water, air, the
undefined and Being, was an early attempt to unify the
understanding of reality
within the framework of highly speculative generalizations.
If this explanation
is correct, if Western
philosophy was born from an application of the conception of science to domains
in which scientific procedures were objectively impossible, how then can we distinguish
the philosopher’s procedures from the scientist’s procedures? It seems that
the answer to that question leads us to important considerations about the
nature of philosophy itself, or at least parts of it. Even though the rational procedures of philosophers are similar to those of natural scientists (philosophy
usually seeks to establish true generalizations from data of some kind, trying
to offer explanations based on these generalizations, as much as the natural sciences...),
there is a fundamental difference in that for philosophy, unlike science, such rational procedures
are merely conjectural or speculative. That was the way it was
from the start. What the first Greek philosophers did was to speculate, to
proceed by conjectures, and the fact that during more than two millennia these
conjectures have come to be argued in more and more refined, complex,
and diversified ways, receiving a treatment that tends to become increasingly
rigorous and sophisticated, does not transform them into something else.
On the other hand, philosophy is said to be the
cradle of the sciences.[2] As
J. L. Austin explained in an insightful, well-known passage:
In the history of human inquiry, philosophy has
the place of the initial sun, seminal and tumultuous: from time to time it
throws off some portion of itself to take a station as a science, a planet,
cool and well regulated, progressing steadily towards a distant final state.
This happened long ago at the birth of mathematics, and again at the birth of
physics; only in the last century have we witnessed the same process once
again, slow and at the time almost imperceptible, in the birth of the science
of mathematical logic, through the joint labour of philosophers and
mathematicians.[3]
Austin’s own
speech act theory, explaining the rules of linguistic interaction, is an
example of this. He needed many years to develop what is today taught more in
linguistics than in philosophy courses. The fact that philosophy is the cradle
of the sciences gives rise to another question: how much of philosophy
can be considered as a kind of anticipation of science – a protoscience? Its entirety, or only
its non-essential domains?
Another question is: what does it mean to
say that an investigation is speculative or conjectural? The answer is: an
investigative procedure is purely
conjectural (or speculative) whenever
the possibility of consensus about its results is totally out of reach.
This is, as we shall see, the fundamental difference between philosophy and
science: while in science it is relatively easy (or at least not impossible) to
obtain a consensus – an interpersonal agreement about results – this consensus
remains unattainable for philosophy. The explanation of
the effects of levers using the law of
the lever offered by the Greek scientist Archimedes can
be tested and publicly verified Everyone can agree
on this explanation after making a few empirical measurements. In contrast, to
explain the generation and destruction of things through the action of the
forces of love (philía) and hatred (neîkos) on the four elements (water,
air, earth and fire), as the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles did, is to
embark on an inevitably vague and obscure speculative investigation. This encompasses
areas of questioning in which the possibility of achieving free consensual
agreement based on empirical methods seems practically impossible.
The
conjectural character of philosophy explains why it is typically an
argumentative and aporetic undertaking: where consensus cannot be reached on
results, what remains possible is to formulate hypotheses and discuss their
possible consequences. The conjectural character of philosophy also explains
the lack of linear progress in its domains. The fact that philosophy cannot reach
consensus on its results means that in philosophical
practice, philosophers find it almost impossible to make decisive inter-theoretical comparisons. While it
is generally agreed that relativistic mechanics is superior to Newtonian
mechanics, given its greater explanatory power, many do not agree that
Berkeley’s proposed nominalism provides more plausible explanations than
Platonic or Aristotelian realism, since these are philosophical doctrines.
Why is it that philosophy cannot reach
consensus on results? The answer is that there can only be consensus about
results when there is a previous consensus about what is being assumed in research – a kind of agreement that is lacking in
philosophy. In philosophy there is no agreement on the adequacy of the questions (many of the philosophical questions, it
is suspected, are nothing more than pseudo problems resulting from verbal
confusions). Nor is there agreement on the adequacy
of the evaluation procedures leading to answers for questions (an argument may seem conclusive to one philosopher and irrelevant to
another). Indeed, all these conditions are only really satisfied by science,
because only science has consensually accepted assumptions and evaluation procedures.
Without satisfying any of these presuppositions, we cannot hope to achieve true consensus concerning results, and are limited to
the aporetic discussions typical of philosophy.
The considerations presented
so far vindicate the attempt
to clarify the nature of philosophy by developing its similarity and contrast with science. This
kind of comparison is impossible if we define science from the reductionist
conceptions imposed on us by traditional philosophers of science, especially
those of the positivist trend, who improperly extrapolate criteria to all domains of
current science that are drawn from the research of a particular
fundamental science like physics (Karl Popper, for example, thought that the
theory of evolution should not be considered scientific, because it is unable to be the
object of repeated observations, as is the case with the theory of relativity).
We feel that our idea of philosophical research is one of something too comprehensive and
abstract to let itself be possibly captured by any such down-to-earth experimentalist
conceptions of science. In contrast to this, it should be noted that this is in
no way what we usually mean when most of us – even scientists themselves – talk of science.
In what follows I present a conception of science that is liberal enough to
encompass any would-be science that could be derived from philosophical
speculation.
We can find this liberal conception of the
nature of science in the kind of social conception of science proposed by the
physicist J. M. Ziman. According to him,
science in all its forms should be understood as “consensualizable”
public knowledge.[4] Under his perspective, the most striking characteristic, common to all
sciences, both empirical and formal, is that they contain generalizations able
to be consensually accepted as true by members of a scientific community of
ideas. This conception of science, in addition to being perfectly in line with
what we usually and naturally tend to call science, seems ideal as a means to
contrast science with philosophy. Indeed, not only physics, but also chemistry,
biology, geology, linguistics, philology, anthropology, and much of psychology
and economics, for instance, can be called scientific from this broad
perspective.
Against the conception of science as
consensual public knowledge we can make the following objection. There are
political, religious, mystical communities in which consensus is imposed from
the top down, excluding the possibility of critical evaluation of the issues in
question. Notable examples of this were the intrusions of political ideologies
into what could or should count as science in Nazi Germany and the former
Soviet Union. However, it seems that according to Ziman’s characterization, the
results of these ideological intrusions should be admitted as belonging to
science, since they were consensually accepted as true by a scientific
community. But that cannot be! Therefore, the consensualist-oriented conception
of science suggested above seems unable to separate science from ideology.
The answer to this difficulty is to apply
here a distinction between true and false consensus, based on a better
characterization of what can be understood as a community of ideas able to
produce science. We can call this institution a critical community of ideas, understanding it as one that
satisfies conditions like those specified by Jürgen Habermas for what he called the ideal speech situation (ideale
Sprachsituation).[5] This means that a critical community of
ideas must satisfy some conditions of freedom and rationality for the
evaluation of the results of investigations, such as:
1.
the
condition of making it possible for the members of a community of ideas to hold critical
discussions oriented to the truth and free of any coercion, to exclude pressures other
than those of the rationality of arguments themselves,
2.
the
condition that members of the community of ideas have free access to
information and the same chances of offering new ideas, improvements, objections,
and critique,
3.
the
condition of competence and equivalence in the training of members of the
community of ideas.
These are
conditions for authentic consensus. It is true that conditions like these are
never completely met. However, a reasonable satisfaction of such conditions is
simply indispensable to establish a consensus suitable for scientific
rationality. In fact, scientists can only do science because they idealize a
critical community of ideas in their minds when doing their research. And when
we hear of a new scientific discovery, we always believe scientific claims for it only if we can reasonably assume that in developing
its new findings, the
scientific community has satisfied to a sufficient extent conditions such as
those mentioned above.[6]
Beyond this, there are, certainly, the
criteria of objectivity, that the members of a scientific community accept
necessary assumptions in order to achieve agreement (for instance, the
replicability of an experiment in biology). It is this previous agreement on
assumptions (methods, data, theories, etc.) which only science has and that is
a pre-condition for the possibility of agreement and
scientific progress.
With all this in hand, we are now prepared
to present a straightforward comparison between philosophy as anticipation of
science (proto-science) and science as consensualizable public knowledge. The
contrast is possible insofar as we characterize science as follows:
1)
Science: An investigation aimed at obtaining a set of
non-trivial generalizations, which will be accepted as consensually true by the
members of a critical community of ideas (the so-called scientific community).
On the other
hand, we characterize philosophy by its similarity and contrast with scientific
research, as follows:
Philosophy: An investigation aimed at obtaining a
set of (non-trivial) generalizations, which is carried out by members of a
supposed critical community of ideas (philosophers), but only to the extent
that this community is unable to reach any agreement regarding the truth of
these generalizations.[7]
What this
contrast suggests is that everything that belongs to philosophy can in
principle, at least, become part of science, insofar as agreement can be
established on assumptions that are sufficient to enable authentic consensus
about results. In other words: philosophy is what can be done in the
impenetrable domains where science – understood as critically consensual
knowledge – has not yet been proved possible and perhaps never will be.
“Science,” as Russell noted, “is what we know; philosophy is what we don’t
know”... “Science is what we can prove to be true; philosophy is what we cannot
prove to be false”.[8] With this, the observation made at the
beginning of this chapter, that philosophy is the search for truth, and not finding and having it, is better clarified: when philosophy finally finds the truth, it has
already lost it to science.
Surveying the history of science, the idea of
philosophy as an anticipation of science has been confirmed again and again.
Let’s look at some examples. Mathematics began to separate itself from
philosophy already in the ancient world, as Euclidean Geometry shows, though in the ideas of Pythagoras
it was still entangled with philosophy and mysticism. Classical logic,
though only systematized as a syllogistic by Aristotle, had its law of
non-contradiction already anticipated by Parmenides, though still dressed in the garb of metaphysics.
Turning to the empirical sciences, according to Karl Popper, the Greek
philosopher Anaximander (century VI B.C.)
vaguely anticipated the ideas of inertia and gravitation by suggesting
that the earth could be a cylinder floating in empty space, without falling down or to either
one side or another, because of its distance from the other stars.[9] The atomist philosophers Leucippus and
Democritus, more than two thousand years ago, had already launched the idea of
the existence of an infinite number of invisible and physically indivisible
particles, which could be aggregated, constituting visible matter,
thus explaining its properties. They thus anticipated the scientific discovery of subatomic
particles by contemporary physics. The periodic table of current chemistry has
taken the place of the long-superseded doctrine of the four elements (water,
earth, air and fire) of ancient philosophy. Galileo’s experimental physics
replaced Aristotle’s rocking-chair speculative physics of natural places and
motions, making possible the scientific development of this fundamental
science. Contemporary biology has replaced the vague vitalist theories
of philosophers, who flourished from Aristotle to Bergson. The platonic theory
of the tripartition of the soul finds a more developed equivalent in the
structural theory of mind in Freudian psychoanalysis, which divides it into Ego (Ich), Id (es) and Super-ego (Über-Ich) (although psychoanalysis still
falls short of having scientific standards which
would make it possible to achieve consensus among its practitioners). And today we believe
that when we finally obtain confirmed scientific knowledge of how the human mind
actually works – the most puzzling enigma of our time – many problems of our current
philosophy of mind and psychology will give way to critical consensus and,
therefore, to scientific solutions.
We cannot for sure say the same about the
central fields of philosophy considered in the present book, including metaphysics,
epistemology, mind-body relationships, ethics… But it is not impossible. One
can argue that it only seems impossible when we consider these fields from a
reductionist viewpoint that denies possible scientificity to the
presently unmeasurable
non-experimental domains of science, as positivist philosophers have done. But
when we consider the mutual support that a growing number of different fields
of science can give one another, when we consider the idea of science free from
prejudices (as in Ziman’s case), this idea ceases to be fanciful.
DIVISIONS OF
PHILOSOPHY
Starting with Aristotle, philosophy has usually been subdivided into theoretical and practical domains.
We can understand practical philosophy as one which deals with human activity and its products;
theoretical philosophy, for want of a better definition, can be negatively
defined as the philosophy that does not serve such purposes.
Under these assumptions, traditionally we find two main subdivisions of theoretical philosophy: epistemology and metaphysics. Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is concerned
with the investigation of the nature,
origin, and limits of knowledge. Questions such as “What is knowledge?”,
“What is truth?”, “How is knowledge justified?”, “What are the sources of
knowledge?”, “How can we answer skeptics?”, can be considered as belonging
to epistemology. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is an investigation of “being qua
being”, better said, the investigation of
those things that constitute the broadest domain of knowledge and their
relations to one another.[10] Such things can be universal properties, material substances, states of
affairs, space and time, causality, number, etc. The extreme breadth of the
domain where we deal with such things marks a difference between metaphysics and
particular sciences, since most objects of metaphysics pass through the
sciences by being absorbed into their terminology. Thus, the category of property
applies simply to all scientific domains, empirical and formal. The category of
material substance, as well as of causality, is presupposed by physics,
chemistry, biology, and many other empirical sciences. Space and time
are assumed by all empirical sciences. The same with the category of number:
after all, what science does not presuppose numbers? (because of this, metaphysical
categories are also called “framework
questions”, though this can be deceptive, suggesting that they are
subjective constructs). Furthermore, since Descartes, modern philosophy has
considered epistemology and metaphysics as in some way complementary disciplines: as Locke noted[11], only by knowing the limits of what we
can know will we be aware of which objects legitimately belong to the domains
of our knowledge and what are beyond its possibilities (possibly entities like
God, and questions like “Why does the world exist?”). The reciprocal, however,
seems equally true: it is only by identifying and examining the objects
belonging to the most general domains of knowledge that we acquire methods to
evaluate the most general characteristics of our cognitive faculties.
Traditionally related to metaphysics is
today’s much discussed philosophy of mind.
It deals with issues such as the nature of consciousness, the relationship
between the mental and the physical, mental causality, which allows our
identification of persons as remaining the same across time (the so-called problem of personal
identity) …
Regarding practical philosophy, which
comprises human activity and purposes, as well as its products, we could
include much, much more than this book can cover. Philosophy of action, the
complex domain of ethics (which investigates moral action), the philosophy of
history (which broadly investigates the changes effected by social action),
political philosophy, aesthetics (which investigates artifacts resulting from
human action), the philosophy of culture (which investigates human culture and
its products like art and even philosophy), the philosophy of life...
[1] W. K. C. Guthrie: A
History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
vol. 1, p. 36 ss.
[2] Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London:
Routledge 1993), Introduction.
[3] J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 232.
[4] This
is the thesis on the nature of science advocated by J. M. Ziman in Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1968), cap. 2. As ne noted:
“science, as a corpus of knowledge, as what scientists do, and as an
institution, can’t be treated separately, more than a solid can be
reconstructed from its projection upon separated Cartesian planes.” p. 42.
[5] See Jürgen Habermas, Wahrheitstheorien,
em H. Fahrenbach (ed.), Wirklichkeit und Reflexion (Neske Vlg.
Pfullingen 1973).
[6] One point to be emphasized about this
characterization is that the exercise of philosophy presupposes a critical
community of ideas able to discuss philosophical ideas, even if in some cases, such as
those of wrecked philosophers like Vico, Peirce and Nietzsche, in a
counterfactual way.
[7] This is not, of course, an all-inclusive
definition, since philosophers have also suggested views of what they do that
oppose this characterization (e.g. Wittgenstein’s descriptivist view of
philosophy). Nevertheless, it agrees fairly well with what we really find in practice.
[8] Apud. afterword by Allan Wood
to Bertrand
Russell’s book, My Philosophical Development (London: Routledge, 1995).
[9] See K. R. Popper
in "Back to the Pre-Socratics", in Conjectures and Refutations,
New York 1962, p. 138.
[10] See G. E. Moore: “What is
Philosophy?”, in Some Main Problems of Philosophy, (London: Routledge
2003).
[11] See “Epistle to the Reader”, in
J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1974 (1690)).
