Karina.kowatsch@springernature.com
ON THE NATURE
OF PHILOSOPHY
________________________
ἡ Σίβυλλα
μαίνεσθαι φθέγξεται ἀστολιστὶ καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀμύριστα, διαπεραίνουσα χιλίων
ἐτῶν φωνῇ διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ.*
Heráclito
Nun scheint mir, gibt
es ausser der Arbeit des Kunstlers noch
eine andere, die
Welt sub specie aeterni einzufangen.
Es ist – glaube ich, der Weg des Gedankens,
der gleichsam über die Welt hinfliege und sie so lässt, wie sie
ist – sie von oben von Fluge betrachtend.*
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Science is what we know; philosophy is what
we don’t know. (…) Science is what we can prove to be true; philosophy is what
we can’t prove to be false.
Bertrand Russell
The gem is of purest ray serene, but it is condemned to remain in
the dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean; the flower has its sweetness, although
it is wasted in the desert air.
Robert Merton
_____________
* The
sibyl, with an angry mouth, uttering words without laughter, without adornment
and without incense, reaches more than a thousand years through the god who
dwells within her.
** It
seems to me that, alongside the work of the artist, there is yet another: that
of capturing the world sub specie aeterni. It is – I believe – the path
of thought which, as it were, soars above the world, leaving it as it is – seen
from above, from its flight.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
I. METAPHILOSOPHICAL
COMMITMENTS
1. Descriptivist and Prescriptivist Approaches
2. The
Analytical Stance
3. Expansionism versus Reductionism
4. Working
Hypothesis
II. METAPHILOSOPHY
AS CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
1. Shortcuts of the Critique of Language
2. Philosophy as Analysis of Language
3. The Objectal Fallacy in Analytic
Philosophy
4. Conclusion: A Parallel with Aristotle’s
Organon
III. PHILOSOPHY AS
CONJECTURAL ANTICIPATION OF SCIENCE
1. The Inevitably Conjectural Character of
Philosophical Inquiry
2. The Idea of Philosophy as Proto-Science
3. Origins and Divisions of Science
4. Some Examples of Proto-Scientific Philosophical
Insights
5. Fission
6. The Resistant Core of Residual Philosophical
Problems:
Two Hypotheses
7. Our General Idea of Science
8. Toward a Non-Restrictive Conception of Science
9. Why Conceive Philosophy as a Proto-Scientific
Enterprise?
10. Consequences of the Proposed Conception
11. Analytic Philosophy: Decline and Fall
IV. RELIGION AND THE
MYSTICAL REMNANTS OF PHILOSOPHY
1. Philosophy and Religion: A Genetic Approach
2. Comte’s Law of the Three Stages
3. A Brief Evaluation of Comte’s Law
4. Philosophy as a Transitional Inquiry Between
Religion and Science
5. Conclusions
V. THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ART
1. The Artistic Flavor of Some Philosophical
Writings:
External Similarities
2. Internal Similarities Between Philosophy
and Art
3. Additional Considerations
VI. INTEGRATING THE
CRITERIAL CONFIGURATIONS
1. Philosophy as a derived cultural activity
2. Seeking an integrative explanation of
philosophical activity
3. The metaphilosophical triangle
4. By way of example
II. COROLLARIES AND
PROSPECTS
1. Forms of Philosophy
2. Three philosophical traditions
3. Three historical periods in the evolution
of philosophy
4. Linguistic-analytical philosophy in the
wheels of history
5. The future of philosophy: perspectives and
limits
REFERENCES
FOREWORD
The purpose of this book is to explore the true nature of philosophy.
While metaphilosophical in scope, the perspective adopted here is intentionally
external: philosophy, particularly in its traditional form, is examined as a
cultural practice whose motivations, contents, and procedures arise from deeper
domains of human culture, namely science, religion, and art. The discussion is
presented in a clear and accessible manner so that readers genuinely interested
in the subject, regardless of background, may follow the argument.
I am deeply grateful to
Professor Susan Haack for her valuable metaphilosophical suggestions regarding
the present state of analytic philosophy. My sincere thanks also go to those
who made this work possible. Professor Peter Stemmer welcomed me to Konstanz
during my turbulent sabbatical year of 2021, and Professor Francesco Orilla
generously invited me to present my ideas on metaphilosophy at the University
of Macerata in early 2002. I owe much to my colleagues and friends Cinara Nahra
and Eduardo Maciel, whose cultural and personal support sustained me through
periods of isolation. Above all, I am profoundly indebted to Rita Cristina
Fressa, to whom I owe more than I could ever fully acknowledge.
Finally, I must recognize that
the blame for everything you are about to read here rests with me alone.
FOREWORD
The central aim of this book is to clarify, once and for all, the nature
of philosophy. The perspective adopted is external: philosophy, particularly in
its traditional forms, is examined as a cultural practice shaped by
motivations, contents, and methods that emerge from other domains of human
activity, namely science, religion, and art.
Many years ago, I published a short
book entitled The Philosophical Inquiry: Towards a Global Account (UPA,
2002). I had written it in 1999, during my tenure as a visiting scholar at Berkeley,
while attending John Searle’s formidable courses. The publisher’s reviewer gave
the work a highly positive evaluation. Nevertheless, the book, like several of
my subsequent publications in English, received no formal reviews and attracted
little attention. In retrospect, this outcome is hardly surprising.
I often describe my condition
as “social dyslexia,” a term I prefer to autism. It has profoundly shaped my
academic path, leading me to withdraw from the cognitive dissonance of
conventional networks, whose demands I found distracting from sustained
philosophical work, and eventually to settle in the welcoming Northeast of
Brazil. At the university, my condition imposed practical constraints that
reduced my role to something close to a sinecure. These circumstances left me
in considerable intellectual and personal isolation, interrupted only by
extended research stays abroad, in places like Berkeley, Oxford, Göteborg,
Paris, München, and Konstanz.
The consequences were
paradoxical. On the one hand, isolation deprived me of visibility and left me
ignorant of how the philosophical community and publishing market operate. On
the other hand, it gave me a remarkable degree of independence: the freedom to
pursue research without external interference, almost entirely on my own terms.
Thus, the same condition that excluded me from the community also enabled me to
undertake work with a degree of autonomy rarely available in academic life.
At the time, I did not realize that in the Anglo-American publishing
market, large houses maintain a near-monopoly. Their primary audience is university
libraries, not individual readers. This fact establishes the institutional
framework within which philosophical texts circulate, even if they risk circularity.
More troubling still, these large academic houses routinely declined to
evaluate manuscripts from complete outsiders like me. After all, who would take
seriously texts written by an unknown Foreigner, without mentioning corporativist
interests? Consequently, I was left with no alternative but to publish with
smaller presses such as UPA, CSP, and even De Gruyter – a venerable but competitively
limited publisher. Combined with my discomfort with mainstream analytic
philosophy, this path did little to ensure that my message reached the right readership.
Nevertheless, I persisted. After all, as Tolstoy knew, those who love their
work find in doing it their greatest reward. The present version, now bearing a
more appropriate title and expanded almost three times the length of the
original, has evolved into an entirely new book, while retaining the backbone
of its predecessor.
I am sincerely grateful to those who helped me
to make this version possible. Professor Peter Stemmer welcomed me to Konstanz
during the turbulent sabbatical year of 2021. Professor Francesco Orilla generously
invited me to present my ideas on metaphilosophy at the University of Macerata
in early 2002. I am also indebted to my colleagues and friends Cinara Nahra and
Eduardo Maciel, whose cultural and personal support sustained me through
periods of isolation. Above all, I owe profound gratitude to Rita Cristina Fressa,
to whom I am more indebted than I could ever acknowledge.
Finally, I must recognize that the blame for
everything you are about to read here rests with me alone.
INTRODUCTION
I want to begin with a concise summary
of the book’s central ideas, so readers can grasp the main thread before engaging
with a text that is unavoidably repetitive and marked by digressions. My primary
objective has been to outline a metaphilosophical theory of philosophy’s nature
– one that is more systematic, more nuanced, and, I hope, more truthful than any
competing approach.
The central aim of this work is to
explain the nature of philosophy by situating the problems and solutions inherited
from tradition within their broader cultural context. Although the focus lies on
these canonical issues, some of the theory’s semantic arms can be easily extended
to any form of philosophical inquiry. Such breath is possible because the
perspective adopted here is external to any single philosophical tradition, allowing
for a more balanced historical and cultural view than that offered by specific
metaphilosophical approaches.
The general idea itself is not new; in fact, it is almost commonsensical.
What matters are the details of its exploration. After all, a long and sustained
engagement with an idea is very different from a merely casual encounter with it.
The theory developed in this book emerged from an inquiry into the
connections between philosophy and the three most fundamental cultural practices:
science, religion, and art. Viewed through these relationships,
philosophy may be understood as a hybrid or derivative cultural practice—an
amalgam shaped by the pursuit of truth characteristic of scientific
inquiry, the holistic impetus stemming from religion, and the metaphorical
resources distinctive of art.
Perhaps the most emblematic example of this amalgam is Plato’s philosophy.
His work embodies a search for truth, expressed in arguments that probe our place
in the world, even as it resists moments of severe self-criticism, as in the opening
of Parmenides. At the same time, Plato reveals a mystical-totalizing dimension,
manifested in his acceptance of a transcendent realm of ideas and in his appeal
to Orphic myths. Finally, his philosophy is marked by a strong aesthetic sensibility
– manifest in the dramatic structure of the dialogues, the refined style, the
irony, the allegories, and the myths that permeate his writing.
For clarity’s sake, we can graphically represent the three primary cultural
practices – those of science, religion, and art – as situated on the vertices of
a metaphilosophical triangle within which philosophy is located, as in the
graph below:
SCIENCE
PHILOSOPHY
RELIGION ART
Depending on the position a
philosophy occupies within the triangle, different forms emerge. Plato’s philosophy
lies near the center; Locke’s is somewhat closer to the scientific vertex, like
Bertrand Russell; Hegel’s gravitates toward the mystical-religious vertex (more
than Kant); Nietzsche’s toward the artistic vertex; Heidegger’s toward the religious-artistic
side.
To a certain extent, this applies
to entire traditions: Anglo-American tradition tends to gravitate toward the scientific
vertex, German philosophy toward the religious, and French philosophy toward the
artistic.
Methodologically, I examined the similarities and differences between philosophy
and these cultural practices. In its proximity to science, philosophy appears
as an effort to approach truth and concrete results, though by its very nature,
it cannot fully achieve them without becoming science. In relation to religion,
philosophy tends to expand the scope and elevate the status of its syntheses,
incorporating speculative elements that possibly transcend the limits of
rational inquiry. In kinship with art, philosophy may be envisioned as an “art
of reason”: a practice that weaves – and often strains – argumentative structures,
while drawing upon the creativity, freedom, and flexibility born of metaphorical
richness and polysemic force.
These relationships are dynamic, subject to transformation throughout history.
Western philosophy arose in ancient Greece as a replacement for mythological
explanations, yet it, too, may one day be replaced. With the exponential growth
of science, much of our philosophy has moved progressively closer to science,
attenuating its ties to religion and art and ceding domains once central to
philosophy.
This
dynamic led me to conceive much of philosophy – even at its historical core – as
a conjectural or speculative endeavor anticipating science, thereby as a kind
of proto-science. From the Pre-Socratics onward, philosophy foreshadowed
many of the disciplines that later became established sciences. Yet to reduce philosophy
merely to the cradle of the sciences risks impoverishing our understanding of
its true nature. This criticism is particularly compelling when science is implicitly
conceived in positivist, reductionist terms, as is still the case.
The conception of science I adopted here, however,
is sufficiently liberal and flexible to avoid such limitations. Following John Ziman,
who defined science as “public consensualizable knowledge”, I argued that the
most wide-ranging conception of science is of any inquiry whose results are
truths capable of consensual legitimation by a critical community of ideas.
Such a community must satisfy, in sufficient measure, conditions that philosophers
like Robert Merton and Jürgen Habermas considered necessary for the authenticity
or legitimacy of a consensus. Examples of such conditions are: similar
competence among participants, unrestricted access to information, equal opportunities
for expression, truthfulness, and rational justifiability.
Furthermore, we know as a matter
of fact that in each particular form of inquiry, critical communities require
adherence to different appropriate standards of objectivity, such as agreement
on basic data and valid procedures, in order to achieve authentic consensus. On
this basis, Ziman’s broad definition of science can be refined as follows:
SCIENCE = any form of inquiry
able to achieve authentic consensus within a critical community of ideas by
means of the inquiry’s proper objective standards.
Accepting this broad conception of
science enables us to recognize a wide range of standards of objectivity across
different disciplines, accommodating not only natural and formal sciences, but
also such things as the theory of natural evolution, archeology, history, linguistics,
philology, geology... among sciences. This definition is indeed in full accordance
with the common use of the word science by scientists and well-informed persons.
Moreover, it is not restricted to established standards of objectivity; a new
field of science can emerge with its own standards of objectivity, enabling authentic
consensus. Once Ziman’s improved definition is met, a critical community can produce
scientific theories whose results are authentically consensualizable regarding
their truth or falsity – something pseudosciences like astrology cannot achieve.
Within
this very liberal conception of science, much of philosophy can be seen as anticipating
science without falling under reductionism or scientificism. In direct contrast
to science, philosophy turns out to be an inquiry into truth developed under
the assumption of a philosophically critical community of ideas rooted in tradition,
which, although already able to disavow implausible views, remains unable to achieve
authentic consensus on its results. The complementary asymmetry between philosophy
and Ziman’s refined view of science is evident, and it tends to be confirmed as
we recognize that many of our scientific results, in empirical and formal
sciences, were indeed speculatively anticipated by philosophy.
An unexpected consequence of conceiving philosophy as conjecture, capable
in some ways of anticipating science as a form of objective knowledge subject
to consensual legitimation, is the relativization, rather than outright refutation,
of the idea that philosophy is mere conceptual analysis. In chapter II, I draw
on W. O. Quine’s notion of semantic ascent, which reveals that conceptual
analysis is nothing more than a semantic, metalinguistic way of treating problems
that may be fully empirical.
As a consequence, we are not deprived of investigating the nature of
philosophy methodologically through conceptual analysis. Indeed, in broad terms,
analysis can be traced back to the Socratic question form “What is X?”, where X
denotes a concept such as courage, friendship, knowledge, or justice. In our
case, X is the concept of philosophy itself. Thus, the methods I employ
to discover the nature of philosophy and to analyze its concept are nothing
more than a continuation of an old modus operandi of philosophical
practice.
I
METAPHILOSOPHICAL
COMMITMENTS
Philosophy is not at its most interesting when it is talking about itself.
Bernard Williams
Among the many problems of philosophy, the question concerning its very
nature is neither the most pressing nor the most inspiring. Yet it remains the
most unsettling for the philosopher. After all, how can one claim to produce something
called philosophy – or even to practice it properly – without being able to explain
what one is attempting to do?
This book seeks to explore what we mean by the word ‘philosophy’, illuminating
the nature of its inquiry not from a single vantage point, but through a broad
examination of its connections with other cultural practices, while also considering
its existence as a socio-historical phenomenon.
A common objection to any attempt at offering a unified account of
philosophy is that it is too multifaceted and mutable a discipline for such efforts
ever to succeed. After all, clouds are not classified by their shapes. But is
it truly impossible to investigate philosophy in a systematic way? Perhaps, if
we begin with criteria drawn from a sufficiently general and flexible perspective,
we might sketch its contours with a sufficient degree of coherence. After all,
meteorology, insofar as remaining in a sufficient degree of generality, has long
classified clouds scientifically in broad terms by their shapes.
In the chapters that follow, I aim to show
that it is indeed possible to construct a general theoretical approach to the
nature of philosophy. A sequence of arguments will be developed to articulate a
conceptual framework broad and resilient enough to delineate and map the most
significant regions of the philosophical landscape. Before proceeding, however,
it is necessary to address some preliminary methodological considerations.
1. DESCRIPTIVIST AND PRESCRIPTIVIST APPROACHES
A first methodological distinction worth
considering concerns the distinction between two approaches to the nature of philosophy:
the prescriptivist and the descriptivist.
The prescriptivist approach seeks to establish
what philosophy ought to be. It offers a normative proposal, setting criteria for
what properly deserves to bear the name ‘philosophy.’ To illustrate the diversity
of such conceptions, I have gathered several examples from the many that have
been advanced throughout history.
Amid the turbulence of the Hellenistic era – an
age scarred by wars, uprisings, and uncertainty – philosophy in schools such as
the Epicurean, Skeptical, Cynical, and Stoic assumed an inevitably practical concern.
Philosophy was to a considerable extent embraced as a spiritual discipline, a
lived practice devoted to cultivating wisdom and safeguarding the soul against life’s
afflictions.
The Stoic, gazing upon the
fleeting and uncertain course of human life, sought peace not in mastery of fortune
but in mastery of the self. By confining concern to what lay within his power –
his thoughts, his choices, his actions – he cultivated an inner citadel of freedom,
meeting all else with serene equanimity.
The Skeptic, even more radical,
confronted the same unpredictability by refusing the very claim to certainty. He
suspended judgment, and in that suspension discovered tranquility: for where no
firm belief is held, no disturbance can arise. To the Pyrrhonian skeptic, true ataraxia
(ἀταραξία) was born of silence before the world’s shifting events, neither
pronouncing them good nor bad, but letting them pass without the weight of dogma. Thus,
where the Stoic found peace in virtue and acceptance, the Skeptic found it in
doubt and detachment.
For Plotinus (204/205 CE to 270 CE), an Egyptian
philosopher of the also difficult Roman Imperial era, philosophy assumed a
profoundly mystical character. He regarded philosophy as “the supremely precious”
– a dialectical exercise of spiritual ascent, leading the soul toward union
with the ineffable principle he named the One (τὸ ἕν).
Jumping about two millenia the founder of
phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, argued that philosophy ought to be a rigorous
science concerned with the essential structures of consciousness. On the other hand, his rebellious disciple, Martin
Heidegger, reimagined philosophy as an inquiry into the ‘meaning of Being’ (was
der Sinn von Sein überhaupt ist), conceived as that which makes the
existence of any entity possible.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a pioneer of analytic philosophy, regarded philosophy as a method
for achieving conceptual clarity. He saw it often as a kind of therapy,
designed to ease our intellectual anxieties by freeing us from the bewitchment
of understanding by the snares of language.
For the
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, philosophy is the art of
inventing and creating concepts that enable us to think the new. In sharp contrast, the logical positivist Rudolf
Carnap once argued that philosophy should restrict itself to examining the logical
syntax of scientific language.
The problem with philosophical prescriptions
is that they amount to nothing more than what certain philosophers thought
philosophy ought to be, given their own intellectual commitments. But there is no
reason to suppose that such definitions can be extended to other traditions or
practices that also call themselves philosophy.
A prescriptive account cannot be judged true
or false simply by comparing it with the historical record, because it is not designed
to explain that record. With respect to the actual history of philosophy,
prescriptivism succeeds only if people adopt it, and fails if they do not.
Although non-adoption is
generally the rule, some philosophical prescriptions have achieved considerable
success. Existentialism, for example, which places the individual – through their
experience of being in the world – at the center of reflection, was inaugurated
by Søren Kierkegaard and exerted profound influence on philosophers such as
Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. However, it was eventually deflated by the
structuralists, particularly by Michel Foucault’s anti-humanism.
Other philosophical
prescriptions not only proved successful but also exerted a crucial and lasting
influence. The epistemological turn introduced into modern philosophy by Descartes,
for instance, replaced the metaphysical starting point of ancient and medieval
tradition with one grounded in the rigorous investigation of the nature and
limits of our capacity to know – only then daring to construct a metaphysics founded
upon what can be genuinely known. This prescription proved immensely fruitful,
becoming the foundation for the philosophies of Locke, Hume, and Kant. Soon after,
however, the German idealists – Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel – undertook to
deflate it by proposing a new, audaciously holistic, once again metaphysical,
point of departure. After all, what significance does the question of our epistemic
access to the external world retain, if everything is homogeneously conceived
as ideas constitutive of the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute? A
comparable upheaval emerged with the linguistic turn initiated by Frege,
Russell, and Wittgenstein in the early twentieth century – a transformation
whose influence continues to resonate today.
In proposing what philosophy ought
to be, the prescriptive approach remains indifferent to past philosophical
practice. Figuratively speaking, it “looks to the future.”
The descriptive approach, by
contrast, looks to the past. It does not seek to dictate what philosophy should
become, but rather to clarify what philosophy has in fact been throughout
history. This approach aims to make explicit the criteria that the
philosophical community has tacitly always admitted as the means of identifying
what is meant by philosophy – whether across the entire trajectory of the
discipline or within more delimited historical or regional segments.
Descriptivist
explanations are more commonly found in philosophical dictionaries and textbooks
than in the doctrines of philosophers themselves, since – as I have already
noted – the latter are usually committed to advancing their own perspectives,
often of a revisionary nature.
Even
so, attempts to uphold a descriptivist paradigm can also be traced within certain
philosophical doctrines. Aristotle, for instance, writing in an era when
philosophy and science were not yet explicitly separated, conceived philosophy
as arising from thauma (θαῦμα), a Greek term that may be rendered as
wonder, astonishment, or perplexity before the world.
With respect to his first philosophy, the so-called metaphysics, he understood
it as the investigation of “being as being.” The idea was elegantly paraphrased
a century ago by E. A. Taylor as “the search for the universal structural principles
without which no ordered system of knowable objects could exist.”
This domain of philosophical inquiry has long been present and continues to be
explored in analytic metaphysics.
More
broadly, the classical philosophers – from Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas,
through Spinoza and Leibniz, to Kant and Hegel – conceived philosophy as what
Wilhelm Dilthey later called a worldview (Weltanschauung).
They understood it in expansive terms as the pursuit of a comprehensive
conception of the world and of humanity’s place within it – a way of thinking
that, even in less ambitious forms, retains its appeal to this day.
Within
the domain of analytic philosophy, Ernst Tugendhat, writing in the latter half
of the twentieth century, perceptively observed that “the aim of philosophy is
the elucidation of the network formed by the constitutive concepts of our
understanding of the world as a whole.”
This formulation, linguistically sharpened and less ambitious in scope,
nonetheless reaffirms in essence a broad conception of philosophy’s task.
What unifies and lends legitimacy to all these
characterizations is the descriptivist effort to encompass much, if not the
full scope, of what has been called philosophy.
Time
itself seems to favor descriptivist approaches. It is conceivable that, as
history advances, the space for prescriptive philosophy will gradually
diminish, while descriptivist perspectives gain increasing relevance; should
philosophy one day come to an end, there would be no room left for prescriptions
– only for descriptions of what it once was.
Today, in the face of diagnoses pointing to
the decline of philosophy,
or even to its death,
the descriptivist approach, which I will adopt in this book, proves particularly
compelling and will therefore be embraced.
2. THE ANALYTICAL STANCE
It is also suitable to clarify in what sense I
shall employ the term philosophy from a descriptivist perspective. The inquiry
undertaken here will focus on elucidating the most proper, academic, erudite,
or traditional meaning of the word – the sense historically used by the Western
philosophical tradition to refer to itself, and exemplarily illustrated in the
works of its most prominent thinkers.
I expect
to render this traditional meaning more explicit by clarifying the criteria
that guide the referential use of the term ‘philosophy’, thereby distinguishing
what legitimately belongs to it from what departs from it. In this broader
sense, I will remain in consonance with the method of conceptual analysis promulgated
by analytic philosophers such as the later Wittgenstein (decomposition), J. L. Austin,
P. F. Strawson, and Ernst Tugendhat, now applied to the concept of philosophy
as it has generally been employed within the Western tradition.
Yet what warrant do we have for
supposing that a unifying account of the nature of philosophy might be achieved
through its conceptual analysis? At first glance, the undertaking seems
plausible – not merely because we (perhaps deceptively) sense that the word philosophy
carries with it a sufficiently coherent traditional or academic meaning, but
also because those properly trained in the discipline appear able, with fair
confidence, to discern what does and does not count as philosophy in that
register.
From this recognition, it follows
that, by carefully tracing the historical uses of the term, we should, at least
in principle, be able to lay bare the criterial conditions that have guided our
decisions to employ it or to withhold it, and to gather these into a comprehensive
metaphilosophical portrait. The ambition to assign a single, unequivocal
meaning to the conceptual term ‘philosophy’ is, assuredly, illusory. Yet I
shall adopt here, as a working hypothesis, the thesis that the philosophical
tradition provides at least a “focal sense” of the term able to guide us – a hypothesis
to be assessed in light of the results it may yield.
At this point, a few remarks on
conceptual analysis may be introduced by way of clarification. It is indeed the
case that, to a large extent, we remain unaware of the criteria we employ in
identifying the designata of the central general terms of our natural language—particularly
those of philosophical interest, such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘existence’, ‘causality’,
‘good’, ‘justice’, and even ‘meaning’.
The fundamental reason for this
lack of awareness is analogous to how we can speak English correctly even
without studying its grammatical rules. As P. F. Strawson observed, when the first grammar of Castilian was
presented to Queen Isabella I of Castile, she asked what use it could possibly
have, since everyone already spoke the language correctly. After all, the grammar
had been constructed on the basis of what educated people, such as the queen
herself, already spoke and wrote. What the queen did not realize was that their
knowledge of the rules of the language was automated, implicit, tacit. What the
grammarians did was merely to make those rules explicit – something that,
without doubt, also enhances the ability to detect deviations and errors.
The central idea of those who
defend philosophy as conceptual analysis in the proposed way is similar: we possess
an unconscious or implicit knowledge of the conceptual rules that give meaning
to terms central to our understanding of the world – such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’,
‘property’,‘justice’, and ‘good’ – yet we are unable to articulate them
explicitly. And the reason for this, as Ernst Tugendhat aptly emphasized, is
that these conceptual rules are learned in childhood not through explicit
definitions, but tacitly, through interpersonal correction, aided by positive
and negative examples. This
is why Augustine wrote: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to
explain it to someone, I do not know.”
Consider, for instance, a seemingly simple conceptual
term like ‘chair’. We all know how to use the word correctly, since we learned
it in childhood by means of examples. Yet the moment we are challenged to
explain what we actually mean by ‘chair’, our confidence falters. As a true
specialist in the concept of the chair, I can assure you that the following
definition captures its sense with suficient precision:
A chair is a non-vehicular seat provided with a backrest, designed for a
single person to sit at a time.
This definition applies to dining chairs, beach chairs, rocking chairs,
wheelchairs, electric chairs, and thrones, while at the same time excluding
benches (which lack a backrest), sofas (designed for more than one person to
sit), vehicle seats (such as those in cars and airplanes), and natural formations
carved by weather into shapes that may resemble chairs but are not artifacts.
If a regular chair were taken to a country where people are extremely thin and
more than one person could sit on it at once, it would still remain a chair, because,
as an artifact, it was made for a single person to sit at a time. Conversely,
if, in some circumstances, it were decided that only a particular person could
sit on a certain sofa, that would not render it a chair, since it was not
designed for a single person to sit on at a time. Finally, if a wooden log that
happens to look strikingly like a chair is further carved, polished, and
lacquered so that it can actually be used as one, it becomes hard to say
whether it is truly a chair. The reason is that our criteria for identifying things
usually have boundaries of indeterminacy. Vagueness is an inescapable feature
of language and arguably of the world it depicts, and there is no reason not to
live with it.
If we already struggle to
define something as ordinary as a chair, imagine the challenge involved in articulating
central concepts of our understanding of the world – such as knowledge, truth, belief,
property, causality, existence, number, justice, and goodness – whose definitional
structures must be far more complex.
Philosophers such as J. L. Austin
have observed that many terms of philosophical importance, such as ‘knowledge,’
‘truth,’ etc., express enduring conceptual structures, embedded in our
understanding of the world since time immemorial. But what should we say of the
conceptual term ‘philosophy’? One might object that it does not belong to the
class of concepts central to our grasp of the world, as it is of much more
recent origin and development. Hence, there would be no implicit criterial rules
associated with it to be recovered.
Yet this objection is insufficient. First, because the conceptual
structure expressed by the word ‘philosophy’ is undoubtedly far more complex
than that expressed by a word like ‘chair’, which, even so, is already capable
of confusing us. Second, because we are often unaware of the criteria governing
the application of many relatively recent technical terms – such as ‘explanation’,
‘prediction’, ‘observation’, and ‘law of nature’ – as they are used in the particular
sciences. If we were to ask a philosophically uninformed scientist what ‘scientific
explanation’ means, he might struggle to provide an unequivocal answer. It is a
task of the philosopher of science to make explicit the complex meanings of
such terms in the scientific domains.
Now, why could this very idea not also be applied
to the word ‘philosophy’? After all, the concept of philosophy was introduced
into our academic culture long ago, and has since undergone a subsequent
internal development which was sustained both by the very nature of philosophical
activity itself and by the innovations that, gradually, came to be assigned to
it as subjects of inquiry.
If we can set forth criteria
that allow us to identify what we call philosophy in a sufficiently illuminating
way – thus justifying its use throughout the history of Western thought – we will
have arrived at a philosophically interesting analysis of this concept. In
other words, we will have elaborated a theory concerning the very nature of
philosophy. In this way, it seems possible not only to gain a deeper understanding
of what philosophers seek to accomplish but also to become better equipped to
avoid deceptive practices that present themselves under the name of philosophy.
3. EXPANSIONISM VERSUS REDUCTIONISM
A second methodological point I wish to address concerns two opposing vices
that may affect both our metaphilosophical and philosophical theories: expansionism
and reductionism. Here is how we may define them:
EXPANSIONISM: a procedural stance that generates theoretical frameworks that
include more than they can adequately support.
REDUCTIONISM: a procedural stance that generates ideas and theories that
exclude more than would be reasonable.
Although they may be regarded as shortcomings, these approaches can
nonetheless prove useful and even unavoidable. The choice may become inevitable
in terms of cost–benefit, since there are extraordinary expansionist works,
such as Hegel’s philosophy, which seeks to encompass the whole world through the
dialectical progress of the absolute, Husserl’s phenomenology, which aims to
ground all knowledge in lived experience, and, less impressively, Martin
Heidegger’s attempt to reach a fundamental ontology centered on an anthropological
metaphor of “being there” (Dasein). Nevertheless, their ambition also
makes them enduringly influential.
On the other hand, there are
equally remarkable reductionist contributions, such as Saul Kripke’s theory of
reference,
which reformulates central issues of reference theory with logical precision – though
for this purpose it must simplify and distort indispensable cognitive and
communicative elements, as more than one critic has seen.
Another example is W. V. O. Quine’s analytic critical approaches, which posed fruitful
challenges, such as the inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of
translation, while nevertheless excluding sociocultural and intentional factors
that are inevitably involved and, when well considered, can undermine his
challenges. One might well describe the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus as reductionist, for he confined meaningful
discourse to the language of science, banishing the languages of art, morality,
and religion to the realm of the unsayable.
The tension between expansionism
and reductionism may be fruitfully extended to the domain of metaphilosophy.
The later Wittgenstein can be interpreted as a methodological reductionist,
insofar as his “therapeutic” approach sought to dissolve philosophical perplexities
by tracing them back to the ordinary uses of language. This strategy, however,
remains reductionist in a crucial sense: it is evident that many philosophical
problems resist complete dissolution into mere linguistic confusions. By
contrast, Wilhelm Dilthey’s proposal that philosophy should be centered on the
construction of comprehensive worldviews exemplifies a methodological
expansionism, insofar as it emphasizes breadth to the point of overwhelming
mere abrangency.
An excessively strong emphasis on worldviews broadens philosophy’s scope but
risks vagueness and overgeneralization.
At this point, one might ask
whether the limitations of expansionism or reductionism are inevitably present
in every form of philosophy. Yet, this is not the case. Consider, for example,
Aristotle’s philosophy. It seems to elude the aforementioned dichotomy by
adjusting its conceptual framework to the breadth of its themes, without
sacrificing either analytical depth or speculative scope. This suggests that
expansionism and reductionism are not inevitable vices, but tendencies that can
be harmonized.
In metaphilosophy, the definition
of philosophy as an explanation of the world as a whole and of the place that
human beings within it is expansive: although highly inclusive and exemplified
by the great systems, it sounds in our times excessively ambitious. Moreover, on
closer examination it fails to provide even a necessary condition – after all, many
significant philosophical works fall far short of such breadth – and it
likewise does not furnish a sufficient condition, since religion also sets out
to accomplish the same task. It would be, as a definition, overly broad.
In attempting to escape this
limitation, we often take the opposite path: reductionism. Through it, we
succeed in formulating more precise definitions, but at the cost of generality.
The most striking example in the field of metaphilosophy is Carnap’s well-known
definition of philosophy as the investigation of the logical syntax of
language. This is an extreme case of reductionism, paying the price of precision
with an exorbitant cost of exclusion.
The comprehensive descriptivist
theory of philosophy advanced in this book aims to preserve the full scope of
its object of inquiry, while avoiding the pitfalls of an overly expansive yet
insufficiently informative characterization, as found in some forms of
expansionism. And it will not be reductionist either. The guiding rationale is
that by situating philosophy within the broader domain of culture, we are
better positioned to discern its essence – namely, its character as a cultural
activity in its own right.
4. WORKING HYPOTHESIS
When we regard philosophy as a cultural
activity, the most compelling suggestion is that traditional philosophy arose
from the confluence of three fundamental currents of human endeavor: science,
religion, and art. It is within this meeting ground – where faith, imagination,
and reason intertwine – that much of traditional philosophy finds its character. Here
is how Wilhelm Dilthey exposed this view concerning metaphysics:
Metaphysics is a strange amphibian… One of its
faces turns toward religion and poetry, the other toward science. Yet it is
neither science in that sense, nor art, nor religion.
The same view was broadened to the whole philosophy by Johannes Hessen
in the following words:
If we seek to define, in brief, the place of philosophy within the system
of culture, we must say this: philosophy has two countenances; one turns toward
religion and art, the other toward science. With the former, it shares the
orientation toward the whole of reality; with the latter, its theoretical
spirit.
Being a learned pastor, Hessen
associated religion and art as expressions of the same spiritual dimension.
This idea recalls Hegel’s well‑known thesis, according to which both are
manifestations of the Absolute: art in its sensible form, and religion in its
representational form. The idea is sufficiently intuitive to be found in other
texts and to be traced to more remote origins, though this is not my concern
here.
Having made these preliminary considerations,
I propose, as a working hypothesis, the supposition that philosophy
bears a threefold cultural determination: from science, religion, and art. The
central task of this book will be to develop the vague intuition inscribed
therein, rendering it more tangible and conceptually robust.
Before we can do that, however, we need to
be clear about the analytical method we will use. Since the results depend on
the conceptual tools we employ, it is worth pausing to examine the nature of
the analytical method itself. That will be the subject of the next chapter.
Cf. Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, p. 164.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, sec. 109.
Rudolph Carnap, “On the Character of Philosophical
Problems” in R. C. Rorty (ed.) The Linguistic Turn, p. 54.
Taylor, E. A., Aristotle (1916), p. 42. In line with Aristotle, G. E. Moore defined
philosophy as an attempt to provide a general description of the broadest
categories of things in the universe and their relationships. “What is Philosophy?”,
p. 23.
Ernst Tugendhat, “Die Philosophie unter sprachanalytischer
Sicht“, in Philosophische Aufsätze (1990), p. 268.
