DRAFT
I
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 a person 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 above all[10] 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.[11] 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[12], 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...
In fact, philosophical questions intertwine in such a way that it can often be difficult to tell which division a problem belongs to. Due to this intertwining of philosophical questions, I chose to divide this book not into general sections, but into chapters, each of them introducing and discussing some central problem of philosophy.
[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] The term ‘metaphysics’ (Aristotle’s first philosophy) has several meanings, this is maybe the most proper.
[11] See G. E. Moore: “What is Philosophy?”, in Some Main Problems of Philosophy, (London: Routledge 2003).
[12] See “Epistle to the Reader”, in J. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (Oxford: Oxfor
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