Day 1, Lecture 1 of my HCC Introduction to Philosophy Course (HCC 2012)
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (there's a lot of mystery surrounding the term for beginning philosophy students) and yet, it's often casually used to refer to personal life philosophies, cultural (Eastern/Western), religious (Buddhist, Christian), bodies of knowledge (philosophy of parenting, educational philosophies)... BUT
Really, philosophy is more method than school of thought. In academia, it is first and foremost, the discipline that teaches us how to articulate, hold and defend beliefs that we might always have held but without having spelled them out or argued for them.1 The word PHILOSOPHY comes from the Greek PHILOSOPHIA, which breaks down into the words, love and wisdom. Philosophy is thus, the love of wisdom. Note that a philosopher then wouldn't necessarily claim to have wisdom, but rather simply to love it. An ancient Greek philosopher many of you have probably heard of, Socrates, defines a philosopher as a person who values learning in every subject area and has an insatiable appetite for learning - learning for the sake of learning. Do you ever find yourself studying something – not because you have to know it for an exam, but because you're genuinely interested in understanding it? Well, you're being philosophical.
I want to come back to Socrates, one of my favorite philosophers and someone still considered by many to be the ideal philosopher. He claimed that “the unexamined life isn't worth living.” What might he have meant by that? What is, to rephrase it, the “examined life”? [Invite students to answer.] Socrates spent most of his time engaged in contemplation and reflection. How much time do we spend in our busy lives asking why and reflecting? Is asking “why?” only for children? Are we embarrassed to ask why things are the way they are? Or worried about offending someone by asking why he believes what he believes, or why something is done the way it is and not another way? What would the world be like if we all, not just the scientists and the philosophers, but we all, asked “why?” a little more often? On the other hand, do you think it's dangerous to ask why, to put forth new ideas, to question old ones? Well, historically it often was dangerous, and for Socrates, it most certainly was.
One of the reasons I love Socrates is because he was unabashedly annoying. He wandered around his city of Athens engaging people in discourse about their beliefs. Almost all those recorded dialogues start out with his speaker claiming to have the right answer; Socrates asks why. When the answer is self-contradictory or poorly defined, he calls the speaker out on his mistakes. Socrates doesn't claim to have the right answer, but he tries to guide us into formulating the right answer or at least to learn what a good answer should look like. He compared himself to a “gadfly” to the people of his city (think horsefly or deer fly – a persistent insect with a painful bite) – he pestered people into either a state of complete frustration, or for the rare humble person, a state of learning.
He came onto the scene in Athens at the end of the so-called golden age of Greek governance when political ideals were preached but not practiced and corruption was seeping through every level of government. Where politicians pursued cleverness to win arguments and favor over the pursuit of truth. Eventually, Socrates had annoyed the government for long enough that they decided to prosecute him for “corrupting the youth” and “not believing in the gods of the city.” They brought him to trial, during which he continued to annoy them as he served as his own lawyer, and they sentenced him to death. He courageously accepted his sentence, preferring to live true to himself as a philosopher or die.
So, for Socrates the examined life was a way of life, which he lived all the time. Being a philosopher is thinking about anything and everything and most of all, it is living thoughtfully. But does that mean living a life completely out of touch with reality? Apparently, Socrates was so tapped into reality, that he upset the rulers to the extreme. Philosophy, then, takes our heads out of the clouds and allows us to see more clearly – to enlarge our perspectives and to make room for new knowledge when we are able to break through the layers of prejudice and naive assumptions that we may be hanging onto for no good reason whatsoever. And if at the end, we hold those same beliefs, let them be the result of a thoughtful, conscious process.
Socrates did not claim to have all the answers, but he did have claim to a certain wisdom over his fellows: he was willing and able to recognize his own ignorance where others were too busy or too self-satisfied to even question the ideas and beliefs that they espoused. Awareness of ignorance - to know that one doesn't know something - is actually a huge achievement and a kind of wisdom. Why? If we believe something that is false but lack the awareness of the possibility of its falsehood, then we are surely a big step behind someone who knows to look for the truth elsewhere.
Alas, though, we live in a society where expertise and confidence are our greatest assets; we want certainty and we want it now! The search for knowledge and for deeper understanding is thought of as impractical or a waste of resources. Well, by the great fortune of the Greek gods, you have the luxury of spending a few new hours a week doing just that – asking why and trying to shape the answers… which finally brings me to what we're actually going to be up to in this class!
First, unlike Athens was for poor Socrates in 400 B.C., I want this classroom to be a SAFE ZONE for the examination of ideas. It is going to be a laboratory for rational, civilized, open-minded discussion and argumentation! We're going to learn to voice our opinions and support them with good reasons. We're going to learn to listen to others' ideas and, before we react emotionally, to think up a good reply: what we disagree with and why. We're going to do that for one another and we're going to do it for the authors whose texts we read. We will find a way to be both open-minded and critical.
Philosophy is then not so much a subject as it is a WAY of thinking, a METHOD, an APPROACH. It is a unique academic discipline in that it is a critical approach to all subjects, the approach to all other subjects. It is concerned with identifying mere assumptions and substantiating them with reason. It asks the most fundamental questions we, as humans, can ask: what, why, how? (it's a bit less concerned with when!) What is the nature of reality? Can we know the nature of reality and is it separate from our own, individual perspectives? Is reality, in other words, different for every individual or is there an independent, external reality? If so, can we know it and test it and discover its laws? - These questions are the starting point for scientific inquiry. They belong to a branch of philosophy called metaphysics.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with how we know what we know. Is knowledge possible? How can we acquire it? Moral and political philosophy address the questions of what kind of life we should live, what kind of goals as individuals we should have and how to accomplish them. The nature of right and wrong... Is there moral authority (God? Society? The conscience?) What kind of government should we build or avoid? Logic is the other major branch of philosophy we're going to look at in this course; it is the foundation of reason and rational thought. It is concerned with argument. Studying logic will give us the tools to assess good and bad arguments and make good ones.
We're going to talk – a lot. We're going to read – a lot. And we're going to write – a lot! I’m going to be there with you every step of the way, giving you clear guidelines and models for constructing and evaluating good arguments.
By the end of this class, whether or not you've decided to major in philosophy (fingers crossed!), my hope is that you're going to achieve a new level of freedom than you started out with. My goal is not to confuse you and make your life choices more difficult – I promise! The idea is that the more clearly you can reason through the information available to you, the more choice you will actually have in life. If you cannot see what lies in front of you, if you cannot identify truth from falsehood, you are in essence a prisoner, since you are blind to the choices. If you can see, even a little more, you will have a greater freedom to choose.
Robert Solomon, Introducing Philosophy, 7th ed. 2001.