Phil 86: What is Philosophy?

“Philosophy”: (a) a business’s main strategic principles and/or branding slogans; (b) someone’s most important values; (c) a method of inquiry / set of intellectual tools

One strategy for answering questions (or at least making progress on them). By reasoning, not scientific experiments or emotions or appeal to authorities. Generally not by bringing in new evidence / facts you can see and touch, but didn’t know before.

(The purple text below is about how the tools are applied; the other text is about what the tools are.)

This method can be applied to BIG QUESTIONS, where other methods seem inapplicable; but can also be applied in domains where it competes or cooperates with other question-answering methods (like science and law), and also to everyday questions (when we made that agreement about washing dishes, what does our agreement imply about this situation that we didn’t explicitly talk about? if you contribute money to the house and I contribute time, what count as equal contributions?)

So: the method is not only applied to BIG QUESTIONS. Also, not trying in this class to figure out when it’s appropriate to answer questions using one strategy (philosopher’s approach) versus other strategies (science, authorities, emotions, democracy, …) (Not agreeing with Socrates that the [philosophically] unexamined life is not worth living.)

What are the philosopher’s intellectual tools?

  1. Especially good at raising questions, sometimes ones that others might not have considered (often philosophers are better at asking Qs than answering them)

  2. They make lots of new distinctions, as part of clarifying and analyzing ideas/concepts (which is a different activity than just defining new technical concepts)

  3. They do a lot with arguments (by which we don’t mean heated disagreement or confrontation; we mean a linguistic articulation of some piece of reasoning. Evidence or reasons or assumptions or premises are offered to support some conclusion.)

    1. They give arguments for conclusions they favor

    2. They challenge arguments for conclusions they oppose (for example, by identifying unsupported or implausible assumptions, that might have only been implicit/hidden; or by showing that some premises are inconsisent or lead to otherwise implausible results)

    3. They defend arguments against other people’s challenges

  4. They look for explanations (of certain kinds, that we’ll discuss later, and distinguish from other kinds)

I think of “philosophy” as…

The use of these intellectual tools/methods to answer questions — especially (but not only) BIG QUESTIONS — and also to critically examine important beliefs we rely on (perhaps normally taking for granted).