questions questions
PHILOSOPHY, IT SEEMS to me, has two distinctive features: the questions it asks and the way it goes about searching for answers. Let’s begin with the questions. In one sense, they are the intellectual leftovers; the questions that nobody else takes the time to ask; the questions to which people assume an answer in order to go about the rest of their business. A scientist uses a particular methodology
in order to design her experiment, carry it out, and interpret the data she collects from it. Te philosopher asks whether that methodology really justifies the conclusions she draws. Another scientist may accept a theory that is stated almost entirely using a mathematical formalism or using novel and alien concepts. Te philosopher seeks an interpretation of this formalism and these concepts; he tries to understand what exactly the theory says about the way the world is. A musicologist analyses a symphony.
Te philosopher asks exactly what a symphony is: does it exist over and above its particular performances, recordings and printed scores? And are there objective facts about the relative merits of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 that the critic may seek to unearth? If there are, how do we unearth them? People typically believe the world is
the way it is independently of how they or anyone else think about it; they think that the objects they take themselves to see and touch really exist and would have whatever properties they have whether or not they believed they did. Tey perhaps don’t even notice that this is an assumption; they may never have formulated it explicitly and may never have entertained the possibility that it is false. Te philosopher does all of this: she formulates the assumption, considers alternatives, and asks whether people have good reason to favour these assumptions. So philosophy is a subject that searches
in the gaps left by other intellectual pursuits. It is concerned with the assumptions that we typically make in order to get started in other subjects or in our daily lives. What, then, about the way in which it seeks answers to these questions? Tis is a difficult question and one to which philosophers have only recently awoken. Te problem is this: If it is philosophy’s job to question the methodologies of other subjects and other pursuits, it cannot use any of those methodologies itself. So what methodology does philosophy use? Some respond to this challenge
by denying that philosophy questions all methodologies: there is a scientific
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
Since he began studying philosophy, Dr Richard Pettigrew hasn’t felt comfortable answering the inevitable question: What exactly do philosophers do? This is particularly embarrassing since the question is itself philosophical. Recently, however, an answer occurred to him – this is it.
methodology, these philosophers claim, which is beyond question; it is this that philosophy should adopt. Tis position is called naturalism. On the other hand, there are those that see a distinctive methodology for philosophy: there are modes of a priori reasoning, these philosophers claim, that are beyond question and yet are strong enough to support interesting answers to philosophical questions. One might call this position rationalism.
discover more Until recently, these different
methodologies were simply assumed by different philosophers as they sought answers to the questions that exercised them. But today the very question of which is the correct methodology for philosophy has itself become a philosophical question. Tus, the questions of philosophy are not simply the leftovers of other intellectual pursuits; they are sometimes the leftovers of earlier philosophical pursuits.
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