Our panel of 91 professional philosophers has responded to

392
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Question of the Day

Do philosophers generally reject that philosophical reasoning relies on axioms? The way I've always thought that philosophy worked is that philosophers have a certain set of tools (deduction, laws of thought, [basic sources of knowledge](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#SourKnowJust)) which they use to come to reasoned answers to questions. Most importantly, these tools are taken as axiomatic. That is, they are seen as starting points from which all reasoning must proceed. To question these axioms wouldn't be possible. However, I've recently seen an attitude that has puzzled me. Many philosophers state that very rarely does reasoning in philosophy rely on axioms. Axioms are things to be avoided and go against the spirit of philosophy. What am I misunderstanding here? If philosophers don't take their tools of reasoning as axiomatic, how do they go about doing philosophy? More importantly, if philosophical reasoning is so pervasive that it questions its own tools, from what framework does the questioning occur? What tools does the philosopher use to question their own tools? When this question was posed to a philosophy student, they responded that: "Philosophers don't tend to think of human thought or reasoning in terms of strict "axioms". Axioms are part of a formal logical system and it's not clear that a lot of our reasoning is like that. We hold *many* beliefs that we might typically think of as taken for granted. Philosophy is really about trying to understand what those are, whether they really fit together properly, and what properties of those beliefs we might want to look at to determine whether we can trust them or we ought to abandon them . . . [philosphers] generally share the idea that we take seriously our basic intuitions about cases of reasoning and we determine general rules and principles from them". Is this the case? Is this how professional philosophers typically go about doing philosophy I've simply held a naive view?

I'm a bit puzzled about where you got the impression that philosophy works this way, Looking at the work of Spinoza, perhaps, might give this impression, but who else? Certainly not Plato. Certainly not Aristotle. Not Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Russell, not a single philosopher active in the last 50 years that I can think of.

The description you quote from your philosophy student acquaintance is pretty reasonable. I'm not quite so happy with the last part—that philosophers determine general principles and rules from their intuitions. The role of intuition in philosophy is much more complicated and also much more controversial than this allows for.

There is no one method that philosophers use. Philosophers worry about consistency and inconsistency. They look for counterexamples and try to avoid them in their own work. They may begin with "intuitions," but they try to develop those intuitions into more precise, well-articulated theses, and they count it as a plus for their view if it covers a range of cases and helps makes sense of things that formerly seemed puzzling. They use thought experiments to explore what their views entail about hypothetical but potentially illuminating cases. They may try to challenge claims made by other philosophers, or they may build on insights that other philosophers have developed. Philosophers also try to make sure that their views don't run into conflict with things we know empirically. But philosophy is not some one thing, philosophers don't all approach their problems in the same way, and just what philosophy is and how it might best be done are philosophical questions.

This all makes perfect sense to anyone who works in the field, because philosophy's issues are by their very nature not straightforward and not capable of being settled in any one way. Questions that yield to the application of a precise "method" are by and large not the questions that philosophers think about.

This frustrates some people. It doesn't frustrate philosophers. It's what gets them out of bed in the morning.