Topics Philosophy

Question Is philosophy the love and pursuit of truth? If so, do the members of this panel believe that there are other ways to attain truth (life experience, religious experience, aesthetic experience, etc.) other than by doing philosophy? Could an old man with a rich life of varied experiences understand more about morality than Kant, despite not having gone through such a rigorous process of reasoning? And, if so, can one have this knowledge without being able to translate it into philosophical jargon (aka (?) reason)?

Accepted:
October 14, 2006

Comments

Sure! One way to pursue truth is to open your eyes and look around. You discover, for instance, that there is a computer screen in front of you. That's a truth. Reading science books, or for that matter seed catalogs, is another way to pursue truth.

But it seems to me that you are really asking about truths to do with philosophical issues like the nature of right and wrong or the like. Can't wisdom earned over a largely unreflective life end up closer to the truth than even ingenious and assiduous attention to arguments and definitions? Here too the answer is, sure! After all, the clever engineer's theory of bridges might be mistaken, and the stone mason might by trial and error have happened upon a much better sense of how to span streams.

Still, I think that this may be both to understimate the degree to which unscholarly wisdom is systematic, and to underestimate the degree to which good academic philosophy relies on ordinary perceptiveness and intuition. The wise old man has not merely a wide range of experience; his wisdom consists in no small part of his having reflected on these episodes and having found patterns and principles that make sense of it all. And a good philosopher will not merely spin an elaborate self-consistent theory; she will be guided in her thinking by perceptive appreciation of the real-world facts that the theory bears on. You can go wrong with too little reflection, or with too little perception.

One thing that might be said for the philosopher's project is that even if it leads a philosopher astray--even if Kant was in fact dead wrong--we can hope that over time, his mistakes will be discovered and clarified by other smart, perceptive philosophers. The old man had only one life over which to earn his wisdom. But if we, like Kant, make our reasoning clear to others, maybe the result is knowledge that no one person, however clever and perceptive, could have attained alone. It is consistent to believe both that living a rich and non-academic life is the surest way to knowledge of ethical truths, and that the best hope for people in general ultimately to attain knowledge about ethics is for there to be an ongoing enterprise of philosophical theorizing.