Topics Philosophy

Question What is the source of philosophy's authority? Is simply tradition? Or logical deductions from some common-sense axioms? Or an appealing fit between reasoned arguments and our contemporary cultural preference? Or maybe a bit of all three, with the other two taking up the slack, when the first one looks inadequate?

Accepted:
November 2, 2007

Comments

I think the first thing we'd need to say is that philosophy doesn't have "authority" in the way that, say, physics does. It doesn't include a body of more-or-less well-established knowledge. Philosophy is all about the sorts of things that some people call "essentially contested questions." So it's a field where disagreement is built in at the ground floor.

You may be asking about where premises in reasonable philosophical arguments come from. There's no one answer. Tradition per se isn't important, though what we might call "reflective common sense" -- the sort of thing that seems reasonable on sober reflection by an informed person -- does often figure in philosophical arguments. So do other things, including, sometimes, mathematical knowledge and things we've learned from science, as well as garden-variety common knowledge. But philosophical arguments are arguments, and as such, they're judged by the sorts of standards that we use to judge arguments in general.