Topics Philosophy

Question If we imagine an intelligent alien race, could we also imagine philosophical questions they have come up with that have eluded us and vice versa? Or are all philosophical debates necessarily universal? My understanding of our application of philosophical analysis is that it is all-encompassing and would even have to apply to any god or advanced alien civilization (I mean the method not the conclusions). Or can something else be conceived? NB I write this as an arch-skeptic and atheist.

Accepted:
December 29, 2007

Comments

Hi,

I'm not entirely sure what the "arch-skeptic and atheist" bit is about, since I'm not sure how it bears on your question. But here are a couple of thoughts.

First, just what counts as philosophy and what sorts of questions belong to philosophy is a matter of dispute. Tjough meta-philosophy isn't a hot topic in my neck of the woods, it's still true that philosophers don't entirely agree about the nature of their discipline. That means that they don't entirely agree about method. Further, method and content may not be easily separated in all cases. (For example: someone doing phil of math may need to draw on methods that have to do with the particular nature of math, and that wouldn't be likely to come up in philosophy of art, for example.)

Philosophy seems to me to be like most disciplines. It doesn't have an "essence," and it's not likely that there will be a useful "sufficient and necessary condition"-style account of what it is. It's another of the many cases of what gets called a "family resemblance" concept. There's lots of overlap and lots of similarity among neighboring parts ot the enterprise, and there are even some things that one can say with high confidence about most philosophy (e.g., that it doesn't address questions that can be straightforwardly settled by empirical means.) But whether there's a universal method that would sort out what practices across the cosmos count as philosophy seems doubtful to me.

I can imagine that the Martians or whatever might engage in intellectual activities that would seem similar enough to clear cases of philosophy that the term would apply comfortably. I can imagine that their own "form of life" might give rise to questions and methods that I would dimly recognize as philosophical, but would have a hard time getting much of a grip on. And I can imagine that they might do things that I just wouldn't know how to classify. So in short, I guess I don't think all philosophical debates and methods have to be universal.