Topics Philosophy

Question Dear Philosophers, Please don’t take offense at this question, but just what is philosophy? I go to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and search “philosophy”, and there is no entry that helps me. I’ll be directed to particular types of philosophy, but nothing that tells me what makes philosophy philosophy. I would have thought that philosophers, who are always asking themselves what makes X an X, would have been able to answer this question concerning their own discipline. Is it simply a matter of semantics—of figuring out the meaning of our terms (like “knowledge”, or “freedom”)? Or is it a matter of metaphysics—of figuring out what knowledge and freedom really are, in the same way that scientists figure out what DNA really is? Is it a matter of figuring out what our concepts are, or what they should be? What are its questions, and what are its methods for discovering answers to these questions? And why should we think that these methods are reliable? Thanks.

Accepted:
July 27, 2008

Comments

It's okay -- no offense taken! It's often hard even for philosophers to explain exactly what philosophy is. But here's a passage from philosopher Thomas Nagel that I think might give a start to answering your question:

“The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What is time?’ A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What is a number?’ A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What makes a word mean anything?’ Anyone can ask whether it’s wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, ‘What makes an action right or wrong.’ We couldn’t get along in life without taking the ideas of time, number, knowledge, language, right and wrong for granted most of the time; but in philosophy we investigate those things themselves. The aim is to push our understanding of the world and ourselves a bit deeper. Obviously it isn’t easy. The more basic the ideas you are trying to investigate, the fewer tools you have to work with. There isn’t much you can assume or take for granted. So philosophy is a somewhat dizzying activity, and few of its results go unchallenged for long.”

The passage is from Nagel's What Does it All Mean?, which I would recommend to you as a very readable, short, and interesting introduction to philosophy, the problems that it studies, and its methods.