Question It seems to me that much contemporary philosophy is a bit obsessed with clarifying arguments and analyzing statements and lacks real wisdom about the world. For example, I can imagine a typical situation where an ordinary person asks a professional philosopher a question relating to an applied ethics question. The philosopher answers by analysing the component parts of the statements contained within the question and attempting to assess the technicalities of the implicit argument put forward by the ordinary person. The outcome is that everybody is none the wiser as to the real answer to the applied ethics question because the philosopher has no real wisdom about the world but is merely trying to analyse argument structures! What do you think about this? Thanks

Accepted:
May 22, 2014

Comments

I think you are quite right. Philosophers know no more than anyone else about anything except the structure of arguments. There is no real wisdom apart from this. If there was, it would be difficult to understand disagreement, as in applied ethics. Where there is disagreement, how can we tell who has the real wisdom? Is it one party, no-one or everyone, to some extent? When we analyze arguments there is some prospect of resolving issues, at least to the satisfaction of a particular thinker and his or her understanding of the arguments.

It is always problematic to think of some people as having a real insight into an issue which is separate from an argument about it. Real wisdom perhaps resides in recognizing this.

I'm not sure that the outcome of analysing arguments is always that no one is any wiser concerning the issue at stake. And that's because there are several possible results of such analysis, all of which would seem to help us better understand the issue at stake and the justifiability of possible answers: (1) Perhaps the (implicit or not) argument the person offers for her answer is invalid; in that case, the philosopher is able to show that, whether or not her answer is right, her argument doesn't give us reason to accept that answer as right. (2) Perhaps there are assumptions the person makes in offering her answer but that she doesn't defend; in that case, particularly if the assumptions seem questionable/controversial themselves, the philosopher is able to show that the answer requires more defense than the person has offered. Or (3), perhaps the way the person has framed the question closes off certain possible avenues of thinking about the issue; in that case, the philosopher is able to point out that, since there may be different ways to frame the question, the choice of a certain frame may itself require defense.

All of this is to say that wisdom isn't confined to knowing the right answers to certain questions. It seems also to include an awareness of when you don't quite have the right answer or when you aren't yet justified in thinking that your answer is right.