Philosophy

Is it possible, and is it likely, that philosophy is a field that is about catching up, rather than discovering? I mean that philosophy's job is to put into words that are convincing knowledge that people already know, from insight. For example, someone might have come to terms with their eventual death in a profound way and be at peace about it. That person might not be a philosopher, but s/he "knows" the answer to questions about death; s/he simply can't put it into words. That's what philosophy does, it seems to me. In this sense, philosophy isn't discovering things people don't already know. Does this make sense?

Comments

Yes, this makes sense: philosophy as clear articulation of certain insights. I'd add two qualifications, though.

First, sometimes what feels like a compelling insight disintegrates under scrutiny. Think, for example, of some of the apparent insights Socrates is described as demolishing in the Platonic dialogues.

Second, philosophy does much more than merely seek to articulate what people already know from insight. For example, some of the most brilliant philosophical writings ask new questions that had never occurred to anyone before. Thus Kant, for instance, asks how time consciousness is possible. All I am aware of stands together in one mental state. So how do I so much as get the idea that things happen (follow one another) in time? His predecessors took this for granted -- Hume, for example, who sought to explain our sense of causal connection as based on repeated experiences with some A-event followed by some B-event. Kant's response is that, in order for us to take events to belong to different time-points we must already rely on assumptions about their causal relations to one another and to our mental life.

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