As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, ‘‘Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.’’ There are many such abysmal views about what philosophy is and what it does in the public eye that it is overwhelming to find a starting point in trying to detangle this mesh of accusations. So it is only fitting that I take an arbitrary point of inception in my argument and hope, that by the end of reading this, you will have a rather up-to-date idea of this discipline and make your own decision about philosophy (not) being bullshit. I will try to do two main things: firstly, erase misconceptions and replace them with a more reality grounded and contemporary view of philosophy and lastly, counter some accusations made on philosophy.
A lot of people confuse philosophy with the subject matter of other disciplines like theology & religion or history or psychology. This is certainly an incorrect idea of what philosophy is but I will not claim that it is unnatural to come to this conclusion. That is because philosophy is a practice, much like law or medicine. This practice has many applications. Almost all intellectual activity since antiquity has borrowed modes of thought from philosophy. It is only natural that the border between philosophy and other disciplines is muddy and unclear. Before science was called science, it was called ‘Natural philosophy’ and to this day, Cambridge University grants a B.A degree even for the sciences because back in the old days, there was no such thing as science. Psychology was born out of the Philosophy of mind. Theoretical physics would not be where it is today without the contribution of philosophers. Most surprisingly, mathematical logic is the toolkit that philosophy uses in its practice, like a doctor uses a stethoscope. All computers and computer programmes are based on logic. So, without philosophy, computers would not have been possible.
It is clear that philosophy has contributed to all disciplines but where does philosophy end and other disciplines start? The answer lies in the fact that philosophy is a methodology. What you use this methodology for is your business. Imagine it being like a screwdriver and the screw being biology, economics and so on. This should clear up what philosophy is not.
Now, finally turning back to our original question: what is (actually) philosophy.
Quite literally, the term "philosophy" means, "love of wisdom." In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other. As an academic discipline philosophy is much the same. Those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for their answers to life’s most basic questions.. .
These “life’s most basic questions” might sound extremely dumb at first, but when you actually give it little more thought, they are not so easy. I’ll give an example below:
A fundamental question in the Philosophy of mind is:
1. what is a ‘mind’?
2. What is its relation to a physical brain?
The ‘mind’ that we speak of here is the abstract part of your mental existence. It is made up of all your subjective experiences and consciousness. There is no denying that there is a neurobiological basis to our thoughts, emotions and experience but this only goes so far to explain consciousness. There is a certain divide between immaterial mental experience and the material brain.
This question gives rise to another few questions then:
1. What is it about living things that make them conscious and non-living things not-conscious, if physical material is all this needed to make something conscious, since both of them are made out of the same kind of atoms and molecules albeit in different configurations.
2. Say, if we were to replicate the human brain down to the last atom in a lab, will this ‘thing’ that we have made in our lab behave like a human. Would it have a personality? Thoughts? Emotions? Experiences? And so on.
These questions might seem too abstract and inconsequential but they are very real. Because mental aspects like your personality drive your behaviour. These behaviours affect the real world. So this is the link between the physical world you see around you and abstract concepts like consciousness (which is indelibly connected to aforementioned personality). Therefore, it is worth using your time to study the ‘mind’.
Philosophy, as a methodology, is uniquely equipped to deal with such fundamental questions. It is based on formalised rules to decide which ideas and solutions are valid, which are not valid, which contradict some other fundamental idea and so on. Philosophy is this specialised screwdriver that fits exactly into such screws.
Now that we have established what philosophy is, let's look at what it does. As an academic discipline, it looks at scientific results from other disciplines like physics or economics and decides whether they are logically consistent. It comes up with theoretical frameworks for other disciplines like law or history to work in. It decides whether certain practices that a society follows are ethical (like war, polygamy etc). It exposes certain logical fallacies that many widely accepted ideas have. Because scientists can look at specific data, but they have to do so with a fundamental base of assumptions. Philosophy checks these assumptions. To sum this up, “Sometimes when you think outside the box, you just jump into a bigger box”, we need philosophy to know if we are just jumping into a bigger box.
There is something very special about philosophy that other areas don't have and that is, the ability to look at the bigger picture and not be afraid of ambiguity. This is indispensable even outside University departments and schools. In business for example, there are many fundamental questions that rise in annual meetings. When the practice of philosophy becomes second nature, decision making becomes more and more accurate. To decide criminal culpability in complex cases in the courts of law, you cannot do so without philosophical thought. The idea of democracy, freedom, human rights etc. have all come from philosophical foundations. The concept of reservation in our country is justified on the basis of ideas from John Rawls and Roert Nozick’s political philosophy. In short, we would not be where we are without philosophy, hence it is not bullshit.
This seems all fine and dandy in theory but one of the most ruthless criticisms of philosophy is that in actual practice, a lot of academic philosophy is concerned with topics that are simply: “who gives a shit” topics. And lastly, if you laid out all philosophers in a line, you would not reach a singular conclusion.
Both of these are true, unfortunately. Many public intellectuals, including Einstein and more recently, Alain de Botton have come forward and said that true philosophy is dead.
Regarding the first criticism: although that is true for philosophy, it is also true for all types of research. There are thousands of research labs conducting many studies in each country. They work tireless, day and night, and publish hundreds of articles each year. How much of that research do you hear about in the media - about some groundbreaking discovery? A handful. That is because research is a conversation. Each small piece of knowledge builds up and eventually leads to some discovery. The same is applicable to philosophy. If you don't care about Ivan Schwab's paper on “the raft of physiological traits that woodpeckers have developed to avoid brain damage and bleeding or detached eyes when hammering their beaks into trees at up to 20 times a second, 12,000 times a day” you probably also don't 5 care about “The meta philosophical implications of Quine's view of metaphilosophy of law” but 6 that doesn't mean its not useful. Ivan Schwabbs paper helped us understand brain damage and make better protective gear for concussions so it's not worthless.
The second criticism is valid and worth considering because philosophy doesn't have an axiomatic base. You can technically question assumptions till the nth degree, eg: questioning the assumption of A, who questioned the assumption of B, who questioned the assumption of C, who questioned the premise of D... and so on. That is bullshit because it leads to nowhere in particular. Although, let me make it clear, it does not give us enough incentive to stop doing philosophy entirely. If this endless loop is avoided, we can reach meaningful ends.
In conclusion, while some philosophy might seem like bullshit, most of it is not. It is very much worth doing. Philosophy is not bullshit.
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~ Rutuparna Deshpande
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