Learning to Philosophize
Learning to Philosophize
The object of this book is to introduce the reader gently to the activity of philosophizing and I hope that it may serve as some guide to what Philosophy is about both for those who are going to study the subject and for those who are not. I hope particularly that it may be of help to sixth form and other students who find themselves faced with what are generally regarded as border-line philosophical topics in their writing of general essays.
The first four chapters discuss the basic principles of the handling of words and ideas. In the fifth chapter I attempt to show these principles in use in the discussion of value judgements, a particularly important example of philosophizing which is very much within the experience of everybody.
I chose ‘Appearance and Reality’ and ‘Free Will and Determinism’ [final chapters] because they seemed to me matters about which most people speculate at some time or other, and it might be useful and interesting to pursue those speculations further.
The Exercises at the end of chapters are designed to enable and encourage readers to practise the activity. Comments on most of the exercises are to be found at the end of the book.
The Supplementary Passages at the end of some chapters are quotations from various sources to illustrate and illuminate points that have been raised, perhaps to explain them from a slightly different point of view.
There is nothing new about the idea that the activity of philosophizing is more important than the subject, philosophy. Some two hundred years ago the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, told his pupils:
You will not learn from me philosophy, but how to philosophize, not thoughts to repeat, but how to think. Think for yourselves, enquire for yourselves, stand on your own feet.
(Quoted in Great Philosophers of the West by E. W. F. Tomlin, p. 197.)
It is important to realize that the activity of philosophizing is not going to produce a set of cut-and-dried answers to clearly stated problems. We shall be moving in a world where
‘one can’t tell’, ‘I don’t know’, ‘it all depends’, ‘it’s a matter of opinion’
will be essential and frequently recurring phrases. We shall hope to sort out and tidy up some problems and discover the kind of question that it makes sense to ask and the kind of answer that we can expect to get; we shall hope to discover something about the nature and the degree of the certainty that is attainable. And we shall hope to end up with more knowledge, more wisdom and a clearer understanding.
There is a tendency, perhaps especially a modern one, to examine words minutely, as it were through a microscope, to see what different shades of meaning they carry. But the results of such an analysis are only valid if they do in fact represent the ways in which people, even if only a minority of people, use the words. Still less will it be legitimate to go on to infer from these alleged minute differences of meaning facts about the nature of the reality which these words purport to describe. The analogy does not work. We can discover facts about flies by examining them through a microscope, because there are microscopic facts about flies to be discovered. But it seems very doubtful whether there are often analogously microscopic facts about usages to be discovered. Our usages on the whole are not sufficiently precise to merit so detailed an investigation. Certainly they must be examined, with care and thought, but again we cannot expect to take out more than has been put in. An impressionist painting of the Parthenon will not, however many times magnified, reveal the writing on the wall. An X-ray photograph of the bust of Napoleon will not tell us whether he had a tumour on the brain.