What is Philosophy?
Our second answer is:
2) Philosophy is thinking about thinking.
When viewed in this way, our initial response is to
turn to the study of logic. The study of
logic is an instructive and useful pursuit, but students and philosophers who
are serious about thinking should shift their attentions to a consideration of
grammar—to an exploration of the context, sense and meaning of
propositions. The progression of the
history of logic suggests this shift; moreover, while logic is a broad field,
the key touchstones of its history can be summarized rather briefly. They main
points of this progression begin with Socrates’ elenchus, which is a sort of prosecutorial cross-examination that
reveals inconsistency, credulity, or fraud.
Plato (if indeed he is to be fully distinguished from his teacher)
places emphasis on taking simple noun-predicate sentences as the basis of
logical structure, though his contextualization of such statements as elements
of dialogue needs to be acknowledged as central to his assessment of the
meanings of expressions. Aristotle
represents the emergence of logic as a distinct and formal discipline; his
efforts yielded deductive logic, and the classification of ordered chains of
premises and conclusions, or syllogisms, with emphasis upon sentences beginning
with “all”, “no”, and “some”. We might note here, that Aristotle’s “all”, “no”,
and “some” are attached to nouns and verbs, while he neglects words like “if”
and “then”, which link sentences and trace the progress of our inferences. But
we digress. In order to evaluate and classify different kinds of syllogisms,
Aristotle attached schematic letters to these statements, and symbolic logic
was born. Aristotle’s activity with
logic was to create a tool (organon
in Greek) to clarify scientific and philosophical problems. His model of a "systematized”
and “categorized” method of logic, however, will later enable figures like Kant
and Russell to attach metaphysical significance to logic (or to reason) and so
create the mirage (as I call it) that philosophers are somehow equipped to do
something “scientific.” Through their obscurantist (elaborate, potted,
sophistic) activity exercising dazzling logical architectures, some
philosophers make a claim upon scientific, moral and political authority, which
in our time is among the greatest threats to democracy, rule-of-law, equality
before the law, human rights, freedom of speech, integrity of property, the right of employees to negotiate with employers, and the
fair and merit-based distribution of goods and services. Here it is appropriate
in this discussion of systematized logic to ask how far we are departing from “thinking
about thinking” and discovering an appropriate overview of how we really think
in the world. Aristotle’s contribution, his influence and the re-discovery of
his methods in the Scholastic period deserve careful consideration. Nevertheless,
in his wake there follows a long hiatus in the development of logic as a tool
for thinking about thinking, and our formulation of a useful exposition of the
“real” thinking we’re seeking to uncover. The key transition occurs, first, with
the emergence of inductive reasoning, which is the activity of assembling long lists
of variously related statements, facts, and data-points, and clearly saying intelligent
things about them. The second point of transition comes with William of Occam’s
observation that logic is properly the analysis of philosophical and scientific
language. Still, we have not said much about what it means to think about
thinking, and moreover this task is complicated by the fact that such notions
as “thinking” (regarded as a sort of neurological activity resembling a
computer process) and “ideas” (in particular the notion that ideas are the
“objects” of thought) are abstract and misleading. Consider: thinking is an activity that is expressed through
language, and ideas are not really “objects.” So, we should wish to move away
from these abstract concepts and rather talk about what we are really doing when
we are thinking. What do we see when we look at ourselves thinking? To find
out, we must clearly understand where we are, what we are doing, what we are
discussing with one another, what we are attempting to do—such is the point of
thinking itself, and which is properly revealed when we look at the language of
our expressions and our dialogues. Such questions as “What is the context of my
statement?”, “What do I mean when I say X?”, “What am I doing when I say X?”,
and what am I seeking to do when I say X?”,
help us to expose the nature, the sense and the meaning of our
expressions, and reveal to us the usefulness, the suitability, the legitimacy,
and the appropriateness of our “thinking.” At this point, we should do well to
define thinking as “coming to an understanding.” When we do good philosophy, we
are creating a synoptic overview of our thinking, in which we can see ourselves
thinking—or writing, or talking. Thus, we seek to clarify our language, seek to
understand the context of our discussions, seek to assess the appropriateness
of our language, seek to clarify questions, seek to answer questions, seek to
solve problems—and in these ways we prepare to take good actions. All the while, we are keenly aware of how our
actions are linked to our understanding, and that our understanding is an
on-going process continually subject to revision and improvement.
Please see HERE for a note on propositions, and please
see HERE for a discussion about setting up synoptic overviews for assessing our
use of language. Also, please see HERE for a bit of therapy in regard to these
matters. After looking closely at this stuff, a bit of therapy is in order.
This post is part of a series:
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Giuseppe Bottani, “Athena revealing Ithaca to Ulysses”
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