What is Philosophy?
The Activity, Purpose and Origin of Metaphysics
The purpose of philosophy can be a mystery. Ancient philosophy was a metaphysical search for understanding, while modern philosophy is often a matter of linguistics.
One conception of philosophy, based on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, considers that philosophy is simply a linguistic analysis of the concepts involved in the various intellectual disciplines, such as science, mathematics, and the humanities. Accordingly, philosophy may only describe cognitive disciplines, but must always stop short of making claims about what is true or false.
Philosophical Investigations
In Wittgenstein's ‘Philosophical Investigations’ of 1953, he writes: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.” This definition would seem peculiar to most people uninitiated in the ways of modern philosophy, and perhaps it is partially responsible for the ambiguity of the purpose of philosophy in recent years.
Aristotelian Thinking
According to Aristotle, philosophy is “thinking about thinking”. According to this more ancient conception, philosophy seeks to know what is true within the various cognitive disciplines, including even religion, art and drama. Moreover, philosophy is called upon to synthesis truth from all these different fields for the sake of consistency. In this sense, philosophy is the final arbiter of truth when disagreements arise. And contrary to Wittgenstein’s assertion above, for Aristotle philosophy is called upon to be a foundation to each separate branch of knowledge. This foundation he calls metaphysics.
Two Ends of A Spectrum
In the first half of the twentieth century the first conception began to have emerging dominance in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy, most notably within the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. But in more recent decades, metaphysical philosophy is receiving an audience again. While the philosophy of language has delivered interesting results for philosophers, students may be forgiven for thinking that this wasn’t what they thought they were signing up to, as philosophy has a name for dealing with the ‘big questions’. If ‘philosophy leaves everything as it is’, it can’t really give the answers that philosophers traditionally search for.
Philosophy in Origin
What seems shared between these two vying theories of philosophy is that the experience of philosophy begins in questioning, borne out of the strangeness of existence. Philosophy may be said to begin with the suspension points … of existence. What is experienced as reality calls for explanation, and it illicits the question 'why?' And yet this why is not itself a question given by the external universe. It is something internal. It is something deeply subjective to philosophise, and yet it is caused by the experience of the mystery of the objective world itself.
Philosophy in Essence
Philosophical questioning is essentially an expression of the desire for clarity. Clarity doesn’t require years of academic training. The test is: does what is proposed answer each 'why' in as full a way as possible? It seems wrong to limit beforehand what philosophy may or may not prove, for this cannot be known in advance. If philosophy were used simply as a tool of linguistic analysis, as Wittgenstein suggests, not only could it not be useful, it seems it could not even be true, as truth calls for a judgment, not just a description. But philosophy seems to be more than that. Deep in the primitive experience of humanity, philosophy begins with a desire for truth. Where it will end is uncertain, but its pursuit says something profound about what it means to be a human being.
