What is Philosophy? What's a Philosophical Question?

A friend of mine, and occasional participant at our Sunday meetings, offers this brief definition of Philosophy:

"Philosophia...from the Greek love of wisdom, φιλοσ and σοφια. So it follows that anything that has to do with that is a philosophical question at root bottom. That might include any fundamental one with regards the human condition. And being itself. Big thing this philosophy."

No matter what a philosophical question starts out as, it ends up being a question about concepts.

What sort of concepts? - the most basic ones, the ones that have the most general application, the ones we find ourselves using or pre-supposing when we talk about the fundamentals of any subject or topic.

What sort of questions about concepts? There are three main sorts. One, questions about the full meaning of a particular concept, questions as to its content , its clarity, and its distinctness from similar concepts. Two, regarding a complex concept (those made up of simpler ones), questions about it's logical form, about its internal coherence and its compatibility with its context of other concepts and propositions. Three, questions about the precision of concepts, about whether they contain all they need to contain for the job they are used for (internal precision), and about whether they don't contain more than is necessary (external precision).

Type one questions are called philosophical analysis. Type two are part of philosophical synthesis. And type three are called philosophical synopsis (sometimes confused with analysis).

This is how I’ve organized of my (provisional, of course) ideas on the matter. (In fact, I've already revised it; here's a slightly altered version of what I posted here Sunday.) This became much longer than I expected it would!
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The definition of philosophy, and what makes some questions philosophical and others not, is a complex question that philosophers still debate, and many of the major philosophers throughout history have offered differing ideas on it. There's probably no strict demarcation as to which questions are philosophical and which aren’t, and there's probably no foolproof definition. Besides, many philosophical questions are also questions in other fields, especially the sciences, social sciences, and humanities such as religious studies, literary criticism, and so on.

When people come to our philosophy discussion group, they often suggest a question they'd like to talk about, and then say something like "I don’t know if this is a philosophical question or not, you tell me…and what exactly is philosophy, anyway, and how is it different from other fields?" This perennial question can be answered in a few ways, I think. By common, everyday usage, "philosophy" means something like "one's worldview and values, especially how one deals with life's misfortunes and opportunities." I like this, but it's too general a definition, especially for how the term is used by those who've been called "philosophers"—and this definition doesn’t spell out for us just what it is that makes some questions and approaches philosophical and some not.

Etymologically, "philo-sophia" means "love of wisdom"—again, this commonly given definition is too general and nonspecific, since many ways of loving wisdom would not be philosophical and, arguably, much of the philosophical literature and activity has little to do with wisdom, at least not directly. Plus, the definition doesn't tell us whether any given question counts as philosophical or not. Other very good, short definitions I’ve come across that are also too general and nonspecific include "The science of questions," and "The ultimate meaning and justification of everything," and "All questions treated as abstractly as possible…using reason," and even "If you want to know what philosophy is, just look at the books the great philosophers have written—that's philosophy!" These definitions are of limited help. No short definition will likely distinguish what's philosophical from what's not.

I've given the issue some thought, so I'll give my attempt at an adequate definition. I'll start with a one-sentence definition, and then offer a long explanation of that short definition, which will come in the form of list of criteria for what philosophy is (or, at least, for what the western philosophical tradition is—this may or may not apply to other traditions). This approach has the disadvantage of taking the form of a long and drawn-out description instead of a short, snappy definition. However, I think it more precisely distinguishes what is philosophical from what is not, or what is more philosophical from what is less so.

Fortunately, most philosophers agree on some common ideas about what philosophy is and what kinds of questions it has. Unfortunately, to give a good definition, you have to do so without smuggling controversial philosophical views into your definition. This is not so easy. Provisionally, here's how I've come to think about it:

"Philosophy" is what you do when you take a philosophical attitude (wonder and striving for meaning) towards a philosophical (i.e., conceptual/ controversial/ fundamental) question and try to answer it in a philosophical (rational) manner. That’s the short version. Let me break that down.

1. So, the first criteria, the philosophical attitude, refers to a sense of fascination for and wonder about the meaning of our life and the world around us, a striving to arrive at what’s true or accurate and to know how to live life well (and to act upon that), and the attempt to take a step back and look at the world in terms of the "bigger picture" and tie together seemingly unrelated parts of life. This requires being open to being truly changed by the new understandings and views you may come upon, no matter what they are, as opposed to trying to reaffirm what you already believe, or settle upon convenient, comfortable, or pleasing conclusions. Easier said than done! A lot more could be said about that, but I think you get the idea.

While most philosophers have identified the field of philosophy by the kinds of questions it tries to tackle and/or how they are tackled, others have defined it in the above way, by the mental attitudes and processes one goes through. In this latter view, the particular answers any thinker comes up with is not the main point of philosophy, just one of its temporary, provisional results. Results will always change, but the underlying attitude doesn’t change so much. As I see it, both components are relevant to distinguishing philosophy from what’s done in other fields.

Apart from these notions of the ideal philosophical attitudes, which may be tough to agree upon, it's easier to state the next criteria for defining philosophy, the philosophical manner of dealing with questions.

2. The second criteria to look at, the "philosophical manner," refers to the way a question is answered. Simply put, the philosophical manner of answering questions and evaluating those answers is by using your sense of understanding and your "critical thinking" skills (i.e., the methods and standards of rationality and logic). The goal is not simply to produce an answer to a question, but to justify that answer as being the correct or most plausible answer, or being better than any of the alternatives.

These methods and standards of rationality would include the following: making and evaluating arguments, introspecting and articulating the vague or unclear, questioning and uncovering our most basic assumptions and beliefs, discovering and analyzing the meanings of words/ concepts and our methods of using language and doing things, making explicit what a concept or view presupposes and what its implications are, examining the logical/ conceptual relations between ideas, bringing ourselves to new insights and understandings of the world and various philosophical or cultural views, devising thought experiments, systematizing ideas, speculating about and creating theories, and so on.

With regards to the evaluation of views, these rational methods of evaluating arguments and ideas stand in contrast to other standards of evaluation, for example, judging an answer by what accords with your intuition, by what the authorities and experts say or write, by what was revealed to you or others by mystical insights, by what feels right emotionally, by what scientific or empirical methods point to, by the consensus of any group of people, etc.

Implicit in the philosophical approach is the attempt to actually arrive at some kind of answer to your question, even if you don't think you can do it, even if you think that nobody will ever have a decent answer to the question, and even if you think there simply is no or cannot be an answer to the question. The idea is to attempt to arrive at the best answer you can, and arrive at the best understanding of the question that you can, regardless of the final result. "Just because you cannot finish your task," a famous rabbi once said, "does not mean that you are free to put the task down."

Thus, sentiments like "all attempts to answer this question are doomed at the outset," or "some things are better left as mysteries," or "I believe because it is absurd (said of one's faith in the trinity of the Christian God) are not philosophical approaches to questions—whatever other virtues these sentiments may possess. Sometimes, however, an answer to a philosophical question comes in the form of "now that we understand the question and its surrounding issues better, we can see that the question is really I'll-formed, vague, or meaningless, and here's why…" This, too, counts as a legitimate way to answer a question.

3. The third criteria, "a philosophical question," refers to the nature of the question itself. As I see it, there are three parts (sub-criteria) to this; a philosophical question is conceptual, controversial, and "fundamental."

A) First, philosophical questions are questions about concepts, not facts about the world. Science focuses on studying the world itself; philosophy focuses on studying how we experience, talk and think about the world. Conceptual questions are about the meanings and definitions of words and ideas, and also about what these definitions and meanings presuppose and what they imply. This conceptual aspect of philosophical questions is brought out by one of the more interesting definitions of philosophy I've seen, "The study not of what is (the realm of science) but of what is necessary or possible."

If the question you're discussing can be settled by leaving the room to investigate the world, do experiments, consult with experts, look through reference books or the internet for facts, run computer simulations, or the like, then it's a factual question, not a conceptual one. On the other hand, if everyone in the room has the relevant facts at hand, and yet you can still meaningfully address the question by talking, thinking and arguing about the meanings of things, then it's a conceptual question.

B) Second, philosophical questions are controversial in that they have no set method for coming to an answer. I think this point was best made by contemporary philosopher John Searle. In one of my favorite definitions of what is distinctive about philosophical questions, he said, "Philosophical questions are those questions for which no generally agreed upon method exists [among experts] for arriving at an answer." [The bracketed words are mine.] As mentioned above, philosophical questions are analyzed and evaluated using the standards of rationality. But even within that general approach, much disagreement exists among philosophers on how to answer, and how to evaluate answers to, the classic questions of philosophy. Different traditions and schools of thought have arisen around a particular favored method(s) of answering questions, but none have been shown to be clearly better than its competitors, and none seem to work for all questions (not yet, at least).

This lack of "generally agreed upon methods for arriving at an answer" is one thing that separates philosophical questions from most mathematical or scientific questions, for example. The latter are often very conceptual, but they aren't philosophical because mathematicians and scientists in the relevant subfield generally agree ahead of time on how to arrive at an answer, or on what kinds of methods or experiments are in the running for a way to come to an answer. Throughout history, questions which were once part of philosophy branched off into one or another branch of science when an agreed upon method for addressing the questions became available.

As an example, if a group of us are sitting in a room arguing about what the nature of energy is, or some other question about how the universe is constructed, and we couldn’t arrive at an answer until we had access to actual physicists or physics texts (i.e., experts in facts about the physical world, most of which have answers or have agreed upon empirical methods for arriving at answers), then the question isn't a philosophical one. On the other hand, if we argue about whether the universe could contain a supernatural realm as well as a natural or physical realm, then we're struggling with a philosophical question. Why? Because physicists can't come close to answering it, it can't be answered by doing an experiment, no generally agreed upon method exists for answering it (among physicists, philosophers, theologians, or anyone else), and the answer depends in large part on the meaning of concepts. These conceptual disputes would include what "natural" and "supernatural" mean, how we know the difference between the two, whether a supernatural realm could be investigated scientifically (and whether this means that it's not supernatural), whether it even makes sense to talk about a supernatural realm apart from the material world, and so on.

C) Finally, the third part or sub-criteria for defining what is and isn't a philosophical question has to do with its "fundamental" subject matter. Philosophical questions are what philosophers have often called "The big questions," or "The most fundamental, abstract, and general questions" that humans have always wondered about. What exactly does that mean? I interpret is this way: If you analyze and examine the assumptions within any question, and ask a question about each of those assumptions, then analyze and examine the assumptions in those questions, and so on, you'll sooner or later come to these big, "most fundamental, general and abstract" of questions. As it turns out, these big, fundamental questions are mainly questions that bear on the way we inquire and think about the world and our lives. A paraphrase of one of my favorite definitions of philosophy put the matter this way, "Philosophy is inquiry about inquiry…critical discussion and thinking about how we carry out critical discussions/ thinking about any topic at all."

Which questions do these include? The most abbreviated version of this is Plato’s notion that philosophy is the discipline that tries to tell us what “The Good, the True, and the Beautiful” is. Let me offer a definition by way of an expanded list of these most fundamental questions, the questions that bear on how we carry out any inquiry at all. Though different philosophers like to cut the pie in different ways, these questions are often said to fall under one of the following, traditional five subfields of philosophy.

i) "What is real, what exists, what are their essences, how do we categorize different kinds of things, and how should we talk about them? What meanings do the most abstract concepts have, e.g., Properties, Objects, Freedom, Identity, the Mind, the Will?" "How must the world be that we can understand it at all?" (Metaphysics).
ii) "How can you tell whether you have knowledge, or facts, instead of mere opinions? How can you tell which knowledge or opinions are better than others? What can be known and what can’t? What methods are the optimal methods the sciences should use, and why are they the best? " (Epistemology).
iii) "What is Good, worthwhile, important, valuable, and wise, and how should we talk about these things? What is right and what's wrong, just and unjust? What's the meaning or purpose of life, or my life, if any? What should I do and how should I live? What does it mean to become a better person?" (Ethics).
iv) "What is art, what is literature, and why are some things beautiful or pleasing? How can we evaluate various artistic works?" (Aesthetics).
v) "What are the correct and incorrect forms of reasoning and argumentation?" (Logic).

The above examples are versions of the classic, paradigmatic questions. But the above list, with perhaps a few additions, is not, I think, merely a representative sample of philosophical questions or problems. Rather, I'm claiming that all or nearly all philosophical questions are just variations on the above questions and/or combinations of them, applied to this or that specific situation.



These (or any) criteria are not absolute, but a matter of degree. To the extent that you meet the above criteria, your attempts are more philosophical in character, and/or your questions are more philosophical. If you meet none of the criteria, you're probably not engaged in philosophical inquiry, and your question is probably not a philosophical one. If you meet some of the criteria but not others, it's likely that your inquiry is only party philosophical and your question is complex one that's partially a philosophical question and partially a factual question from some other field. Many political and cultural questions of the day, for example, are of this last type.

--Brian

Hi John,

I think this is great...wanted to toss some thoughts your way. You said we believe our questions to be answerable though since we are asking we likely don't know the answer ourselves...do you mean answerable personally or universally? I think that distinction is a large factor that makes philosophy unique as compared to science or other fields of study. I think depending upon the philosopher and the issue at hand, he/she will say philosophy is answerable in a very personal way...like how Foucault does a "history of the present" as he says, more or less how one came to be the way he is now or how Aristotle talks about the virtues, and that the mean sought after for ultimate virtue will be different for everyone, different but corrrect. Of course, there are far too many others to list that rely solely on a very analytical/logical breakdown of a series of thoughts, which if thought should only lead to that 1 conclusion, i.e. be universally accepted.

I think philosophy is both a way of knowing and coming to know. Those that engage in philosophy have a different thought process than those that don't...yet, perhaps it could be argued that scientists or engineers, attorneys for that matter have a process of gathering facts, referencing, experimenting with ideas...what we think might be fact(s)...and therefore engaging in very much the same process as a philospher would about why war is necessary, that God exists, or whatever claim he/she is making and through facts placed nicely together result in the conclusion. Yet, a philosopher's way of knowing is far less about tangibles, but abstraction...thinking atypical of other professionals which sets it a part. With regards to a way of knowing specifically, I think many philosophers have a sense of where the logic will lead them at least partially down the path and so in that way they too have a knowingness.

Coming to know I think most definitely, as where one thought he would arrive is not where he necessarily does, and say even if it is, his understanding is broadened I think by having firmly come to know that which was sought.

You say that answers provide us knowledge about reality rather than the "way of seeing things/information about ourselves"...but is reality not personal? The reality for you and the reality for me may be very different based on our likes and dislikes, upbringing, beliefs, notions of self/identity, environment, accumulated experience and so on. I think it is all relative to the extent that we preceive/interpret differently. For example, you see a woman and she is sitting alone, glasses on, straightfaced, not really looking around. Maybe I think she is shy, feels awkward in this setting. Perhaps you think she is arrogant and pretentious. Perhaps, she thinks she is a loner, outcast. I believe it to be this variations of reality or truth that make that "reality" personal to a certain extent.

Only because I think the human experience is largely similar that "reality" thus can hold as a universal. I believe this to be true because we all experience more or less the same, fact being that we all experience love and fear...and the multiple variations of the emotions such as joy, anger, apprecation, nervousness etc. The fact that we all can feel and thus in this way take in or experience a similar state regardless of what the actual experience was...death of a family member, car crash, hostile neighbor...we understand and see "reality" as a universal because we can all "know" it, despite whatever experience we personally draw on, or metaphor we use to describe it/reality/our reality. In this way I believe philosophy can most definitely give/provide knowledge/insight to or about reality in a more generalized context and a personalized concext due to one's take on things.

Something interesting you wrote is that we have no experience to rely on to justify or back up our theories...very true. Though I thought it fascinating during the discussion that took place on Sunday...I'm not sure if you were there as there were so many people...the issue of lanuage and linguisticality or something arose. It was said by some that that which can't be expressed in any form is thus unknown to the person. If it can't be articulated then it can't be philosophical for it must be expressed in order to enter into the discussion/dialogue/idea pool that is philosophy. I personally have had a number of experiences/instances where I have known something, something for which I had yet to have the right words for. I would try to think it through, express it to myself, to others even, but it not really making sense until some other experience and thus knowing made all the pieces fall into place. I think this goes back to your point about knowing and coming to know...I personally have both, though sometimes neither :) .

Anyway, goodness my point being that I did need experience to render full/clear thought/knowledge/answer. I can think up a storm and have good/rational/logical conclusions about many things...but like the right course of action I think is personal.

And so back to what philosopher's of non-emipircal concepts is that yes we have no experience...but I really wonder is it the answer we want or the experience of the answer? I wonder if we engage in philosophy so much not because we want answers, but because it is our outlet for being unable to experience and so we attempt to satisfy this desire to endure/feel/partake in by contemplating? Not to say that knowing and conclusions and answers aren't wonderful...but I think it's really the experience of knowing that we really want...though I can't particularly say why. If I were to hazard a guess I'd say it is because "reality" is subjective/personal and while we can have thoughts and logically arrive at this notion/concept/belief these things so to speak remains thoughts and we want to live/be of and so the thoughts about something just aren't enough as experience can be. Not that I'm not highly recommending thinking and philosophy, abosolutely...I think a great offset to that problem is application. I think if you can know and become from that so it becomes a part of who you are and how you live then that is one hell of a thought!

Anyway, great ideas, I just wanted to say.
Emily