National Association of Philosophy Students (Nigeria)

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WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

On this board so often I have seen topics take horrible turns such as “What is your favourite way to kill yourself” and such that I simply do not think have anything to do with philosophy. Equally debated has been, “what is philosophy” this topic will attempt to uncover what that is.

Philosophy is not a person’s opinion. Going back to Aristotle and Plato both were willing to admit this much. Plato and Aristotle both differentiated between “doxa” and “episteme.” Doxa are those things that are opinionated such as qualitative items like beauty. Episteme fall into an exact category of “knowledge.” Episteme means that there is only one right answer for each problem.

So thus far philosophy is episteme, or knowledge. This is to say that episteme is philosophy is necessarily true, for there is another break that much form. It occured roughly in the 1600s. Rene Descartes believed that all philosophy could be described in exact answers with inductive (particulars to universals) logic. They both developed what has further developed into the scientific method (they being both Descartes and earlier Sir Francis Bacon).

What they were describing though was not philosophy. What they did was create a distinction between two things, philosophy that can be solved inductively and philosophy that can be resolved deductively. For one we call it “science” and for the other we call it “philosophy.”

Throughout studies these two fields will clash together because there are things people think is philosophy but is actually science and vice-versa. One for example cannot say that science can determine ethics. Ethics is a non-naturalistic concept while gravity is naturalistic.

Therefore science is dedicated to absolving all of the physical things in our world (contradiction: political science). Sciences analyze facts and contribute them to a concept.

English philosophers like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Mooore and to a lesser extent Austria-Hungarian Ludwig Wittgenstein all believed philosophy went beyond this classical dichotomy. They felt that philosophy was the study of concepts and their validity. The job of philosophy on their account was to clean up the language we use by analysis of concepts. This is not science. This is not taking particulars and forming a universal. Merely what philosophy for them is taking our current language with its concepts and analyzing what we mean by things.

American high school teacher John Dewey started this revolution with his “Popular Science” article “How to make our ideas clearer.” What we are attempting to do here is create yet another division in what philosophy is. Philosophy is not simply the study of non-naturalistic concepts. Philosophy is a method of how we confirm all concepts. Mathematical ones are self-evident (A=A).

Philosophy is not interested in finding tautologies though. Not everything can be A=A, philosophy needs to find meaningful things. Like if I was to say “esse is episteme” which means “what is, is knowledge.” This is not meaningful because when broken into a mathematical form it simply states (what is knowledge)=(what is knowledge)

So for these analytic philosophers what we need to do is analyze concepts such as these and correct them. Philosophy is not looking for new ideas and new concepts, this is the job of science. Philosophy’s purpose is to clean up our language so that people do not think esse is episteme is true. Philosophy is not looking to find what is true, that is science. Philosophy is a method of confirming what is true from what is not true.

This is where modern philosophy leads off. While Heiddegar attempted to show philosophy as a study of metaphysical elements, the conceptual analysis has prevailed as what philosophy is.

Philosophy requires logical functions and method. Philosophy does not mean a person’s underlying dogmas. If a dogmas is proven to have an unresolvable contradiction then it is not necessarily false, but it is meaningless. Take for example if I was to say nothing exists. That in itself forms a contradiction. This contradiction does not mean that it is not true nor false, it means that it has no meaning. Meaning in this sense is to say that it has no reference or sign.

This IS what philosophy is. If you wish to crtique on this and try to resolve your dogmas on what you think philosophy is, you are willing to try and challenge mine.