Overview of Course
The Nature of Philosophy: The Classical Account
The Nature of Philosophy and its Relation in General to Common Sense and to other Learned Disciplines
Philosophy is a contemplative or speculative discipline. It consists in the sustained effort to think and
speak clearly, insightfully and circumspectly, developing and employing skills of interpretation, analysis
and argument to sharpen and deepen our understanding. But other disciplines have their reflective side.
Philosophy is distinguished from these fields of study not just by the exclusivity of its use of
understanding and reasoning to seek and obtain its objects or ends – as opposed, say, to making new
observations, experiments or case studies proper to the discipline itself. Rather, it is also distinguished by
its topics. For it is by virtue of the nature of its most central topics – e.g. truth, being, good –, topics that
pervade all areas of thought, that it appropriately makes exclusive or primary use of some methods of
interpretation, analysis and argument to sharpen and deepen our understanding of what, as a matter of
special science, art, common sense or faith, we already know or seem to know.
Mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, theologians, and generally well-educated people, use concepts
of truth, meaning, being, good, beauty and justice. They also have some conception, however implicit, of
themselves as living beings who think in terms of such concepts. These concepts then are matters with
which we are generally already familiar. They pervade, as we have said, our thinking and speech. They
are also concepts fundamental to how we orient ourselves, on the whole, in our lives. One’s nature and
career as a person are guided and shaped by or manifest latent commitments to certain conceptions and
attitudes towards these matters. For example, whether one takes truth or beauty to be to be objective
matters having some foundation in reality affects how one orients oneself to one’s own interests and those
of others. But philosophers not only follow or apply these concepts. Rather, starting often from some
points of perplexity, uncertainty or unclarity in our casual acceptance or use of these concepts,
philosophers are focused on them as central topics of their own inquiry, debate or learning. Usually, each
of these topics is examined on more specific themes in more specific areas of philosophy – e.g. “truth”
and “meaning” in logic and philosophy of language, “being” in first philosophy, “good” and “justice” in
ethics and politics, “beauty” in aesthetics, and the concept of ourselves as thinking, sentient living
subjects in philosophical psychology and biology.
An Extended Illustration of the Nature of Philosophy: Making Sense of Apparent Conflicts Between
Common Sense Beliefs and Received Scientific Theories
Consider, for example, certain apparent conflicts or discontinuities between common sense beliefs and
received scientific theories about the nature of the objects of sense experience and about the nature of
sense experience itself. Common sense beliefs are those we are naturally inclined, on the basis of our
experiences, to form, simply given a basic general education, an education adequate for one to function
and cope in one’s society. The only competence one needs to be able to understand and form such beliefs
is one shared by generally well-educated adults, not one specific to any special learned discipline or
technical trade. Received scientific theories, in contrast, are, on the common modern conception of
science, logically structured complexes1 of empirical, explanatory propositions that, according to those
qualified within the relevant specific learned observational and experimental discipline, have met certain
standards of proof. They have been accepted as specifying models that are adequate to represent and
make sense of all possible phenomena of experiment and observation within a certain specified range.
The theories of relativity – e.g. that the laws of motion are invariant across different inertial frames of
1
The propositions are ordered in the structure by relations of implication, for example.
reference – and quantum mechanics – e.g. that ponderable, visible matter is constituted of elementary
particles that are sources of four fundamental forces – are currently received scientific theories, as
Newton’s mathematical theory regarding the principles of motion was a received scientific theory. The
Darwinian theory of evolution is a received scientific theory. So are the theories informing the received
predictions or projections of continued anthropogenic global warming – e.g. that carbon-based gases in
the atmosphere will block radiant energy reflected from the surface of a planet so that, as a consequence,
the mean temperature of the whole atmosphere will tend to increase.
Common Sense Beliefs about Nature
Now, as a matter of common sense, we believe that there are things in nature that undergo change and yet
remain the same individuals, changing determinately in such intrinsic individual factors or features as
location, volume and bulk, and colouration. Let us call such objects or things basic material individuals.
We also believe, simply as a matter of common sense, that while some material individuals are living,
others are non-living; that only some living material individuals are sentient and that among these only
some are capable of speech and thought. These are basic common-sense beliefs about the basic order of
things in nature and the concepts in terms of which they are framed are all common sense concepts.
Whether it is a matter of common sense belief, let alone knowledge, that some order in perfection in being
or valuation follows this order from non-living to intellectual living things is itself an issue, no less than
whether such an order in perfection exists is one.
We also hold are or inclined to hold, as a matter of common sense, that things such as ourselves, material
living, sentient individuals capable of speech and thought, apprehend things through sense experience as
they are in nature – that is, that the features or factors by which we apprehend basic material individual
things – e.g. colours, sound tones, textures – in some sense, belong to those things as some of their own
intrinsic characteristics. This means that our ordinary perceptual judgements, framed in common sense
terms, as well as our common sense beliefs themselves, are capable of truth and falsehood in a sense in
which their truth or falsehood is an objective matter founded in the nature and character of natural things
themselves.
Current Received Scientific Theories about Nature
In contrast, as a matter of received scientific theory, we hold that nature is, at least at its most basic and
pervasive or general level, a field of forces, the forces originating from elementary particles lacking in
most of the kinds of characteristics by which we observe physical things – e.g. colouration. We also have
learned through scientific observation and experiment, that our sense experience is a culmination of
complex internal physiological and psychological changes and external physical processes, processes that
also can be adequately represented in terms that are not part of our common sense repertoire of concepts.
Even so, we are still planning, designing and conducting experiments, and studies and observations in
terms of common sense notions, even if the observational data or results are framed in more theoretical
terms. Moreover, our practical interests in the results of scientific theorizing, informed, checked and
confirmed by such data, are also understood or communicable in common sense terms. Accordingly, we
can’t precisely separate scientific theory, its practice and its practical significance, from relying upon our
common sense accounts of the world and of our place within it. But also at the very least some
discontinuity, and perhaps even some inconsistency, exists between our unreconstructed common sense
notions of the order of things in nature, including such things as ourselves, and the concepts of received
scientific theories.
Uncertainty and Perplexity Regarding the Relationship between Common Sense Conceptions of Nature
and those of Received Scientific Theory
Now, the relation between our common sense notions and those of our best scientific theories is and has,
since the emergence of scientific theorizing, always been a potential source of some perplexity. The
theoretical or practical problems connected with the uncertainty we have about this relation are not
anything essentially new or modern. For any approximation to scientific theory about the behaviour of
natural things, going all the way back to the presocratic, the naturalists and the Pythagoreans, requires
going beyond the basis of common sense conception, involving the postulation of things with a nature,
structure or form not itself a matter of common sense conception. The observable phenomena, especially
when understood simply in the terms of common sense, do not, as it were, explain themselves.
This kind of uncertainty and perplexity arises, then, from our casual use of common sense and scientific
theoretical concepts but it is a kind of uncertainty and perplexity that neither common sense nor the
methods of scientific theory (in the modern sense at least that limits such theory to the modeling and
explanation of observational phenomena or data) can resolve. Rather, it requires philosophical reflection
and analysis, which is primarily a matter of making conceptual sense of things we accept initially on other
grounds. We will try to exhibit this briefly through a few examples.
To begin with, according to common sense, we see colours but normally see them only in seeing coloured
things first. The colours are seen as belonging inseparably from the things seen. But, on our scientific
models, the nature of the colours we see and their relation to the things in nature is resolvable only on
some identification of the presence of colours with either some effect of rays of light, which are streams
of photons on the surfaces of things say, or some effect in our sense organs, composed perhaps not only
of our eyes but of the whole neurological network underlying vision. But this identification is precisely
what is not a matter of scientific observation or experiment. It is more precisely a conceptual problem,
requiring other methods of inquiry, methods of conceptual analysis, uncovering, or dismantling, to
address such a problem adequately or satisfactorily.
Again, according to common sense, our visual perception is not just an outcome of the physical and
physiological processes, the changes that external things and our own bodies undergo, that underly the
perception. It is not itself a change or a process, but an act or operation that the individual animal as a
whole performs and partakes in. It is not then simply an outcome of the operations of the animal’s proper
organic parts, its eyes, optic nerves and visual centers of the brain, operations consequent upon some
external stimulation of the eyes by the reception of light. We have learned through biological and
physical theory, more generally, that these operations and the motions they bring about do underly the
perception. But the relation between these processes and the act of visual perception we take ourselves
and other animals to perform, as well as the nature of the unity of the animal as visually perceiving things,
is also not simply a matter of common sense or scientific theory.
Finally, as we have noted, according to unreconstructed common sense, the truth of our judgements, if
and when true, consists in our judging things to be as they are in themselves – i.e. how they are apart from
any relation to ourselves as apprehending them or to our specific cognitive capacities –; their falsehood,
consists in their not being as we judge them to be. We also unreflectively may bring this common sense
account of truth and falsehood to the evaluation of our empirical scientific theories. But the very
discontinuities or supposed inconsistencies between common sense belief and received scientific theory,
as well as the uncertainty regarding the reality or foundation in reality of the objects to which our
concepts in those theories bear reference, raise problems for this conception of truth. They prompt us to
ask questions regarding the nature of judgement, about what it is to judge things, whether truly or falsely,
and then what it means to say the truth of a true judgement is founded in the things and that such things
have some foundation in reality. These are not problems to be resolved by making any special new
observations or experiments. All the data we seek to explain, of which we seek to make some final sense,
are already given, for the data, as it were, are just the concepts that we employ in common sense belief
and scientific theory and that we use in evaluating them – e.g. truth, evidence, real being or reality.
Again, they are, more precisely, conceptual problems, requiring other methods of inquiry, methods of
conceptual analysis, uncovering, or dismantling, to address adequately or satisfactorily.
The Need for a Speculative Discipline such as Philosophy to deal with such Conceptual Sources of
Uncertainty and Perplexity
The same general points may be illustrated through considering how the discontinuities or supposed
inconsistencies between other supposed modes or sources of belief and knowledge – e.g. the practice of
the fine arts, or of religious faith, or civic life – and common sense or scientific theory generate
uncertainty and perplexity about other central fundamental topics of human concern – e.g. goodness,
justice, beauty, the sublime or sacred, personal dignity. But we will not develop such illustrations here.
From such considerations, the same points could be made i) that philosophy is, in contrast with other
modes or sources of belief, a speculative discipline, focused on making some unified sense of the
fundamental topics we already grasp as a matter of common sense, received scientific data and theory, the
practice of art or religious faith, and ii) for this reason, its proper methods are exclusively those of
conceptual analysis and (primarily deductive) argument.2
Specialization in Philosophy and its Underlying Unity as a Discipline
Now, to the central concepts or topics of philosophy that we have already mentioned, we may add others
that are themes of more specialized study within philosophy itself, some depending upon the adoption of
certain philosophical theories. However, while philosophy does divide into different sometimes highly
specialized technical areas – for example, metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics – it is typically taken
to have a fundamental underlying unity, whether by virtue of the unity of the topics themselves or their
common status as pervasive fundamental concepts. Philosophers then may dedicate themselves to one
area rather than another. But, even so, they are traditionally expected to be at least conversant not only
with other areas of philosophy but also with some other areas of learning – for example, history,
anthropology, literature, mathematics, physics, biology or theology. Philosophy, despite its increasing
specialization, then, is still supposed, as it was with Plato, to be a synoptic discipline, bringing some unity
to our thinking in various areas of learning.
Philosophy as an Art of Living
Finally, philosophy is also traditionally at least expected or hoped to have ultimately a practical
orientation, bringing some unity not just to our thinking, but, given its subject matter, some overarching
or developing unity to our lives. Put more picturesquely, philosophy, through its methods and techniques
of conceptual interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and development, is hoped to make some significant
contribution to the art of living fully and well.
2
We should leave open here that the unity of conception making sense of what we believe or seem to know may
require the abandonment, suspension, qualification, reinterpretation, or reconstruction of some beliefs from one
mode or another. But even such cases the stance taken is not an arbitrary one, lacking some overarching rational
account or justification the merits of which are a matter philosophical scrutiny or disputation.
Challenges to the Above Classical Account of Philosophy
This, so far, is a quite traditional or classical account of philosophy, one that we will be aiming to show or
support through the lectures of this course.
It is an account of philosophy as a rational, non-empirical, synoptic theoretical discipline, encompassing
in its scope the world, our place within it and our various ways of conceiving it. But it is also one that, as
we have said, has ultimately an overarching practical orientation.
But such an account has faced and continues to face many challenges both from within and without
philosophy itself. From sophists and ancient skeptics such as Protagoras and Pyrrho to anti-theoretical
philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, the intelligibility or prospects of any objective
theoretical orientation and aims in philosophy have been vigorously opposed. These figures, in their
challenges to the classical model, have employed, moreover, modes or strategies of argument and analysis
that have themselves become part of the repertoire of philosophy itself.
In this course, we will also be encountering such challenges to philosophy and attempting to address
them. From these last remarks, we may see that the nature, scope, goals and prospects are just as much a
matter of inquiry and dispute as the central topics we have listed above. As we shall note later, this is one
of the reasons we have adopted an historical approach in this course to the introductory study of
philosophy.
Orientation towards the Course Given the Classical Account of Philosophy and the Challenges with
and without Philosophy to This Account
In this course, then, we will be introduced to philosophy through the study of the works of several
eminent, historically significant philosophers, starting with Plato and ending with James and Russell.
Students will study topics such as the nature of change and changeable things, the nature of basic
individuals, their characteristics and relations, the nature and perfection, or lack thereof, of the world and
the natures of truth, falsehood, proof and evidence. But we will also have a focus throughout the course
on the nature and structure of the human person, especially as the subject of rational experience, creative
insight and theoretical knowledge.
Work in the course will consist mainly in the critical interpretation and assessment of the theses and
arguments of several great figures in the history of philosophy. In this way, students will be introduced to
key philosophical problems and positions in metaphysics or first philosophy (the philosophical study of
being, becoming, existence and essence), philosophical psychology (philosophical study of human
motivation, consciousness and cognition) and, more specifically, epistemology (the philosophical study of
science or theoretical knowledge.
More specifically, we will be critically examining ideas and arguments presented in selections from the
following texts:
Plato's Meno and Republic
Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology
James’ Lectures on Pragmatism
Russell’s Philosophical Essays
Since this is an introductory course, the focus of study and of graded assignments will be on the critical
interpretation and evaluation of the ideas and arguments presented in these works. Students should
acquire knowledge, then, of the basic ideas, methods and goals philosophy as these have been developed
throughout history, knowledge students should demonstrate in the writing of critical argumentative
essays.