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What is Philosophy?
Philosophy has two main meanings, of an attitude to life, and of a type of knowledge. This lecture is
concerned largely with the second meaning, that is, a type of knowledge. However the attitude or way
of living has a relationship with the knowledge version of philosophy. Philosophy has been driven, from
its beginning in Greece about 500 BC, by the desire for knowledge more certain than ordinary
knowledge. Ordinary knowledge has its limits and is open to doubts and uncertainties. People have
striven after certainty.
Philosophers have been those who have wondered about what constitutes really reliable knowledge:
whether from our senses, or from mathematics and logic, or from some other source or combination of
the above. They have asked whether knowledge based on reflection can give new knowledge about the
world outside us. To illustrate this, consider a triangle. You can draw triangles and measure their
angles and see that the 3 angles add up to 180. But you can also prove, without using any
measurements, that the 3 angles of any triangle add up to 180. You may ask whether the geometric
proof, which is a logical form of knowledge, has told you something about the real world.
Some philosophers have speculated about whether there is a real world outside us, or is all sensation of
such a world purely due to our minds. Some have debated whether examining the world can tell us
what ethics or morals to adopt. Philosophers have wondered does the world have a purpose, and can
philosophical debate decide if humans have a purpose. Some have thought about whether natural
observations can tell us about a supernatural world. Different philosophers have given different
answers to these questions.
Many philosophies have been elaborate systems, based on some few principles, and from these deriving
or deducing views on ethics, politics, art, religion, and science. They have varied on how much
philosophy can say about these subjects.
The different answers involve several schools of thought in philosophy. Some are named after their
originator and others named descriptively. I propose to describe changes in the model of what is
philosophy, touching on some of these schools.
Much work in philosophy has been about solving these problems. But a lot of philosophers' work has
been about showing where past solutions were mistaken, or where the idea of the problem was itself
misguided. So a lot of philosophy has been and still is a reaction to or a disagreement with previous
philosophical work.
Philosophy has at times started with common sense. Often the doubt about existing knowledge involves
doubting the common sense view of a subject. Philosophy's conclusions have often disagreed with
common sense.
I intend to talk about what is the subject- matter of philosophy, about what methods it can use, and
about what conclusions have been reached (this last on only a very limited part of philosophy). Going
through these matters we will talk about a view, and then look at the advantages and disadvantages of
that view, and see what other views have been put up in their stead.
Why people incline towards Philosophy

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I have said that philosophy began in Greece about 500 BCE with a quest for more certain knowledge.
People were aware that various things they might think they knew were doubtful or false. As an
example, consider a simple object such as a table, and one of its qualities such as its colour. You will
notice many colours on its different parts, varying as the angle of light on that part, so it is hard to
decide on a definite one colour. In dull or in sunny light the appearance will differ. Proceeding on form
this, some philosophers have decided that our single colour which we say is the colour of the tablebrown, let us say- exists in our mind and does not exist so strongly in the real world. A few philosophers
have proceeded further and decided that matter is less real than mind and mental events. This leads on
to more far reaching questions, such as what are things or the world made of, whether there is a mind
or spirit in charge of the world, and whether the world has any purpose.
Few philosophers have claimed that finding answers to these questions is easy, and the answers given
have varied much. As we will see, many philosophers have been most moved by how they felt previous
solutions have been false or unsatisfactory.
The Subject- Matter of Philosophy
Thus the original and perhaps still commonest view of philosophy's subject matter is of a type of
knowledge. One version of this is seen as about questions that cannot be answered by science, yet are
worth asking, and can be elucidated or partly answered by reason and debate.
Another set of philosophers have a model of philosophy covering quite a wider territory, seeing it as a
grand- or super- science.
This definition looks quite broad. There can be problems where it is taken as too broad. Philosophy is
Greek for love of wisdom, and it originally included natural philosophy, which is what is now called
science. In Greece from 500 BCE many people wrote both about science (natural philosophy) and about
the other subjects which can not be answered by examining nature. This tradition has continued to
some extent. Although most scientists do not get involved in philosophy, many philosophers take an
interest in some sciences. Although physics has kept its distinction from philosophy since Isaac Newton,
psychology was still not free of the philosophers a hundred years ago. Today, the problem of the relation
between mind and body, or now, between mind and brain, remains a philosophical problem, but the
philosophers, the psychologists, and the neuroscientists have worked out a reasonable relationship
between their areas of knowledge.
This broad idea of philosophy as a king of sciences is present in some ancient and some mediaeval
philosophy. As examples I would give Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. Thomism (following
Thomas Aquinas) persists into the present century. In this century the most noted Neo-Thomist has
been Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). This was a reasonable position while natural science was
undeveloped, and some knowledge obtained purely by reason and debate was clearly more reliable
than any scientific knowledge. But philosophy was reluctant to give up this territory, and criticisms of
the universal science model were made.

Reason as the source of the most reliable knowledge

I should explain a bit here about how knowledge obtained by reason and argument alone has been seen
as more reliable than knowledge from the senses. It was not easy to settle whether the earth is round or
flat- this is often debated today, even if few people decide it is flat. There have been other questions,
such as what are the elementary substances of which the earth is made, and what the sun and moon are
made of and how far away they are. It has taken centuries of science to answer these questions. In
ancient and mediaeval times there were no definite answers.

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By contrast, ancient mathematicians had shown, from a few axioms and using a limited number of rules
of inference, that the sum of the 3 angles of a triangle was 2 right angles. This was proved without
examining any real triangles; yet on examining real triangles the result is confirmed, in every case. This
appeared to show that the most reliable knowledge is obtained by reason, and that it is knowledge
about the external world.
One of the original questions for philosophy was what is the ultimate or basic substance the world is
made of. This is now a question of physics. In spite of this being one of the more obvious faults of the
king- of- sciences model, I believe it was not the source of the major criticisms of the model, which is to
be expected as few physicists have also been philosophers.
Nevertheless several important lines of philosophers have sought to limit philosophy to those questions
that are open to logic and argument, but do not involve anything that can be decided by experiment or
examining the real world.
Why philosophy as King of Sciences was dethroned
Reason and argument were originally seen as the prime source of reliable knowledge. Plato referred to
this as dialectic. In the 18th century Immanuel Kant, having been very impressed with how Isaac
Newton described the real world by his theory of gravitation, wrote about how synthetic a priori
propositions are possible. A priori means before examining any data; and synthetic means saying more
than is merely implied by or contained in the starting premises. Kant viewed Newton's theory as giving
definite knowledge about the external world, in the same way as geometry had been thought to do from
ancient times.
However, in the 18th and 19th centuries an inquiry into the elegance of Euclid's geometry led to the
dethronement of the position of pure thought as superior to examination of the real world.
Euclid's geometry used a limited set of rules of inferences to derive theorems from already proven
theorems. However he had to start from somewhere, so he took some "theorems" as for granted. These
he called axioms or postulates. Euclid had 5 postulates. The first four are about points, lines, surfaces,
and solid objects. The fifth postulate is quite different in character. The fifth postulate says that, in a
plane, for any straight line and a point outside it, there is one and only one straight line in the plane
that passes through the point but never meets the first line no matter how far it is extended in either
direction. As this is called a parallel line the fifth postulate is also called the parallel postulate. For
many centuries mathematicians were taken by the elegance of the first four postulates and the relative
inelegance of the fifth postulate. In order to make geometry more elegant, attempts were made to try to
prove the fifth postulate as a theorem from the first four postulates. These were not successful. In the
18th century Gerolamo Saccheri put forward two alternatives to Euclid's fifth postulate, one being that
no parallel line exists (every line through the point meets the first line), the other being that many or
indeed infinitely many straight lines can be drawn through the outside point but not ever meeting the
first line. He then showed that the consequences of either of these would be a geometry, so odd
compared to the familiar geometry, that he thought this a proof of the fifth postulate by a reductio ad
absurdum. However in the next century this was seen as the invention of two new geometries.
Accordingly by the start of this century it was seen as a matter of examination of the real world, or a
matter of choice, whether to use the geometry of Euclid or one of the other geometries to describe, map,
or model the external world. Euclidean geometry is just as useful as ever for most purposes. But in
modelling the large universe there is debate as to whether non-Euclidean geometry is best. Another
variety called Riemann geometry I understand is useful under Einstein's theory of relativity in the
vicinity of very massive objects.

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Dialectic
As dialectic is said to be an older method than Russell's logistic or analytic method, I will say a bit
about it. Plato often refers to dialectic as his own method and as the highest form of knowledge. For
Plato dialectic is the method of asking a question, giving an answer, and asking further questions until
the matter is solved. Aristotle appears to have had the same meaning for dialectic.
The present day meaning of dialectic is different and is due to Georg Hegel, who was official
philosopher to the Prussian kings in the early 19th century. Hegel saw that two opposing viewpoints
may each contain some truth, and he said the dialectic method of reaching better knowledge is to seek a
synthesis or a larger whole containing elements of both the opposing views. Hegel saw this as the main
or the ideal method of getting greater wisdom or knowledge. Karl Marx took up Hegel's version of
dialectic and extended its use to his idea of the development of history and social structures.
I am here going to criticise Hegel's dialectic, particularly when it is seen as the main or the ideal
method for dealing with contradictory views. While in some or many cases the two (or more) opposing
views may each contain an element of truth, there are other cases where the fault lies wholly or almost
wholly in one of the opposed arguments. In the case of each particular argument, whether there be
some truth in both sides, or one side is largely false, is open to examination in each case. If Hegel's
dialectic is applied to a case where truth is largely on one side of the argument, it leads us away from
the truth. To extend this criticism to Karl Marx, there is no evidence to suggest that the development of
social or political structures must proceed by an amalgamation or synthesis of the existing, competing,
influences. As in the case of arguments, it is possible for one tendency to entirely obscure or triumph
over the other influence(s).
In spite of the above, Hegel and Marx and their version of dialectic have many adherents still.

Philosophy as about mental contents or events

One of the most famous attempts to derive a system of certain knowledge was that of Ren Descartes, in
17th century France. Descartes exemplifies the method of logistic, that is of having simple elements of
knowledge and deriving more complicated knowledge from them. He also illustrates the principle of
abandoning all supposed present knowledge (because it is open to doubt) and trying to start from some
small item that cannot be doubted. Descartes felt it was not open to doubt that he was thinking, and so
he started his argument and his philosophy from there. From this he concluded that he definitely
existed- cogito, ergo sum. Descartes founded the idea of rationalism, that if an idea is clearly formulated
and clear in the mind, it is likely to be true.
From Descartes' position of knowing he was thinking, it remains open to debate whether the outside
world is real, or if it is merely the thoughts or dreams of the thinker. The idea of the world being one's
dream is called idealism. It sees matter as secondary to mind or spirit. The most celebrated idealist has
been George Berkeley (18th century Ireland). He argued that physical things exist only while we or
someone is watching or thinking about them; and the continuity of objects while no-one looks at or
thinks of them is provided by God looking at or thinking of them. To most of us, the external world is
taken for real because it is the simplest hypothesis; but if you look carefully at this hypothesis you will
not be able to prove it is true.
The opposite to idealism is called realism (perceptual realism) - the idea that matter is primary to mind
or spirit. Both idealism and perceptual realism talk a lot about mental events, and so to many
philosophers, mental events constitute most or all of philosophy's subject matter. Edmund Husserl

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(born in what is now the Czech republic in 1859) set the field of philosophy as being concerned with
mental events, and called this view Phenomenology. Husserl's aim was to make philosophy a strict
science, and he saw the pre existing philosophy as borrowing methods and foundations from natural
sciences. Undoubtedly he was right to withdraw philosophy from encroaching on physics and other
sciences, but it is now clear that he instead borrowed the subject matter of psychology.
Philosophy as identical with logic, and analysis as its method
In moving against the super science model of philosophy, and limiting philosophy to a science of a priori
propositions, not distinguishable from logic, Bertrand Russell in this century built on the realisation
that geometry is logical and that we do not know a priori from geometry that the parallel postulate is
true of the external world. But Russell was also moving against the tendency of many previous
philosophers to construct a system from their thoughts and speculations. He thought that philosophers
had from a limited starting point derived ideas about many varied fields such as politics, ethics, and
theory of knowledge. He was concerned that they came to believe that, if the foundation of the system
was good, all the ethical, political, or epistemological products would be good. He felt they were
sometimes not so good, or at times very much mistaken. He substituted a piecemeal approach to
reaching philosophical solutions, with two problems not necessarily using the same methods of solution.
Reactions to encroachment on science by greatly limiting the scope of philosophy
The discovery of non Euclidean geometries showed that logical argument was not as strong at proving
things about the real world as had been thought for 2000 years. While physics became strong enough in
its own right, from the time of Galileo and Newton, to separate from philosophy, psychological
discussions continued in philosophy up to the start of this century. We have seen how Bertrand Russell
sought to strip scientific matters, that is, those open to physical survey or experiment, from philosophy.
At the turn of the last century psychology was beginning its independence. In ways psychology was the
last object science still held within philosophy. For many centuries philosophers, from an armchair
position, had commented or speculated on such matters that were open to experiment or examination.
Partly because of this, the logical positivists, such as Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle, said that
philosophy should be limited to formulating the logical syntax of the sciences. This means setting out, by
logic, what type of things it is reasonable, permissible, or logical to say. The logical positivists would say
that any detail about the real world belongs to some "object science", and philosophy has no business
saying what any science should refer to.
Carnap and the logical positivists were also motivated by the competing schools of philosophy over the
preceding few centuries, and with the impossibility of deciding between their competing views. One of
the conclusions they reached was that many disagreements were because people have always used, and
we still use, languages that are not logically exact: so that some disagreements are because the debaters
are using the same words to refer to different things. The logical positivists therefore argued for a
logically purer language, indeed several logically distinct languages. They required these languages to
be in a hierarchy. Thus there would be an object language, in which we could talk about material
objects such as tables and people. There would be at least one level of logical language above that, in
which object-words are not used, but only logical ideas or propositions from the lower language would
be referred to. They felt that many past philosophical problems had been combinations of object
problems and logical problems, and that this was why the arguments had gone astray.
The logical positivists saw a place for science, object sciences as Carnap calls them. They also saw a
place for logical argument about what types of proposition science could contain, and this was the
subject matter of philosophy. This plan excluded many questions hitherto seen as part of philosophy,
which the logical positivists considered to be pseudo-problems. These included ethical and theological
questions. Russell shared the logical positivists' call for several logically distinct types of language, but
did not agree with their designation of so many questions as pseudo-problems.

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Philosophy as inquiry without being tied to a particular method

John Dewey (USA 19th to 20th century) saw a problem with the aim of philosophy in finding more
certain knowledge. Dewey saw that the philosophers recognised that the ordinary, common, knowledge
was not reliable, and they were seeking to construct reliable knowledge on sound foundations. But he
saw that what they hoped to end up proving as true was the existing knowledge. He thought that,
instead of looking in an open minded manner to prove whatever would turn out at the end of the proofs,
the philosophers typically hoped to prove to be true much of the existing beliefs. Dewey thought the
existing beliefs came from emotional or tribal origins. He commented that philosophical discussions
happen in a social context, and he felt that philosophical problems should be solved in a social context.
He saw the aim of philosophy as clarifying problems. This is a valuable idea, attempting to save
philosophy from interminable fruitless arguments, as have happened. However Dewey seems to
withdraw philosophy from giving any rulings on the truth or relative truth of propositions.

Summary of the main philosophical problems

I think the most basic problem of philosophy has been about what type of knowledge is the most
reliable, and how we obtain it. The main solutions that have been offered have been: that knowledge
comes from pure thought or reason; that it is derived from sense data; that it comes from an interaction
between an idea or theory and sense data. There have been several varieties of these views. There has
been the idea that reason or thought can give knowledge of the external world, and the denial of this
view.
To many people, the most important philosophical problem has been ethics or morals. I have not
discussed the major views on ethics or morals as I feel it is quite a large subject and needs a lecture of
its own. The solutions offered have included: that morals can be derived or read from nature, typically
biology or human biology; that morals derive from some thing or being above nature (supernatural
origin); that morals are entirely a matter of human choice. There have, again, been a few varieties
among each of these.
Philosophy began with the problem of what is the nature of the world, or what it is composed of.
Solutions have been- that it is composed of many things; or of one thing; matter being primary; or
spirit being primary; a dualism of matter and mind, with a form of interaction between them.
Philosophy has also included logic, and has taken an interest in mathematics and its relationship to the
external world. This includes the relationship of general or class words to words that refer to singular
objects.

Present status of the main philosophical problems

The field in which pure reason, without any base in sense data, can give knowledge is now recognised as
much smaller than was thought by the ancient philosophers. It does not give any knowledge about the
external world, except about what is logically possible. The model of interaction between theory and
sense data is the most widely supported source of knowledge.
In morals or ethics, I believe all of the solutions described above still have many adherents.
Many parts of the question on the nature of the world have been removed from philosophy and are now
part of various sciences. The mind- body problem (mind- brain in some people's version) has several
competing solutions. Idealism has now quite few adherents.

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The question of where the colour of an object resides, and how we perceive it, in spite of varied
illumination of the object, has been taken out of philosophy and has a physiological solution.
Mathematics is now seen as a very extended and elaborate form of language, and not an aspect of the
external world.
Philosophy has not answered the questions about purpose for the world or for humans. In this field the
ability of philosophy to provide answers is seen as very much less than in ancient times.
In the general quest for certain knowledge, many criticisms of past philosophical solutions have moved
us to see that the range of subjects on which certain knowledge can be obtained is a lot less than was
thought or hoped for in antiquity.
_______________________________________

Peter O'Hara 1997

Peter O'Hara is a psychiatrist working in the Mid Western Health Board's hospital and community
psychiatric services in Limerick and has a long time interest in philosophy.
This paper was delivered to the Limerick Philosophical Society on Thursday 29 May 1997.

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