Doing Philosophy summary

Once the natural sciences had established their usefulness in the study of the natural world, a seismic shift would take place in philosophy, which needed to carve out a new place for itself if it was going to survive in a changing world.

This shift would become known as the linguistic turn. It was during this period, at the turn of the twentieth century, that the focus of philosophy moved away from discussions about the nature of worldly things to discussions about the language we use to talk about them.

In much the same way that scientists devise physical experiments to test their hypotheses, philosophers devise thought experiments to test theirs.

A thought experiment is like a little story that puts a theoretical problem into context. It could be a possible scenario or a fanciful one; it doesn’t really matter.

Argumentation is a favorite pastime for philosophers. It’s considered a sign of success if a philosophical lecture breaks out into heated debate, and many lectures will pit two speakers against each other and have them duel it out as if in gladiatorial combat. From the outside, it might seem like philosophers have a perverse desire to have their work attacked and torn to shreds. But it’s all part of a timeworn process, going back to the very beginning of philosophy.

The combative element of philosophical debate is really just for the sake of performance, but it does serve a purpose: it helps to improve the theorist’s arguments. The process of defending their ideas from each other forces both parties to revise and modify their assumptions, buttressing their theories against their opponent’s attacks. 

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates inaugurated the western philosophical tradition with his famously paradoxical utterance, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Many centuries later, the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes would launch the modern philosophical tradition by casting into doubt all that we think we know, including the existence of reality itself.

So philosophers have a penchant for doubting. It’s something they do a lot, doubting that our beliefs are true, doubting that our arguments are valid and doubting that our perceptions are accurate. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume even argued that we have no reason to be sure the sun will rise tomorrow.

The achievements of the sciences are undeniable. Science has made rapid progress in the relatively short time it has existed. By comparison, philosophers seem to be discussing the same questions people have been asking for thousands of years, such as “What is ‘the good life?’” Whether they’re asking the wrong questions or using the wrong methods, philosophers just can’t seem to produce definitive answers.

Well, this is another stereotype about philosophy that needs to be dispelled.

The experimental methods of the sciences and the armchair pontification of philosophy couldn’t be further apart, could they? Well, mathematicians come up with their conclusions from their office chairs, but their results aren’t considered any less scientific.

The truth is, the philosopher has to struggle against powerful stereotypes in the public imagination. Throughout history, philosophers have been described variously as hermits, spiritual gurus and political polemicists.

Even today, it's normal for first-year philosophy students to begin their studies by reading Plato. So they really do start at the beginning, some two and a half thousand years ago. 

Compare this with the sciences, where no one expects students to read, for example, the dialogues in which Galileo argues for the merits of a sun-centered cosmology. Scientists generally just take past discoveries for granted so they can get on with the business at hand.

It might seem like philosophy is only a marginal and unimportant subject today, since philosophy departments are so small. The truth, however, is that the spirit of philosophy is a part of every discipline. After all, disciplines turn to philosophical methods when they question their most fundamental concepts.

Most disciplines aren’t as obsessed as philosophy is with challenging their assumptions all the time. Mostly, their work builds off of basic assumptions. But now and then, it proves useful to go back to basics. When this happens, their work becomes a lot less experimental and a lot more philosophical. This happens when, say, economists stop making models based on the assumption that agents always act rationally, and instead question how rational people really are, or question what it means to be “rational” in the first place.