How to Do Philosophy

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| September 2007In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the
less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job
training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively
impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes
or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms
of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion.But I had some more honest motives as well. I thought studying
philosophy would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. All the people
majoring in other things would just end up with a bunch of domain
knowledge. I would be learning what was really what.I'd tried to read a few philosophy books. Not recent ones; you
wouldn't find those in our high school library. But I tried to
read Plato and Aristotle. I doubt I believed I understood them,
but they sounded like they were talking about something important.
I assumed I'd learn what in college.The summer before senior year I took some college classes. I learned
a lot in the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy
101. And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact. It was
my fault I hadn't learned anything. I hadn't read the books we
were assigned carefully enough. I'd give Berkeley's Principles
of Human Knowledge another shot in college. Anything so admired
and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have
a nice edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems
unlikely.The difference between then and now is that now I understand why
Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. I think I see
now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.WordsI did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. It
didn't work out as I'd hoped. I didn't learn any magical truths
compared to which everything else was mere domain knowledge. But
I do at least know now why I didn't. Philosophy doesn't really
have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other
university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must
master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various
individual philosophers have said about different topics over the
years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten
who discovered what they discovered.Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in
logic. I don't know if I learned anything from them.
[1]
It does seem to me very important to be able to flip ideas around in
one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of
possibilities, or when one idea is the same as another but with a
couple things changed. But did studying logic teach me the importance
of thinking this way, or make me any better at it? I don't know.There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The
most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of
freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned
that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that
lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But
there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with.
You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means
your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each
transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such
an operation. You have to imagine being two people.The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life
are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard. Even a concept as
dear to us as I. It took me a while to grasp this, but when I
did it was fairly sudden, like someone in the nineteenth century
grasping evolution and realizing the story of creation they'd been
told as a child was all wrong.
[2]
Outside of math there's a limit
to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad
definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise
meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well
enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work,
just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them
break if you push them far enough.I would say that this has been, unfortunately for philosophy, the
central fact of philosophy. Most philosophical debates are not
merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we
have free will? Depends what you mean by "free." Do abstract ideas
exist? Depends what you mean by "exist."Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical
controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure
how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized
this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than
becoming philosophy professors.How did things get this way? Can something people have spent
thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are
interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting
questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to
approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get
lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down
like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone
wrong.HistoryWestern philosophy really begins with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
What we know of their predecessors comes from fragments and references
in later works; their doctrines could be described as speculative
cosmology that occasionally strays into analysis. Presumably they
were driven by whatever makes people in every other society invent
cosmologies.
[3]With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition
turned a corner. There started to be a lot more analysis. I suspect
Plato and Aristotle were encouraged in this by progress in math.
Mathematicians had by then shown that you could figure things out
in a much more conclusive way than by making up fine sounding stories
about them.
[4]People talk so much about abstractions now that we don't realize
what a leap it must have been when they first started to. It was
presumably many thousands of years between when people first started
describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked "what is
heat?" No doubt it was a very gradual process. We don't know if
Plato or Aristotle were the first to ask any of the questions they
did. But their works are the oldest we have that do this on a large
scale, and there is a freshness (not to say naivete) about them
that suggests some of the questions they asked were new to them,
at least.Aristotle in particular reminds me of the phenomenon that happens
when people discover something new, and are so excited by it that
they race through a huge percentage of the newly discovered territory
in one lifetime. If so, that's evidence of how new this kind of
thinking was.
[5]This is all to explain how Plato and Aristotle can be very impressive
and yet naive and mistaken. It was impressive even to ask the
questions they did. That doesn't mean they always came up with
good answers. It's not considered insulting to say that ancient
Greek mathematicians were naive in some respects, or at least lacked
some concepts that would have made their lives easier. So I hope
people will not be too offended if I propose that ancient philosophers
were similarly naive. In particular, they don't seem to have fully
grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy: that
words break if you push them too far."Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers,"
Rod Brooks wrote, "programs written for them usually did not work."
[6]
Something similar happened when people first started trying
to talk about abstractions. Much to their surprise, they didn't

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