What Is a Philosopher?
My good friend Chet has challenged me (at least I think it was me!) to help us understand
what a philosopher is. As he points out, in earlier centuries that might have been an easier
task because philosophers, as "lovers of wisdom," were often precisely those who advanced
our understanding of the natural world and of every other aspect of what we call "reality."
Admittedly, thinking about what a philosopher is or does in the contemporary world is more
difficult because the study of what used to belong to the domain of philosophical thinking
has split off over time and has been taken up by specialists in the other disciplines, what we
call today the natural and social sciences. So, Chet asks, what's left for philosophers to
think about? Why do we need philosophers at all anymore?
The answer, I think, has to do with the peculiar nature of philosophical thinking from its
origins. Philosophy, in the proper sense of that term, is concerned with examining,
clarifying, and questioning the fundamental assumptions of all our human activities and
inquiries. Philosophers ask: what are the fundamental assumptions of our social and political
lives? our institutions? our religions? our ethical stances? our art? our various modes of
inquiry? With respect to that last item, we might observe that the working physicist, to use
one example, proceeds with a method and a vocabulary but does not spend time examining
that method and vocabulary; that is what a philosopher does best.
It's the philosophers, and, yes, even those much maligned postmodern philosophers, who
remind the practitioners of the other disciplines that in the deep background of their
research are basic assumptions about who we are and what the world is that are not fixed
and eternal, but contingent and subject to modification or even radical revision. If history is
our guide, then the very assumptions that Chet the physicist proceeds with today are likely
to be viewed sometime in the future as no less quaint as Aristotle's assumptions appear to
us today! So, to put it simply, good philosophy keeps our unknowing in view, and therefore
keeps us thinking, keeps us questioning, keeps us wondering. Good philosophy keeps us
unsettled in our knowing -- and, remarkably enough, it's precisely in this way that
philosophy serves to "advance civilization."
http://blog.sciencemusings.com/2010_05_01_archive.html