Abstract
Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.
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Notes
See Hadot 1995, 49–70.
See for example Broad 1923, 16. The elucidation of concepts has taken many forms; indeed, A. J. Ayer (1970, 113ff) identified no fewer than eight ways in which it can and has been done. It is worth noting that not all analytic philosophers held such a view of philosophy; some (e.g. White 1975, 116) saw themselves as engaged on a process which aims to discover the necessary features of certain of our concepts, which makes philosophy straightforwardly truth-seeking in nature.
In acknowledging this objection, it’s not uncommon to find philosophers (e.g. Russell 1967, 90; Urmson 1967, 11–12) claiming that philosophy has at least served as midwife to the embryonic sciences of (for example) physics, biology, psychology and linguistics, and that these disciplines have made good headway with those questions that previously had been in the domain of philosophers. It is questionable, however, that this should count as a victory for philosophy, for even if the discipline can claim successful offspring this does not prevent philosophy itself being a perennial underachiever!
This is not to say that the truth-seeker might wish to reserve judgement on an outcome when he has reason to doubt its reliability, e.g. because a mistake was made in the process of enquiry etc.
This can be seen as a natural consequence of the Socratic exhortation to follow the argument wherever it leads. See Plato’s Euthyphro 14c, Phaedo 107b, and Republic 394d. Some philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill (1991, 52), have considered the Socratic injunction to represent the ideal for intellectual endeavours such as philosophy.
For example, because the chosen truth-seeking procedures are themselves inherently flawed, or were not followed correctly, or perhaps because—as some thinkers have argued—truth is itself arbitrary, or relative, or impossible for us to attain etc.
Of course the schema is very simplified, and would need to be fleshed out to capture the nuances present in real-life examples of rationalization. One possible way to flesh it out is along the lines of what Gary Gutting (2009, 192) refers to as the ‘convictional argumentation’ schema, a 5-step process that begins with a philosopher identifying a practice that he endorses ‘as unquestionably appropriate,’ building a theoretical framework around it, and then applying the theory to other problems.
See the account related in Sirat 1985, 241 f.
See also Bartlett 1989, 302.
See also Crutcher 2010, 438.
Bertrand Russell (2004, 427) famously denounced Aquinas for just this very practice. He wrote: ‘There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.’
For details of Descartes’ faith, early years, and education, see Gaukroger 1995, 15–67.
Russell (2004, 84) once claimed that this was true of ‘all philosophers’ in the field of ethics: ‘One of the defects of all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they already know the conclusions to be reached.’ However Russell offered no evidence for this assertion.
Amongst ‘pre-existing beliefs and opinions’ we ought to include personal biases and prejudices. According to Karl Popper (1975, 48), ‘All men and all women…have…philosophical prejudices. Most of these are theories which they unconsciously take for granted, or which they have absorbed from their intellectual environment or from tradition.’
An anonymous referee makes the following point: ‘Philosophical papers in journals are not stretches of doing philosophy, they are reports of the results of doing philosophy.’ Although intended as an objection, I am not convinced that it can be, because it is precisely the point in question. In the two examples that follow, that of Searle and Waller, the reader should judge for himself/herself whether the practices described are indeed the results of doing philosophy (understood as truth-seeking), or rather, as I contend, mere attempts to rationalize pre-existing beliefs.
It is worth noting that this view is much more contentious than Searle seems to think. To the claim that animal consciousness is obvious, Susan Blackmore (2003, 168) retorts ‘This is not obvious.’
He mentions in this regard (536) accounts developed by Robert Kane, Roderick Chisholm, Daniel Dennett, and Harry Frankfurt, amongst others.
And has received it, of course, though the explanations offered vary in quality quite considerably.
A variation of this objection would charge that philosophical theories developed by philosophers engaged in rationalizing rather than truth-seeking are worthless because they must be false. The obvious retort here is that it does not follow at all that such theories must be false; in fact there is no logical reason why a theory with such origins cannot be true, although we might justifiably be surprised if it were true, since its author did not craft it with truth in mind (consequently, then, if it did turn out to be true, this would be more by accident than by design).
I would like to thank P. M. F. Clarke, Raif’hār Doremítzwr, and an anonymous Philosophia referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Strickland, L. Philosophy and the Search for Truth. Philosophia 41, 1079–1094 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9426-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9426-5