General characteristics and sources of disagreement[edit]
The problem of defining philosophy concerns the question of what all forms of philosophy have in common, i.e. how philosophy differs from non-philosophy or other disciplines, such as the empirical sciences or fine art. One difficulty is due to the fact that the meaning of the term "philosophy" has changed a lot in history: it was used in a much wider sense to refer to any form of rational inquiry before the modern age. In this sense, it included many of the individual sciences and mathematics, which are not seen as part of philosophy today.[1][2][3] For example, Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica formulating the laws of classical mechanics carries the term in its title.[1] Modern definitions of philosophy, as discussed in this article, tend to focus on how the term is used today, i.e. on a more narrow sense.[4] Some basic characterizations of philosophy are widely accepted, like that it is a critical and mostly systematic study of a great range of areas.[5][6][1] Other such characterizations include that it seeks to uncover fundamental truths in these areas using a reasoned approach while also reflecting on its own methods and standards of evidence.[7][8][9] Such characterizations succeed at characterizing many or all parts of philosophy, which is a wide discipline spanning across many fields, as reflected in its sub-disciplines termed "philosophy of...", like the philosophy of science, of mind, of law, of religion, or of pornography.[5][6][1][7] One difficulty for this type of approach is that it may include non-philosophical disciplines in its definition instead of distinguishing philosophy from them.[5][6][1][7]
To overcome these difficulties, various more specific definitions of philosophy have been proposed. Most of them are controversial.[6][1] In many cases, they are only accepted by philosophers belonging to one philosophical movement but not by others.[7][4] The more general conceptions are sometimes referred to as descriptive conceptions in contrast to the more specific prescriptive conceptions. Descriptive conceptions try to give an account of how the term "philosophy" is actually used or what philosophers in the widest sense do.[4] Prescriptive conceptions, on the other hand, aim at clarifying what philosophy ideally is or what it ought to be, even if what philosophers actually do often fall behind this ideal. This issue is particularly controversial since different philosophical movements often diverge widely in what they consider to be good philosophy.[4] They are often revisionistic in the sense that many presumed parts of philosophy, past and present, would not deserve the title "philosophy" if they were true.[10]
Some definitions of philosophy focus mainly on what the activity of doing philosophy is like, such as striving towards knowledge. Others concentrate more on the theories and systems arrived at this way.[7][11][1] In this sense, the terms "philosophy" and "philosophical" can apply both to a thought process, to the results of this activity in the form of theories, or even to contemplative forms of life reflecting such theories.[1][7][11] Another common approach is to define philosophy in relation to the task or goal it seeks to accomplish such as answering certain types of questions or arriving at a certain type of knowledge.
The difficulty in defining "philosophy" is also reflected in the fact that introductions to philosophy often do not start with a precise definition but introduce it instead by providing an overview of its many branches and subfields, such as epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics.[5][6][12][11] The discipline known as metaphilosophy has as one of its main goals to clarify the nature of philosophy.[10] Outside the academic context, the term "philosophy" is sometimes used in an unspecific sense referring to general ideas or guidelines, such as the business philosophy of a company, the leadership philosophy of an entrepreneur, or the teaching philosophy of a schoolmaster.[1]
Deflationism, essentialism, and family resemblance[edit]
An important distinction among definitions of philosophy is between deflationism and essentialism.[4] The deflationist approach holds that philosophy is an empty blanket term.[13] It is used for convenience by deans and librarians to group various forms of inquiry together.[14] This approach is usually motivated by the enduring difficulties in giving a satisfying definition. According to this view, philosophy does not have a precise essence shared by all its manifestations.[7][4][14] One difficulty with the deflationist approach is that it is not helpful for solving disagreements on whether a certain new theory or activity qualifies as philosophy since this would seem to be just a matter of convention. Another is that it implies that the term "philosophy" is rather empty or meaningless.[4]
This approach is opposed by essentialists, who contend that a set of features constitutes the essence of philosophy and characterizes all and only its parts.[4][15] Many of the definitions based on subject matter, method, its relation to science or to meaning and understanding are essentialists conceptions of philosophy. They are controversial since they often exclude various theories and activities usually treated as part of philosophy.[4]
These difficulties with the deflationist and the essentialist approach have moved some philosophers towards a middle ground, according to which the different parts of philosophy are characterized by family resemblances.[4] This means that the various parts of philosophy resemble each other by sharing several features. But different parts share different features with each other, i.e. they do not all share the same features.[16][17] This approach can explain both that the term "philosophy" has some substance to it, i.e. that it is not just based on an empty convention, and that some parts of philosophy may differ a lot from each other, for example, that some parts are very similar to mathematics while others almost belong to the natural sciences and psychology. This approach has the disadvantage that it leaves the definition of philosophy vague, thereby making it difficult for the non-paradigmatic cases to determine whether they belong to philosophy or not, i.e. that there is no clear-cut distinction.[4]
Based on method and subject matter[edit]
Two important aspects for distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines have been its topic or domain of inquiry and its method.[4][9] The problem with these approaches is usually that they are either too wide, i.e. they include various other disciplines, like empirical sciences or fine arts, in their definition, or too narrow by excluding various parts of philosophy.[4] Some have argued that its method focuses on a priori knowledge, i.e. that philosophy does not depend on empirical observations and experiments. Instead, such an approach bases philosophical justification primarily on pure reasoning, similar to how mathematical theory-making is based on mathematical proofs and in contrast to the scientific method based on empirical evidence.[11][4] This way of doing philosophy is often referred to as armchair philosophy or armchair theorizing since it can be done from the comfort of one's armchair without any field work.[10][4] But this characterization by itself is not sufficient as a definition, since it applies equally well to other fields, such as mathematics. Giving a more precise account of the method, for example, as conceptual analysis or phenomenological inquiry, on the other hand, results in a too narrow definition that excludes various parts of philosophy.[4]
Definitions focusing on the domain of inquiry or topic of philosophy often emphasize its wide scope in contrast to the individual sciences.[4] According to Wilfrid Sellars, for example, philosophy aims "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term".[18][19] Similar definitions focus on how philosophy is concerned with the whole of the universe or at least with the big questions regarding life and the world.[9] Such attempts usually result in a definition that is too broad and may include both some natural sciences and some forms of fine art and literature in it.[4] On the other hand, they may also be too narrow, since some philosophical topics concern very specific questions that do not directly deal with the big questions or the world as a whole.[4]
Because of these difficulties, philosophers have often tried to combine methodological and topical characterizations in their definitions.[9] This can happen, for example, by emphasizing the wideness of its domain of inquiry, to distinguish it from the other individual sciences, together with its rational method, to distinguish it from fine art and literature. Such approaches are usually more successful at determining the right extension of the term but they also do not fully solve this problem.[4]
Based on meaning, understanding, and clarification[edit]
Many definitions of philosophy see as its main task the creation of meaning and understanding or the clarification of concepts.[9] In this sense, philosophy is often contrasted with the sciences in the sense that it is not so much about what the actual world is like but about how we experience it or how we think and talk about it.[4] This may be expressed by stating that philosophy is "the pursuit not of knowledge but of understanding".[4] In some cases, this takes the form of making various practices and assumptions explicit that have been implicit before, similar to how a grammar makes the rules of a language explicit without inventing them. This is a form of reflective, second-order understanding that can be applied to various fields, not just the sciences.[4]
A conception of philosophy based on clarification and meaning is defended by logical positivists, who saw the "clarification of problems and assertions" as the main task of philosophy. According to Moritz Schlick, for example, philosophy is unlike the sciences in that it does not aim at establishing a system of true propositions.[4] Instead, it is the activity of finding meaning. But this activity is nonetheless quite relevant for the sciences since familiarity with the meaning of a proposition is important for assessing whether it is true. A closely related definition is given by Rudolf Carnap, who sees philosophy as the logic of science, meaning that it is concerned with analyzing scientific concepts and theories.[4] From the perspective of logical atomism, this clarification takes the form of decomposing propositions into basic elements, which are then correlated to the entities found in the world.[10][30][31] On this approach, philosophy has both a destructive and a constructive side. Its destructive side focuses on eliminating meaningless statements that are neither verifiable by experience nor true by definition.[10] This position is often connected to the idea that some sentences, such as metaphysical, ethical, or aesthetical sentences, lack a meaning since they cannot be correlated to elements in the world that determine whether they are true or false. In this sense, philosophy can be understood as a critique of language that exposes senseless expressions.[10] Its constructive side, on the other hand, concerns epistemology and philosophy of science, often with the goal of finding a unified science.[10]
Other conceptions of philosophy agree that it has to do with finding meaning and clarifying concepts but focus on a wider domain beyond the sciences.[4] For example, a conception commonly found in the analytic tradition equates philosophy with conceptual analysis.[11] In this sense, philosophy has as its main task to clarify the meanings of the terms we use, often in the form of searching for the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a concept applies to something.[32][33] Such an analysis is not interested in whether any actual entity falls under this concept. For example, a physicist may study what causes a certain event to happen while a philosopher may study what we mean when using the term "causation".[11] This analysis may be applied to scientific terms but is not limited to them.
From the perspective of ordinary language philosophy, philosophy has as its main enterprise the analysis of natural language.[10] According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, philosophy is not a theory but a practice that takes the form of linguistic therapy.[1][34] This therapy is important because ordinary language is structured in confusing ways that make us susceptible to all kinds of misunderstandings.[10] It is the task of the philosopher to uncover the root causes of such illusions. This often takes the form of exposing how traditional philosophical "problems" are only pseudo-problems, thereby dissolving them rather than resolving them.[10] So on a theoretical level, philosophy leaves everything as it is without trying to provide new insights, explanations, or deductions.[34]
The focus on understanding is also reflected in the transcendental traditions and in some strands of phenomenology, where the task of philosophy is identified with making comprehensible and articulating the understanding we already have of the world, sometimes referred to as pre-understanding or pre-ontological understanding.[4][35] The need for such an inquiry is expressed in Saint Augustine's remark concerning the nature of time: "I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled".[4] This type of understanding is prior to experience in the sense that experience of a particular thing is not possible without some form of pre-understanding of this thing. In this sense, philosophy is a transcendental inquiry into the a priori conditions of possibility underlying both ordinary and scientific experience.[36][37] But characterizing philosophy this way seems to exclude many of its sub-disciplines, like applied ethics.[4]
Others[edit]
Various other definitions of philosophy have been proposed. Some focus on its role in helping the practitioner lead a good life: they see philosophy as the spiritual practice of developing one's reasoning ability through which some ideal of health is to be realized.[38] Such an outlook on philosophy was already explicitly articulated in stoicism and has also been adopted by some contemporary philosophers.[38] A closely related conception sees philosophy as a way of life.[39][38] This is based on a conception of what it means to lead a good life that is centered on increasing one's wisdom through various types of spiritual exercises or on the development and usage of reason.[39][38][40] Such an outlook can already be discerned in ancient Greek philosophy, where philosophy is often seen as the love of wisdom. According to this characterization, philosophy differs from wisdom itself since it implies more the continued struggle to attain wisdom, i.e. being on the way towards wisdom.[1][7]
A closely related approach sees the principal task of philosophy as the development and articulation of worldviews.[4][5] Worldviews are comprehensive representations of the world and our place in it.[41] They go beyond science by articulating not just theoretical facts concerning the world but also include practical and ethical components, both on a general and a specific level. This way, worldviews articulate what matters in life and can guide people in living their lives accordingly.[42][43] On the worldview account of philosophy, it is the task of philosophers to articulate such global visions both of how things on the grand scale hang together and which practical stance we should take towards them.[4]
Other conceptions of philosophy focus on its reflective and metacognitive aspects. One way to emphasize the reflective nature of philosophy is to define it as thinking about thinking.[11] Another characterization of philosophy sometimes found in the literature is that, at least in principle, it does not take any facts for granted and allows any presupposition to be questioned, including its own methods.[7][11] This is reflected in the fact that philosophy has no solid foundations to build on since whatever foundations one philosopher accepts may be questioned by another.[11] Sokrates identified philosophy with the awareness of one's ignorance.[7] For Immanuel Kant, philosophical inquiry is characterized as "knowledge gained by reason from concepts" (Vernunfterkenntnis aus Begriffen).[44][1] According to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosophy is the science of reason.[7]