PHILOSOPHY 



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PHILOSOPHY 



PHILOSOPHY: THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM 



A. D. Lindsay, H.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford 



This work contains articles on the various systems of philosophy, e.g. 



Epicureanism ; Pragmatism ; Scepticism ; Stoicism. See biographies 



of the great philosophers, e.g. Aristotle ; Descartes; Green; Hegel; 



Kant ; Plato ; Socrates ; also Ethics ; Metaphysics 



Philosophy is a Greek word, in- 

 vented by Socrates in the 5th 

 century B.C. to express the dis- 

 tinctive attitude which he took up 

 to knowledge. His scientific con- 

 temporaries and predecessors had 

 called themselves Sophoi wise 

 men ; he called himself a philo- 

 sopher one fond of or seeking 

 wisdom to show> that, while he 

 believed in wisdom or science, he 

 did not think he or anyone else had 

 attained it. The philosopher ia 

 someone who is seeking wisdom, 

 and has begun by a consciousness 

 of his own ignorance and philo- 

 , sophy is the name for the inquiries 

 he makes, or for his thinking. 



In the original meaning of the 

 word, then, there was little dis- 

 tinction between philosophy and 

 science, except that the suggestion 

 of seeking conveyed by the word 

 philosophy made men give the 

 name science to those inquiries 

 where knowledge was attained and 

 certain, philosophy to those where 

 the search for knowledge was more 

 obvious than its results. In this 

 sense of the word philosophy, the 

 sphere of philosophy contracts as 

 that of science widens. This is to 

 some extent borne out by history. 

 We find the Greeks, or even a man 

 like Descartes in the 17th cen- 

 tury, including under philosophy 

 what we should now certainly call 

 science. This suggests that in 

 time, as the methods of science 

 are applied to every sphere of 

 human inquiry, there will be no 

 sphere left for philosophy. 

 Meaning of Philosophy 



But the real implications of 

 Socrates' new word were rather 

 different. When he said that he was 

 ignorant, he did not mean that he 

 was ignorant of certain things 

 which the mathematician knew, 

 but that the mathematician did 

 not know as much as he thought 

 he knew ; that the so-called know- 

 ledge of his contemporaries was not 

 really knowledge. Philosophy, 

 therefore, with him and his suc- 

 cessors, involved a criticism of 

 existing knowledge, an attempt to 

 say what it all comes to. In a 

 famous passage in the Republic, 

 Plato contrasts the methods of the 

 scientist and of the philosopher by 

 saying that the scientist starts 

 with certain assumptions which he 

 takes for granted and does not 

 examine, while the business of the 

 philosopher is to criticise the as- '" 

 sumptions of the separate sciences 



and from such criticism to come to 

 an understanding of the whole. 



This suggests two characteristics 

 of philosophy. In the first place 

 its method is reflective. It takes 

 as its data not the data of the 

 sciences, but the sciences them- 

 selves. In the second place it is 

 concerned with things as a whole, 

 while the sciences are depart- 

 mental. 



Science, Religion, and Morality 



The impulse to philosophy arises 

 from the apparent contradictions 

 of different spheres of human 

 inquiry. Thus in Greece in the 5th 

 century B.C. the growth of science 

 seemed to threaten the moral basis 

 of the Greek city state science 

 and morality seemed in conflict 

 and the great Greek philosophers 

 were men who cared for both science 

 and morality. Their task was to 

 show that if the real nature of each 

 was understood, and what each 

 implied, the contradiction vanished. 

 It came only from one or the other 

 inquiry overstepping its proper 

 bounds. So again in the 17th cen- 

 tury the new applied mathematical 

 sciences, with tluir assumptions 

 of a world infinite in time and 

 space, rigorously determined and 

 mechanical, seemed to destroy 

 the foundations both of religion 

 and of the moral life. The work of 

 the philosophic movement of the 

 17th and 18th centuries, which 

 began with Descartes and cul- 

 minated in Kant, was to resolve 

 this apparent contradiction. It 

 did so by seeking first to determine 

 the real nature of science and of 

 religion and morality, and by so 

 doing to determine their bounds. 



The general lines of the solution 

 are always the same. Contradic- 

 tions arise only because men en- 

 gaged hi these different inquiries 

 have not properly understood what 

 they have been doing. They have 

 not made clear to themselves the 

 principles on which their inquiries 

 are based, and so have gone outside 

 their proper task. Religion has 

 talked science, talked it on religious 

 lines and therefore badly, and given 

 its bad science an authority it did 

 not deserve. Science has talked 

 religion, on scientific methods and 

 therefore badly, and given to its 

 bad religion an authority it did not 

 deserve. We can only understand 

 what we are doing in these differ- 

 ent spheres of life by reflecting on 

 the principles or assumptions on 

 which our different activities are 



based. This is the task of philo- 

 sophy. Thus the business of moral 

 philosophy is not to say what is 

 right or wrong that is done in 

 moral judgements but to under- 

 stand what morality is ; as the 

 business of the philosophy of art 

 is not to say what is beautiful or 

 ugly, but to understand what we 

 are doing when we call things beau- 

 tiful or ugly, and what the relation 

 of that activity is to morality or to 

 science. Philosophy, therefore, is 

 always concerned with the prin- 

 ciples or assumptions which lie 

 behind different branches of human 

 activity. It is not concerned with 

 the details of those activities, 

 except in so far as they tlhstrate 

 the principles. It is not the busi- 

 ness of philosophy, for example, to 

 examine or to do over again the 

 work of the physicist, but when 

 the progress of physics makes it 

 necessary to revise the assumption 

 on which physics has so far been 

 based, as has happened recently 

 in the discoveries of Einstein, 

 then philosophy is concerned. 

 For criticism of assumptions is its 

 business. 



This concern with first principles 

 is what gives philosophy what is 

 called its a priori character. This 

 does not mean, as is sometimes 

 supposed, that philosophy has no 

 relation to facts, and is spun out 

 of the philosopher's inner con- 

 sciousness. All great philosophies 

 have started with the consideration 

 of special problems presented by 

 the sciences of their day, and have 

 been built on knowledge of and 

 reflection upon those sciences. It 

 has, however, sometimes been 

 thought that it is possible by a 

 study of the first principles implied 

 in science and other human acti- 

 vities to build up a knowledge of 

 the real nature of the universe, 

 which goes beyond and may have 

 very little to do with our actual 

 knowledge of different facts. 

 Idealism and Materialism 



Idealism, as sometimes under- 

 stood, and materialism, are philoso- 

 phies which profess to show, by rigor- 

 ous reasoning, that the only reality 

 is mind or matter. It was the great 

 achievement of Kant to show in his 

 Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, that 

 in such a dogmatism, as he called 

 it, philosophy was overstepping the 

 limits of its function, and using 

 conceptions, which were only 

 applicable to what we experience, 

 outside the bounds of experience. 

 Philosophy, he held, should be 

 confined to cricitism, to the under- 

 standing of the relation of the 

 sciences and other forms of 

 human activity to one another. 

 ( Nevertheless, just because philo- 

 sophy ia reflective in the sense 



