Ask a Philosopher: I often get questions in emails about my blog or books. I have been replying to these on email but decided I might also start posting answers as part of a series “ask a philosopher.” Who wouldn’t want to ask a philosopher something?
Question: Why Study Philosophy?
Reply: Part of answering this question is knowing what is meant by “philosophy.” Sometimes this means something like learning the history of ideas, or learning how to play complicated mind games. Here I mean something different and I cover that in a video you can watch at this link. This does not necessarily translate into studying philosophy at a university to earn a degree. I will address this in another post.
Philosophy in the sense I am studying it begins with an attitude of the love of wisdom. This means it affirms that wisdom is attainable in contrast to what can be called “academic skepticism.” The Academy itself began in contrast to skepticism. Skepticism is the claim that no knowledge is possible. Instead, the professional teachers, called the Sophists, taught their students how to argue well for whatever personal conclusions they held. These might be for personal gain or for some professional office. Either way, it was taken for granted that knowledge was not possible and there were only personal opinions of varying complexity. If knowledge is not possible then there is no rational justification to study (it might be a personal hobby at most).
So step 1 in answering this question is that we study philosophy because we love wisdom and we believe wisdom is attainable in contrast to skepticism. Wisdom is both knowing what is good and knowing how to achieve what is good in life. Philosophy addresses questions like “what is good” and teaches the tools to critically analyze various answers for meaning. This is similar to what Plato did in founding the Academy, and can be called “classical philosophy,” but is dissimilar to what is done in much of “academic philosophy” today which looks more like academic skepticism.
In my book “Reason and Faith at Early Princeton” I look at the origins of Princeton and compare them to the origins of the Academy and think about similarities in progression from initial goals into academic skepticism. I consider the image of Cicero giving a lecture with the ruins of the Academy as a backdrop. There are common patterns that help explain this change. These include a lapse into false dichotomies including empiricism vs rationalism, hedonism vs virtue/deontology, and monism vs dualism. These are used by skeptics to argue that knowledge is not possible.
Why study philosophy? Because you love wisdom.