WHAT  IS PHILOSOPHY?

It may come as a surprise to many that anyone debates the question "What is philosophy?" Actually, this question is widely debated, especially by philosophers.

Why is this?

Philosophy is an ancient Greek word invented by the cult leader and thinker Pythagoras (582?-500? B.C.E.). It came from words meaning "love (of) wisdom," philos and sophia respectively. The word philosophy came to be applied not only to the things that Plato and later philosophers discussed, namely, justice, education, the role of the citizen and the state, and so on, but also about wise things that earlier thinkers, retrospectively also dubbed philosophers, had had to say about the origins and nature of the universe.

I''ve discussed what these earlier thinkers and sages had to say in the first part of my brief sketch on the history of metaphysics.

What was different about Greek philosophy, what differentiated it from faith-based "wisdoms" and religions around the world, was that philosophy always extensively involved reasoning. Cult leaders and seers like Pythagoras and Empedocles were only partly philosophers. When Pythagoras and his followers argued by analogy or by demonstration their beliefs, for example, about mathematics and harmony, they were behaving like philosophers. When they didn't, but merely made assertions without evidence or against the evidence, they were acting like religious leaders.

So philosophy came to be associated with what we call reason or reasoning. The subject of the reasoning could be anything. One could discuss the gods, society, justice, the ultimate nature of reality, or what stars were made of.

But this openness all changed when Christianity came on the scene.

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In Christianity certain truths were to be accepted on faith, and on faith alone. By faith one had to believe that human-born Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God, sharing a divine nature with Him; belief in Jesus' divinity would give one eternal life in Heaven. Those who did not believe in Jesus by faith, it was thought, would suffer at least mortal death and, perhaps, permanent separation from God; possibly, if they had been wicked, they would also suffer eternal damnation and torture in Hell.

As Christianity took over the Roman Empire in the fourth century C.E., Christianity became mandatory in the Empire. This partly came about through the strong influence of the major Christian theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who interpreted Jesus's remark "Suffer the little children to come unto me," as an order from Christ to the Church to force pagans to become Christians. Dissent from official Roman Christianity gradually became outlawed. The last schools of non-Christian thought in the Roman Empire were closed in the sixth century. The Church struggled to maintain unity by a program of persecuting heretics. Nevertheless, it began to split into factions quarreling over doctrine.

For centuries it was dangerous to debate critical points of Christian theology: one could be persecuted or killed. (The situation is similar in the Muslim world today.) For centuries learned Christian authorities did not debate their ultimate truths: the existence of God, the sonship of Jesus, the promise of resurrection and eternal life. These were to be taken on faith. Christian thinkers had what they felt were the more important tasks of conversion and confirmation. Pagans and believers alike had to be rid of all doubts to ensure their salvation.

But some Christian thinkers did have respect for some of the non-Christian Greek philosophers of centuries before. The Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas (circa 1224-1274) believed, or took for granted, that the earlier pagan philosophers had indeed been wise, but only about secular matters. So he tried to absorb the philosophy of Aristotle within Christianity.

Similarly, parts of the philosophies of other heathen thinkers were sometimes absorbed into new Christian frameworks.

Christians, after all, lived inside a mental world structured by Greek thought. The Christian gospels were even first written in Greek. If we examine the matter fairly, we can see that much of Christian belief in the soul derives from Plato, Aristotle, and similar philosophers. The Gospel According to St. John begins with a passage that clearly derives from the Greek concept of the Logos; that is, the hypothetical rational principle supposed to structure the Universe, as well as speech and reasoning. Christians' official astronomy was taken bodily from Greek natural philosophers like Ptolemy and Hipparchus. They took their medicine from Galen and Hippocrates. And after the Dark Ages (roughly 450-800 C.E.), Christians took much of their understanding of biology and the ultimate nature of the natural world from the works of Aristotle, recently rediscovered from the Muslims.

In Western Europe, philosophy was constricted to the Christian understanding of things until the 15th century. At that time an attitude began to prevail in Europe that much knowledge was yet to be discovered, and that the Church might occasionally even be in error. This developing belief caused the development of an interest in human anatomy and the spread of the anti-Ptolemaic astronomy of Copernicus. In the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, and the new science of Francis Bacon, lord Verulam, philosophy expanded beyond Christian limits.

So in the Renaissance philosophy gradually grew wider as a field of study. There were new developments in natural philosophy; it gradually came to be called natural science (meaning, natural knowledge).

By the early 19th century natural philosophy and natural science came simply to be called "science." The various fields of natural science became simply known as sciences.

So the concept of philosophy at this point narrowed. It moved away from the sciences. The natural sciences were now pursued by specialists. Philosophers attacked more general, vaguer, more speculative questions of thought.

One of the areas they discussed was the philosophy of (natural) science. What made a (natural) science a science, and not an area of technology or philosophy? What was the proper way to perform science? How could one establish a true fact in science? What is the proper role of induction in science? These questions led to the philosophies of positivism, pragmatism and logical positivism.

But throughout, philosophy has remained the human activity of reasoning deeply about experience and knowledge.

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Last modified: 5:06 AM 03/11/2002