The professor scolded the wag: 'We are discussing philosophy, not natural sciences!'
Does that little cross-chat mean anything to you?
Why did the professor see his first question as a philosophical one?
Why did he claim his student had asked a non-philosophical question?
And IS there any real difference between a scientific question and a philosophical one?
If you can answer these questions you already have a 'feeling' for philosophy, hopefully by the end of this easy course you will be able to grasp the powerful 'science of thought' which it in fact entails.
So what IS philosophy?
Lets start with Pythagoras - born nearly 600 years before Christ - who first gave us the word when he spoke about: 'Philia tes sophias.' - Love of Wisdom.
He was good at hard sums and natural sciences too; in fact he was a great mathematician. You could almost say he was the first maths teacher (Remember Pythagoras's theorem?). He also discovered the relationship between the pitch of sounds and the length of vibrating strings. He studied astronomy, too - such as it was at a time before telescopes. But he believed in the transmigration of souls and founded a 'religion', perhaps because he perceived a higher order of 'rules'. Actually, only a tiny handful of the Greek thinkers mixed formal religion with science thereafter; these were the emmanationists who believed that all matter issued from a natural deity (Pantheism). Nevertheless the underlying premise of their sciences was the inevitability (or to use a philosophic term, necessity) of cosmic motion. This implied religion remained until Bishop Tempiere employed the truths of Christian Revelation to discard the concept of natural necessity. (Read Pierre Duhem's Le Systeme du Monde). It is easy to scoff at those who did mistake nature for God, but imagine the sense of astonishment when the huge ebb and flow and flux of the material cosmos around suddenly stopped as it were and men noticed that EVERYTHING seemed to 'obey' a fixed law. It was Creation by numbers! It was like looking at a flowing, interminably changing river and then, as if by magic, noticing that it was one big perfect machine or engineering structure, working to a design that never changed. Suddenly nothing was accident. Everything was designed and had a purpose. In fact Pythagoras was gaping at nature and meaning in an even more exciting intellectual period than the present day when mathematicians seem to be taking over from theologians and are proposing the unlikelihood of accidental or random 'creation'. Should you be now be surprised by some other modern thinkers who argue from a standpoint of chaos? CAN one argue from 'chaos'? We'll look at these factions later.
Incidentally it is worth noting in passing that Pythagoras did not come from a position of primitive religion or pagan magic to propose meanings for nature and science but rather from an understanding of nature and science which led him into a realm composed of both certainty and mystery; certainly towards what he felt was something apart and quite sacred.
Yin and Yang, from ancient China, the metempsychosis or transmigration of souls of the Indian Brahmins, the theory of 'the music of the spheres' and the Golden rule of Ancient Greece, the ancient Hebrews who claimed to speak personally to one God; they all grew and twisted into the first roots of man's longing to understand his world, his hunger for a true and accurate Wisdom. Sorcery and fantasy jostled intellectual rigour and sheer wonder and the ensuing mix and muddle of men wishing to be wise often made magic of the sacred and profaned the secular.
The ancient groundwork IS important before a full understanding can be offered, but I shall return to the early thinkers a little further on. Right now we must leap ahead to what is now usually understood by Philosophy and its distinction from the wonderful physical sciences where men seem to forget that they were a long time learning how to observe natural phenomena accurately and test their theories rigorously. Remember, science began in the discipline of philosophy and until very recently was considered to be at its centre. We may well have to consider how they have almost drifted apart today.
But philosophy has NOT died; and as modern men begin to wonder if they have become technological giants at the expense of corrupting into moral or ethical Lilliputians many universities are being asked to dust down their old Human Wisdom books.
Philosophy has a number of levels, in science, politics, law, even the application of what we call common sense. But at its highest level philosophy is the science of KNOWING.
This is called metaphysics and we will develop what we can know about that queen of intellectual attainment in the second and third series of lectures.
But we can say this about it right at the start. It is not psychology. That is the study of the mechanisms of thinking or sensing; the central nervous system and its chemistry; processes of thought and behaviour and in a more general sense, the study of the cause or initiation of any human action.
Philosophy can touch upon such things but it remains a higher science. Thus again we may say that Philosophy is not a science of behaviour but the science of knowing.
Knowing what? Knowing EVERYTHING? Oh dear, does that mean I have to learn fly-fishing too?
Sadly, for no pastime becomes a philosopher better than angling does, no.
Here is the most accurate description probably ever written about what philosophy is and what it oversees. The supreme French intellectual Jacques Maritain put it thus in his famous Introduction Generale a la Philosophie:
We will accompany Maritain in the search for a 'more profound definition, which reveals the nature of the object, we shall study in the sequence of concrete history the formation and genesis of what men have agreed to call philosophy'.
I want you to treasure these and the following few paragraphs. Keep them all your lives in a special place and never tire of testing the truth of what they tell you.
If there were no other text for students to study, this would suffice and ensure the safe passage of mankind and the security of his civilisation.
Science has lost the higher authority of metaphysics and has accordingly run wild to make monsters. We can tame these monsters and by gentle example help our fellow men to think straight as God equipped us so to think.
A brief history of observation and speculation
It would be arrogant to suppose that early men could not speculate or consider the possible outcome of actions. If we could transport an artist from the caves of Lascaux and invite him to join this class he might very well ask why and how and then consider what the outcome of his joining us might be. He would consider options and speculate. If you showed him the computer keyboard he might very well think: 'If I touched the A key, I wonder what might happen?' If he then saw the letter A appear on the screen he might very well consider the possibility that hitting the B symbol would bring up its clone on the monitor. Speculation is an element of what we call common sense (incidentally there are even special considerations ahead of us even as regards that old 'horse' and we may well discover that it is not as common as we all think it is) But it would also seem, if the evidence of history is accurate, that this basic faculty had not been raised by men into a system (as, say, the art of replicating ideas and observations on cave walls had been.). And in fact it is not until 800 years before Jesus Christ was born that men came, almost as suddenly as wanderers finding a straight road in the desert, upon what we call philosophy.
Until then, people had to rely on 'common sense' and tradition rather than upon any formal set of rules like logic or any agreed guidelines to the testing and development of ideas. There were no multiplication tables set down for example and no science of geometry at the early stage of our journey.
All people carry another problem; complex mental 'software' - if I may borrow from computer vocabulary. The human brain does not simply operate rationally like a pocket calculator. To reason clearly requires self discipline and concentration. Sloth corrupts thinking and it is easy to be lazy in an ill-organised society. Other possible enemies of clear reasoning are the emotions and senses. All excellent in a perfectly balanced person but, again, requiring control and discipline if they are not to rule and therefore disrupt the intellect. Yet another faculty may distort the operation of the brain when it should be its greatest help - the imagination. Too often, perhaps, we see this mental process primarily as a means of entertainment or diversion when, in fact, its first function is to project concepts and images in the mind in such a way that the reason may test and develop them in order to reduce complex ideas into plans for action. Thus a man may imagine a place where he may be warm and safe and ultimately crawl into a cave or build a castle. Incidentally, a far greater end of this wonderful power is the contemplation of perceived good, ultimately God.
It is improbable that God left our earliest ancestors without primitive notions of religion and the capacity to forge protective societies. Mankind can be described from observation as a religious and political animal.
The earliest people had knowledge, the power to increase it and the need to pass it on (education). But uncontrolled imagination has often conjured up unreasonable ideas like idols, and there is no doubt that it has been the cause of religious and social degeneration. On the other hand, it was even possible for people to ignore perfectly obvious truths on no other grounds than that it did not suit them to recognise them - much like the dwindling number of modern 'scientists' who choose to ignore overwhelming evidence from a multitude of disciplines which indicate that matter cannot (or at least did not) create itself. Some (very few) even insist on postulating theories contradicting the reasonableness of ethical rules, morality or even the very existence of the Creator. Without great effort, rigorous honesty, control of the emotions and feelings (moods, passions, appetites etc.) philosophy was not going to be erected as mankind's most wonderful enterprise.
So here is, more or less, what we know of the adventure and of the heroes at its centre.
Knowing by what medium, by what light?
Knowing by reason, by what is called the natural light of human intellect. This is a quality common to every purely human science (as contrasted with theology). That is to say, the rule of Philosophy, its criterion of truth, is evidence of its object.
The medium or light by which a science knows its objects is termed in technical language its lumen sub quo, the light in which it apprehends the object of its knowledge (itself termed the object, quod). Each of the different sciences has its own distinctive light (lumen sub quo, medium seu motivum formale) which corresponds with the formal principles by means of which they attain their object. But these different principles are alike in this, they are all known by the spontaneous activity of our intellect, as the natural faculty of knowledge, in other words by natural light of reason - and not like the principles of theology, by a supernatural communication made to man (revelation), and by the light of faith. We have now to consider the object quod of philosophy.
Knowing what? To answer this question we may recall the subjects which engaged the attention of the different philosophers whose teachings we have summarised. They inquired into everything - Knowledge itself and it's methods, being and non being, good and evil, motion, the world, beings animated and inanimate, man and God. Philosophy therefore is concerned with everything, is a universal science.
This does not however, mean that philosophy absorbs all other sciences or is the sole science, of which all the rest are merely departments; nor on the other hand that it is itself absorbed by the other sciences, being no more than their systematic arrangement. On the contrary philosophy possesses its distinctive nature and object, in virtue of which it differs from the other sciences. If this were not the case philosophy would be a chimera, and those philosophers whose tenets we have briefly sketched would have treated unreal problems. But that philosophy is something real, and that its problems have the most urgent claim to be studied, is proved by the fact that the human mind is compelled by its very constitution to ask the questions which the philosophers discuss, questions which moreover involve the principles on which the certainty of conclusions reached by every science in the last resort depends.
'You say' , wrote Aristotle in a celebrated dilemma, 'one must philosophise. ...Then you must Philosophise. You say one should not philosophise. Then (to prove your contention) you must philosophise. In any case you must philosophise.'
But how can philosophy be a special science if it deals with everything? We must now inquire under what aspect it is concerned with everything, or, to put it another way, what is it that which in everything directly and for itself interests the philosopher. If, for example, philosophy studies man, its object is not to ascertain the number of his vertebrae or the causes of his diseases; that is the business of anatomy and medicine. Philosophy studies man to answer such questions as whether he possesses a soul, if he has been made to enjoy God or creatures, etc. When these questions are answered, thought can soar no higher. No problems lie beyond or above these. We may say then that the philosopher does not seek the explanation nearest to the phenomena perceived by our own senses but the explanation most remote from them, the ultimate explanation. This is expressed in philosophical terminology by saying that philosophy is not concerned with secondary causes or proximate explanations; but on the contrary with first causes, highest principles or ultimate explanations.
Moreover, when we remember our conclusion that philosophy knows things by the natural light of reason, it is clear that it investigates the first causes or highest principles in the natural order.
When we said that philosophy was concerned with everything, everything which exists, every possible object of knowledge, our statement was too indefinite. We determined only the matter with which philosophy deals, its material object, but said nothing of the aspect under which it views that object, or the attributes of that object which it studies; that is to say, we did not define its formal object, its formal standpoint. The formal object of a science is the aspect under which it apprehends its object, or , we may say, that which it studies primarily and intrinsically and in reference to which it studies everything else; that which philosophy studies in this formal sense in things, and the standpoint from which it studies everything else, is the first causes or highest principles of things in so far as these causes or principles belong to the natural order.
The material object of a faculty, science, art, or virtue is simply the thing or subject matter - without further qualification - with which that faculty, science, art, virtue, deals. For instance, the material object of chemistry is inorganic bodies; of the faculty of sight, objects within our range of vision. But this does not enable us to distinguish between chemistry and physics, which is also concerned with inorganic bodies, or between sight and touch. To obtain an exact definition of chemistry we must define its object as intrinsic or substantial changes of inorganic bodies, and similarly the object of sight and colour. We have now defined the formal object (objectum formale quod), that is to say, that which immediately and of its very nature, or intrinsically and directly, or again necessarily and primarily (these expressions are equivalent renderings of the Latin formula per si primo), is apprehended or studied in things by a particular science, art, or faculty, and in reference to which it apprehends or studies everything else.
Thus philosophy, alone among the branches of human knowledge, has for its object everything which is. But in everything which is, it investigates only the first causes. The other sciences, on the contrary, have for their object some particular province of being, of which they investigate only the secondary causes or proximate principles. That is to say, of all branches of human knowledge philosophy is the most sublime.
It follows further that philosophy is in strictest truth wisdom, for it is the province of wisdom to study the highest causes: sapientis est altissimas causas considerare. It thus grasps the entire universe in a small number of principles and enriches the intellect without burdening it.
The account we have just given is applicable in an unqualified sense only to the first philosophy or metaphysics, but may be extended to philosophy in general as a universal body of sciences whose formal standing point is first causes (whether absolutely first causes or principles, the formal object of metaphysics, or the first causes in a particular order, the formal object of the other branches of philosophy). And it follows that metaphysics alone deserves the name of wisdom absolutely speaking (simpliciter), the remaining branches of philosophy only relatively or from a particular point of view (secundum quid).
Conclusion I. - Philosophy is the science which by the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things in their first causes, in so far as these belong to the natural order.
The difficulty of such a science is proportionate to its elevation. That is why the philosopher, just because the object of his studies is the most sublime, should personally be the most humble of students, a humility, however, which should not prevent his defending, as it is his duty to do, the sovereign dignity of wisdom as the queen of sciences.
The perception that the sphere of philosophy is universal led to Descartes (seventeenth century) to regard philosophy as the sole science of which the others were but parts; Auguste Comte, on the contrary, and the positivists generally (nineteenth century), sought to absorb it in the other sciences, as being merely their 'systematisation'. It is evident that the cause of both errors was the failure to distinguish between the material and formal object of philosophy.
Philosophy of Aristotle and St Thomas
Philosophy and the corpus of other sciences have the same material object (everything knowable). But the formal object of philosophy is first causes, of the other sciences secondary causes.
Descartes. Auguste Comte.
Philosophy absorbs the other Sciences absorb sciences - is the whole of philosophy - there is no science. philosophy.We said above that philosophy is a science, and that it attains certain knowledge. By this we would not be understood to claim that philosophy provides certain solutions for every question that can be asked within its domain. On many points the philosopher must be content with probable solutions, either because the question goes beyond the actual scope of his science, for example in many sections of natural philosophy and psychology, or because of its nature it admits only of a probable answer, for example the application of moral rules to individual cases. But this element of mere probability is accidental to science as such. And philosophy yields a greater number of certain conclusions of metaphysics, than any other purely human science.