Bill's Notes

[Editor's Note: This post has been rewritten somewhat to improve clarity.]

So what's philosophy all about, anyway? Glad you asked. Here's an attempt to give a broad overview.

There are three main branches of philosophy: ontology, epistemology and ethics.

1. Ontology deals with this fact: A world exists, and that world is orderly. It is concerned with asking all the big questions about this fact: What is being? What is the nature of reality? What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of the order of the world? What is man? What is society? Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, or is it the community and the individual merely a constituent part? Is there a God? What is his nature? Ontology basically boils down to all the "What is ...?" questions.

2. Ethics deals with the question: How should I act? What is the proper way for people to behave? Obviously, your ontology affects your ethics. For example, if man is an animal, why should he be privileged above other animals? Is PETA correct that meat is murder? (Note: Paul Burgess has correctly noted in the comments that technically, ethics is subsumed under the branch of philosophy known as axiology, that is, the answer to the question: How do I make judgments, whether ethical, aesthetic, or otherwise?)

These two questions, and indeed, any question pursued far enough, leads to a third question. Hence, the third branch of philosophy, epistemology.

3. Epistemology deals with the question, "How do I know?" As you can tell, this is more fundamental than, "What is ...?" or "How should I act?" Because you don't know the answer to how do you know, you really can't answer any other question. "Is there a God?" is an ontological question. "How do I know there is a God?" is an epistemological question. If man is an animal, how do I know that he is an animal and not something above the animals?

These three questions, "What is ...?" "How do I know it?" and "How should I act (or how should I make judgements)?" are the key questions of philosophy. The attempt to answer these questions leads to other questions, which lead to other questions, arguments and counter-arguments, which form the history of philosophy.

Some particularly issues:

Immanuel Kant, for example, held that a purely rational epistemology (that is, you can reason your way to truth) is flawed because our brain depends on our sense organs for information, and we really can't be sure that anything outside of our sense organs exist.

Critical theorists hold that epistemology has failed — we simply cannot know how we know, and thus we don't know. There are only personal "truths," contingent and fluid, and they aren't real truths at all. In fact, since there is no truth, there is only power, and power relations. The attempts to declare one thing true is merely a mask for the exercise of power. Any attempt to declare a higher truth is a pretense — someone's reaching for your wallet.

That is, you declare something is in the interest of justice, but since you don't know what justice is, you are merely declaring what's just for you, or more correctly, for your race, class and gender group. And not only that, but you didn't come up with these concepts yourself — they are socially constructed and you just bought into them by not critically analyzing them. (Some say that critical theory is simply a series of ad hominem attacks on those in power.)

Thus critical theorists attempt to "deconstruct" arguments to show the power relations behind any argument, especially arguments in the past. This applies to literature in the sense that storytelling is deconstructed to show the power relations at play in the story. The Tempest is thus about Caliban, not Prospero, except for Prospero's "othering" of Caliban.

Many critical theorists also hold that man is an animal, who thinks not like an individual with free will, but is conditioned by the power relations of his community, and controlled by meta-narratives that keep him or her in line. (That is, your worldview, and abstract concepts, are socially constructed.) Thus, critical theories seek to expose these meta-narratives for the power grabs they are, and replace them with more "just" social relations. Hence, its support for race, class and gender analyses.

If you've read this far, you might note a sleight-of-hand — critical theorists have some absolutes, the first of which is that "we don't know" is an answer to the question, "How do we know?" If we don't know, then we know we don't know, which means we know something. Some critical theorists are honest enough about this to leave it open-ended, and to say, we can't even be sure we don't know.

Second, the power relations thing assumes an idea of justice — but what is justice? And how would we know? Especially if we can't know. And how do we know that the critical theorists aren't merely after a power grab of their own, especially considering they believe that power is all? (Ain't that a scary group of people to have in charge?)

*****

But enough of critical theorists. Let's move on to some other groups of epistemologists:

1. Empiricists employ the scientific method to determine what is NOT true. The focus is on finding a repeatable experience. As Einstein put it, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

2. Positivists. Basically, if the scientific method can't answer it, they don't ask it. Often, they focus on definitions. For example, a triangle is a geometric figure on a single plane that contains three sides. No big questions, just the little ones answered precisely, not necessarily accurately. (Accurate means true; precise means correctly measured.)

Note: You can be an empiricist and not a positivist.

3. Nominalists. When you try to answer the question, "How do you know?" you end up discussing abstract concepts, such as liberty, justice, freedom, and the like. You end up thinking about whether or not these concepts have any reality. So nominalists focus on the problem of universals. They hold that abstract concepts have no reality in and of themselves, but are merely names.

This conclusion is a bigger problem than it sounds. If there is no reality to the abstract concept of "freedom," then it means any damned thing we want it to mean. But if we hold that abstract concepts have a reality in another realm, then a natural moral order is possible.

Plato apparently realized the temptation of nominalism long before nominalism became popular, and created his theory of the forms to counter it. Plato held that abstract concepts are real, and that individual things in this world instantiate the abstract reality of the other realm. So a real-world apple instantiates the abstract idea of apple, which exists in the forms. It's the appleness of the apple that makes an apple an apple, not the fact that we call that fruit over there an apple.

Again, this is more important than it sounds, because the disease from which our culture suffers is largely caused by philosophical nominalism. You lose that appleness of the apple, and pretty soon, you have chaos.

Others opposed to nominalism include religious people hold that abstract concepts have reality in the mind of God. Most members of the "elite" are nominalists, and are wrong.

4. Rationalists. There may be a few dead-enders left. They haven't apparently gotten the message of what Hume and Kant did to their arguments. Rationalists hold that you can reason your way to truth. Um, yeah.

5. Mystics. These folks hold that man can experience truth directly, beyond reason and experimentation, and focuses on techniques for having those mystical experiences.

*****

Now, most of us aren't quite sure how we'd fit in, and of course, I've left out a gazillion categories and reduced the rest. This is meant merely to serve as a kind of map of the terrain, akin to a map of the world that says "continents," "water," and "Thar be dragons."

I know that I've struggled with philosophy, and only until I focused on the three questions, did I have any hope of thinking about it.

You should also know that almost every possible answer to these questions is already a philosophical school of some sort. It's your fault for showing up so late in history.

That's all.