Introduction

In many a village around the world, in societies traditional and industrialized, people gather in the evenings to talk. In pubs and bars, under trees in the open air in the tropics, and around fires in the far north and south of our globe, people exchange tales, tell jokes, discuss issues of the day, argue about matters important and trivial.

It would be natural enough, as we built a picture of those values, theories, and concepts in another culture, to describe what we were doing as coming to understand the philosophy of that culture. In one sense, the philosophy of a person or a group is just the sum of the beliefs they hold about the central questions of human life— about mind and matter, knowledge and truth, good and bad, right and wrong, human nature, and the universe we inhabit.

At their most general, as I say, these beliefs are naturally called “philosophy,” and there is nothing wrong in using the word this way. There is much continuity between conversation about these univer­sal questions—what we might call “folk philosophy”—and the kind of discussion that has filled the chapters of this book.

All human cultures, simple or complex, large or small, industrial or preindustrial, have many of the concepts we have discussed—or, at least, concepts much like them. Issues about what is good and right, what we know and mean, what it is to have a mind and to think, can arise for people living in the simplest of societies (and, alas, can be ignored in the most complex ones).

But it is important, too, that there are discontinuities between folk philosophy and the discussions of this book. Philosophy, as it is practiced and taught in modern Western universities, is a distinctive institution that has evolved along with Western societies. I men­tioned toward the start of Chapter 4 that science—unlike minds and knowledge and language—has not existed in every human culture. The problems of the philosophy of science occur only in cultures that have the institution of science; and just so, most of the ques­tions raised in political philosophy and the philosophy matter only if you live—as not all human beings have lived—in a society organized as a state with a legal system.

The differences between folk philosophy and the discussions of this book are not, however, simply differences in subject matter. Along with the new problems of the philosophy of science and law, social change has also produced new ways of tackling the old prob­lems. One way to focus on what we have learned about the charac­ter of modern Western philosophy, the kind of philosophy that I have tried to introduce in this book, is to contrast it both with the folk philosophy of other cultures and with other styles of thought in our own culture. In doing this, it will help to have a name for the style of philosophical thought that I have been engaged in. I suggest that we call it “formal philosophy,” to contrast it with the informal style of folk philosophy.

In the next few sections I am going to contrast formal philosophy with the traditional thought of nonliterate cultures, with Western religious thought, and with science. Each of these contrasts will

allow us not only to learn more about philosophy but also to ask some important philosophical questions.

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