The special character of philosophy

What can we say we have learned, finally, about the distinctive style of philosophical work? The first lesson, as I argued in section 9.9, is that philosophy, even when it is answering apparently particular questions—“What is the difference between M and my mother?”— approaches them in the light of broadly conceptual, abstract consid­erations, even though it would be foolish to do philosophy without one eye on the empirical world.

Another lesson, confirmed many times in this book, is that there is no area of philosophy that is independent of all the others. The subject is not a collection of separate problems that can be addressed independently. Issues in epistemology and the philoso­phy of language reappear in discussions of mind, morals, politics, law, science, and—in this chapter and the last—of religion. Questions in morals—such as, when may we take somebody's prop­erty against their will?—depend on issues in the philosophy of mind—such as, Are interpersonal comparisons of utility possible?— and are further dependent on metaphysical questions—such as, What is consciousness? I have just argued in sections 9.10 and 9.11 that the question of free will and determinism illustrates this inter­dependence of the different areas of the subject very well.

What is at the root of the philosophical style is a desire to give a general and systematic account of our thought and experience, one that is developed critically, in the light of evidence and argument.

If the history of philosophy is anything to go by, one person's reflective equilibrium is another person's state of puzzlement. Cartesianism seemed to many seventeenth-century thinkers a rea­sonable way of understanding the mind and its place in the world. To modern behaviorists, on the other hand, and to functionalists it seems to raise too many philosophical difficulties. Perhaps the his­tory of the subject is better represented by the picture suggested by the great German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Hegel thought that the life of reason proceeded by a continuing sequence of ideas, in which the opposition between two positions might eventually be resolved by moving the debate to a new level. First, someone develops a systematic theory—which Hegel's prede­cessor, Fichte, called a “thesis.” Then it is challenged, Fichte said, by those who support the antithesis; finally, a new view develops that takes what is best of each to produce a new synthesis. Hegel's suggestion is that the new idea can be said to “transcend” the old debate, moving it to a higher level. That is arguably what we saw in the movement from Cartesianism to behaviorism to functionalism in the philosophy of mind; or from realism to emotivism to pre­scriptivism in moral philosophy. But this is not the end of the process. On an Hegelian view, a synthesis can itself become the the­sis for some new anti-thesis.

Hegel also thought, however, that this process was tending toward a final goal, in which philosophy approached ever closer to the absolute truth.

Since I have made use of Ramsey's idea of a Ramsey-sentence a number of times in this book, I am tempted to use it now one more time. For this whole book is an attempt to say what philosophy is by showing you what it is to do philosophy. So if you took the conjunc­tion of all I have said in this book, removed the word “philosophy” from the book, and replaced it with a variable, “x,” you could write “Philosophy is the x such that... “ in front of that conjunction and you'd have my answer to the question, “What is philosophy?” But perhaps that would be taking Ramsey's idea too far!

9.13