Introducing Philosophy

Here is a question that has no obvious answer: Is it ever right to break the law?

Take a moment and think about it. You probably have a view — most people do. But notice what happens when you try to defend that view. You immediately need to make some further claims: about what “right” means, about what laws are for, about whether there is some authority higher than the law that can override it. Each answer opens more questions. That’s not a failure. That’s what philosophical inquiry feels like from the inside.

Philosophy is what happens when you refuse to stop at the first answer. It is the practice of following questions wherever they lead — carefully, rigorously, and with a willingness to revise your position when the reasoning requires it. In that sense, it is less a body of knowledge than a set of habits: the habit of asking what we mean before we argue, of looking for hidden assumptions, of taking the strongest version of a position we disagree with seriously before rejecting it.

This course will not give you a list of correct philosophical answers. It will give you practice asking the right kind of questions — and tools for evaluating the answers that get offered.

Philosophy and science

One useful way to get a handle on what philosophy is: philosopher W. Russ Payne defines it as all of rational inquiry except for science. That might sound like a strange definition at first. It implies that philosophy and science are related but distinct — both involve reason and evidence, but they address different kinds of questions.

Science investigates the empirical world: what exists, how it behaves, what causes what. Philosophy investigates the questions that surround and underpin scientific inquiry itself — questions like: What counts as knowledge? What makes an argument good? What do we mean by cause? These aren’t questions a laboratory can answer, because the answers are assumed before the laboratory opens.

Payne’s definition also implies something important: philosophy can’t be replaced by science. The question of whether science covers all of rational inquiry is not itself a scientific question. That’s a philosophical one — and it’s a good example of the kind of question this course is built around.

How philosophy proceeds

If you want to know what philosophers actually do, here is a concise answer: they formulate and evaluate arguments. An argument, in the philosophical sense, is not a fight. It is a set of reasons offered in support of a conclusion. Philosophy is the practice of working out what those reasons are, whether they hold up, and what follows if they do.

This back-and-forth of argument and response — formulating a position, facing objections, revising, responding — is called dialectic. It is sometimes called the Socratic Method, and you will see it in action from the first pages of the first reading in this unit. Watch for it throughout the course. It is the engine that drives every text we will read.

Most philosophical questions fall into one of three broad areas. You don’t need to memorize these as categories — they are just a useful map for recognizing the terrain as you move through the course.

Metaphysics — What is it?

Metaphysics asks about the fundamental nature of reality. What exists? What is the relationship between mind and body? Does God exist? Does the past exist in the same way the present does? These are not questions science settles — they are questions about the framework within which science (and everything else) operates. You will encounter metaphysical questions most directly in Unit 2, when Descartes asks what can be known with certainty and what the mind actually is.

Epistemology — How do we know?

Epistemology asks about knowledge and justified belief. What is knowledge, as opposed to mere opinion? Can we ever be certain of anything? What makes a belief rational? Skepticism — the view that we cannot know as much as we think — is epistemology’s constant companion. You will meet it in Unit 2 with Descartes and again in Unit 3 with Hume, who raises skeptical questions about causation that have never been fully resolved.

Ethics — What should we do?

Ethics asks about how we ought to live, how we ought to treat others, and how we ought to organize our communities. It comes as a surprise to many students that these questions can be reasoned about at all — that morality is not simply a matter of what someone in authority commands. Philosophy takes seriously the possibility that moral questions have answers we need to discover, not just rules we need to obey. You will encounter this most sharply in Unit 1 itself, when Socrates faces the question of whether he should obey the law even when he believes it is unjust.

Before moving on to the Socrates & Plato content, watch this introductory lecture by Dr. Richard Brown. It covers many of the same ideas as the sections above — what philosophy is, how it differs from other disciplines, and why it matters — but in a conversational format that may make the concepts stick differently than reading does.

“What Is Philosophy?” — Dr. Richard Brown, Introduction to Philosophy, Lecture 1. Captions available via YouTube.