>>>As part of the re-launch of my blog, I’ve decided to create a couple of regular post series. The first of these is “philosophical lectures.” The idea is this: I imagine I’ve been given a philosophy 101 class to teach and have to come up with material. I hope to be able to write 35+ posts of substantial length, not long enough that they would take an entire class period to read aloud, but long enough to take up a good chunk of the class period before going to questions. For readers who aren’t professional philosophers or in training to be one, it makes sure I’m giving them accessible stuff on core philosophy, on a regular basis. For me, it’s a way of stretching myself as a writer and philosopher, figuring out what core areas of philosophy I need to brush up on.<<<

The topic of this first lecture is "what is philosophy?" Some philosophy professors just throw up their hands when it comes to this question, but I'm going to claim to have an answer or two. My first answer is this: try forgetting that you're in a philosophy class, and just think of this as a class about arguing about things. Nothing in particular, just things that people argue about all the time: religion, ethics, politics, science.

Superficially, this sounds like it could be a class in the English or communications department. I'd like to take the opportunity to say something about English professors. How many of you are familiar with Jon Stewart and the Daily Show? How many of you know about his appearance on Crossfire? When he went on Crossfire, the expectation was that he'd just be cracking light jokes, but instead he started tearing into the mainstream media. One of his comments was this:

I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad. I felt that that wasn’t fair and I should come here and tell you that it’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America.

That’s about how I feel about English teachers: It’s not so much that what they do is bad, it’s that it’s harming America.

Here’s why: when you learned persuasive essay writing in high school you probably learned about how to structure your essays. You learned about how to sound sophisticated. You may have been told things like “talk about what the other side has to say because it makes you sound more sophisticated.” You were probably taught how to go into the library and find books that backed up what you said and then work that into your essay. If you major in communications, you might get into studying in depth what techniques are most effective in sounding convincing, whether in private communication or a national PR campaign. What missing here, though, is a concern for having what you say actually be true. It would be an exaggeration to say English teachers never talk about good reasoning, but that’s not where the emphasis is.

In this class, in many cases you won’t be graded for getting the right answer. You can be expected to know what people have said about various big issues, but when it comes to what the correct position is on those issues, we’re in territory where even professional philosophers disagree, so there’s no point in insisting freshmen get it right. What I will be looking for is signs that you’re developing the ability to tell good arguments from bad ones. That’s the ideal, I won’t pretend that on essays and tests regurgitation of pros and cons discussed in class won’t get you far. Regurgitate in a way that convinces me you actually understand the material, and you’ll get a B. However, if you want the A, you’ll have to be able to add a little original insight, showing you’re capable of thinking about these things for yourself.

Back to arguments: philosophers have this funny idea that the main purpose of arguments is not to convince people, but to get at the truth. This isn’t to say that philosophers don’t argue for normal reasons, things can get quite confrontational in journals and conferences, but that’s not supposed to be the focus. The thought is first, there are good arguments and bad ones. You’ve probably all heard of the idea of a fallacy. Arguments with fallacies are the exemplars of bad arguments. But an argument can be not very good for all kinds of reasons not limited to stock fallacies, and it’s not always clear what makes a good argument either. This makes telling good arguments from bad ones tricky. But–and this is the second key point, in understanding how arguments get you the truth–hopefully you can sit down to listen to everyone’s arguments, carefully examine them, pick out the good from the bad, maybe come up with some original ones. Once you’ve worked out what the good arguments are, if they favor one side, then that’s the side you should accept, that’s the side that’s more likely to be true.

This is really important. In the modern world, you have people making all kinds of disputed claims, about abortion, gays, taxes, health care, God, the afterlife, evolution, global warming, and for some reason, we let the debate be run by journalists. Your typical journalist majored in something like English, or communications, or of course journalism. And when you listen to what they have to say, it often becomes painfully clear that they have no idea how to figure out if what they’re saying is true. Their arguments can be offensively bad. Sometimes, they don’t seem to recognize there’s a difference between good and bad arguments, talking only about the effectiveness of communication tactics. Sometimes they even seem to have a rather shallow grasp of the idea that what they say could be true or false. My big, big, goal in this class is to teach you all how to spot that kind of stuff, and how to avoid doing it yourself. For this reason, though I’ll be talking a lot about what things philosophers have said on the issues we discuss, I’m also going to try to work in discussion of things that get said in newspapers and magazines and on TV. If you don’t see now that a lot of really bad arguments fly around in those media, hopefully you will by the end of the class.

Now that I’ve given you my highly opinionated take on the value of philosophy vs. the value of English, I should retroactively warn you that I’m going to be very free with my opinions here. I know this is going to be new to you, since in high school there’s all this concern with teachers abusing their power over students, and whatever, but here, you’re all adults now. You should be able to deal with hearing strong viewpoints, other than your own expressed. If you aren’t, all I can really say is “grow up.” I’ve seen professors in big lecture-style philosophy classes try to keep their opinions secret, but I’ve never seen it done well. I emphasize that no, you won’t be graded on agreeing with me, in fact, original responses to something I’ve said will get you far in this class. Again, while I’ll start most class periods just talking like I am now, there will also be time for questions, which includes challenges. Heck, I think humanities professors who can’t deal with challenges from students are pretty silly. If any of you have a prof like that from another class, try having some fun with them.

One problem you may have with this teaching style is this: you suspect there’s more to be said for another side of a dispute, but you’re not sure what. If you feel that way, I suggest looking for books in the university library, or taking more philosophy classes with other professors, or other departments. Philosophy professors may not be the best place to get another view of the English vs. philosophy thing.

Back to handling Q&A: I you all to take a look at an article from /The Onion/ a few years back: Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up. When I was an undergrad, I was that guy. I’d like to think I contributed something to the discussion, and while I think my professors appreciated it, I don’t think my fellow students always did. And I once had a fellow student who asked a lot of questions, and who even the professor found frustrating. You may be surprised to find I won’t tell you not to be that guy, but I will tell you to think carefully before being that guy.

Now I want to return to the subject of philosophy, because what I told you earlier about what philosophy is is actually pretty definitely false. Philosophy isn’t really about arguing about nothing in particular. There are some things that are traditionally considered philosophical questions, and some things that aren’t. Examples of things that aren’t: it’s very unlikely you will ever take a philosophy class in which the finer points of molecular biology, say mechanisms of cell death after ischemia, are debated. Same thing with the fine points of material science. With the exception of the history of philosophy, it is very unlikely you’ll ever take a philosophy class where the finer points of translating some ancient text are discussed.

What definitely is philosophy? There are maybe four areas that get discussed in every introductory philosophy class:

*Philosophy of Religion: Mainly whether or not God exists, sometimes also faith
*Epistemology: Big fancy word for the study of knowledge and related topics, like belief, reason, and so on. Main sub-topic discussed in introductory courses is radical skepticism, the claim we can’t actually know anything. Another subtopic is the nature of science, what counts as good science.
*Philosophy of Mind: Mainly, the relationship between the mind and the brain. Can also include things like free will and the afterlife.
*Ethics: Various modern controversies like abortion. Often framed in terms of two big ethical theories, “deontology” and “utilitarianism.” Don’t worry what those terms mean now. Can also include political philosophy, which involves questions like what make a government legitimate or just.

When you look at thing professional philosophers talk about, another big topic that gets added to the list, metaphysics. I’m not actually sure what this term means. My understanding of the term’s origin is this: “Meta” is a Greek word meaning “after.” The famous Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote some books on physics, and then he wrote some other books, and they were called the metaphysics because they came after the physics. Or maybe it was because you were supposed to read them after reading the physics, regardless of which order they were written in. I haven’t read those books, which is okay, because apparently they only have a limited connection to what philosophers today call “metaphysics.”

So forget Aristotle. Here’s a modern definition of “metaphysics” from David Chalmers:

No! How many times do I have to tell you? Nothing whatever to do with this New Age stuff! Now move my book away from the stand containing Shirley MacLaine, or I shall be very upset

This is actually a very good definition for telling you what metaphysics isn’t. But it doesn’t say what it is. Here’s another definition from leading metaphysician Peter van Inwagen:

Metaphysics is the attempt to distinguish appearance from reality. Examples of metaphysical questions are: Do we have free will, or do we simply seem to? Is there such a thing as objective truth — or is the appearance of objective truth no more than appearance? Is there a real world outside the human mind — or is our belief in such a world an illusion?

This definition is actually wrong, because the illusion vs. reality bit makes it sound like metaphysics should include a lot of stuff generally called “epistemology.” I should note that elsewhere, van Inwagen has said that there’s no good way to define metaphysics.

So, just as I’m trying to explain philosophy by way of example, I’ll try to explain metaphysics this way too: metaphysics includes:

*Claims about the nature of truth, and the nature of specific kinds of truth.
*Questions about the fundamental nature of what things are, and how much they can change and still be the same thing, and how much they could have been different and still be the same thing. If that last sentence didn’t make any sense to you, you have my sympathy.
*The nature of causation.
*The nature of possibility.
*A few questions that seem like they should be part of philosophy of mind, but which some people insist on calling metaphysics and definitely not philosophy of mind: free will, the nature of the self, the afterlife.

From this, it seems tempting to say “Metaphysics is dealing with fundamental questions about the nature of reality.” I confess I’m not sure whether that definition actually works.

Enough about metaphysics. If you look for examples of what philosophy is among professional philosophers, you’ll find a few other things. Some things I listed as sub-categories in this lecture get elevated to independent specialties, like political philosophy and philosophy of science. Aesthetics is also a mid-sized fish in the world of philosophy. Many philosophers consider philosophy of language a really big deal, though I personally don’t see the point. Oh, and I should warn you that many philosophers consider philosophy of religion unimportant, on the grounds that we all already know that there is no God. I should also say that though I am an atheist, I think ignoring philosophy of religion is a mistake.

My own line up of topics I’ve selected for this class are as follows: God, ethics, politics, mind, truth, reason, science, in that order. The order is important: I think one of the best reasons for deep reflection on the later topics is their relevance for the earlier ones. In debates about the early topics, people do say things like “there is no ultimate truth about ethics” or “no one can claim to know whether there is a God or not.” You have to think about things like the nature of truth to assess those claims. However, I think it would be a mistake to think that obscure reflections on the nature of truth are the most important thing in philosophy.

Is there any coherent rationale for throwing all these things together in one academic specialty? One approach: philosophers are supposed to imitate mathematicians in doing all our work from the armchair. (“Armchair” is a figure of speech, we more often work from office chairs.) That is to say, philosophy is all the questions, except mathematics, that can be answered without looking at any evidence in the sense of scientific experiments or historical documents. I personally don’t buy this approach, I see no reason why evidence should be irrelevant to any of the questions I just listed as traditional philosophical topics.

My favorite approach is from the great 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell:

Until the eighteenth century science was included in what was commonly called “philosophy,” but since that time the word “philosophy” has been confined, on its theoretical side, to what is most speculative and general in the topics with which science deals. It is often said that philosophy is unprogressive, but this is largely a verbal matter: as soon as a way is found of arriving at definite knowledge on some ancient question, the new knowledge is counted as belonging to “science,” and “philosophy” is deprived of the credit.

On the one hand, this makes philosophy sound like the source of all good things in the world. On the other hand, it really amounts to an admission that if philosophers knew what they were talking about, it wouldn’t be philosophy.

I think this is basically right. Philosophy is when you don’t know what you’re talking about. This view helps explain the relationship between evidence and philosophy. It isn’t that philosophy has to be done from the office chair, you can appeal to evidence. However, if what you’re doing is to count as philosophy, there can’t be a clear, widely accepted idea of how the evidence is to be used. I should warn you that I’ll teach this class largely from the point of view of office chair argument. It’s wonderful if you try to learn relevant science, and I can try to point you in the direction of that kind of material to read outside of class, but I view my job as teaching you how to argue, not teaching basic science.

This means there’s a very important benefit to a philosophical education: in most fields, there’s an established way of doing things, so you don’t have to think to hard about what you’re doing. But in philosophy, since no one has any idea what they’re doing, people are forced to be very, very careful about the reasons they give for various claims. Learning to do this isn’t just a good skill for philosophy, it’s a good skill for other things, too. Apparently, studies have shown that philosophy majors to very well on the LSAT, the law-school admissions test, and they’re also supposed to do well in law school itself and a number of other things besides. Again I cite Russell: he once said that the main thing about philosophers is that they are smart enough to avoid obvious fallacies, so they come up with really ingenious ones. I think this is significantly true and significantly embarrassing, but hey, at least we philosophers are avoiding the obvious mistakes, which is more than I can say for English majors.

Should you major in philosophy? I don’t know. Learning critical thinking skills so you don’t make a fool of yourself in debates is definitely a good thing. However, philosophers are capable of making fools of themselves too, sometimes when they forget that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and especially when they start talking on scientific subjects where there are people out there who know what they’re talking about. Also, philosophy is an amorphous subject, you don’t come out with a nice, tightly-defined skill set, the way you do learning say physics or a foreign language. Part of me wishes I had majored in things that have a nice skill set that absolutely needs to be drilled in, because that’s hard to get outside of college. So decide yourself what to do with your major, but even if you don’t go on in philosophy I do hope you’ll continue to think about, read about, and discuss the topics you’ll learn about here, trying to further develop your critical thinking skills.

>>>At this point in the lecture, depending on time, I will either quickly read off the syllabus, or if time does not suffice, tell students that the syllabus is boring and they don’t need me to read it to them.<<<