Three Concepts of Philosophy
Content
Three Concepts of Philosophy
Reading Assignment No. 2 THREE CONCEPTS OF PHILOSOPHY By Armando F. Bonifacio
Perhaps the best way to characterize philosophy is to begin by noticing some very commonsensical notions, or better still, uses of the term ‘philosophy’. Let me then draw attention to the general belief that each man has a philosophy of his own. I must say I agree with the view that each person (the jeepney driver, the farmer, the factory hand, the sidewalk vendor, the teacher, the politician, and so on) has a personal philosophy of his own. And this personal philosophy significantly affects his mode of relating or dealing with his environment. However, if I were to ask a jeepney driver or a farmer what his personal philosophy is, he would mostly likely regard me in puzzlement for he would not know what it is I am asking. There is obviously some oddity here for we are claiming that this man has something – a personal philosophy – but he does not know what it is we think he has. So long as we do not, at this stage, try to sublime philosophy in the way most academic philosophers often do, we should not really get into deep trouble drawing from a person his personal philosophy; for in truth each of us has internalized through time some fundamental values, some rules of life, some basic assumptions about things, persons, institutions, etc., and all of these form, as it were, an entire set of presuppositions that influences our decisions, beliefs, actions or whatnot. Consider values, or more specifically, our ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, including our concept of the good life. These ethical notions (most, if not all of them anyway) have come to us through training and exposure to our physical, social and intellectual environment: our parents, teachers, peer group, the books we have read, the movies we have seen, and so on. These values have become part of our intellectual repertoire, lodged as they are, so to speak, at the back of our minds serving as the reference point of our ethical judgment. What we usually refer to as ‘conscience’ may in fact have some distinct connection with these underlying values. To be sure others believe that conscience is something intrinsically in man, some kind of divine gift. But be that as it may, it would seem to be that some of the values we have learned and internalized, e.g., such virtues as honesty, fairness, love of country, and so on do come into play in our judgments, evaluations and decisions. In fact, in becoming conscious of a patent
dishonesty that we may have displayed, we may react in genuine discomfort, a case in which we are inclined to say: our conscience is bothering us. But it could very well be that at bottom, what is really at work here are certain values we have acquired now surfacing and, as it were, asserting them. Apart from values, we also have some very basic metaphysical and epistemological notions. We know the difference between shadows and rainbows, between what is called a physical/material object and ideas, thoughts or images. We are able to separate the true from the false, or the true from the merely probable, the real from the unreal. As some philosophers have noted, some of our conceptual difficulties are rooted in some woolly metaphysical notions, e.g., some may think that when we talk about something, there ought to be something in reality, in the external world, we are talking about. A more sophisticated formulation of this, in the form of a theory of language, is that our statements divide neatly into subject and predicate; and, if at all the statement is true then the subject must refer to something in reality. But we get into some difficulties working our way through the statement that “Square circles do not exist” for then if this is true, there ought to be in reality, in the external world, such things as square circles which are non-existent. Concerning epistemological notions, when a farmer teaches his son how to use the plow, the farmer has certain ideas on how best to transmit knowledge. He also has certain beliefs about the value of this knowledge. If someone were to given him a piece of information, he may on occasion, doubt its veracity and thus raise questions leading to its verification or confirmation relying mainly on his own criteria of epistemological validity. All these underlying ethical, metaphysical and epistemological notions make up an individual’s personal philosophy. To be sure, this philosophy does not, as a rule, surface to the person’s consciousness, but just the same, it provides shape and directions to his beliefs, actions and expectations. **** This activity of reflection, i.e., of objectification and analysis is itself a kind of philosophy. In fact, some philosophers incline to the view that the activity of objectification and analysis is what philosophy all about. My own view is that to objectify and analyze the foundation of our values, including the roots of our metaphysical and epistemological belief is to engage in philosophy. But certainly it is something else to delimit philosophy to only this type of activity. At any rate, we not that while the ordinary man as a rule engages in this philosophical reflection on a piecemeal fashion, others go at it in a more systematic and comprehensive manner. The latter
include the professional and academic philosophers, and those who have systematically reflected to human life. Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Russell, Ayn Rand, Herman Hesse, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Radhadkrishman, Newton, and others stand out. **** Analysis, is one thing, the effort to engage in reconstruction is another. Our activity of reflection finds broader meaning not merely in showing the error of our ways, the implausibility of our ordinary beliefs, but in putting things together in the proper perspective. Many of the philosophers I have mentioned, and certainly there are others, did not exhaust themselves merely on analysis. On their own they looked for more viable foundations for our ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. Russell's own work in the field of mathematical logic represents an achievement in philosophy, so is Kant's Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals or the famous Analects of Confucius. There is, I suppose, a stirring within every philosopher to come up with a systematic treatise, a more comprehensive view of the universe; although, perhaps, at this stage of our knowledge, in particular our academic disciplinal orientation, the formulation of a truly comprehensive philosophy shall remain no more than a dream. What our intellectual centers turn out are specialist in specific areas: law, medicine, engineering, including education, political science, sociology and philosophy itself. The true philosophers are those who can go beyond the confines of a particular discipline. Perhaps it is necessary that the philosopher (by this term I do not mean the professional, academic philosopher but the person, the intellectual or academic who seeks a more systematic and comprehensive view of the world) acquires a detailed knowledge of every discipline, from anthropology to zoology. If we assume that all our knowledge rest upon some common foundations, then a reflection on these and the related effort at reconstruction would amount to some form of comprehensive philosophy, or at least a reconstructed philosophy that would serve as the unifying frame of all our knowledge, beliefs and actions. But all these rest on 'ifs,' on certain conditions which philosophy must itself validate. In the foregoing, I have in effect separated three senses of the term 'philosophy'. Clearly, we may use philosophy to mean the whole range of our intellectual presuppositions, on which is rooted our epistemological, metaphysical and ethical judgments, beliefs and actions. We may also use the term to refer to the reflective activities directed at these presuppositions. And finally, we may use it to mean the reconstructed belief or value system, which for some, should show a universal and comprehensive character.
The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle.[1] It is often used to represent philosophy.
Reading Assignment No. 2 THREE CONCEPTS OF PHILOSOPHY By Armando F. Bonifacio
Perhaps the best way to characterize philosophy is to begin by noticing some very commonsensical notions, or better still, uses of the term ‘philosophy’. Let me then draw attention to the general belief that each man has a philosophy of his own. I must say I agree with the view that each person (the jeepney driver, the farmer, the factory hand, the sidewalk vendor, the teacher, the politician, and so on) has a personal philosophy of his own. And this personal philosophy significantly affects his mode of relating or dealing with his environment. However, if I were to ask a jeepney driver or a farmer what his personal philosophy is, he would mostly likely regard me in puzzlement for he would not know what it is I am asking. There is obviously some oddity here for we are claiming that this man has something – a personal philosophy – but he does not know what it is we think he has. So long as we do not, at this stage, try to sublime philosophy in the way most academic philosophers often do, we should not really get into deep trouble drawing from a person his personal philosophy; for in truth each of us has internalized through time some fundamental values, some rules of life, some basic assumptions about things, persons, institutions, etc., and all of these form, as it were, an entire set of presuppositions that influences our decisions, beliefs, actions or whatnot. Consider values, or more specifically, our ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, including our concept of the good life. These ethical notions (most, if not all of them anyway) have come to us through training and exposure to our physical, social and intellectual environment: our parents, teachers, peer group, the books we have read, the movies we have seen, and so on. These values have become part of our intellectual repertoire, lodged as they are, so to speak, at the back of our minds serving as the reference point of our ethical judgment. What we usually refer to as ‘conscience’ may in fact have some distinct connection with these underlying values. To be sure others believe that conscience is something intrinsically in man, some kind of divine gift. But be that as it may, it would seem to be that some of the values we have learned and internalized, e.g., such virtues as honesty, fairness, love of country, and so on do come into play in our judgments, evaluations and decisions. In fact, in becoming conscious of a patent
dishonesty that we may have displayed, we may react in genuine discomfort, a case in which we are inclined to say: our conscience is bothering us. But it could very well be that at bottom, what is really at work here are certain values we have acquired now surfacing and, as it were, asserting them. Apart from values, we also have some very basic metaphysical and epistemological notions. We know the difference between shadows and rainbows, between what is called a physical/material object and ideas, thoughts or images. We are able to separate the true from the false, or the true from the merely probable, the real from the unreal. As some philosophers have noted, some of our conceptual difficulties are rooted in some woolly metaphysical notions, e.g., some may think that when we talk about something, there ought to be something in reality, in the external world, we are talking about. A more sophisticated formulation of this, in the form of a theory of language, is that our statements divide neatly into subject and predicate; and, if at all the statement is true then the subject must refer to something in reality. But we get into some difficulties working our way through the statement that “Square circles do not exist” for then if this is true, there ought to be in reality, in the external world, such things as square circles which are non-existent. Concerning epistemological notions, when a farmer teaches his son how to use the plow, the farmer has certain ideas on how best to transmit knowledge. He also has certain beliefs about the value of this knowledge. If someone were to given him a piece of information, he may on occasion, doubt its veracity and thus raise questions leading to its verification or confirmation relying mainly on his own criteria of epistemological validity. All these underlying ethical, metaphysical and epistemological notions make up an individual’s personal philosophy. To be sure, this philosophy does not, as a rule, surface to the person’s consciousness, but just the same, it provides shape and directions to his beliefs, actions and expectations. **** This activity of reflection, i.e., of objectification and analysis is itself a kind of philosophy. In fact, some philosophers incline to the view that the activity of objectification and analysis is what philosophy all about. My own view is that to objectify and analyze the foundation of our values, including the roots of our metaphysical and epistemological belief is to engage in philosophy. But certainly it is something else to delimit philosophy to only this type of activity. At any rate, we not that while the ordinary man as a rule engages in this philosophical reflection on a piecemeal fashion, others go at it in a more systematic and comprehensive manner. The latter
include the professional and academic philosophers, and those who have systematically reflected to human life. Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Russell, Ayn Rand, Herman Hesse, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Radhadkrishman, Newton, and others stand out. **** Analysis, is one thing, the effort to engage in reconstruction is another. Our activity of reflection finds broader meaning not merely in showing the error of our ways, the implausibility of our ordinary beliefs, but in putting things together in the proper perspective. Many of the philosophers I have mentioned, and certainly there are others, did not exhaust themselves merely on analysis. On their own they looked for more viable foundations for our ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. Russell's own work in the field of mathematical logic represents an achievement in philosophy, so is Kant's Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals or the famous Analects of Confucius. There is, I suppose, a stirring within every philosopher to come up with a systematic treatise, a more comprehensive view of the universe; although, perhaps, at this stage of our knowledge, in particular our academic disciplinal orientation, the formulation of a truly comprehensive philosophy shall remain no more than a dream. What our intellectual centers turn out are specialist in specific areas: law, medicine, engineering, including education, political science, sociology and philosophy itself. The true philosophers are those who can go beyond the confines of a particular discipline. Perhaps it is necessary that the philosopher (by this term I do not mean the professional, academic philosopher but the person, the intellectual or academic who seeks a more systematic and comprehensive view of the world) acquires a detailed knowledge of every discipline, from anthropology to zoology. If we assume that all our knowledge rest upon some common foundations, then a reflection on these and the related effort at reconstruction would amount to some form of comprehensive philosophy, or at least a reconstructed philosophy that would serve as the unifying frame of all our knowledge, beliefs and actions. But all these rest on 'ifs,' on certain conditions which philosophy must itself validate. In the foregoing, I have in effect separated three senses of the term 'philosophy'. Clearly, we may use philosophy to mean the whole range of our intellectual presuppositions, on which is rooted our epistemological, metaphysical and ethical judgments, beliefs and actions. We may also use the term to refer to the reflective activities directed at these presuppositions. And finally, we may use it to mean the reconstructed belief or value system, which for some, should show a universal and comprehensive character.
The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle.[1] It is often used to represent philosophy.
