Tutor HuntResources Philosophy Resources

Methods In Philosophy

A basic introduction to some ways of doing philosophy

Date : 01/06/2022

Author Information

Neil

Uploaded by : Neil
Uploaded on : 01/06/2022
Subject : Philosophy

Methods in Philosophy

There are those who say Philosophy is a body of knowledge and those who say it is primarily an activity. No matter which conception one might adhere to there are certain approaches to philosophical questions which, in general have proven fruitful. I would be willing to say that there are certain methods which one can use to attack most intellectual and philosophical problems, and here I will outline a few which you may find useful to deploy in your journey through philosophy. Some of these may seem obvious, but none of these methods is free from controversy!

Meditation

French thinker Rene Descartes spent a lot of his time in an oven. A huge oven granted, but an oven nevertheless. You might ask why and it is a good question. The answer is meditation, of which Descartes was a great practitioner. Now I am not talking here about esoteric, eastern style meditation involving chants and incense but simply thinking in a place where no external stimulation can distract one. An oven is a very dark place, and there is not much to stimulate one except the thought in one s own head. When Descartes was working on a particularly hard philosophical problem he would attempt to shut out sense data. Indeed many philosophers before and since worked from the assumption that the truly real has little to do with that which we experience through the senses. The nature of things is to be sought in the realm of the mental or the non-physical, and the best method for penetrating into these things is by meditating upon them, and that in a way in which you are least distracted by the senses.

There is a story about Socrates that one day stopped in the street and stood there in complete silence. After hours had passed, night had come and a crowd had gathered around him, he apparently got to the bottom of whatever he was thinking and simply strolled off to continue his day (or more to the point his evening). Friends of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein related how, on being shown into his rooms at Cambridge he would tell them to sit saying I will only be a minute , and would return to gazing at a sheet of paper in the next room. If they were lucky the friends would only have to wait half an hour for Wittgenstein to finish , some simply had to give up and go home.

There is no substitute in philosophy for spending time thinking about the problem.

Dialogue

Another one from the Platonic play-book, dialogue (philosophical conversation) has always been an essential method in philosophy. Unfortunately though, it is not always easy to find a good partner. Like tennis philosophical dialogue is best with two players of equal ability if one is too far superior she quickly gets bored and frustrated with her mediocre partner, and if you happen to be on the other end of the stick a headache and an inferiority complex may be your only reward. That said dialogue is in my opinion essential if you would become a competent philosopher. As Soren Kierkegaard pointed out, it is not until you speak out the ideas in your head that they can be challenged, and you can begin to see how flawed some of your own ideas might be!

The Greeks speak of something called a virtue friendship. A virtue friendship is a relationship where both parties choose to seek some noble goal together. In philosophical terms a virtue friend can be someone with whom you seek the virtue of wisdom. In Plato s school, the Academy, much of their time was spent simply walking up and down, or sitting in a portico talking. The master would simply talk with his student, not requiring them to write essays and book reviews, or give Powerpoint presentations, but simply talking with them. One would express an idea and the other would question. What do you mean by this? Do you see that your position implies this? Isn t that incoherent? What if you said this instead? In a good virtue friendship both parties must feel free to be challenged on any point in their thinking, and in turn to be wiling to listen well and interrogate their partner when they have something to say.

Forgive me if this sounds like blatant salesmanship, but it would certainly be useful to try Master Philosophy with a friend or even a small group, where you could discuss what is said each month and test where you agree or disagree with a particular philosopher or idea, and more importantly say why you think as you do. The difference between doing philosophy and just talking down the pub is being able to support what you believe with robust and coherent argument! The best way to develop such skills is in dialogue.

Analysis

By this we mean simply taking to pieces . Analysis is where we look at something and try and break it down into its constituent parts. A DVD player is fully analyzed when all its parts are laid out in front of me and no one piece is left connected to another. This is obviously a useful tool in philosophy (in fact a whole philosophical school is named after it), but the things we take apart are ideas, concepts and any other intellectual entities.

The strength of analysis as a tool is that it allows us to see just how many elements we are working with. For instance, David Hume s Bundle Theory uses analysis to interrogate beliefs about the existence of the human soul. This is achieved by the imaginary breaking apart of the human person into its constituents. Hume has us deconstruct the human person and, as it were take an inventory of all of its parts. There is:

  • # -the body with it s various organs

  • # -the intellectual faculties

  • # -the emotions

  • # -the appetites and desires etc.

    And so on.

    Hume asserts that once we have this analyzed list, that is if we disconnect each part from all the others, and we look at the function of each part, that we can fully account for all aspects of the human person without reference to a soul. All the functions we see in the human person are accounted for, and the soul, in this analyzed picture just has nothing to do. Hume takes from this that there is in fact no such thing as a soul (imagined as a ghost inhabiting the human body), because if there is it would do something. But analysis has shown there is nothing left for it to do. We are literally just a bundle of bits with no unifying core, no soul.

  • So here analysis could help us in constructing an economic account of the human person, and force us to seek more appropriate ways of understanding how we use the words soul or person .

    Analysis is also an excellent tool for assessing arguments. Philosophy critique often consists in taking an argument apart and showing where certain aspects are doing no work or in showing places where two ideas have been run together, where they can in fact be separated. If you find a particular theory suspect it is often worth asking whether a false presupposition has been piggy-backed into that theory, and analysis can show up where that bad connection is. For instance, the Bundle Theory outlined above can be said to suffer from such hidden presuppositions, and if we are suspicious of Hume, we may want to see what ideas are hidden in his account of soul and see if that idea can be usefully analyzed, and the unhelpful parts removed, (thus restoring man s soul!).

    Seeking the Essence

    A bit controversial and we have to be a bit careful of this but, in understanding a phenomenon or a group of phenomena it is common practice to seek the unifying factor, the essence. One might approach a question such as what is art? in such a way. We could ask what is it that all the things we call art have in common? If we make a list of such things we can then go about eliminating those things which seem incidental, those things which could be left out of an account of what art is without emptying the definition of meaning, and hopefully we would arrive at the essential quality or qualities, thereby providing a strong account of what art is.

    Sounds easy right? Well, as I said, this way of philosophizing is controversial and can be unhelpful, as in some cases it is not even appropriate to ask the question what is the essence of ...? For example, we might ask what is goodness? or what is the essence of goodness? People like Plato or Aristotle might have thought there was a sensible answer to such questions, but there are others who would disagree. When looking for the essence of a thing, we must always be open to the fact that there may not be one unifying element in it. In the case of goodness it may be better to say that those things we apply the word good to, and the meanings of those applications, are so diverse that there simply is no unifying element (I must confess that I am often skeptical about the possibility of finding the essence of things, so be aware and don t let me lead you down the garden path if you can argue differently!)

    An influential proponent of the seek-the-essence way of thinking was German thinker Martin Heidegger. He saw the fact that lots of things existed, an that the adjective is can be applied to all that exists. He sought to understand that adjective and give an account of being , that is what it is to exist, what is the essence of being. To be fair it is a far ranging question, probably the most far reaching imaginable! And it has a good pedigree, being discussed from as far back as the 6th century BC by Parmenides of Elea, whom Heidegger writes on. If this type of thinking gets you going, try Heidegger, an influential and respected philosopher.

    But, when trying to understand some concept or class of things which may not have one unifying element to seek, we would do well to try the next and final suggested method...

    Language Survey

    Going back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, we come to a way of doing philosophy which sees philosophical problems as resting on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. What Wittgenstein meant by this was that philosophers tend to create philosophical problems when they don t understand how language works. For instance, the question Is the Good more or less identical than the Beautiful sounds deep and philosophical. But in fact it is probably a nonsense question, because to ask it one must assume that because good or beautiful are nouns they must point to some object. If one realizes that in ordinary talk these words cannot be used like that, we begin to see why this is a bad question.

    To get around such difficulties when trying to understand something like goodness or beauty, we can do a language survey that is, we can take note of how the words good and beautiful are used in ordinary, everyday speech, then we might get a better idea of what these various types of meaning these words have in different circumstances. Looking at ordinary language will show us that good has several, very different meanings. For instance, a tea-pot is said to be good if it works well, or looks pretty in my kitchen whereas a person is said to be generally good if they act in a virtuous manner, their goodness having nothing to their usefulness in making tea! Ordinary usage here tells us that the uses of the word good should make us skeptical about finding one thing, one object or idea, which is the essence of all we mean by good .

    Of course some will want to use language in more philosophical ways, which go beyond ordinary usage. Consider Heidegger s use of the word being certainly not how we use that word in everyday life. But whether language can be appropriately used in this extended philosophical sense is something I will leave you to work out!

    We might explore concepts such as freedom, time, moral value etc in the same way, seeing what ordinary language can tell us about these philosophically mysterious terms.

    This resource was uploaded by: Neil

    Other articles by this author