Years ago, somebody asked me whether it makes a difference philosophically if you begin with objective starting points (as Aristotle does) or subjective ones (as Descartes does).  At the time my answer was that you could go either way; the big questions can be answered from either perspective, and the answers will be similar, although admittedly the details will differ.  For instance, the individual man or ox is a given for Aristotle, while for Descartes it is arrived at only by an inference the ultimate first premise of which would be “I think, therefore I am.”  Subjective starting points may give you a more complicated account in many (not all) cases, I thought, but there was no reason to think the account inadequate.

However, it seems to me now that there is a clear priority of one set of starting points over the other.  Let me illustrate with an argument from Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy (PPh) in which he shows that the coherence theory of truth presupposes the correspondence theory.  His question is how truth should be defined, whether as the correspondence between a belief and the facts, or as coherence among beliefs held.  And he structures his answer around two main points.  The first is that there may easily be more than one set of coherent beliefs about a given scientific or philosophical question, that is, there may be more than one hypothesis that is entirely coherent considered in itself.  So coherence alone would not pick out the true hypothesis.  The second point, and the more important one, is that coherence as a concept presupposes the truth of the principle of contradiction.  The principle of contradiction, in turn, though it is what Russell calls a “Law of Thought” (PPh, chap. VII) must be understood to be, “about things and not merely about thoughts.” (PPh, chap. VIII)  Thus the law of contradiction, being about things, if true presupposes a correspondence theory of truth.  But if the principle of contradiction were false, then there could be no coherence of beliefs, i.e., no difference between coherence and incoherence.  Therefore the concept of coherence presupposes the law of contradiction, but the law of contradiction presupposes the correspondence theory of truth.  Therefore the concept of coherence presupposes the correspondence theory of truth.  Coherence, Russell concludes, may be a test of truth, but cannot provide the definition of truth.  (PPh, chap. XII)

By analogy, I think it fair to say that a philosophy based on subjective starting points presupposes a philosophy based on objective starting points.  To that extent, the objectively-based philosophy is prior to, more easily known than, and logically required by the subjectively-based philosophy.

Here’s my argument:  philosophies based on subjective starting points, such as Descartes’ cogito and the phenomenological method (in which the external world is “bracketed”) choose subjective starting points as foundations of knowledge.  These foundations, in turn, are thought to be certain or evident in themselves and to impart reliability to beliefs that are based on the foundational beliefs.  Typically this means that sensory knowledge of the external world, so called, cannot be foundational because of its susceptibility to error.  Rather, sensory knowledge of the external world has to be derivative, or based on the subjective foundations.  (Thus Russell tells that we have knowledge “by description” of the real table; only the appearances of the table—our sense-data—are known to us “by acquaintance.”)  However, if there were no reliable sensory knowledge of external things (the individual man or ox), then there could be no knowledge that errors can infect our sense-perception-based beliefs about the external world.  In other words, knowledge of the errors that can infect our sense-perception-based beliefs about the external world presupposes reliable sensory knowledge of external things.  Otherwise one could never know that one had made a mistake (about the individual man or ox).  But the philosophical program beginning with subjective starting points, such as Descartes’ cogito, presupposes knowledge of the errors that can infect our sense-perception-based beliefs about the external world.  Therefore the philosophical program beginning with subjective starting points presupposes reliable sensory knowledge of external things.  And therefore the objectively-based philosophy is prior to, more easily known than, and logically required by the subjectively-based philosophy.

In less abstract terms, this means that the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Brentano, the phenomenologists, etc., and even Bertrand Russell in his reliance on sense-data (despite his defense of the correspondence theory of truth) are all logically dependent upon philosophies like those of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Reid.  One can philosophize successfully in the subjective mode, no doubt, as Pope John Paul II has claimed with reference to phenomenology, which he considered complementary to, and a needed completion of, traditional or perennial philosophy. (Woytyla, “The Degrees of Being from the Point of View of the Phenomenology of  Action, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XI, 125-130.)  But in doing so one must acknowledge a debt to those whose procedure is more empirical, that is to say, more direct.

The ultimate reason for this is that the human mind is by nature oriented to the knowledge of physical things, that is to say, it knows physical things first and most easily and knows its own activity (as in “I think, therefore I am”) not first and most easily but rather later and with greater difficulty.  As Aquinas puts it, the human intellect, “. . .is not its own act of understanding [as God is], nor is its own essence the first object of its act of understanding [as in the case of angels], for this object is [rather] the nature of a material thing.  And therefore that which is first known by the human intellect is an object of this kind, and that which is known secondarily is the act by which that object is known; and through the act the intellect itself is known, whose perfection is the act itself of understanding.  For this reason did the Philosopher [Aristotle] assert that objects are known before acts, and acts before powers.” (ST, I, q.87, a.4)

Tags: Aristotle, Bertrand Russell, Descartes, Starting Points, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid

The philosophical world in the West, since the beginning of the 20^th Century, is thought to be—and maybe is—quite divided.  Setting aside the differences (and similarities) between philosophy in the West and philosophy elsewhere (in India, China, Japan, Africa, and perhaps among indigenous peoples worldwide, not to mention Marxists), sharp differences are noticed today just within the tradition that traces itself back through modern and medieval European philosophy to ancient Greece.

If you were to check graduate school philosophy departments around the U.S., you would find that in many cases they characterize themselves as either Analytic or Continental, either exclusively or in emphasis.  Certainly individual philosophers often so characterize themselves.  If you were to ask what this means, you might get a surprising and mysterious answer in terms of literature.  That is to say, Analytic philosophers read and respond to a certain set of books and articles, while Continental philosophers read and respond to a different set, and there is very little overlap, if any.  Why?  Is this an ideological difference?  A methodological one?  A historical schism?  A difference in subjects addressed?

As a matter of fact, when you try to pin down the difference, it turns out to be pretty difficult to do so clearly.  Partly, this is because it would take quite a lot of research to specify the ideological and methodological commitments of philosophers working today, or to trace their philosophical histories and influences, or even to catalog the subjects they address.  I suspect that if you did this research, you would find a complicated picture, with many intersections across the Analytic/Continental divide, and little in the way of a clear picture of the divide itself.  But I can’t prove that without writing a book about it; a daunting project.  Another reason why the difference is difficult to pin down is that the perception of it is based largely on geography:  Analytic philosophers are commonly defined as those who work in an Anglophone tradition, found in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada; Continental philosophers are commonly defined as those who work in a largely Francophone tradition, found in the countries of Continental Europe—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.—North Africa, and Canada.  But the definitions break down as soon as you set them up.  It’s not hard to find “Continental” philosophers in the United States working in English, nor is it hard to find “Analytic” philosophers in Europe working in German.

However, geography is not now and has never been the defining criterion of distinct schools of philosophy.  In ancient times, when philosophy sprang up, as tradition has it, in Ionia (modern Turkey), just about as soon as Thales developed his theory that water is the arche of the kosmos, other philosophers—Anaximander and Anaximenes—developed competing theories.  They all lived in Ionia, and they’re called “the Ionians,” or “the Milesians,” but they differed philosophically as radically as water does metaphysically from the infinite or from density.  Later on, Plato and Aristotle differed on many points, including methodology; both count as Greek philosophers, though.

There is also a logical difficulty with the expressions ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ as they are used today to designate schools of philosophy.  The terms are not comparable (except geographically—a fruitless interpretation).  ‘Analytic’ is a term referring to method; Analytic philosophers get their name from their method of analyzing ordinary language, among other things they do.  Continental philosophers analyze ordinary language, too, among other things, but their name, ‘Continental,’ does not designate a method.  Rather it designates a lineage.  Of course, Analytic philosophers have essentially the same lineage.  So the terms, ‘Analytic,’ and ‘Continental,’ differentiate schools of philosophy neither on the basis of method nor on the basis of lineage.

Yet, philosophers will tell you that they can tell the difference between Analytic philosophers and Continental philosophers, moreover that they agree with the one and disagree with the other, and even that they dislike and have no interest in the one and feel very passionately enthusiastic about the other.  What is going on?  As a matter of historical fact, for instance, Franz Brentano (1838-1917) taught Edmund Husserl (a key “Continental” philosopher), but also attracted the attention of G.E. Moore (a key “Analytic” philosopher).  Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, was deeply influenced by Brentano’s habilitation thesis, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle.  Moore’s colleague, Bertrand Russell, went to great lengths to answer the ontological claims of Brentano’s student, Alexius Meinong.  Does this simply represent the initial stages of a great rift?  No.  Several decades after Brentano’s death, Jacques Derrida (a Francophone Algerian Jew, designated “Continental”) was deeply influenced by J.L. Austin (an Englishman, designated “Analytic”).  Both therefore have a clear debt as well to a slightly earlier philosopher, Russell’s and Moore’s student Ludwig Wittgenstein (an Austrian, designated “Analytic”).  Analytic and Continental philosophers also share a common debt to Hegel and to Kant, as well as to the whole prior history of philosophy going back to the Greeks.  And their current interests are similar:  sense perception; subjectivity; the cultural effects of modern science; ethics; aesthetics.

The Polish logicians (if Poland isn’t Continental, what is?) exercised influence especially over the Analytic philosophers, but their education was Eastern European, and traceable to the school of Brentano.  However, Analytic philosophers typically complain that Continental philosophers are “literary” rather than “philosophical” or “logical,” while Continental philosophers complain that Analytic philosophers do not speak to people where they live, that they do not address the “meaning of life” issues philosophy ought to be concerned with.  And so it goes.  How do I even know who’s who?  We’re brought back to an answer in terms of literature.  Almost every philosopher who publishes today betrays him- or herself by the sources he or she cites, and those sources are categorized by the nearly arbitrary Analytic/Continental distinction.  My father once promised me a dollar for every reference to Jesus Christ that I could find in a Unitarian hymnal.  I promise you the same for every reference to a recent Analytic philosopher that you can find in a Continental book or article, or vice versa, and I expect to lose about as much money as Dad did!  But all of us, whatever our initial sympathies, should become at least reasonably well-versed in the philosophies from the “other side.”  Even Wittgenstein’s family resemblances obtain among philosophers in general, and not just among Analytic or Continental philosophers in juxtaposition.

Tags: Analytic Philosophy, Brentano, Continental Philosophy, G.E. Moore, Heidegger, Husserl

Susan Gabriel
Department of Philosophy
Saint Anselm College

Colloquium Feb. 24, 2009

Thomas Reid’s Theory of Personal Identity:

Closer to DesCartes or Aquinas?

Click on the link above to listen or right click to download.

The Philosophy Department podcast series can be found at:
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Tags: Descartes, Personal Identity, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid

In his Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid (1710-1796) gives this advice: “Let us accustom ourselves to try every opinion by the touchstone of fact and experience. What can fairly be deduced from the facts duly observed or sufficiently attested, is genuine and pure; it is the voice of God, and no fiction of human imagination.” It is hard to recall a stronger endorsement of empiricism than this in the whole history of philosophy—to identify the facts duly observed, and what is inferred from them, with the voice of God. Has Reid gone too far? Or should philosophers follow him?

Reid’s assumption, when he recommends that we test every opinion “by the touchstone of fact and experience,” is that we can in fact acquire reliable experience of the world. He clearly thinks that by starting with due observation and sufficient attention to the testimony of others we can reach philosophical knowledge that is “genuine and pure.” This is something that has been doubted from time to time in the history of philosophy ever since the days of the ancient Sophists. The doubt involves a suspicion that what we consider to be facts, the purported foundation of philosophical and scientific knowledge, may in fact be relative to the observer and hence not objective or real facts at all. In Hellenistic times, Pyrrhonian Skeptics believed that one should suspend belief in all cases, because it is impossible to know whether a proposition or its contradictory is true. In essence, they reasoned as follows: because people disagree, therefore nobody knows anything. Obviously though, if the Sophists and Skeptics are right, Reid is wrong.

Another way of disagreeing with Reid would be to say that we actually do have genuine and pure knowledge, but it does not come from experience. This is a view opposite to that of the Sophists and Skeptics in the sense that rather than trading on doubt it trades on the desire for absolute certainty. Philosophers who put reason and logic before experience are inclined to hold that whatever reason discerns as being deduced from fundamental principles must be true, because it is deductively certain, like mathematics. Thus, by relying on deductive logic, Berkeley proved that there is no such thing as matter,[1] and British Idealists held, for instance, that “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.”[2] The fact that these conclusions fly in the face of common sense is thought not to count against them, because they are shown strictly to follow, not from facts, but from indubitable principles. The rationalist program requires precisely that we subordinate our ordinary understanding of things to the results of logical inquiry. It is as though we were to say, these are my theories, so much the worse for the facts! Again, if Berkeley, the British Idealists, and various other rationalists are right, then Reid is wrong.

What should we think? It is perhaps helpful to remember that philosophy in the West began with the Greek confidence that the world we live in is intelligible. The kosmos, an ordered whole, and physis, nature, are accessible to nous, intelligence, and to logos, reasoned speech, physei, by nature. Thus philosophia, the love of wisdom, is not an unrequited love or doomed enterprise in our tradition. On the contrary, it is Plato’s “upward path,”[3] the path we choose when we reject abject skepticism, extreme rationalism, and other paths that deny the natural capacity of the embodied human mind to understand. As human beings, rational animals, our mode of understanding is empirical, that is to say, we learn by the use of sense perception and emotion together with intelligence. Admittedly, this involves our subjectivity, and perhaps even prejudice. However, in Gadamer’s striking phrase, “there are legitimate prejudices,”[4] namely those authoritative pre-judgments that actually aid understanding. I think this is close to what Reid meant when he recommended that we rely on the touchstone of fact and experience. He regards it as a justifiably confident reliance, like the loving trust a child places in its parents and teachers. Not that experience (and parents and teachers) can never be wrong, but rather that when we fairly consider “the facts duly observed or sufficiently attested” as well as what follows from them, we become able to judge of those experiences (and parents and teachers) and to discern when their deliverances are right and when they need to be taken with a grain of salt or even rejected altogether. This is the philosophical attitude par excellence, and Reid is not out on a limb with it at all. Rather, if we want to be philosophers, too, we should follow him and heed the voice of Truth as it speaks to us in well-considered experience. For, “through the infinity of the universe, the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.”[5] To depart from this faith is to embark on a different path altogether.

Tags: empiricism, fact, Gadamer, Thomas Reid

The members of the Philosophy Department were asked which book they thought would be important to teach to students in an introductory philosophy course. Their answers are below. You can listen to them all at once or you can click on the name of the individual professor below to listen to each professor’s answer.

All answers in one mp3 file.
click the link to play or right click to download.

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-Professor Robert Anderson

David Hume-An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

http://www.amazon.com/Inquiry-Concerning-Human-Understanding/dp/002353110X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222103665&sr=1-3

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-Professor Robert Augros

Professor Augros argued that the dialogue between teacher and student was more essential to the philosophical process than any book.

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-Professor David Banach

Euclid’s Elements

http://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-T-L-Heath-Translation/dp/1888009195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222103502&sr=8-1

Albert Camus- The Stranger

http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720200/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222102515&sr=1-2

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-Professor Montague Brown

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

Saint Augustine’s Confessions

http://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Confessions-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0192833723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104161&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/Englishconfessions.html

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-Professor Drew Dalton

Marcus Aurelius-The Meditations

http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Penguin-Classics-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/0140449337/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104796&sr=8-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

Slavoj Zizek

Violence-Big-Ideas-Small-Books

http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Big-Ideas-Small-Books/dp/0312427182/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222283299&sr=1-1

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-Father John Fortin

Saint Anselm- Monologium

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-monologium.html

Proslogium

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-proslogium.html

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-Professor Susan Gabriel

Bertrand Russell- The Problems of Philosophy

http://www.amazon.com/Problems-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/160597899X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104969&sr=8-3

Online edition

http://books.google.com/books?id=33jP5wdnt7YC&dq=the+problems+of+philosophy&pg=PP1&ots=iYnhLWaJnI&sig=IsMx9A1hbcpsZWLGZFZ40Ihs56Y&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA3,M1

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-Professor Sarah Glenn

Sophocles- Oedipus Rex

http://www.amazon.com/Oedipus-Rex-Literary-Touchstone-Sophocles/dp/1580495931/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105258&sr=8-1

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-Professor Matthew Konieczka

Leo Tolstoy-The Death of Ivan Ilyich

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Ilyich-Stories-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1840224533/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105435&sr=1-3

Plato- The Apology

http://www.amazon.com/Euthyphro-Apology-Crito-Phaedo-Philosophy/dp/0879754966/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105582&sr=1-4

Online Edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

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-Professor Thomas Larson

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

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-Professor Max Latona

Josef Pieper-The Philosophical Act

http://www.amazon.com/Josef-Pieper-Anthology/dp/0898702267/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222282616&sr=8-2

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Professor James Mahoney
C.S. Pierce, “The Fixation of Belief”
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

Michael Novak, Belief and Unbelief
http://www.amazon.com/Belief-Unbelief-Self-Knowledge-Michael-Novak/dp/1560007419

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-Professor Joseph Spoerl

Plato- The Gorgias

http://www.amazon.com/Gorgias-Penguin-Classics-Plato/dp/0140449043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222106429&sr=8-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html

Plato- The Republic

http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Plato/dp/0872207366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222104060&sr=1-1

Online edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

Plato- The Apology

http://www.amazon.com/Euthyphro-Apology-Crito-Phaedo-Philosophy/dp/0879754966/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222105582&sr=1-4

Online Edition

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

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-Professor Kevin Staley

Plato- The Euthyphro

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

Tags: Teaching

The cliché, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is probably either trivially true (there can be no perception of beauty without sense organs) or else obviously false (the same thing could turn out to be both beautiful and non-beautiful). But what if we said that beauty is in the soul of the beholder? This is what Plotinus tells us (Enneads), and he is hardly a squishy relativist.

Plotinus’s argument runs something like this: Qualities such as symmetry and harmony cannot be definitive of beauty because they apply only to compound objects, but not all beauties are compounds. In fact, the quality in a beautiful thing that governs other qualities, such as symmetry and harmony, is unity; but unity is properly found only in non-compound objects, such as the soul. Just as the soul imparts unity to the body, which is a compound, so form imparts unity to an artwork or natural object. The human soul thus has an affinity for the form of beautiful things—and an aversion to the deformity of ugly things—by nature. It is by virtue of this affinity for beauty residing in the soul of the beholder that beautiful things are recognized as such. Therefore—my paraphrase—beauty is in the soul of the beholder.

It’s interesting to think about this in connection with a perennial problem in aesthetics: how do you reconcile the irreducibly subjective concept of taste with objective criteria of beauty in nature and in artworks? Kant wrote about this. An aesthetic judgment is subjective, he claimed, but its content is understood to be universal, or objective (Critique of Judgment). So what I mean when I say that I like a given painting is actually that it is beautiful and that you should like it, too. But at the same time, I realize that you might not like it, that taste varies. This is paradoxical, just one of quite a few paradoxes that Kant cheerfully embraced in his philosophy.

But is the situation really paradoxical, or does Plotinus have a key to its solution? The faculty of taste is subjective and highly variable; it requires a person, a perceiver, a soul, that is, one who likes or dislikes, and no two persons are entirely alike. At the same time, the appreciation of beauty—whether in nature or in art—is an activity that inherently points to something outside of and beyond the person. Beauty itself is in one sense the objectification of something realized from within and manifested externally, whether by the creative artist, by the appreciative viewer or listener, or by God. In a word, to recognize something as beautiful—a painting, a song, a sunset—is to acknowledge that it pleases the human soul. And this is something that every human soul in fact does acknowledge with regard to some things. Disagreements about matters of taste presuppose some degree of universal or shared humanity, and that humanity, or human soul, is beautiful in the primary sense of the term. Other beauties are derivative from it. Or so Plotinus appears to have thought.

Tags: aesthetic, beauty, Immanuel Kant, Plotinus, soul

Do Philosophers Simplify Things or Complicate Them?

On the one hand, Shakespeare’s Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But on the other hand, Thomas Reid wrote, “there is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.” What are we to think? Is philosophy impoverished, compared to reality, or is it fantastically richer than reality?

Perhaps the disagreement between Shakespeare and Reid is due to the different times in which they lived. Shakespeare, in the English Renaissance, had inherited a philosophy that was more rigid and formulaic than did Reid, writing in Eighteenth Century Scotland, when the rebellion against medieval thought had ultimately produced many new philosophical systems, some of them involving truly amazing, if not absurd, propositions such as Berkeley’s rejection of the existence of matter. To Shakespeare, then, philosophy may naturally have seemed restrictive, inadequate to the mystery of reality itself, while Reid may have thought, with equally good reason, that it was about time for philosophy to be reined in, tamed, brought back down to earth.

However, I think there is more to this than the historical account suggests. It’s also possible that Shakespeare and Reid simply had completely different temperaments. The poet and playwright would naturally be a more imaginative person, the philosopher and champion of common sense more literal-minded.

Still I think there’s more to it. In fact, it is philosophy’s task to envision reality in such a way that it gives an account neither too plain nor too flowery, and the very difficulty of doing this may be the source of some people’s complaints that philosophy is too dull and repetitious as well as of others’ that it is too bizarre and counterintuitive. Certainly, as a teacher of philosophy for nearly thirty years, I have heard both complaints repeatedly.

Doing philosophy is one way for a person to live in the world. Consequently the world as it exists at a given time, and the person who philosophizes with given inclinations, both affect the spirit of the philosophy that is produced. But since reality itself, in all its glory and horror, is at least somewhat beyond us mere mortals at all times, we can expect that certain distractions will intervene to over-simplify or over-complicate the philosophical task. I think in particular of three of these:

1. There is the temptation of reductive analyses. By this I mean propositions of the general form, “x is really just y,” where x is the object of experience to be explained and y is a simpler phenomenon with which it is identified. For instance, in physics, “colors are really just different wavelengths of light.” In science, reductive analyses often inform. But philosophy is not science; for philosophers, a reductive analysis is likely a way to shirk our work. Consider: “a mind is really just a brain.” The reality of mind goes far beyond that.

2. There is the attraction, too, of our own delightful, architectonic schemes and the charm of interlocking concepts that appear to bring all things together into one, comprehensible (though of course very complicated) whole. Such schemes and concepts require a vocabulary all their own which inevitably lends them an air of depth and veracity. If you get the terminology right, you can prove that a table is a “colony of souls,” as Bertrand Russell complained, disapproving of Leibniz. But the facts will have their day, whether we like it or not, and then so much the worse for our theories, our prized and precious creations. Philosophy is not art.

3. There is even our laudable faith in the intelligibility of the cosmos, a faith bequeathed to us by the Greeks, without which neither philosophy nor Western civilization in general would even be possible. Yet this faith wavers between the humility of genuine wonder and the arrogance of self-absorbed intelligence, sliding toward the latter as often as not. “What can I learn from others?” we ought to ask, not “How impressively can I refute them?” To learn the relative importance of the former question, though, we need to listen and read carefully, for as Aristotle rightly points out, nobody is mistaken about everything.

How can our philosophies remain open to all the things in heaven and earth, especially to the things we do not yet know? And how can we, thus open-minded but (we hope) never empty-headed, still retain our ability to discern and reject the absurd? I think that in order to devise a philosophical outlook that does some justice to reality—a view neither too austere nor too ornate—we have to remember, as Daniel Boorstin put it, that illusions of knowledge are obstacles to discovery. This is true in the sciences, in the arts, and also in philosophy. For whenever we presume to know more than we actually do know, we stop considering that we might be wrong, and when we stop considering that we might be wrong we stop learning. But with finite minds we cannot afford to stop learning. Therefore we must remain somewhat skeptical (from the Greek, skeptikos, thoughtful, inquiring). Perhaps we could venture to modify a famous phrase from Kant, who in “What is Enlightenment?” told his reader, “sapere aude,” dare to know. First let’s dare to think, cogitare audeamus! This does require perseverance and even courage because really to think involves both hard work and not knowing where we’ll end up—though of course we hope to arrive closer to the truth rather than further away from it. Somewhere, that is, between the too simple and the too complex.

Tags: philosophers, philosophical thinking, philosophy, William Shakespeare

The Meet the Philosopher Series are interviews with the members of the Saint Anselm College Philosophy Department. They aim at introducing you to the members of the department along with their interests and ideas. Professor Susan Gabriel is the seventh profile in the series.

In this interview, Professor Gabriel talks about her interest in Franz Brentano and about the importance of Human Dignity in Ethical Theory.

Saint Anselm Philosophy Podcasts can be found here.

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Tags: Susan Gabriel