Being a philosopher?

Non-professional actor Yalitza Aparicio’s performance as Cleo in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) earned her an Academy Award nomination. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Is there anything especially expert about being a philosopher?

by David Egan

Edited by Sam Dresser


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Outside a university setting, telling people that I’m pursuing a career in philosophy can be a bit of a conversation stopper. More times than I can count, I’ve faced the bemused but well-intentioned question: ‘How is that useful?’ 

I seem like a nice guy, smart, capable – why am I intent on doing something that won’t make me rich and won’t make the world a better place?

The humanities in contrast with the ‘hard’ disciplines of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), are often disparaged as ‘soft’. You don’t need an advanced degree to read a novel, so why bother?

There’s a similar contrast we could draw between a first class in philosophy and a first class in electrical engineering. 

I lead my students into philosophical questioning by starting with intuitions that they already hold and then applying pressure to those intuitions, asking them to take their reasoning farther than they’d normally take it. 

We all make claims to know things, for instance, and we all recognise that sometimes these claims are justified and sometimes not. 

But outside a philosophy class, we rarely press very hard on the question of what constitutes knowledge and how we might distinguish it from, say, a lucky guess. 

I invite students to press harder on this question by starting with their familiar intuitions about when they are and aren’t licensed to claim to know something. 

By contrast, although I confess I’ve never taken a class in electrical engineering, I’m pretty sure that the course doesn’t begin by teasing out the students’ intuitions about how electrical circuits work.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein compared language to an ancient city: a centre packed with a maze of streets and squares, with new buildings squeezed in against old ones, which gradually gives way to newer, planned suburbs with an ordered grid of streets and uniform houses. 

We could think of the field of human inquiry similarly. The sciences are like these well-regulated suburbs, rigorously ordered according to precise methodologies, and the humanities are like the chaotic centre, as messy as the human lives that buzz about in it. 

You take a trip out to different suburbs for specific purposes: you want to send a rocket into space, treat an aggressive cancer, or devise a proof for Goldbach’s conjecture. Most of us will never visit these suburbs, and no one will ever get deeply acquainted with all of them. But we all come together in the city centre. 

All human lives feature some deliberation over what matters to us, what we like and dislike and why, what’s meaningful, admirable or despicable, what’s to be hoped for, what’s to be feared. 

When we start asking these questions more deliberately and rigorously, we’re intensifying an activity that’s already familiar.


So how is philosophy useful? 

The response I’ve learned to counter with is that the question being asked is itself a philosophical question. 

One of the things we do in philosophy is precisely to ask what’s worth doing and why. 

For the most part, my questioners have already presupposed a fairly limited set of acceptable answers to the question of what’s worth doing – answers that generally bottom out in the material wellbeing of oneself and others. But those answers, innocuous as they might seem to the speaker, are philosophical answers to a philosophical question.


In other words, we’re all doing philosophy all the time. 

We can’t escape the question of what matters and why: the way we’re living is itself our implicit answer to that question. 

A large part of a philosophical training is to make those implicit answers explicit, and then to examine them rigorously. Philosophical reflection, once you get started in it, can seem endlessly demanding. But if we can’t avoid living philosophically, it seems sensible to learn to do it well.

Link: https://aeon.co/ideas/is-there-anything-especially-expert-about-being-a-philosopher

by David Egan 

-- a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at CUNY Hunter College in New York. 

He is the author of The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (2019).

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STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. 

Education Values and beliefs Knowledge

06 December, 2019


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https://aeon.co/ideas/is-there-anything-especially-expert-about-being-a-philosopher