Beebee Helen - Philosophy : why it matters

Politys Why It Matters series

In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.

Helen Beebee & Michael Rush, Philosophy
Robert Eaglestone, Literature
Lynn Hunt, History
Tim Ingold, Anthropology
Neville Morley, Classics
Alexander B. Murphy, Geography
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Linguistics
Graham Ward, Theology and Religion

Helen Beebee
Michael Rush

Polity

Copyright Helen Beebee and Michael Rush 2019

The right of Helen Beebee and Michael Rush to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2019 by Polity Press

Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3218-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Beebee, Helen, author. | Rush, Michael, 1976- author.
Title: Philosophy : why it matters / Helen Beebee, Michael Rush.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032465 (print) | LCCN 2018051371 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509532186 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509532155 | ISBN 9781509532155 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509532162(paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B72 (ebook) | LCC B72 .B44 2019 (print) | DDC 100--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032465

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

We would like to thank Pascal Porcheron and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer at Polity for their encouragement, enthusiasm, efficiency and good advice, as well as three anonymous reviewers, whose comments and suggestions led to many improvements.

Thanks to Al Baker for conversations on a book idea that led to a different book idea that led to a different book idea and ended up here. Thanks also to the following people for reading and commenting on a draft of this book: Sammy Boardman, Matthew Elton, Harry Gray, Jasmine Hay, Anneli Jefferson, Pauline Kwiat-Hodson, Emilia Meissner, Matthew Rush, and Ema Sullivan-Bissett. Youre all great.

We dedicate this book to the memory of Harry Lesser (19432015): an inspiring teacher, generous colleague, and friend.

Perhaps you are reading this book because youre interested in knowing more about how philosophy might be relevant to your life and your understanding of the world around you. Perhaps you are reading this book to help you decide whether to study philosophy more formally; maybe you are wondering which courses to take at university. We firmly believe in the value and interest of philosophy at every stage of every walk of life. Philosophy matters.

Philosophy matters because it seeks and promotes understanding and clear thought and because it is practically helpful, intrinsically interesting, and culturally and historically significant. Those are grand claims, but in this book well show you why we think theyre true. Philosophy is not the only valuable discipline, of course, and each has its role in the collaborative effort to understand the world, but philosophy has an important and distinctive part to play, as we will see.

As well as being important, philosophy is also misunderstood: it might not be what you think it is. The good news is that philosophy is all around you and theres a strong chance youve asked yourself distinctively philosophical questions already even if you didnt know thats what you were doing. If youve ever asked yourself whether parents should be allowed to demand risky and expensive medical procedures for their children; had a passionate argument about whether Rachmaninoff is really better than Rage Against The Machine; puzzled over how we can tell whether our elected leaders are lying to us for their own gain and whether we should be concerned if they are; wondered whether you can believe that physics tells us how the world really is and also believe in God; speculated about whether we have free will and some measure of control over our actions or are at the mercy of unconscious natural processes just like when you slip on the ice or the leaves fall from the trees then youve taken your first steps in philosophy. All of these are philosophical questions and all of them are questions that might occur to you as you make your way about the world.

We can engage with these questions to some extent without any deep knowledge of philosophy. Most people do just that, but it is also possible to engage with them more fruitfully, more fully, and more satisfyingly once you know a bit about the philosophical theories and methods that define the questions and constrain the sorts of answers we can reasonably give. Philosophy allows you to be interested in all the things that already fascinate you but to engage with them more deeply. This is why philosophy matters to you. Once we all engage more deeply with the sorts of questions that face us we can live more richly and we can start to expose the sort of sloppy thinking that works against the smooth running of the world and is used by some people to maintain positions of power and influence over others. This is why philosophy matters to everyone.

There are a variety of fair reasons why you might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick about what philosophy is. Perhaps philosophy wasnt taught at your school; it isnt very widely taught in schools. It is just well enough known in the public imagination for it to have been lampooned, without being well enough understood for the jokes always to be recognized as jokes. It concerns itself with abstract questions that dont always lend themselves to casual conversation.

As a result, you might think that philosophy is just a matter of expressing your opinion, or that it involves sitting around all day wondering whether your chair exists. You might think that philosophy is really just like theology or some other religious pursuit, or that it mostly involves meditation. You might even confuse philosophy with psychology. Historically thats not ridiculous, since psychology started out as a branch of philosophy, though they parted ways more than a century ago now. Or you might think that philosophy is something that was only done a long time in the past or that, though its still done today, it is only indulged in by people in dusty libraries where they cant do any harm or get in the way.