WILLIAMSON - DOING PHILOSOPHY: how philosophers think

Jean-Pierre Rives is a rugby union legend. Livewire captain of the great French team in the years 197884, he was an unforgettably dashing figure on the field with long, wild, blond hair and often a bloodstained shirt. In a newspaper interview, he explained his thinking about tactics. The key, he said, is to have a clear and distinct idea of what you are trying to achieve. Then you should break each complicated move down into its simplest components, make them intuitive, and build it back up from there. Without naming the iconic French philosopher Ren Descartes (15961650), Rives was following both his signature emphasis on the need for clear and distinct ideas and one of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (rule 5). French schools teach philosophy, and it has unexpected uses.

Philosophy also has dangers. Rives did not recommend another part of Descartes method, his radical strategy of doubting whatever he could, including the whole world outside his mind, in order to rebuild science on the firm foundation of the few remaining certainties. Extreme doubt may not yield sporting success. Anyway, Descartes did not live up to his own high standards. He relied on dodgy old ways of thinking to prove Gods existence and then used God to resolve his doubts. Even at the time, many philosophers found his solution unconvincing. His reasons for doubt were like Frankensteins monster, which he constructed but could not control. That is the problem of scepticism. Its often dismissed as a non-issue, of interest only to paranoid philosophers. But dont forget the public relations consultants called in by politicians and businesses to undermine inconvenient scientific discoveries, like global warming and the harmful effects of smoking. Those consultants have a slogan: Our product is doubt. They know they cant prove the scientists wrong. Their aim is just to create enough confusion, to make people think The experts cant agree, so theres no point worrying. Climate change scepticism isnt a harmless philosophical eccentricity; its a threat to future generations.

Descartes starting point for reconstructing knowledge was his knowledge of his own inner thought. That too still has strange echoes. In March 2003 the United States under President George W. Bush and the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Tony Blair invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Husseins regime, claiming that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The claim soon turned out to be false. In a 2004 speech defending his actions, Tony Blair said: I only know what I believe. He hadnt known that there were WMD, but he had known that he believed that there were WMD. He tried to divert attention away from the question of testable evidence out there for WMD to the question of his inner sincerity.

Philosophy also plays a role when we recognize that the people of that region have endured a long history of human rights abuses. We can do so because we have an idea of human rights. Philosophers played a key role in developing that idea: notably, in the same period as Descartes, Hugo Grotius (15831645), John Locke (16321704), and others.

Philosophy isnt something totally alien to us; its there already in our lives, in trivial ways and important ones. But what is philosophy? What are philosophers trying to achieve?

Traditionally, philosophers have wanted to understand the nature of everything, in a very general way: existence and non-existence, possibility and necessity; the world of common sense, the world of natural science, the world of mathematics; parts and wholes, space and time, cause and effect, mind and matter. They want to understand our understanding itself: knowledge and ignorance, belief and doubt, appearance and reality, truth and falsity, thought and language, reason and emotion. They want to understand and judge what we do with that understanding: action and intention, means and ends, good and bad, right and wrong, fact and value, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, life and death, and more. Philosophy is hyper-ambitious.

That brief description raises an obvious question: since scientists study many of those topics, how is philosophy related to science? They were not always separate. From the ancient Greeks on, philosophy included natural philosophy, the study of the natural world. To cut a long story short, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, natural philosophy turned into something recognizable as natural science in the modern sense, especially physics. Pioneers such as Galileo and Newton still described themselves as natural philosophers. Some philosophers were also scientists and mathematicians, including Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716). But natural philosophy or natural science developed a distinctive methodology, with a key role for experimentation, exact observation using special instruments such as telescopes and microscopes, measurement, and calculation. Increasingly, this child of philosophy has looked like a rival and mortal threat to its parent. For philosophy and natural science seem to be in competition to answer the same questions about the underlying nature of reality. If it is a duel, philosophy seems to be outgunned, for it only has thought, while natural science has those other methods too. If philosophers insist that they are better at thinking than natural scientists, who will believe them? To change the metaphor, the philosopher is cast in the role of the lazy man lecturing us from the comfort of his armchair about how the universe must be, while the scientist goes out to look and see how it really is. If thats right, isnt philosophy obsolete? Thus the rise of modern natural science has provoked a slow-burning crisis of philosophical method.