What is a Philosopher?
Saturday, January 01, 2000
What is a philosopher? Literally, a lover of wisdom – sometimes also called a seeker of truth. Not just any truth, but truth about important basic, elusive issues such as what is right & wrong, what is sure, what is human? These are the questions we confront when everyday thinking is inadequate to our situation.
Isn’t everyone a philosopher? Perhaps, at least occasionally. Just as most people are, at least occasionally, a healer – although we usually reserve the term for one who has devoted a life to the pursuit.
What makes Philip O’Carroll a philosopher? He has devoted his 53 years to the search. But this is only part of the story. He is a former philosophy lecturer, specialising in Logic and Ethics, but this too does not prove the claim. An academic philosopher is not necessarily a philosopher. Some are historians of philosophy. Some teach philosophical methods - such as linguistic analysis and logic. Some teach schools of thought - such as scholasticism or post-modernism.
[Is it absurd to say that an academic philosopher is not a philosopher, that an X-ish Y is not a Y? Well, it’s a bit unusual, but words get used in all sorts of ways. Consider for example, the fact that an armchair general is not usually a general!]
Philosophy is a discipline. Philosophers train themselves to weed out both prejudice and wishful thinking from their perception of reality. Philosophers pursue truth regardless of popularity, fashion or legislation. Philosophy is a dedicated lifestyle. What a philosopher believes and asserts is not controlled by a need to belong to a school of thought, nor by the requirements of one’s employer.
Philosophy needs clear thinking and reasoning. To increase the mind's ability to juggle complex elements, the philosopher deliberately forgoes the vanity of unnecessary jargon and the vanity of unnecessary verbosity. While philosophising, he or she uses concise, plain English as much as possible.
All of these philosopher’s virtues do not of course guarantee that everything they say is right. Philosophers seek truth in difficult areas. Typically, one cannot pluck the truth directly from a tangle of confused thoughts, but must spend much time carefully weeding around, removing the falsehoods and the contradictions.
Although philosophers may have a heightened capacity to accurately perceive the facts of life, the greater part of their work is in integrating those facts into a coherent world-view, most of which is generalised far beyond the limited evidence of their own experience.
It is like taking a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and hypothesizing what the overall picture is. There are many ways of getting it wrong. The problem is less often incorrect facts, and more often flaws in reasoning.
A philosopher must be willing and able to say "I don't know." Often, a philosopher finds that they have to entertain several possible alternative hypotheses, each of which provides a plausible solution to the few facts that are known on the matter under consideration.
Philip O'Carroll