Approaching Philosophy | Blog of the APA

This collection invitations seasoned philosophers to share crucial reflections on emergent and institutionalized shapes of and encounters inside philosophy. The collection collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s private, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that may even assist younger teachers and college students navigate philosophy at present.

The next is an edited extract from the introduction to a guide on philosophy, Coming Spherical: Philosophy within the Fullness of Time, that the writer, Dr. Brian Klug, is at the moment writing. 

‘What’s philosophy?’ If there’s a beacon that, like a jack-o’-lantern or ignis fatuus, has lit my approach down a number of a long time of studying and writing, in addition to educating in college departments, it’s this simple-sounding query. It’s my main query. Whereas the query is simple to pose, I discover it tough to make clear its level and to elucidate the pull it exerts on me. However that is a part of the pull: its elusiveness and but ubiquitousness. ‘What’s it about philosophy such that I hold coming again to this query?’ That’s one solution to paraphrase the query. ‘When is writing philosophical?’ That’s one other; which is as a lot as to say that this very writing too is in query to itself. Does it depend as philosophy? Does it even strategy it? 

No matter else, the phrase ‘philosophy’ stands for a convention of thought and enquiry, a literature and observe that appears again (or fails to look again) to Socrates, the gabbing protagonist of Plato’s dialogues. (There’s an ancient times, after all, however considerably we name it Presocratic, as if Socrates had been the hinge on which the custom turns.) Inside these dialogues, Socrates frequents the market sq. (Euthyphro), pops up at a consuming occasion (Symposium), or walks along with his pal within the countryside (Phaedrus), or speaks at his trial (Apology), or awaits execution in his jail cell (Phaedo); however by no means does he seem in a seminar room, giving a paper, nor in a examine, writing one, nor in a lecture corridor, holding forth on his space of experience; for he has none. In brief, he’s not a tutorial determine: a scholar or a realized professor. He has no title—besides the one he bestows upon himself: thinker. He insists that he has nothing to show: he’s, fairly actually, a professor of ignorance. If something, he’s the antithesis of a tutorial. But Plato makes him the presiding spirit of the Academy, the unique college. (You could possibly name this ‘Platonic irony’.) It looks as if a contradiction. It’s actually a paradox, one that’s worthy of Socrates himself.

Educational philosophy begins with this conundrum, which Plato bequeaths to posterity, throwing down the gauntlet. Right here is how I see it. The determine of Socrates, the one inscribed in Plato’s dialogues, dwells endlessly on the threshold of the division, outdoors the college, perpetually carrying the smile of a satyr (the musical satyr Marsyas, whom Alcibiades says he resembles), by no means crossing over into academia, all the time remaining on this planet outdoors. Philosophy begins and ends with this determine. That’s to say, it has to maintain discovering a approach again to Socrates, whom it retains dropping, as if it retains forgetting learn how to start, or learn how to derive itself from its personal supply. (The historical past of ‘western’ philosophy is essentially the historical past of dropping the determine of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, and there may be multiple solution to lose him.) On this reckoning, the important thing drawback of philosophy is simply this: The best way to learn Plato within the gentle of his paradox? This drawback—and the repeated lack of it within the custom—haunts my work; it’s the lead given by my main query: ‘What’s philosophy?’ This movement—from academia to Socrates—is the method for all my pondering, its artificial a priori type. All of which quantities to this: ‘educational philosophy’ is a contradiction in phrases.

This actually wasn’t the way it struck me at first. I bear in mind how, as a teen in school, I held in my arms a college prospectus, thrilled by the outline of the philosophy curriculum. It was stuffed with alluring phrases, phrases that appeared intrinsically deep, phrases into which I needed to solid my line to fish for knowledge: ‘metaphysics,’ ‘epistemology,’ ‘logic,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘aesthetics,’ ‘thoughts.’ Such a heady prospect! Right here, I assumed, is the place I can pursue my burning questions, which, like pimples, broke out unbidden: final or elementary questions, questions in regards to the existence of God, the character of actuality, of self, of time, of fact, of excellent and evil, and the like. And but, once I enrolled for a philosophy diploma, I had combined emotions, for I didn’t come bereft, like a clear sheet or a clean slate. There was one thing else, one thing except for the thirst for knowledge: amorphous ideas, gray shapes that swam under the floor—not ideas precisely however extra like wishes desirous to grow to be ideas. I can’t clarify this clearly however I felt them urgent on my chest, as if they might not let me relaxation till the day when, like a refrain of whales, they might rise to the floor and break into track or flip into birds: as if at some point I’d have one thing to say. I used to be fearful on behalf of my nascent ideas and nervous that with formal training they might die earlier than their time. Confiding in my notes, I noticed a prospect of “crumbling decay and the start of a dry learnedness.” This was on the one hand. Alternatively, I welcomed the chance to throw in my lot with like-minded individuals who, like me, had been bitten by the bug. In any occasion, my qualms didn’t hold me from stepping contained in the 4 partitions of a philosophy division; and, in a way of talking, I’m nonetheless there.

I check with ‘like-minded individuals.’ I considered it this fashion as a result of I didn’t anticipate the extent to which the division may very well be a lonely place to pursue philosophy—lonely as a result of a lot of what went on appeared devoid of the sense of urgency that had introduced me there. Quickly I discovered myself having to review stodgy previous articles in stuffy skilled journals on such questions as these: ‘Is existence a predicate?’, ‘Are names disguised descriptions?’ If I discovered the articles arid, it was not on account of their abstractness per se, however as a result of their sentences appeared to be in a state of stasis. I didn’t see any agonizing over something—with out which I questioned what on earth would possess anybody to put in writing them. (‘Was this philosophy?’, I questioned.) 

Moreover, I didn’t know learn how to take them. That’s to say, over and once more, in the midst of my formal training in philosophy, I used to be befuddled: I couldn’t inform what was happening. There, in entrance of me, had been pages coated with printed phrases in my mom tongue, and but these phrases didn’t appear to take. It wasn’t a lot the remoted proposition that mystified me because the article or paper as a complete. I had the identical type of expertise in seminars, the place different individuals would take opposite positions and thrash it out, whereas I sat there, mute and subdued, unable to see what, if something, was at stake in these battles of wits. I felt like an ignorant bystander. Or a dope.

For a while I led a form of mental double life, a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence that cut up off the division from philosophy. By day (so to talk) I used to be Jekyll, taking part in in line with the foundations of the sport (so far as I might make them out) within the division. At night time (because it had been) I turned Hyde, furtively following strains of thought whose vitality owed much less to the syllabus than to the stimulus of occasions in my life—together with my life within the division. As Jekyll, I dutifully wrote essays for tutorials. As Hyde, I hoarded notes that I wrote in personal—notes that will not have handed muster within the division. Step by step, nonetheless, this state of affairs modified: the partition between my official and unofficial pondering was breached as I found sure philosophical works that reached me finally. Studying them, I not felt as if I had been a stranger in an odd land. However whereas this made a welcome change, the very fact was oddly unsatisfying, for I couldn’t put my finger on what it was in regards to the works in query that made the distinction. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is a living proof. I might inform that one thing—to not say all the things—is at stake in its pages, and there have been passages that undoubtedly resonated with me. However I didn’t know what to make of it as a complete, partly on account of the unfamiliar jargon. Phrases like ‘nihilate,’ ‘interiorize,’ ‘being-in-itself,’ ‘being-for-itself’: was this the language of the love of knowledge or mere humbug? So, in a way, I used to be no higher off than earlier than studying this textual content. Both approach, whether or not a philosophical textual content left me chilly or struck some muffled chord, I wound up feeling baffled: I couldn’t come to grips with it. I used to be at a loss to know, within the remaining evaluation, simply what to say.

My bafflement led to a delicate shift in my focus. After I first approached philosophy, I used to be searching for knowledge. Now what I sought was philosophy itself. I had a brand new set of burning questions. Philosophy: what’s it? The place is it to be discovered and when can we lose it? If philosophia means ‘love’ (philo) of ‘knowledge’ (sophia), then what does the love that defines it consist in? When and why does this love lapse into indifference and even flip surreptitiously into its reverse: hatred of knowledge masquerading as philosophy? Knowledge: what’s that? Moreover, my expertise with studying philosophy was that sure works deliver pondering to life whereas others kill it. How come? How is it that some works possess this energy whereas others don’t? I used to be additionally haunted by a merciless comment of Kierkegaard’s: “At each step philosophy sloughs a pores and skin into which creep its nugatory hangers-on” (Journals of Kierkegaard, 53). This struck me as true, however how do you inform the discarded pores and skin from the dwelling flesh? “Who’re the true philosophers?” the younger Glaucon asks Socrates within the Republic. “These with a ardour to see the reality,” is Socrates’ irritating reply, for it feels like a truism. “Actually. Proper,” acknowledges Glaucon, then including (with a hint of impatience, as I hear him): “However how do you imply?” (Republic, E book V, 475e). (emphasis added). Precisely. Glaucon’s query turned my query—however with this distinction: over two thousand years have intervened.

The place do the solutions to those questions lie? I launched into a brand new venture: tracing works of philosophy to supply by reference to different works throughout the philosophical custom on which they drew or to which they reacted. However invariably the sources themselves turned out to be no much less opaque than the works they spawned. I saved desirous to ask, with respect to a given textual supply: “What lies behind this?” and “What are the sources upon which it’s drawing or to which it’s responding?” 

The path of clues led additional and additional again into philosophy’s previous, all the way in which again to the baseline of Plato’s dialogues and past; again to the earliest fragments of historic Greek philosophy, philosophy’s primordial period, lengthy earlier than Socrates confronted the Athenians within the fully-fledged dialogues of Plato; the interval when Pythagoras coined the phrase ‘philosophy’ (probably) and the solitary Heraclitus asseverated that the trail that leads up leads down. I hoped that the trail I had taken down into the previous would take me again as much as the current day. Moderately just like the angels on Jacob’s ladder, I ascended and descended in time, going from rung to rung, selecting up cues as I went alongside. However on none of my excursions into the previous did I acquire the agency foothold I used to be searching for. Then, what precisely was I searching for? Though I didn’t (and couldn’t) formulate it on the time, it appears to me now that I imagined it thus: sooner or later, I’d attain bedrock—primary texts, arduous nuggets of which means mendacity round like pure stone, the self-evident foundations on which all subsequent works of philosophy are constructed. However there was no bedrock, no arduous nuggets, only a mess of tiny rivulets of thought that slipped by means of my fingers. But when my venture was a failure, this very failure was a significant discovery that no work of philosophy can relaxation safe on the pedestal of a convention, as there isn’t any such pedestal or base or assist—no self-evident foundations— which is terrifying but in addition surprisingly liberating. For, if no work can relaxation safe, then nor can any work of yours. You could enterprise to talk. In philosophy, if you’re ever to have a voice, you should finally muster the braveness to show and face and, along with your again to the wall, say one thing.

Once you strategy philosophy, the place does it take you? Socrates tells Euthyphro: “The lover should observe the beloved wherever the latter would possibly lead” (Euthyphro 14c). From the outset, I used to be drawn to philosophy like a moth to a candle. Or maybe a donkey to a carrot dangling in entrance of its nostril, for I’ve adopted it wherever it has led—from pillar to put up, from venture to venture. It continues to guide me up the backyard path. I used to be by no means totally within the division and I’ve by no means fully left it. In a sure sense, I stay in it so as to discover my approach out—not by way of the door by which I entered, for I closed that door behind me, however by pursuing the carrot dangling in entrance of my nostril. The place does philosophy lead? Again to life, again to the world, again to the fray of the market sq. the place, bang within the center, the singular determine of Socrates stands out in opposition to the group, main the excessive and mighty on a merry dance, working rings spherical them, to the delight of the Athenian youth, of whom, in a approach, he’s one although he’s seventy and will know higher. 

I spot him quizzing Euthyphro, the self-proclaimed knowledgeable on piety, probing his pretension to be clever, unmasking him (or letting him unmask himself). Above the din of the stall-keepers promoting their wares, the voice of Socrates is as clear as a bell. “So we should examine once more from the start what piety is” (Euthyphro 15c). (Da capo, Euthyphro! Da capo!) It’s Euthyphro’s cue to go away. “Another time,” he says, “for I’m in a rush” (15e), as if there was ever one other time than now. Gathering up his toga, Euthyphro toddles off (presto), bumping right into a donkey in his haste and prodding it along with his thumb, inflicting the “nice and noble” (Apology 30e) beast to bawl like a child: hee haw, hee haw, hee haw. I discover myself chuckling on the resultant brouhaha available in the market. Socrates does too, our mingled peals of laughter ringing in my ears. Instantly, I discover that he’s crossing the sq. in my path, his enigmatic smile sending shivers down my backbone. I do know I’m in for a grilling. Nonetheless, I take my braveness in my arms. Girding my loins, gritting my tooth, and swallowing arduous, I strategy him as he approaches me.