A Definition of Philosophy

Article by Derek Li, Harvey Mudd ‘23

φιλοσοφια λογω εμοι, λογος εμου φιλοσοφια.

吾哲思，吾思哲

My thought, my philosophy—my philosophy, my thought.

Is it not, for the student, the first and final question—what is philosophy? To some, it is a name for all prodigious attainments of human thought. It approaches us, an ancient recollection—of what is, of what is not, of principles and elements, of nature, of virtue, of goodness, of the soul, of existence’s intelligibility, of knowledge, of logic, of metaphysics, of the limit of understanding, of unity. To thoroughly study each part of Being, we designated the disciplines of natural philosophy, moral (human) philosophy, and critical (thinking) philosophy. Yet to us students of modernity, heirs of twenty-three centuries of this enterprise’s history, hopeless it seems to maintain one body of knowledge through one method of thought. For some of us, philosophy is a moribund enterprise having exhausted its efficacy. Its proper purview for the present and futurity is the specialized disciplines of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This is our efficient disciplinarization—is it a truer conception of philosophy?

Perhaps a disputation of terminology is only significant when it is a dialogue of the associated meanings, and my question, for a definition of philosophy, is whether there is not a common idea that underlies different subject areas and may act, not as a functional, but a constitutional definition of philosophy. This question, I realize, is certainly beyond me, a college student who has not completed a first reading of philosophy’s history, of East or West. Yet the question is upon us, and we must address it by our present thoughts. The ancient Greeks sought unity in nature. If being is after all a plurality—if the unity of philosophy cannot be found in its subject—can we identify it in the philosopher, in a unity of thought?

In this essay, I begin with the first recognized Western philosophers known as the Presocratics, philosophers before Socrates, and proceed to concepts of philosophy developed by Plato and Aristotle. I suggest a view of the history of philosophy as a maturation of a method of reasoning that can be generally called deduction.¹And deduction, I think, constitutes a philosophical criterion for all sciences and understanding, on which we may seek a definition of philosophy. I understand that my sources and the central ideas that form my subject are solely from Western philosophy, and the applicability of my remarks should, strictly, be to these. Yet, as a young student, if ever I hope for understanding’s unity, it is in the name philosophy.

An interesting inquiry of philosophy’s nature, in a sense the earliest, is our identification of the origin of Greek philosophy with the thinkers before Socrates, the Presocratics. To issue an identification of the beginning of philosophy, we contemplate what we mean by philosophy and what it was historically—this is search for a definition. Philosophy was not the earliest of intellectual endeavors, not even the earliest system. In Greece, the literary tradition of Homer and Hesiod was well established prior to the emergence of the legendary first philosopher Thales in 6 BCE, and the poetic tradition likely remained the dominant system of thought during the time of the philosophers.²Rather, it appears that only after a tradition of ideas and culture had fermented, was philosophy to be engendered. Hence our notion of philosophy as a first explanation of the world is at least historically inaccurate, which is more germanely ascribed to mythology (muthos), meaning simply story, such as one finds in Hesiod’s Theogony, genesis of the Gods:

First of all Chaos came into being. Next came
Broad-breasted Gaia [Earth], the secure dwelling place forever of all…³

Such is a story—an account—of the constitution of the cosmos. When first reading the passage, I wondered what is meant by “first came into being” —does an object coming to be imply the existence of the process by which it came to be? Is declaring ‘chaos’ as the first being a confession of original incomprehensibility? These, however, are not questions of direct interest to the poet. As my professor of ancient philosophy Richard McKirahan puts it, “Hesiod explains neither how the sum total of existence came into being nor how it came to be divided.”⁴ What then distinguishes philosophy from the earlier literary tradition? The standard, though historically inaccurate,⁵ conception is that the Presocratic philosophers introduced argumentation, justification of beliefs with reasons, to their theories. Anaximander, the second of the Presocratic philosophers after Thales, posited for the element of the cosmos, that is, its principal constituent, an entirely indefinite substance he called apeiron.⁶ One reason for the postulate of apeiron is that given the existence of opposite properties as moisture and dryness, hot and cold, if the element, the fundamental substance, has such a definite property, it cannot constitute something holding the opposite: if water is the element, then fire cannot be satisfactorily explained. An alternative reason is that, as in Hesiod’s Theogony, for any definite object, we are prompted to ask how it was generated, and the question proceeds ad infinitum. To terminate the infinite regress, therefore, the elementary being should be indefinite and ungenerated to which the question of generation does not apply.

These are not sufficient reasons to justify a belief in apeiron, and so may be for most of the Presocratic arguments on various subjects. Nevertheless, the Presocratics initiated critiques of common beliefs and introduced new theories that, in turn, invited sustained questioning.⁷ Their influence can be found in the later sophists and in the theories of Plato and Aristotle. Thus, by this, they initiated reason, whatever it may be, as the standard of a theory’s acceptance, which the rest of history is to develop. They also boldly stated conceptual models of reality, e.g. the atom, idealizing and abstracting phenomena to a set of principles that can be analyzed precisely. The Presocratics demonstrated criticality in examining the premises of ancient beliefs. Criticism toward a system of thought can be defined as an investigation of its fundamental beliefs. A person who has reflected carefully on the working of his or her genius appreciates how conventional thinking is, and how scarce and alienated is a critical thought that induces insight! There is yet no universal method of critique, for critique itself is an introduction of ideas. An idea, to be appraised or criticized, requires another, as assumption. That assumption defines the nature of the critique. So long as our thought has not comprehended all Thought, we cannot claim, for any system of ideas, that we have eliminated the possibility of criticism. In this sense criticality is relative—it is not an unambiguous basis for a definition of philosophy, and the Presocratic philosophers are regarded as critical for the relative novelty of their ideas not by an absolute standard that demarcates them from earlier thinkers. As posterity, nonetheless, we may incorporate the readiness to engage, deconstruct, and evaluate fundamental beliefs as a quality to our philosophical attitude.

Criticality is a careful attitude of taking apart our wonted ideas, yet it is not a precise method of analysis or a positive way of devising a theory. What would be the criterion for a more complete model of reasoning? Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, voices his discontent with Anaxagoras, a Presocratic philosopher: “the man mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things… but he would neglect to mention the true causes of things.”⁸ In the dialogue Gorgias, distinguishing philosophical disciplines from other, what he considers, specious intellectual subjects, Socrates identifies philosophy as having “investigated both the nature of the object it serves and the cause of the things, and is able to give an account of each of these.”⁹ Herein I think is a definition of philosophy—a knowledge of causality. Socrates is disenchanted with the theories of earlier natural philosophers because the principal causes they posited, e.g. water, air, fire, earth, do not satisfactorily explain existence. The variety and complexity of phenomena cannot be derived from these simple causes. With his theory of Forms, Plato attempted to account for this plurality, though we, in light of our modern system of physics, may perhaps be as disenchanted with it as a cosmological theory, as he was with the Presocratics. Nonetheless, the object is for us, as for Plato, one—a system that encapsulates the causes of things, and through causal relations with which all can be derived and understood. A theory of everything may appear, to our view, more of a project for the physicist. Yet the nature of such a system of knowledge—what are explained, the method of explanation, the limits in our understanding—is of the utmost interest to a philosopher if not to any scholar. Furthermore, the idea of causality itself, the essential criterion of any such theory, is central to philosophy.

What is causality? By it, I do not mean the temporal ordering of events, for instance, that I am caused by the Big Bang. Knowing merely that it preceded my existence affords me little understanding of myself. Rather, I understand atoms and atomic interactions as causes of molecules, people and collaboration as causes of society, the substances and physical laws issued by the Big Bang as the cause of my and the universe’s being. These I call epistemic or theoretical causes, which are the end of any philosophical or scientific enterprise. They are the set of underlying principles from which other things of import can be derived. Γ is the cause of A if A can be logically deduced from Γ. In this sense, causality is a relation of ideas. It is, in simplicity, deduction.

Now, for those who have studied the idea of ‘causation,’ significant confusion might ensue over my definition of causality. David Hume famously analyzed our concept of causation, demonstrating the difficulty of validating what we conceive as causes, our theoretical causes, physically.¹⁰ The problem here with the terminology, as I perceive it, is that we apply the word ‘cause’ in discussions of reality, whereas ‘deduction’ pertains to concepts and ideas, where the word ‘priority’ might be the analogue of ‘causality.’ Between idea and reality is the great mapping problem of philosophy, which I do not attempt to broach here. What I consider useful for our present discussion is the observation that any true physical cause we can understand is necessarily represented as ideas and theories. When we reason about anything, it is implied that ‘that thing’ can be represented by our ideas and so is amenable to reasoning. Furthermore, we cannot validate, without presupposing the validity of some ideas, that any idea corresponds to reality. This is the priority of theory: make no assumption—and we cannot think. Hence, our conception of reality, and of causality which organizes reality, must assume the form of ideas available to our mind and specifically, through deduction. We consider something sufficiently explained, say the lower density of ice compared to water, when we can deduce it from foundational principles, here energetics, provided that the principles are empirically verified. In this essay, I consider the question of ideas or concepts primarily, which I call understanding, leaving aside the question of validation, which maps concept to reality, commonly denoted knowledge.

The importance of deduction to philosophy is intuitive. Students of analytic philosophy may consider it a tautology. After all, why is Plato so philosophical for us?¹¹ It is probably the plurality of his ideas. Yet is it not essential of Plato that he presented them as systems of deductive arguments, as theories? Perhaps a defining contribution of Socrates is that he first sought clear definitions of things that encapsulate their nature, which made deduction and clear arguments on these defined concepts possible. Thus, in one sense, a legacy of philosophy is to have applied and developed a model of abstract deduction typical in mathematics to objects of our common experience, such that we can rigorously reason and thereby understand. Plato produced arguments in ethics and introduced questions in epistemology, politics, and metaphysics. Aristotle, his successor, formulated the sciences as deductive disciplines. In the opening of Physics, he proposes:

In all disciplines in which there is systematic knowledge of things with principles, causes, or elements, it arises from a grasp of those: we think we have knowledge of a thing when we have found its primary causes and principles, and followed it back to its elements.¹²

The essence of principles is that they can sufficiently derive other things. As such, they are putative causes of other phenomena. Explaining phenomena by tracing to first principles is still the standard mode of scientific explanation. In the contemporary philosophy of science, for example, the Deductive Nomological Model defines an explanation as a deduction from verified first principles, so-called laws of physics.¹³(For Aristotle this deductive quality is essential not only to natural science but to all disciplines that produce understanding, which he called the sciences.) Yet beyond technical explanations as found in science, there is, I suspect, a significant relation between deduction and what we call understanding. To under-stand, in a precise sense, is to be able to explain. An explanation is a constructive and conscious activity. By this qualification, I exclude the freighted word ‘intuition,’ for if we cannot reason about it—such as I cannot as easily mentally create a feeling of touch as I can conceive an image—we cannot study its meaning.

In what contexts do we say we understand something without deduction? We often use the term ‘inductive reasoning.’ Yet do we really understand that the sun shall rise tomorrow? Perhaps we may understand it by the law of gravitation, which’d be a deductive law. Fundamentally, though, induction is an association of similarities—myself from yesterday and today, this atom and that atom—that cannot rationally be justified. This is Hume’s analysis of induction, which is a basic faculty of our mind that associates similar or so-called ‘identical’ objects. This association, though, is an assumption, and we cannot construe it in any deeper sense.¹⁴If induction will not qualify as understanding, perhaps we will consider a statement such as “humans are good and evil” as an example of so-called approximate or abductive reasoning. What do we really understand in this statement? Is it not that an individual has interests, and interests of individuals can conflict and unite, sometimes tending to things we regard bad and sometimes to good? This then is a rather precise notion that can be made deductive. The reason we do not consider our concept of the statement “humanity is good and evil” as deductive is that we have no precise mathematical definition of humanity as well as of good and evil, to show the latter follows from the former. Yet the essential constituents of the sentence that may qualify as understanding are such deductive segments.

The reader will object that the question—is there understanding apart from deduction?—is specious, as I seem to only recognize deduction as understanding, hence presuming the answer to the question. This is true, yet my contention is that if there is no other common mode of thinking which may qualify as understanding, intuitively, then this tautology of understanding and deduction might be a significant one. How else can I understand an idea other than by knowing what it is, which is knowing the definitions that constitute it? A triangle is a planar figure enclosed by three intersecting lines. But ‘definitions’ need not be formal or technical. A person is an organism with a head, a torso, and four limbs. I need not have definite notions of all of the parts that constitute a person, but precise notion of any part, say one head per person, allows me to count the number of visitors I have—deductively. I wonder if it cannot be maintained that any meaningful idea implies a set of definitions that constitute it deductively. Deductivity is the necessary relation of ideas. (And if we need a term to distinguish this general concept from pq, we may call it universal deduction.) Deduction, then, appears to be the maturation of any reasoning; the end of any science is a deductive system; and a view of the history of western philosophy is the maturation of this method of knowledge’s organization, that is, as deduction.

I must emphasize, though without the liberty to entertain the point, that human thinking is certainly more than deduction. Through inductions and other means, we form the ideas that render deduction possible. Deduction is a model of reasoning—it is a criterion by which we assess the validity of our ideas. Success in formulating a deductive system imparts the maturity of our understanding. Yet deduction itself is not how we generated the system. Mathematics, philosophy, the sciences are not closed enterprises that proceed deductively from an initial set of premises, but they are revolutions that constantly develop the consequences of certain ideas while introducing new ones. What I mean to say is that deduction is the universal standard and method of reasoning—what I may call a philosophical criterion, necessary to understanding and to all disciplines.

If the reader has been able to somewhat indulge the concept of deduction I suggested, then my intent for giving a definition of philosophy as deduction is plainly rendered with the quote of Moritz Schlick, “philosophy is not a separate science to be placed alongside of or above the individual disciplines. Rather, the philosophical element is present in all of the sciences; it is their true soul.”¹⁵ That we call it philosophy is not my contention. Indeed, let us call it Biology, call it Mathematics, call it Chemistry, Physics, and Sociology, for the plurality of ideas they engage, as deduction certainly depends on the fundamental ideas that constitute its definitions—they create the meaning of the deductive system. Only when we reflect on all the knowledge we have generated and seek our method of thought, if we will, we shall call the common core philosophy.

I would like to close with a view of logic. If we mean to define philosophy with deduction, it is required to be a precise idea. What is deduction? It is the relation of ideas. What are ideas? Have they ever been defined? If I may consult a philosopher of mathematics, I’d like to ask: has the number 1 ever been defined? Or is it isomorphic ideas conceived in the minds of you and I? We want to say that the idea of 1 makes it the minimum number together with the ideas of other natural numbers, not that the notation 1 is nominally the first number, which’d be impossible to comprehend. Yet if we cannot define an idea, is deduction, the necessary relation of ideas, a precise concept? We cannot claim that all meaning is deductive without having access to all meaning. I am capable of reasoning about numbers, for my mind can grasp and analyze distinct notions of them and formalize them as notations. As much as we would assign to our mathematical world, the a priori, an independent existence from our natural being, is it not due for an empiricist to affirm that what we call deduction—the reasoning that proceeds through a proof—is a phenomenon of our mind? That the meaning of those mathematical ideas are the active thoughts conceived in our ideation? Thus, mathematics and our models of logic cannot define deduction but are the most admirable artifacts of that deductive capacity of the mind. To fully understand deduction then is to understand this deductive capacity. Can we understand our understanding? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Yet only through thinking can we understand our thought. And to philosophize, ultimately, is to reflect on our thought and understanding. We students of philosophy are as that youth of Shakespeare:

But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes
Feedst thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel...¹⁶

Endnotes

This view, given its simplicity and crude historicity, has probably been proposed and treated by historians but, by the lack of my reading, eluded me. I present it here not as a historical argument on the discipline of philosophy but only as a perspective from which a notion of philosophy can be fashioned.
“Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy”, Chapter 2, Philosophy Before Socrates. Richard D. McKirahan.
Ibid, pg. 9.
Ibid, pg. 10.
My brief discussion of Presocratic philosophers here is couched in the general treatment given in the book Philosophy Before Socrates by Professor McKirahan. The chapter references given in my notes and references regarding the Presocratic philosophers are all to this book. Prof. McKirahan has cautioned me about the historical infidelity of identifying the Presocratics as the introducers of rigorous argumentation, (an identification drive perhaps by an impulse of analytic philosophers) the point of which I acknowledge here and also later in considering argumentation as a relative and not truly precise measure. This inaccurate characterization is, I think, nonetheless useful and interesting to discuss, not the least for later viewing Plato and Aristotle as articulating more rigorous methods of reasoning.
“Anaximander of Miletus”, Chapter 5, Philosophy Before Socrates.
See Xenophanes and Parmenides, Chapters 7, 11, Philosophy Before Socrates. The theories of the natural philosophers and later the atomists are also novel and critical ways of explaining the world that initiated new discourses and argumentation and so effectively critical toward traditional ways of thinking.
Phaedo, 98c-e. Plato.
Gorgias, 501a. Plato.
“Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding”, Section 4. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. David Hume.
Plato is the putative inventor of the word philo-sophia, love of wisdom, in his dialogue Gorgias. Intuitively meaningful, to use the etymology—love of wisdom—as a definition of philosophy begs the question of what wisdom is, which is a freighted and unelucidated term for Plato.
Physics, 184a, Aristotle.
“The DN Model”, Section 2, Scientific Explanation. Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
“Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding”, Section 4, Part 2, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. David Hume.
Preface, General Theory of Knowledge. Moritz Schlick.
Sonnet 1. Shakespeare.