Why philosophy? Vaste question!

Two Reasons

Let me simply contrast two reasons for philosophising which seem to have enjoyed great popularity throughout the twentieth century and beyond and point to a number of questions about the two reasons, questions which are rarely discussed or noticed. Some of these questions are philosophical, some sociological or historical. They include questions about the nature and possibility of philosophy, about the history and sociology of recent philosophy and, of course, questions about the reasons, good, bad and not too awful for philosophising.

One reason for philosophising in the twentieth century seems to have been curiosity about the answers to philosophical questions about the twentieth century, about the actual world, questions pertaining to ethical, aesthetic and, above all, political and social philosophy[1]. A quite different reason for philosophizing seems to have been either an interest in questions pertaining to theoretical philosophy (logic, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language….) or, if in practical philosophy, curiosity about the abstract questions of social and political philosophy. Interest in practical philosophy of this sort does not of course essentially involve any interest in how practical philosophy applies to the present. A philosopher falling into the second category might, for instance, be fascinated by the relations between freedom in republicanism and freedom in democracy, between political freedom and inner freedom or the paradoxes of political representation but not be interested, as a philosopher, in late capitalism, Amerikanismus, desire under capitalism, technology and mass man, contemporary forms of oppression or the health of the democracy she lives in.

The two reasons for philosophising in the twentieth century, then, are, first, an interest in the philosophy of the twentieth century, in normative, philosophical questions about the twentieth century, and, second, an interest in philosophy without any special or essential reference to the twentieth century. Questions about the applications of political and social philosophy to the twentieth century are, understandably enough, often felt to be more urgent than philosophical questions which are not about the twentieth or any other century.

In this characterization, the actual world is contrasted with merely possible worlds and the present, like the reference of “now”, can be more or less long. Interest I take to be a feeling which typically motivates wondering whether p and the desire or will to know. I assume that interest is a necessary condition for philosophising and that when the will or desire to know is motivated not by interest but by what is in someone’s interest one is no longer in the presence of a philosopher.

Much philosophy in the twentieth century in the West was concerned with aspects of life in the twentieth century: capitalism, late capitalism, desire and imagination under capitalism, power relations under capitalism, bourgeois forms of life, technology and rationalization, oppression and exploitation, imperialism and colonialism. More recently the varieties of oppression and the omnipresence of these varieties have captured philosophical interest. Many of these phenomena were taken to have a history which continued into the twentieth century. Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze and Habermas all wanted to understand aspects of twentieth century life through the lens of practical philosophy, conceived of in many different, often incompatible, ways.

But the twentieth century was also the century in which the philosophies of logic, mathematics, science, language and mind flourished. As did practical philosophy, often without any essential reference to the contemporary world. The different branches of philosophy were cultivated without any reference to the contemporary world above all in early phenomenology and analytic philosophy.

Two Exceptions: Russell & Scheler

There are two striking exceptions to this rule. Two twentieth century philosophers who wrote extensively about the ethical, political and social questions of their times are Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Max Scheler (1874-1928). Each occupied a central position in the philosophical movements or currents to which they belonged, what came to be called analytic philosophy and phenomenology. Russell put logic, analysis and the philosophy of science at the heart of analytic philosophy in many of its manifestations. Scheler was the most influential and productive phenomenologist after Husserl up until the death of phenomenology in 1927 and published extensively on ethics, moral psychology, the theory of values and norms, social philosophy, the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. In addition to their extensive writings on the most abstract of philosophical questions only peripherally connected with contemporary reality, they both regularly adopted positions about Zeitfragen – Russell about social democracy, Marxism and Bolshevism, female emancipation, capitalism, power, nuclear weapons, both World Wars and the war in Vietnam[2]; Scheler about the first World War, capitalism, social democracy, socialism, Marxism and Bolshevism, female emancipation, religion in Germany and numerous contemporary political views and positions[3].

In 1935 a German historian of philosophy grouped or yoked the two philosophers together as follows:

What Troeltsch once said of Scheler, that his philosophy is a curious mixture of penetration (Scharfsinn), thoughtfulness (Tiefsinn) und thoughtlessness (Leichtsinn), holds also of Russell whose spiritual kinship with Scheler in these and other respects is obvious.[4]

Whatever “spiritual kinship” there was, their philosophies could not be more different. The essentialism, trust in the deliverances of intuition (Anschauung), naïve realism about values and essential non-formal connections and theism then panentheism of Scheler were all foreign to Russell (who continued to take seriously the value realism of Moore for only a decade or so after the publication of Principia Ethica).

Both philosophers were, on the other hand, interested in the ravages created by ressentiment and sour grapes. Both saw in capitalism and the love of money the enemies of what Russell called vitality and Scheler vital values. Indeed Scheler greeted enthusiastically what he took to be Russell’s agreements in Principles of Social Reconstruction with views Scheler had espoused before the Great War. They shared a strong and at the time unusual interest in the relations between sociology and philosophy. In the social conditions in which different philosophies emerged and in the social conditions marked by different philosophies. They wrote extensively about questions in social philosophy, in particular about non-normative questions in social philosophy. Unlike their closest philosophical collaborators, they were much exercised by the nature of power. They were among the first and most important thinkers to reject both capitalism and Marxism. They saw very clearly, unlike so many of their contemporaries, the emergence of the phenomenon of political religions, as opposed to non-religious political movements and activities, in particular Bolshevism. Indeed the first thorough attempts to understand political religions, totalitarianism, Bolshevism and Fascism are due to thinkers who were students of Scheler or strongly influenced by him (Gurian, Voegelin, von Hildebrand, Kolnai). Nevertheless, as Scheler’s only Cambridge disciple, the poet, philosopher and soldier, T. E. Hulme, pointed out, from Scheler’s point of view, Russell’s ethical and political views were in many respects neo-Romantic mistakes.

Two Types of Saviour – Doctors of the Age vs Medicine Men

What did Russell and Scheler think they were doing when writing about contemporary normative questions?

Scheler was struck by the increasing number of his contemporaries, philosophers and non-philosophers, turning their attention to contemporary, normative questions. He baptized them “doctors of the age” (Ärzte der Zeit). A new literary genre is coming into being, he says, which is not yet clear about its task and so is often confused with philosophy, ethics, psychology, pedagogy and the genre of history. Among the better known specimens of the genre he mentions are some writings of Dilthey, Weber, Sombart, Troeltsch and Freudian psychoanalysts, as well as his own explorations of ressentiment and the bourgeois. The art of the doctor of the age goes beyond philosophy to destroy the myths and illusions of his patients in order to heal, that is, save them.

But, Scheler stresses, the doctors of the age are surrounded by medicine men and other false prophets and quacks. These include the representatives of what he calls Literatenphilosophie, who pay no attention to the sciences, are unmethodical and lack rigour. Their aphoristic “philosophical literature” abounds in opinions and value judgments expressed in a personal and subjective form. He mentions in this connection Rathenau, Steiner, Spengler, Keyserling and some members of the George Circle[5]. Rathenau is the object of similar criticisms by Musil, criticisms which take wing in the biting portrait of Arnheim, the figure in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften based in part on Rathenau. Scheler and Musil are indeed the leading critics of neo-Romanticism (which Scheler calls Pan-Romanticism) in the German-speaking world. And Musil’s “essayism” is often an attempt to philosophise about contemporary normative questions without falling into the errors of Literatenphilosophie or Lebensphilosophie (or of philosophers like Scheler).

Scheler’s “interventions” concerning burning political and ethical questions of the day invariably draw on his substantive normative views about different sorts of value, moral, ethical, religious, aesthetic, legal, epistemic, vital, economic, political and sensory, as well as on a remarkably thorough social philosophy and philosophy of sociology.

But this is not true of Russell’s “interventions”. Nor could it be given his scepticism about or rejection of the possibility of substantive, normative political and ethical theory. He seems often to have taken himself to have started from his own “subjective” moral and political preferences and to have proceeded from there via detailed arguments, distinctions and empirical claims to practical, urgent conclusions. Is (what seems to be) Russell’s view of his political life[6] correct?

Consider a modification of Russell’s views, a modification which concerns only his meta-normative views.  Suppose Russell’s ethico-political preferences are correct. Suppose, then, that among the highest ethico-political values are freedom, political freedom but also inner freedom; the satisfaction of desires, not merely the satisfaction of desire as a propositional attitude but the satisfactions of the desire or impulse to F, enjoying F-ing, what Russell called zest, and Scheler Funktionsfreude; and, finally, the values of different aspects of vitality, including the value of power.

What sort of philosophy emerges from this modification of Russell’s official meta-normative view? One plausible answer is suggested by Wollheim, who says it would be

a matter only of simplification, and not of grave distortion to look on the whole of Russell’s social philosophy as an attempt, a sustained attempt, to repair that of John Stuart Mill: to supplement its deficiencies, to relate it to new ideas, and to demonstrate its applicability to the ever-changing realities of the twentieth century[7].

The modification mentioned is perhaps compatible with Russell’s early Moorean, naïve value-realism and with the forms of naturalism with which he experimented late in life. But not, of course, with the subjectivisms, emotivisms, anti-cognitivisms and error theory he endorsed for most of his life. But Russell, of course, had weapons ready to hand which did not require anything more than his own political and ethical preferences:

The political systems that I most dislike have the quality of being, in practice, self-refuting, that is to say, those who try to establish them are almost certain to fail (Russell 1944 740).

The publications by Scheler which make up his political life, his attempts to doctor or educate the age, are, as far as I can see, unique in the history of early, realistic phenomenology in their quantity, range and depth. Realist phenomenologists were by and large concerned with what they thought of as timeless questions. The most important – although not the only – exception to this rule apart from the case of Scheler is furnished by the publications of von Hildebrand and Kolnai in the 1930’s about and against German fascism. (The philosophical tradition which gave rise to early phenomenology, the descriptive psychology of Brentano’s most influential students, displays a similar structure. Ehrenfels’ active proselytizing for the cause of polygamy seems to be the sole major excursion into the political arena in this tradition).

In this respect, Scheler’s position within phenomenology resembles that of Russell within early analytic philosophy. But analytic philosophy is still very much alive and phenomenology died a long time ago. Analytic philosophy since the death of Russell has seen a great deal of applications of both normative ethics and political philosophy to the contemporary world. Numerous analytic philosophers have pronounced on contemporary political questions from Roger Scruton, Ernst Tugendhat, Michael Sandel and Peter Singer to Jason Stanley, Olivier Massin and Michael Esfeld.

Two Vices

Suppose a philosopher turns her attention from views about ethics, politics and social philosophy in the abstract to the actual world. What could possibly go wrong? Many of the things that could go wrong are not peculiar to such a philosopher. They are the risks that any economist, lawyer, scientist, politician or concerned citizen runs in addressing the public about burning issues of the day. One familiar risk is that strong feelings about the matter under discussion, the character of urgency they so often take on, will trump genuine interest, curiosity and the will to know. This is the risk of foolishness. There does not seem to be much reason to believe that philosophers writing about the present and future of the “construction” of the EU, dangers to the German Volk, the welfare state, abortion, social justice, justice or feminism are less likely to avoid foolishness than economists, lawyers, scientists, politicians, or concerned citizens. Is there a risk run by philosophers as such?

One such risk occasionally comes into focus in the classical critiques of and polemics against intellectuals from Ortega and Benda to Jean-François Revel and Thomas Sowell. Nor is this surprising. Many intellectuals have had some relation to philosophy or at least been happy to be considered philosophers. The risk often remains invisible because of easy and loose understandings of the very notion of “applying” normative philosophy to the actual world. It is, I suggest, best understood by bearing in mind a central feature of normative political philosophy. Philosophers of democracy, republicanism, socialism, communism, feminism and oppression typically have views about what makes a society democratic, a political regime republican, a citizen or subject free, a law just, a relationship one of oppression and so on. These views consist in large measure of specifications of value-makers or valifiers, of what more or less complex conditions make something democratic, republican, free, just. But the identification of such value-makers in the actual world, as opposed to their specification within a political philosophy, is a task for which philosophy is of little help. An additional but related problem arises when normative political philosophies are committed to claims about the interrelations between different values (goods, norms, rights) and their valifiers or conditions. The task of identifying the value-makers of a given value in the actual world is then complicated by the pressure to identify the valifiers of other values systematically connected with the value in question. The familiar risks of squeezing or trimming or exaggerating or underplaying the facts to make them fit an attractive theory are then run.

The philosopher is on safer – but not always safe – ground when she criticizes contemporary myths and ideologies. The “living myths” of an age, as Scheler points out, are what Ibsen called its ghosts. Criticisms of philosophical propositions are activities with which philosophers are very familiar and do not involve actually looking at the contemporary world in order to decide whether this or that society or custom or relationship in the actual world is an example of freedom, injustice or oppression.

Two Priorities

Within philosophy, within a philosophical tradition, it may be thought that the burning normative questions of the day are also the philosophically urgent questions or the philosophically most important questions or indeed the only philosophical questions. When such a view triumphs, then there occurs what Brentano called the second phase in the decline of philosophy. In this phase, there is a weakening or falsification of theoretical interest and inquiry is increasingly determined by practical motives.

Neither Russell nor Scheler thought that philosophy could or should be reduced to the attempt to grasp its time in thought. Neither thought that the burning normative questions of the day were philosophically urgent questions or the philosophically most important questions or indeed the only philosophical questions.

Was twentieth century philosophy characterized by the priority of practical interests over theoretical interests? This is a large and difficult empirical question, yet another rarely asked question. But it does seem to be the case that in early phenomenology and in analytic philosophy theoretical interests ruled the roost.

Two and Twenty Qualifications & Questions

Twentieth century Continental Philosophy did not follow the examples of Scheler and Russell. In the different traditions yoked together by their North American fans under this curious label, philosophy often seemed to run the risk of being identified with or swallowed up by the political philosophy of the present. What were the philosophical motivations, if any, for these near-identifications? This is one of the many questions suggested by the distinction within twentieth century philosophy between philosophy which is simply philosophy of normative aspects of life in the twentieth century and philosophy which is not so cribbed and confined.

A relevant motivation or reason is the pervasiveness of historicism. But I suspect that a detailed account of the causes of and reasons for the turn towards philosophy as a diagnosis of its own time and of its increasing importance would throw more light on historicism than the simple application of this term to swathes of intellectual history. I know of no detailed attempt to explain the peculiarities of the temporal and normative philosophical focus of what is called Continental Philosophy which would confirm or infirm this suspicion.

Another obvious question is suggested by the writings of those historians of political philosophy who throw doubt on the existence of political philosophies which are not essentially about their own times and its political problems and which are, they argue, addressed only to contemporaries. Such a view threatens many of the simplest ways of understanding the very idea of applying a political philosophy to contemporary problems.

Should such a view be generalized? Is all philosophy essentially about its time, whatever philosophers occasionally think or hope? This is not the way in which Scheler, Russell and many another philosopher have understood philosophy. But it might well be attractive to those who think that all truths are contingent truths and thus that there no non-contingent philosophical truths. This view or important elements of such a view has a striking lineage – Hume, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, according to some readings of these figures. But what exactly is its relation to the distinction between philosophy which is philosophy of its own time and philosophy which is not? The question, as far as I can see, is not often asked.

The distinction alluded to above between propositions which are contingently true, if true, and propositions which are non-contingently true, if true, has often been employed to justify the distinction between philosophy which is essentially bound to and about its own time and philosophy which is not so bound. But it has often been thought, particularly during the twentieth century, to be a distinction which corresponds to no real difference. Within a theory, it is said, there is no sharp difference between propositions of one sort and propositions of the other sort. Sometimes such a view is supported by reference to the undeniable fact that twentieth century theoretical philosophy has paid more and more attention to contemporary developments in empirical science. How could the philosophy of physics or of biology be done without such attention?

How, then, might or should the distinction between philosophy which is and philosophy which is not essentially bound to its present be understood if a sharp difference between contingent and non-contingent truths is rejected?

My next question or speculation is sociological. Analytic philosophy has, it seems, turned out to be a remarkably sturdy creature. It seems, too, to have weathered many of the storms which have beset other disciplines in Faculties of Letters, Arts and the Geisteswissenschaften. There are many possible, compatible explanations for this sturdiness. One such is the fact that analytic philosophy is, in principle, as much at home in a Faculty of Letters as in a Faculty of Science. Might it also be the case that the sturdiness is due to the fact that within analytic philosophy the view that philosophy is fundamentally practical philosophy and the view that practical philosophy is fundamentally the philosophy of the present have never triumphed? The application of ethics or political philosophy to the present is still more often than not the application of a perfectly general set of claims – one or another form of utilitarianism, one or another theory of social justice, one or another theory of rationality – to the actual world.

A final set of questions. Suppose there is a distinction to be drawn within twentieth century philosophy between doctors of the age, on the one hand, and medicine men, quacks and charlatans, on the other hand. The distinction will doubtless be drawn – indeed in some cases has been drawn (Lukacs on Scheler and Wittgenstein on Russell) – in many different and sometimes incompatible ways.

Philosophers are not likely to agree about who (of, say, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Lukacs, Sartre, Scheler and Russell) belongs on which side of the divide. Perhaps there is no sharp distinction to be drawn but only a continuum of cases. In each case, one might wonder whether what prevents a would-be doctor of the age from being or becoming a medicine man is a clear and constant awareness of the distinction between philosophy which is and philosophy which is not urgent. As far as I can tell, Scheler and Russell, in their pedagogical and political writings, regularly have this distinction in mind. Is it perhaps one way for philosophers to avoid a specifically philosophical form of foolishness?[8],[9].

Notes

[1] Cf. Ollig 1991.

[2] For good overviews and discussions, see Ryan 1988, Wollheim 1974, Schultz 1992.

[3] Scheler 1984.

Was Troeltsch einmal von Scheler gesagt hat, dass nämlich seine Philosophie eine seltsame Mischung von Scharfsinn, Tiefsinn und Leichtsinn sei, das trifft auch auf Russell zu, dessen Geistesverwandschaft mit Scheler auch in anderer Hinsicht in die Augen springt (Metz 1935, 107)

[5] Scheler 1986.

[6] Cf. Ryan 1988.

[7] Wollheim 1974, 209. For a discussion of Wollheim’s suggestion, see Schultz 1994.

[8] It is a great pleasure to contribute to this Festschrift in honour of Gianfranco Soldati, one of the very few philosophers alive who knows his way around the writings of the descriptive psychologists, the phenomenologists and the analytic philosophers. In this, as in other respects, he resembles his predecessors in Fribourg, J. M. Bochenski and G. Küng.

[9] This paper is based on part of a talk, “Geschichte und Zukunft der analytischen Philosophie”, at the 2022 Wuppertal conference, Der alte und der neue Ueberweg (zum 150sten Todestag von Friedrich Ueberweg). Neue Perspektiven einer Historiographie der Philosophie für das 21. Jahrhundert. I am grateful to Jobst Landgrebe for his suggestions.

References

Metz, R. 1935 Die philosophischen Strömungen der Gegenwart in Grossbritannien, Leipzig: Meiner.

Ollig, H-L, 1991 ed. Philosophie als Zeitdiagnose. Ansätze der Deutschen Gegenwartsphilosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Russell, B. 1944 “Reply to Criticisms”, in Schilpp (ed.), 681-741.

Ryan, A. 1988 Bertrand Russell. A Political Life, Penguin.

Scheler, M. 1982 Politisch-pädagogische Schriften
(ed.) Manfred S. Frings, Gesammelte Werke IV, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.

1986 Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, Bd. 1: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, Gesammelte Werke, X, (ed.) Maria Scheler, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag.

Schilpp, P. A. (ed.), 1944, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Chicago: Northwestern University.

Schultz, B. 1992, “Bertrand Russell in Ethics and Politics”, Ethics, 102: 594–634.

Wollheim, R. 1974 “Bertrand Russell and the Liberal Tradition, Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy, (ed.) G. Nakhnikian, 209-20. New York: Barnes & Noble.

When talking about the reasons for doing philosophy, the line between personal, sentimental talk and proper philosophy can seem fine. Instead of walking it, I will try to intentionally cross it, from the former to the latter.

When I first started my studies at the University of Fribourg, one of the first classes I took was with Gianfranco. I remember him starting his classes with questions from the students, and dedicating as much time as needed to clarify and expand on what had been said in the previous week. In his seminars, the impression one got was that we were all, together, trying to figure something out. We were trying to understand the text together, what the author was arguing for, and then figuring out whether we agreed with it, if there was a fault in the reasoning, or a better way of explaining something. Gianfranco’s attitude was less that of an authority telling us what to think, and more of a guide showing us different ways to think.

I found this extremely valuable as a student. He took students seriously. And he showed that philosophy didn’t have be an exclusively solitary task. There was space for conversation, a conversation that was not a conflict. And more importantly, I learned that uncertainty was not an obstacle to good philosophy. In that seminar room, we were all, in some ways, either uncertain about something or (in the case of Gianfranco, I assume) pretending to be. That uncertainty drove the conversation. We were unsure, and we kept discussing, challenging each other, trying and mostly failing to reach firm ground. That uncertainty was the start of the conversation, and often the end. But we were not less well-off for this. Because the process – the conversation – was interesting in itself. We wanted to learn how to do philosophy. And one does not learn how to do philosophy by memorizing answers. One learns to do philosophy by asking questions and attempting to answer them.

The goal of this is not to flatter Gianfranco. I do think his attitude and the atmosphere in the room were favourable for good philosophy. But the latter is what I want to focus on: good philosophy. What are some of the necessary conditions for it? And why is it good for us?

I want to propose two necessary conditions for good philosophy: honesty and humility. We must be honest, because we have to acknowledge that countless philosophers have given a myriad of different answers to a myriad of different questions throughout history – it is useless to pretend that we are the first to come up with something – an example, a theory, a claim. And we have to acknowledge the limits of our research. When we realize that there may be an issue with what we are presenting, the best course of action is to address this openly. And when we’re unable to answer to an objection, “I am not sure” works better than “I guess we have different intuitions”.

And we must be humble, because we know that what’s true of the past can be true of the future: ours are not going to be the only arguments in the history of philosophy to never face objections. We can be assertive when we present our own claims and arguments, but the possibility of our being wrong, of our papers or talks being unoriginal should never fully be banished. Why is humility so important? Observing what happens on the opposite side of this spectrum can be of help. What happens when a philosopher feels so certain of their claim being right that they allow no space for challenges? He impedes discussion. And discussion is essential to good philosophy.

Discussion is impeded when an author or speaker relies too much on their feeling of certainty. We are more likely to listen to someone suggesting something than someone affirming that they are the only person who is right about a topic. The effect of the latter is, generally, to make us want to prove him wrong. We may still take the argument seriously, but we may be less charitable. We will be less open to what he is proposing, even if what he is proposing could have struck us as interesting, or worth exploring, in other contexts.

Someone who listens to a talk or reads a paper can also be distracted from good philosophical work by a feeling of certainty. They could feel absolutely certain that the content of a paper or a talk is wrong. They could spend a good chunk of a Q&A trying to prove the author wrong, highlighting the faults. He needn’t be driven by bias, or a feeling of certainty regarding an opposing theory he personally defends, so his fault needn’t lie there. But by focussing on the mistakes, and the mistakes only, he could fail to realize the potential importance of the question the author attempts to answer, or the potential ingenuity with which he does so. In other words, he could fail to appreciate a fellow’s effort. He puts himself in the position of a competitor, or a judge, rather than a colleague. Facing such disregard, the author might respond in kind by disregarding the listener’s or reader’s objections altogether, or, on the other hand, they may come to regard their own work as an absolute failure and abandon a potentially good idea.

Two things on this. First, I do not mean to say that criticism is to be abolished. Criticism in philosophy is good as long as it is aimed at making things better, at helping others. The feeling of certainty is anathema to good philosophy also in the positive cases, i.e. when we become so convinced that another’s theory is true that we do not question it anymore.

Second, someone may of course respond that while it is true that this would be our initial way of responding to someone who feels absolutely certain about their own work, or about their judgment on someone else’s work, we should not react this way and, in fact, not everyone does. In the face of arrogance, people can nevertheless be charitable, and they can stand their ground. This is true. But all I mean to say is that this is not the ideal situation. These things put obstacles on the path to good philosophy. Remaining charitable in the face of dogmatism is a good response given the circumstances. But we should not therefore conclude that it’s good to be dogmatic. We should, rather, eliminate dogmatism.

Now, what happens when discussion is eliminated? When people retreat from the debate? Isolation follows. But the myth of the lone philosopher is exactly that: a myth. Discussion with others – even by reading other people’s work and taking it seriously – has been and continues to be essential to good philosophy. So anyone who isolates themselves from the community cannot do good philosophy.

We may sometimes have the impression that uncertainty is a contingent fact about philosophy, something with which one must make do on one’s path to knowledge. But in fact, uncertainty is a necessary part of good philosophy. Good philosophy is philosophy that, while it asserts itself, allows for contradiction. We have to follow that uncertainty or, as the title of this talk suggests, trust the uncertainty. The uncertainty involved in good philosophy is not of the paralysing kind, but rather of the motivating kind. We face the uncertainty and, in facing it, we can surpass it – though only momentarily, or only by moving to another state of uncertainty. It is an uncertainty that we seek to explain, clarify, and dispel. We ask a question, and we try to find the answer. But once we’ve dispelled it, once we’ve found the answer, the uncertainty about the answer arises. It keeps us on our toes, ready to move forward.

But in which way do we have to trust the uncertainty?

First, we have to trust the initial uncertainty concerning a certain question. We start by considering the question and evaluating different possible answers. Or maybe we have an intuition about the answer, and we wonder whether it could be right. But to challenge the answer, to test it, we have to consider the possible objections, the counterarguments – generally, the different ways in which we may be wrong.

Second, we trust that the answer we’ve found, the claim we defend, the argument we propose may lead to more debate in the field. We have to be open to the possibility of being wrong. And in fact, we must embrace it. Because without that, without challengers, without uncertainty, there can be no progress.

But why do philosophy, then, if it is an uncertain field? This would be the wrong question to ask. The fact that uncertainty lies at the heart of philosophy is only a problem if we think that something is worth doing only if it is based on certainty or has certainty as its goal. Philosophy can lead and has led to knowledge, but what I’ve suggested is that that knowledge is not what makes philosophy good. (In fact, I do not think that having knowledge as a goal is essential to philosophy at all.)

So why do philosophy? Some find the process fascinating, satisfying in different ways. Some believe that philosophy is a morally good pursuit and believe that this is a good enough reason to dedicate one’s life to it. I believe that uncertainty is a possible answer to this question. Uncertainty is an essential part of human existence. And philosophy allows us to see uncertainty as valuable rather than terrifying. Philosophy shows us that uncertainty can be constructive. It keeps us open to possibilities. Instead of standing on firm ground, we can navigate through different possible worlds.

Why Be Pessimistic About Philosophical Inquiry?

Inquiry, it seems, has value insofar as it enables us to reach valuable epistemic standings by settling certain questions. We inquire into the explanations of certain events, into our moral obligations or into the fundamental components of reality and, plausibly, the reason why we engage in such activities is that inquiring into those aspects of reality can enable us to secure knowledge or understanding by settling the questions that initiate our inquiries.

Yet, in light of these observations, one might reasonably wonder whether philosophical inquiry really has value. For, one might point out, the history of philosophy provides us with numerous reasons to think that philosophical inquiry typically does not enable us to settle the questions that drive our philosophical theorizing. Most philosophers would agree, for instance, that the question of how we can gain knowledge of an objective reality through the exercise of our perceptual capacities is not yet settled. Although many insightful answers to this question have been offered, it remains unsettled. This might in turn prompt a deeply pessimistic take on philosophical inquiry. Indeed, assuming that inquiry is valuable insofar as it allows us to reach finally valuable epistemic standings by settling the questions that drive our inquiries, one might argue that the history of philosophy gives us reasons to doubt that philosophical inquiry has value since this type of inquiry typically does not enable us to settle the very questions that guide our philosophical theorizing.

There are of course several ways of dealing with such pessimism. One could, for instance, maintain that philosophical inquiry does allow for the settling of philosophical questions while acknowledging that, in many cases, it does not put us in a position to know that the philosophical questions guiding our inquiry have indeed been settled. In the present paper, however, our aim is to show that an independently plausible view of inquiry can provide us with the means to grant the main tenet of the pessimistic argument just outlined – i.e. that philosophical inquiry does not enable us to settle philosophical questions – while still maintaining that philosophical inquiry is nonetheless valuable.

Inquiry and Inquiring Attitudes

According to an influential view put forward by J. Friedman (2013, 2019, forthcoming), inquiring into a question is a matter of adopting an inquiring attitude toward this question. As J. Friedman observes, no series of bodily actions is, by itself, sufficient – or necessary[1] – to count as inquiring into a particular question. This in turn suggests that a distinctive feature of inquirers is the specific attitude they adopt toward the questions they inquire into. More precisely, on such a view, to inquire into certain questions is a matter of wondering these questions or of being curious about them.[2]

While intuitively appealing, this view of inquiry nevertheless raises important questions regarding the nature of inquiry. For it seems that one can wonder a particular question without thereby being committed to take steps toward answering it. One can, for instance, wonder why the universe is expanding after having read that it is in a newspaper without thereby being committed to take steps toward answering this question. One can wonder why the universe is expanding “in passing”, so to speak. Yet, simply wondering “in passing” why the universe is expanding does not appear sufficient to qualify as an inquirer with respect to this question. The question that naturally arises from such observations is whether there is a principled way to distinguish between inquirers and mere wonderers while maintaining that inquiring attitudes constitute the distinctive feature of inquirers.

In the present paper, our aim is to motivate a view of inquiry that builds on J. Friedman’s proposal to elaborate on this distinction. In particular, on the view we will sketch, it is only because inquirers – as opposed to mere wonderers – have a specific understanding of the questions they come to wonder that the curiosity they manifest toward these questions can be the source of a type of commitment that is distinctive of inquirers.

Now, as it should be clear, there is a sense in which wondering any question, whether “in passing” or not, requires having some understanding of the target question. To wonder, for instance, if the universe is expanding, one must be able to entertain the content ‘is the universe expanding?’ and, if questions are semantically connected to their answers,[3] this plausibly involves being in a position to recognize what would count as a possible answer to this question. There is, however, another, albeit related, sense in which a subject can understand the question she wonders that is, as we shall argue, more directly relevant to the distinction that might be drawn between inquirers and mere wonderers.

Inquisitive Models

Following van Dijk and Kintsch’s (1978, 1983) Construction-Integration Model of language comprehension,[4] one can draw a distinction between two levels of representation related to speech comprehension: textbase propositional representations and situation models.[5] Considering the understanding one can gain from a written text, textbase propositional representations consist of individual propositions that identify what is explicitly stated in the text. Situation models, for their part, consist of more comprehensive representations whose content extends beyond what is stated either explicitly or implicitly in a text, since they result from an integration of the information present in the text with the reader’s background information about the world. To illustrate this distinction, consider the following piece of written text:

1. Sam threw the bucket of water. The fire went out.

To understand (1), a reader must identify what is explicitly stated by (1) through a set of individual propositions. This set should at least contain the propositions ‘Sam threw the bucket of water’ and ‘the fire went out’, but other propositions such as ‘there was a fire’ or ‘something was thrown by Sam’ may be part of it. Now, while such propositional representations of (1)’s content provide the reader with an understanding of what is stated by (1), this understanding is somewhat shallow as it simply consists of a list-like representations of ideas present in (1). To gain an overall understanding of (1), the reader must integrate the information identified through these propositional representations into a model of the concrete situation described by (1) and this typically involves establishing certain connections between these propositional representations in light of the broader information about the world possessed by the reader. Assuming, for instance, that the reader knows that water can extinguish a fire, by drawing certain inferences, she can build a model of the concrete situation represented by (1) that captures the causal link between the two events explicitly represented by (1).

Now, the distinction that can be drawn between these two levels of representation can be – we believe – relied upon to shed light on the nature of the understanding that inquirers, as opposed to mere wonderers, have of the questions they come to wonder. For, although wondering a question Q requires understanding Q in the sense of having, given one’s conceptual and syntactic abilities, the capacity to recognize what would count as a possible answer to Q, a deeper understanding of Q may be achieved by the wondering subject through the integration of Q with background information about the world and its incorporation into an inquisitive model.

To see this, consider again the question ‘is the universe expanding?’. Assuming that a subject understands this question in the sense that she has the capacity to recognize what would count as a possible answer to this question, she can achieve a deeper understanding of this question by integrating it with background information she possesses about the world. Indeed, she can first determine whether the question is sound and affirmatively open – i.e. evoked – relative to her background information. The relevant notions of evocation, soundness and affirmative openness are central notions of inferential erotetic logic and are, according to Willard-Kyle, Millson and Whitcomb (forthcoming) closely connected to the norms of inquiring attitudes.[6] According to the definition proposed by Millson and Whitcomb (2024, p. 4), a question Q is evoked relative to some background information Γ when it is both sound and affirmatively open relative to Γ, where Q is sound relative to Γ whenever Γ entails that Q has a true direct answer, and Q is affirmatively open relative to Γ whenever Γ does not entail any direct answer to Q. Now, assuming that one understands Q in the sense of being in a position to recognize what would count as a possible answer to Q, it is reasonable to think that achieving a deeper understanding of Q involves, in part, determining through inferential processes whether Q is evoked relative to Γ.

Q’s integration with one’s background information must however go beyond determining whether Q is evoked relative to this background information if it is to yield a truly deep understanding of Q. In particular, it is reasonable to think that achieving a deeper understanding of Q also involves identifying Q’s erotetic implications as well as ways of deciding among Q’s possible answers. And it is precisely through the integration of Q with background information about the world that these aspects of Q can be identified. Indeed, to identify the erotetic implications of a particular question, one must rely on declarative premises and, thereby, on background information about the world, as erotetic arguments only allow drawing certain conclusions in light of declarative premises. Likewise, identifying ways to determine what would count as an acceptable answer to a particular question requires relying on background information about the world, as it is only by drawing on such information that the standard of acceptability of what would count as a possible answer can be made salient.

Achieving a deeper understanding of the question one comes to wonder thus requires gaining a better grip on various aspects of this question by integrating it with background information about the world. And, since these aspects of the understood question are typically related to an inquiry into that question, the representation or model resulting from this process of integration can be adequately thought of as a model of inquiry into the question – i.e. as an inquisitive model. Indeed, by determining whether a question Q is evoked relative to one’s background information, one determines whether an inquiry into Q can be successful. Similarly, by identifying Q’s erotetic implications and ways to determine what would count as an acceptable answer to Q, one essentially identifies the steps that a successful inquiry into Q would involve.

Why be optimistic about philosophical inquiry?

A deeper understanding of the question one comes to wonder may thus be achieved by integrating it with background information about the world and incorporating it into an inquisitive model. But why think that, as we suggested, achieving a such deeper understanding of a question is related to the type of commitment that is characteristic of inquirers?

To see why, let us first emphasise the connection between inquisitive models and a subject acting on the curiosity she manifests toward certain questions. Having a model of inquiry into Q is plausibly what puts a subject in a position to act on the curiosity she manifests toward Q. For if we are correct about the process from which inquisitive models result, this process involves determining whether an inquiry into Q can be successful and identifying – with varying degrees of accuracy – the steps that a successful inquiry into Q would involve. Now, given this connection between inquisitive models and a subject acting on the curiosity she manifests toward certain questions, the adoption of an inquiring attitude toward a question that is understood to a sufficient degree can be regarded as a way of committing to a specific epistemic project – one whose content is determined by the subject’s understanding of the question she wonders. This is because if a subject understands a question Q in such a way that she has a model of inquiry into Q, her wondering Q can no longer consist in wondering Q “in passing”. Given her understanding of Q, this subject possesses a plan or project for an inquiry into Q, and her wondering Q is best conceived as a way in which she commits herself to this project.

Note that the notion of epistemic project, as we propose to understand it in the context of the present discussion, denotes something that is importantly different from intentions. While epistemic projects guide an inquirer’s actions in the same way as intentions can be said to guide intentional actions, one’s commitment toward a specific epistemic project does not result from a decision. It results, instead, from the adoption of an inquiring attitude toward a question which has been incorporated by the wondering subject into a model of inquiry. Consequently, on our view, putting a question Q on one’s research agenda is not a matter of forming a specific type of intention, nor is it simply a matter of wondering Q “in passing” without having engaged cognitively with the question one wonders. What characterises inquirers are the epistemic projects to which they are committed in virtue of the inquiring attitudes they adopt toward questions they have incorporated into specific inquisitive models.

With this in mind, let us now return to the worries raised about philosophical inquiry in Section 1. Recall that under the assumption that philosophical inquiry has value insofar as it enables us to settle the questions that guide our philosophical theorizing, one may reasonably doubt that philosophical inquiry has value. After all, one may insist, the history of philosophy provides numerous reasons to think that philosophical inquiry typically does not succeed in settling the questions that drive our philosophical theorizing. The view of inquiry just sketched, however, puts pressure on the assumption underlying such a pessimistic take on philosophical inquiry, since, we want to suggest, the understanding of philosophical questions that is achieved in the course of genuine philosophical inquiries is finally valuable. And this remains true even if the epistemic projects whose content is fixed by the understanding gained of philosophical questions do not result in these questions being settled.

Why think that achieving a deep understanding of the philosophical questions one inquires into is finally valuable? The short answer is: because such an understanding of philosophical questions consists of a type of cognitive achievement that is valuable for its own sake.

Achievements can be broadly conceived as successes that result from the exercise of distinctively rational abilities, and it is reasonable to think that achieving a deep understanding of some philosophical question constitutes a success in that it involves gaining specific insights into the nature of philosophical problems. It involves, for instance, determining whether a specific philosophical problem is metaphysical rather than semantic, or if and why certain methodological tools are suited to addressing the target problem. Now, as it should be clear, securing such insights into the nature of a philosophical problem requires the exercise of distinctively rational abilities, which makes the understanding constituted by these insights a type of cognitive achievement.

Assuming that cognitive achievements are finally valuable, the view of inquiry just sketched thus allows explaining how and why philosophical inquiry has value, even while granting the main tenet of the pessimistic argument – i.e. that philosophical inquiry does not enable us to settle philosophical questions. For, this view suggests that the kind of perspective adopted by Russell on philosophical inquiry is a viable strategy for escaping pessimism:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions—since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true—but rather for the sake of the questions themselves [because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, diminish the dogmatic assurance that closes the mind against speculation, and provide philosophical contemplation]. (Russell, 1912, p. 161)

Independently of whether philosophical inquiry enables us to settle philosophical questions, the understanding of philosophical questions that is achieved in the course of genuine philosophical inquiries constitutes a type of cognitive achievement that is valuable for its own sake.

Notes

[1] After all, as J. Friedman (2019, p. 311) notes, a subject can count as inquiring into a particular question although her inquiry is purely mental.

[2] In what follows, we shall take the attitude of wondering as being the paradigmatic inquiring attitude. As a result, our discussion will focus solely on that type of attitude.

[3] In what follows, we will assume that questions are sets of their direct answers that stand in inferential relations to each other.

[4] See also Kintsch (1998).

[5] See, for instance, Zwaan & Radvansky (1998), Wyer & Radvansky (1999), Richter, Schroeder & Hoever (2008), Zwaan (2016) and Grodniewicz (forthcoming).

[6] The standard definition of those notions can be traced back to Wisniewski (1991 ,1995).

References

van Dijk, T. & Kintsch, W. (1978). Toward a Model of Text Comprehension and Production. Psychological Review, 85, 363–394.

van Dijk, T. & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.

Friedman, J. (2013). Question-Directed Attitudes. Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 145–174.

Friedman, J. (2019). Inquiry and Belief. Noûs, 53, 296–315.

Friedman, J. (forthcoming). Zetetic Epistemology. In B. Reed & A. K. Flowerree (Eds.). Towards an Expansive Epistemology: Norms, Action, and the Social Sphere. London: Routledge.

Grodniewicz, J. (forthcoming). The Representational Structure of Linguistic Understanding. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

Hoever, I., Richter, T. & Schroeder, S. (2008). Getting a Picture that is Both Accurate and Stable: Situation Models and Epistemic Validation. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 237–255.

Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Millson, J. & Whitcomb, D. (2024). Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 10, 444–466.

Millson, J., Whitcomb, D. & Willard-Kyle, C. (forthcoming). Evoked Questions and Inquiring Attitudes. Philosophical Quarterly.

Radvansky. G. & Wyer, R. (1999). The Comprehension and Validation of Social Information. Psychological Review, 106, 89–118.

Radvansky, G. & Zwaan, R. (1998). Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory. Psychological Bulletin, 123, 162–185.

Russell B. (1912). The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press.

Wisniewski, A. (1991). Erotetic Arguments: A Preliminary Analysis. Studia Logica, 50, 261–274.

Wisniewski, A. (1995). The Posing of Questions: Logical Foundations of Erotetic Inferences. Dordrecht: Springer.

Zwaan, R. (2016). Situation Models, Mental Simulations, and Abstract Concepts in Discourse Comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1028–1034.

Living the world

One may live in the world without living it. Living the world goes beyond the sheer fact of survival. Some additional conditions must be met. They have to do with one’s ability to be in tune with the particular situations one may encounter. One can never be certain, however, as to whether one has really managed to live a particular situation and to what degree. There is, besides, a significant amount of uncertainty as to whether what one does or undertakes contributes to increasing one’s capacity to live the world or goes, instead, in the opposite direction, and this holds both from the first- and the third-person perspectives. Despite these constitutive uncertainties, one cannot help sketching some guidelines or directions in the hope that they might enhance one’s capacity to be alive, that is, to live in this specific sense I am exploring (Corbí 2021, James 1994, Proust 1992).

In this paper, I will argue, however, that some philosophical assumptions that are meant to provide the basis for such guidelines or directions may paradoxically contribute to our disorientation. I would talk in such cases of radical disorientation, as opposed to mere disorientation or even to double disorientation, that is, to being disoriented regarding a certain matter while being convinced of one’s adequate orientation. I will then outline an alternative view about what the ultimate source of our orientation regarding how to live the world might be. For this purpose, I will vindicate a sort of receptivity that involves one’s capacity to acknowledge and be responsive to the claims that a particular situation makes on us (Corbí 2012, 2023). This concept of receptivity is ultimately connected to Kant’s notion of ‘the reason’s feeling of its own need’ as explored in ‘How to orient oneself in Thinking’ (Kant 1786), although it crucially departs from his approach insofar as the idea of receptivity I have in mind is at odds with some fundamental Kantian dichotomies, such as the divide between the inner and the outer, between reason and natural dispositions, and between the theoretical and the practical. Needless to say, it may, indeed, happen that my own approach is prey to radical disorientation but, as one might expect, I cannot help trying (Beckett 1953)

We may focus, to begin with, on the fundamental practical question: ‘How to live?’ In the philosophical tradition —and, generally, in the Western culture— this question has mainly been construed as an invitation to specifying the set of general norms or principles that should guide one’s life. The question ‘How to live?’ is thus transformed into the normative question: ‘How should one live in the world?’ In the pursuit of generality, the normative question tends to disregard the specific details of the world we find ourselves in and focusses on the norms and principles that would apply to everyone in any world one might inhabit. The normative question is inspired by the hope that general norms and principles would allow us to address all sorts of political, social, and personal conflicts in a more rational and efficient way than a battle or a fight. Needless to say, this question has given rise to countless philosophical debates about what these general principles might be, what form they should take, whether they can be grounded solely on reason and whether, once grounded, everyone will be motivated to comply with them.

The practical question admits, however, an alternative reading. Instead of focusing on the general norms or principles that should guide our lives, it may be interpreted as concerned with a more elusive matter, namely ‘How to be alive?’ or, in other words, ‘How to live the world?’ The fundamental practical question would thus be understood as an existential question. The experience of being alive contrasts with that of death in life into which the survivors of brutal and unthinkable harm are often plunged (Alexievich 1992, Améry 1966, Levi 1986, Suria 2019, Weil 1941). Death in life is occasionaly the outcome of a lucid attitude towards some devastating situations one is confronted with. This capacity to keep one’s gaze in the sight of horror involves a sort of receptivity towards the claims that the situation makes on oneself. Such claims come with some kind of necessity, they impose themselves upon us regardless of what one might want or decide, for, after all, they concern —and serve to discern— what really matters in human life. This sort of receptivity, that is, a receptivity to the normative order in the world is crucial to my defense of the primacy of the existential question with over the normative one.

Insofar as the philosophical tradition focus on the normative question, it typically assumes that, only once the sphere of the permissible have properly been delineated, will the subject be free to articulate within it a life of their own that might make sense for them, so that they might feel alive. My point is, by contrast, that, only those who successfully address the existential question and manage to live the particular situations one is confronted with, will be in a position to acknowledge the normative demands that each situation imposes upon them. This connection between the existential question and the normative question might sound initially intriguing but, in fact, it is hardly mysterious, given that the experience of death in life that many survivors report, derives from the vulneration in their own flesh of some normative expectations, which Jean Améry (1966) divides into two: a primary expectation, ‘No one will hurt me’, and a secondary expectation, ‘If someone attacks me or I find myself in a state of need, someone else will come and help me’ (Corbí 2012).

A further source of death in life is the subordination of one’s own body to some normative demands that are entirely external to it, and therefore cannot be individuated via the sort of receptivity I am exploring. As it happens, principles and norms have often this kind of externality —including those that the Kantian approach would identify as autonomous— and trying to comply with them is a source of death in life. It follows that a certain receptivity to one’s own bodily experiences and the authority that comes with them is a condition for one’s orientation regarding the existencial question and, if I am right, regarding the normative question as well, which, as a result, will no longer be composed of a set of principles or norms, but will only provide some guidelines as to what practices and attitudes to engage in and cultivate. To further analyze the sort of receptivity that may enhance our capacity to live the world and how this capacity is connected to the normative question, I will distinguish two notions of intimacy, namely, intimacy as privacy and intimacy as a bond.

Intimacy as a bond

We typically associate intimacy with privacy, with what we can hide from the gaze of others, with what happens when we are alone at home or in our bedroom. We may reveal our intimacy to those we want; everyone else will then be perceived as an intruder. From this point of view, intimacy involves a temporary detachment from other people, from the world, and even from one’s own body, which may eventually emerge as the most sinister intruder insofar as there is no way in which one can get rid of its drives and pains. Given this assimilation of one’s intimacy to one’s privacy, we might say that, in order to accept someone into the sphere of one’s intimacy, and therefore keep an intimate relationship with them, all that one has to do is to let them know, see or even touch what is barred to others.

Intimacy thus construed presupposes the exitence of a divide between the inner and the outer, while intimacy as a bond takes place where the divide between the inner and the outer blurs or, in other words, that is, where the private and the public meet. Intimacy as a bond renders us the more vulnerable to other people’s actions and attitudes, which may either enhance our capacity to be alive or turn us instead into living dead. Intimacy as privacy seeks to protect us from this vulnerability by delineating a realm of the private that nobody could assault. We might then live within a fortress or in a trench. This approach to intimacy amounts to the recognition of one’s incapacity to live the world; from the viewpont of intimacy as a bond, it amounts to a degraded kind of intimacy or even to a renunciation to intimacy itself. By contrast, intimacy as a bond will allow us to vindicate a notion of agency that calls into question the divide between the inner and the outer as well as the metaphysical gap between reason and natural dispositions. This notion of agency will help us to understand how to live the world, and thus to address the existential question. For this purpose, I will explore the notion of intimacy as depicted in two paintings: Woman Reading a Letter (Vermeer, 1663-64) and Hotel Room (Hopper, 1931).

Woman Reading a Letter (Vermeer, 1663-64) represents a rather hopeful view of the world that the New Science and its technological achievements have just inaugurated. Vermeer succeeds in conveying this hope through multiple allusions to the way in which the outer is intertwined with the inner, so that nothing is either completely external or internal to oneself. The map is located inside the room, but it speaks of what lies outside, that is, of the world they are beginning to conquer. The letter comes to the woman from a place represented on the map, but, upon entering the house, it becomes a new, cherised object in the household. Her reading the letter crosses a new frontier by reaching her deepest feelings and attitudes. The light that allows her reading and floods the room comes from a window that connects the women and the viewer with the external world. All this leads us to the baby in her womb ans whose father the viewer imagines to be the author of the letter, who is now outside, but was once very much inside. The baby themselves still takes refuge in their mother’s womb, but they will soon be exposed to a world whose promise is expressed by the presence of the map, by the light and the letter, as well as by the furniture and the clothing. There is an outside and an inside, but the outside that comes to us sifted by the window light is hospitable; it is not home, but it is not a hostile and unarticulated space either: the map and the letter present the outer as a space to trust.

The woman is dressed with decorum and care, ready for someone to visit her. She is not locked behind a door, but open to the world. I would say that the woman reading the letter has an intimate relationship with her neighbors, with the world and with her own body as well. Her head tilted slightly forward, her attentive gaze, her hands delicately holding the paper, speak to us of her openness or receptivity, that is, of her willingness to let the letter reach her deepest self, so that she might feel the company of its author, no matter how far away he might be. But it is not only the woman who welcomes the letter, but the very environment in which she reads it and makes it at all possible. The map, which represents the place where the author of the letter is located, fits quite smoothly with the rest of the furniture in the room. The idea of a travel through a represented (and therefore known) world seems to be part of the homely space. The mother’s expectation at her baby being born adds to the world she cherishes, is the ultimate affirmation of this way of life, that is, of a world that is an integral part of the homely space to which she belongs and in which she feels welcome; a home, a world, that she trusts.

The notion of intimacy that emerges from the contemplation of Vermeer’s painting is centered, as we see, on the idea of contact, bond, or encounter between the outer and the inner, between one’s body and one’s thoughts, between home and the world. Where the idea of contact or bond is emphasized, intimacy cannot be conceived of as mere privacy. By contrast, the desolate tone of Hotel Room (Hopper, 1931) underscores both the extinction of the sort of intimacy that illuminates Vermeer’s painting and the fact that this extinction gives rise to a new concept of intimacy. Intimacy is no longer conceived of as a particularly valuable and hopeful mode of relating to other people and to the world, but as a form of isolation, of rupture, or splitting. The situation in which the women finds herself in the hotel room is the paradigm of the idea of intimacy as privacy, that is, as splitting or rupture and, finally, as desolation. She leans over a piece of paper that rests lightly on her knees. The viewer can only guess what it is. It may be a personal message, but it could easily be a bill or a request. Whatever that message might convey, it does not invite its reader to welcome the world with hope, but to retreat more and more into herself. Her body is only covered with underwear. She could not allow anyone to enter the room without dressing herself with a robe; unlike Vermeer’s woman, she is not ready for a visitor, but rather secluded in an anonymous room attentive to an interiority that as observers we can only intuit or guess.

This woman is locked in her room after a journey whose origin and destination remains unknwon. The journey is no longer an exploration but a mere transit from one to another place as the unpacked suitcases suggest. They are unpacked because it is not worth unpacking them; she will not remain in this room for long. Moreover, it is unclear where the light comes from. The light might be just artificial or it may come from a window beyond the viewer’s sight. If it were the former, it would be a blind, windowless room, isolated from the world outside. Only an aesthetic trick allows us to observe the scene. The painter cannot be where we are prescribed to imagine him to be for, otherwise, he would be invading the woman’s intimacy; by contrast, we can easily imagine Vermeer himself painting the women in her room while she is reading the letter; after all, she is properly dressed to welcome a visit. It seems then that Hopper’s women expresses the idea of intimacy as privacy, that is, as a space where she may feel protected from an inhospitable world, and therefore as a refuge for her loneliness and desolation. Vermeer’s painting, by contrast, depicts a sense of an intimate bond with one’s body, other people and the world through the idea of a homely space that is open to a hospitable and promising world.

The Inner and the Outer

Intimacy as a bond or as an encounter requires a certain kind of receptivity. When one faces a situation with this attitude, some aspects of it emerge as salient, including some claims and demands that it can make on us. We may thus say that an intimate encounter with a certain situation entails the recognition of such claims, but, for this purpose, it is essential to cultivate a certain kind of receptivity, that is, the kind of attitude that Vermeer’s women has towards the world she lives in when reading the letter. Only those actions that stem from this sort of attitude will count as genuinely one’s own, that is, as a manifestation of one’s identity, and therefore as a genuine exercise in one’s agency. From this perspective, the site of our agency will no longer be our capacity to control what we do or the fact that we are in charge of our actions thanks to the effort of the will. On the contrary, one’s agency is affirmed and formed through the exercise of one’s capacity to be receptive to the claims that each particular situation may make on us. It is only by being obedient to such claims that one is intimately connected with the world and manages to live it. The idea of a rule or a principle might be useful at some stage, but the crucial point is that one’s responsiveness to any particular claim or demand that a situation may place on us should emerge out of the depths of one’s own body, that is, as an expression or sign of our receptivity to the order in the world.

The notion of receptive passivity and that of intimacy as a bond can hardly be accommodated, however, within the dominant conception of the world. Central to this framework is the idea that the world is disenchanted, that is, that it is composed of particles in motion, that is, of mechanical processes that only careful empirical research could discover. As a result, nothing in the world as it is in itself includes evaluative properties; nothing is either beautiful or ugly, good or bad, cruel or courageous, useful or useless. When we regard something as beautiful or good or useful we are merely projecting onto the world our desires, emotions and interests. The inner is thus split from the outer, the subjective from the objective, the self from the world. Hence, the disenchanted conception of the world isolates the self. My identity as an autonomous agent is not defined by what happens in the world, but by the way I think and feel. What I am, my intimacy, is situated in the sphere of the mental, which is so private that only oneself can have a direct access to it; other people can only infer what I feel or think from what I say or do. One’s body is just part of the external world; it doesn’t belong to my intimate self.

The self is not only conceived of as alien to the world but as divided into two parts, namely, reason and passsion. The inner is then split not only from the world but also from within. Reason includes not only our capacity to observe the world and to discover its properties, but also our capacity to ascertain the most adequate means to achieve an end. Beyond the exercise of reason, lie our psychological dispositions, our emotions and desires, our vices and virtues, which push us in one or another direction and which often resist the principles of reason. We speak in this case of the force of passions. It is difficult to see, however, how reason and passion can communicate with each other since passion is pure resistance, like water pressing a dam, while reason is merely deliberative, and therefore its decisions are deprived f any motivational forced unless accompanied by some passion. Passions as such are thus arrational. They do not serve, therefore, as a guide for one’s life and we must therefore restrain them and let ourselves be led only by the principles of reason, which are, nevertheless, inert. Some philosophers have endeavored to elaborate some form of rational motivation to overcome the drive of passions or have insisted on the power of the will. All these strategies highlight the difficulties of the divided conception of the self to account for our capacity to govern our lives. If we want to address the existential question as Vermeer’s painting does, and therefore make sense of the kind of receptivity that it involves, we need to articulate an alternative conception of the self that not only brings together the inner and the outer, the mind and the body, but integrates reason and passion.

The difficulty of this endeavor lies in the fact that both the divided conception of the self and the disenchanted conception of the world are part of our transcendental horizon, and therefore we can hardly find any experience of the world that convinces us of the need to revise it, for any aspect which we might appeal to will somehow find a place in that view. But, if am right, such conceptions unduly limit the resources available to address the existential question and, therefore, to live the world. I hope, however, that the study of scenes and situations such as those depicted by Vermeer’s and Hopper’s paintings, may invite us to revise the dominant view. More specifically, I am convinced that our assumptions as viewers of a painting reveal deeper aspects of our practices and attitudes towards the world and the self than our intuitions about the counterfactual situations posed by mental experiments, of which some philosophical traditions are so fond. It is not that, in my view, such experiments are worthless, but that they can hardly constitute the only, or even the most basic, ingredient in our philosophical diet. First, because the design of thought experiments is often seriously conditioned by the philosophical and existential assumptions of their designers and, second, because our intuitions about a counterfactual situation may significantly differ from our actual atittude when confronted with it. By contrast, our attitudes as viewers of a painting are themselves elements of a practice, although it is certainly the task of philosophy to discern what view of our actions and the world are expressed or presupossed in such practice and how it connects with some other practices that may help us to articulate a meaningful life.

Conclusion

We may conclude that a proper understanding of the fundamental practical question should focus first on the question as to how to live the world, that is, the existential question, and only derivatively on the normative question, whose answer will no longer be composed by a set of principles but invite a kind of receptivity to the normative claims that a particular situation may impose upon us. This sort of receptivity provides an intimate bond with other people and the world, including one’s own body, and crucially departs from the standard association between intimacy and privacy. Such association hinges on the divide between the inner and the outer that is constitutive of the disenchanted conception of the world and the divided conception of the self. In a process of reflective equilibrium, we may appeal to the scenes depicted by Vermeer’s and Hopper’s painting to challenge such conceptions and articulate a view of the world and the self inspired by the way Vermeer’s women reads the letter, which coming from the outside world reaches her deepest self. It is by the sort of receptivity that she displays that we may seek to orient ourselves.

References

Alexievich, S. 1992. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices in a Forgotten War. London: Chatto & Windus.

Améry, J. (1966) 1980. At the Mind’s Limit. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Beckett, S. (1953) 2009. “The Unnamable.” In Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Kindle Edition, 284–405. New York: Grove Press.

Corbí, J. E. 2023. “Distinctive Substantial Self-Knowledge and the Possibility of Self-Improvement.” Synthese. https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04195-2.

Corbí, J.E. 2017. “Justification, Attachment, and Regret.” European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1718–38.

Corbí, J. E. 2012. Morality, Self-Knowledge, and Humand Suffering. New York: Routledge.

Hopper, E. 1931. Hotel Room.

James, H. 1903. The Ambassadors. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Kant, I. (1786) 1996. “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” In idem, Religion and Rational Theology, Kindle Edition, Loc. 447-790. Cambridge University Press.

Levi, P. (1986) 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus.

Proust, M. (1913–1927) 2024. À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Paris: Gallimard.

Suria, M. 2019. Ella Soy Yo. Bacelona: Círculo de Tiza.

Vermeer, J. 1663. Women Reading a Letter.

Weil, S. (1941) 1999. “L’Iliade Ou Le Poème de La Force.” In Oeuvres, by Weil, S. Paris: Gallimard.

I would like to start with a provocation I’ve heard many times when I was a PhD student: “If it has concrete implications, it’s not really philosophy.” Alternatively, some were voicing the exact opposite: “If it has no concrete implications, it’s useless philosophy.” These are, of course, caricatures, but they reflect a tension at the heart of applied philosophy, and particularly of practical ethics. On one hand, there is the worry that the more a philosopher engages with real-world dilemmas, the more she risks losing touch with philosophy. On the other hand, there is the opposite worry: that philosophy risks becoming irrelevant if it cannot speak meaningfully to urgent questions that arise in our world.

Trained as a philosopher, I have gradually moved away from what might be called “classical philosophy” and have specialized in bioethics. Although applied ethics is firmly rooted in philosophy and I still consider myself a philosopher, I recognize that my work differs significantly from that of, say, an epistemologist or a metaphysician. This becomes especially apparent when I reflect on the fact that I mainly collaborate with and teach non-philosophers—medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, theologians, and others. Since bioethics, like applied ethics more broadly, is often viewed as both emerging from and departing from traditional philosophy, I would like to take up the question “Why philosophy?” from a slightly different angle. Instead, I want to ask: why bioethics—as a philosopher?

As a bioethicist, I research and teach on the topics of medical ethics, research ethics, and the ethics of emerging technologies. I arrived there in part by chance: an opportunity came up early in my career to intern at a clinical ethics center, and I took it. But I stayed for reasons that are more substantial. I found the questions engaging in ways that were intellectually rich and morally pressing. I also found that doing this kind of philosophy required drawing not only on theoretical resources, but on a kind of imaginative and emotional intelligence—on empathy, sensitivity to context, and the willingness to live with uncertainty.

What is bioethics?

Bioethics encompasses the ethical issues that arise in medicine and health care, from questions about abortion and assisted dying to debates about informed consent, end-of-life decisions, and the use of emerging biomedical technologies. These are not merely theoretical problems. They often involve specific cases—specific patients, specific families—and they arise in moments of crisis, suffering, or loss. They are questions that require action, not just reflection, and in many cases, they are matters of life and death. When lives are at stake, the trolley problem becomes more than a thought experiment and a decision with very real consequences needing to be made.

A second area of my work is research ethics. Here, the questions concern the ethics of how knowledge is produced. This includes questions related to doing research with human participants: what kinds of risks are acceptable in research? When does research cross the line into exploitation? What do we owe to participants? These questions have been thrown into sharp relief by historical cases such as the Tuskegee syphilis study—in which African American men were misled and denied treatment for decades in the name of scientific observation (Brandt 1978); Milgram’s obedience experiments, which exposed participants to extreme psychological stress in order to study authority and compliance (Milgram, 1974); and Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study that falsely linked the MMR vaccine to autism, sparking a public health crisis (Rodriguez 2025). These episodes serve as cautionary tales, but also as moral reference points—reminders of what can go wrong when ethical considerations are ignored or subordinated to other aims. Research ethics also includes questions related to research integrity: what is fraud in research, what are questionable practices and why they matter to produce reliable knowledge and build trust within society.

More recently, I’ve been working on the ethics of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces. These technologies raise complex questions not only about individual risk, but about broader societal implications. What kinds of harms might they cause, and how should we evaluate those harms? How do we balance potential benefits with ethical concerns about autonomy, privacy, bias, or surveillance? These are questions we are only beginning to explore, and they call for philosophical thinking that is both careful and creative.

Why bioethics as a philosopher?

Given the interdisciplinary nature of these fields—where law, medicine, theology, and social science also have important roles to play—it is fair to ask what philosophy brings to the table. My answer is that philosophy contributes in at least two key ways. First, it provides normative frameworks—moral theories and principles that can guide ethical decision-making. In bioethics, for instance, the so-called four principles approach—autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice—has become a common tool for structuring ethical analysis (Beauchamp & Childress, 2019). While these principles are not uniquely philosophical, they have been refined and debated within moral philosophy in ways that give them real analytical power.

Second, philosophy equips us with conceptual tools: the ability to think clearly, to detect fallacies, to analyze arguments, and to draw careful distinctions. These skills are especially important when working in areas where the stakes are high and the concepts are contested. For example, when people say that assisted suicide either threatens or enables human dignity, it’s not immediately clear what is meant by “dignity.” Is it something inherent in human beings, something that can be lost, something that can be violated? Is it linked to autonomy, to recognition, to suffering? Philosophy can help us unpack these questions, and show that what appears to be a simple disagreement is in fact a deep normative conflict.

Another example involves the ethics of caring for people with dementia. Is it morally permissible to deceive someone with dementia, for instance by displaying a video of an aquarium rather than having a real one, or by giving them a robotic pet rather than an animal? Some dementia care facilities use such techniques to create a comforting environment. But do these deceptions undermine respect for persons? Or are they acts of kindness, adapted to the needs of someone whose grasp on reality is slipping? Once again, philosophy can help clarify the underlying issues, including what it means to respect autonomy in cases where the capacity for informed consent is diminished or lost.

This leads naturally to questions about personal identity. When a person with dementia expresses a desire that contradicts the values they held earlier in life, whose preferences should we honor—the preferences of the person they were, or the person they are now? This is not just a question for ethics, but one that touches on long-standing debates in the philosophy of personal identity and the metaphysics of the self.

There are also broader conceptual challenges that arise in applied ethics. One that I frequently encounter is the so-called naturalistic fallacy—the idea that something is bad (or good) simply because it is “unnatural.” This line of reasoning is surprisingly persistent in public debates, whether about IVF, GMOs, or gene editing. It can be rhetorically powerful, but it often lacks logical coherence. Here, again, philosophy has a role to play in disentangling normative arguments from appeals to nature that may obscure rather than illuminate.

Let me end with a reflection on the kind of output that practical ethics aims for. In many cases, we are trying to make decisions—ideally, ones that reflect our values and that minimize harm. Sometimes we can find a creative solution that respects competing moral considerations. Other times, we have to acknowledge that some value must be sacrificed. We may never know with certainty whether we’ve made the “right” choice. But what philosophy enables us to do is to make a reflected choice: one that has been carefully considered, one that is sensitive to complexity, and one that is grounded in ethical reasoning rather than impulse or expediency.

Of course, philosophy does not act alone. In the real world, ethical practice depends on law, communication, empathy, institutional support, and social context. But I believe that philosophy has a vital role to play—precisely because it asks us to slow down, to think more deeply, and to question assumptions that others might take for granted. And for me, that is why applied philosophy matters—not only in the philosophy department, but also in the hospital, the nursing home, the laboratory, the policy office, and beyond.

Thank you, Gianfranco, for giving me the opportunity to be your PhD student—for guiding me, challenging me, and allowing me to learn from you over the years. In doing so, you made me a philosopher—even if not a classical one.

References

Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (2019). Principles of Biomedical Ethics (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Brandt, A. M. (1978). Racism and research: the case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Hastings center report, 21-29.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York : Harper and Row.

Rodriguez, N. J. (2025). Anti-vaxxers: Wakefield and the Autism Scare. In Pandemic Resilience: Vaccination Resistance and Hesitance, Lessons from COVID-19 (pp. 69-82). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Some people think that there are only two types of philosophy: good and bad. Even leaving aside the fact that nobody knows exactly what constitutes good philosophy, such black-and-white thinking is a can of worms. For one thing, such a broad classification requires further gradations within ‘good’ or ‘bad’ philosophy. Moreover, one might ask what the true purpose of philosophy is, and how progress in the field can be measured. There is no clear answer to these questions, any more than there is to the question of the purpose of religion or art.

Some, therefore, believe that in such cases we should refrain from making any evaluations. In philosophy, too, it should be up to each individual to decide which method or which goals he or she wants to choose. Alternatively, philosophy should no longer be regarded as a goal-oriented enterprise at all. In that case, it is not only superfluous to talk about good and bad philosophy, it also makes no sense to talk about old-fashioned and progressive philosophy. The idea of progress in philosophy would be just as obsolete as in art or religion.

In the following, I will try to avoid two mistakes: the mistake of painting in black and white and the mistake of confusing pluralism with arbitrariness. These errors are like Scylla and Charybdis, between which we must find a third way.

The solution I will argue for is to distinguish different kinds of progress in philosophy and to consider them as equivalent. Specifically, I will distinguish four concepts of progress, but the exact number is not important to me. In my opinion, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with dichotomous distinctions. However, they should be made in such a way that they can be combined with each other. With this in mind, I begin by distinguishing between philosophers who are what I call targeted hedgehogs and exploratory foxes, following Isaiah Berlin, who revived this metaphor. I then distinguish between philosophers whom I call theoreticians and critics. This roughly corresponds to the distinction between “doctrinal” and “non-doctrinal” philosophy proposed by Michael Hampe, except for his negative assessment of the former. The intersection of both classifications then results in a quartet of four types of philosophers: targeted theoreticians, targeted critics, explorative theoreticians and explorative critics. I draw examples of all four types from the tradition of Austrian philosophy, which is particularly rich in ideas about how to reform philosophy. ^[1]

Targeted hedgehogs and explorative foxes

All people strive for knowledge, but not everyone does it in the same way. Some try to solve the great mysteries of the world, others collect knowledge out of curiosity, just as one collects beautiful things. This observation was already made by the Greek poet Archilochus (born around 680 BC), from whom the saying has been handed down: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. This metaphor was made famous by an essay by Isaiah Berlin, first published 1953, in which he divides the great poets and thinkers into these two categories: those who focus on a single goal or a single big idea, and those who pursue many different interests with small-scale ideas. Following this line, one might then interpret the history of philosophy as a kind of competition between the hedgehog faction and the fox faction.  Plato, Pascal, Hegel and Nietzsche are among those who, in Berlin’s words, “in varying degrees” advance a single idea, while Aristotle, Montaigne and Erasmus develop a multitude of smaller ideas in their philosophy.[2] The reader is left to speculate about the rest of the line-up. Many have accepted this invitation and so, as the editors of the Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin write, Archilochus’ motto has become a “durable metaphor for discussing the temperaments and philosophies of politicians and intellectuals.”[3]

The many possible uses of the hedgehog-fox metaphor, which can be found in the Cambridge Companion alone, show that there are hardly any limits to the imagination here. It serves equally as a symbol for the contrast between monistic and pluralistic approaches to life (p. 19), systematizing and unsystematic forms of thinking (p.51), single issue fanaticism and flexibility (p.51), value monism and value pluralism in moral theory (p.51), visionary and multi-focal virtuoso politicians (p. 62), aristocratic and democratic styles of leadership (p. 76) as well as the relationship between nationalism and Zionism (p. 186). I will leave the plausibility of these interpretations open to question.

For my purposes, it is sufficient to consider the specific case that occupied Berlin. He is concerned with Tolstoy as a poet and philosopher, whose work raises the following question for Berlin: Was Tolstoy a ‘hedgehog’ who wanted to show how history is shaped by a big idea, or was he a ‘fox’ for whom history is nothing more than a loose collection of events, each of which is remarkable in its own way? Starting from this question, Berlin arrives at an interpretation of Tolstoy, the essence of which is captured in the following statement:

“Tolstoy’s interest in history […] seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise. […] With it went an incurable love of the concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of the abstract.”[4]

Berlin thus concludes that Tolstoy was, in a way, both a hedgehog and a fox. What made Tolstoy a hedgehog was his desire for a comprehensive and profound explanation of historical events. However, Tolstoy was too much of an empiricist to be completely absorbed in this vision. As a fox, he also harbored a distrust of any grandiose theory of history. Joshua Cherniss and Henry Hardy summarize this tension, on which Tolstoy’s work thrives, as follows: “Tolstoy was aspiring to a monistic vision while constitutionally unable to foreswear his natural vulpine sensitivity to plurality.”[5]

This example shows why the idea of a competition between two camps is not appropriate here. Berlin, after all, leaves it open whether it is better to behave intellectually like a hedgehog or a fox. It is not a question of which side wins, but whether and how both points of view can be fruitfully combined. In the following, I would like to apply this lesson to philosophy and its various concepts of progress. I therefore suggest that most philosophers harbor two conflicting souls within them and should be categorized based on how they navigate this inner tension. Some put all their eggs in one basket, others try to resolve the conflict in small steps. The former are the “targeted hedgehogs”, the latter are the “explorative foxes”.

However, this categorization alone will not suffice to develop a pluralistic concept of progressive thinking. Let us therefore consider a second classification, which brings a completely different dimension into play, namely: How do we understand the activity of philosophizing? This question sparks a divide in opinion, which I will refer to as that between “theoreticians” and “critics”.

Theoreticians and critics

In his book What Is Philosophy For? (2018), Michael Hampe distinguishes between two types of philosophy, which he calls “doctrinal” and “non-doctrinal” or “post-doctrinal” philosophy. The terms reveal the purpose that Hampe pursues with this classification. His book is intended as a critique of doctrinal philosophy. In his eyes, this includes philosophy as it is mostly taught at universities today. To Hampe, this academic philosophy seems like a straitjacket in which no free thinking is possible. If philosophy is to contribute to students becoming autonomous thinkers, they must be freed from doctrinal philosophy.

At first glance, Hampe thus provides an example of the dichotomization between good and bad philosophy that I warned against at the beginning. On closer inspection, however, one can see that behind Hampe’s criticism lies a consideration of the activity of philosophizing, which can also be interpreted in a value-neutral way. I will follow this trail.

According to Hampe, philosophizing is an activity that can be understood in two ways. Depending on which perspective one chooses, it is either an assertive, explanatory and argumentative activity, or an activity that is better described with terms such as “exploring”, “making comprehensible” and “narrating”. The two perspectives correspond to two different pedagogical concepts. Those who see philosophy primarily as an assertive and argumentative activity want to teach students above all how to make judgments about the correctness of philosophical claims and how to justify such judgements. On the other hand, those who, like Socrates, understand philosophy as a searching activity will strive as educators to guide students to organize and articulate their own thoughts.

In principle, there is nothing to be said against combining these pedagogical concepts. You can both explain to students the correctness or incorrectness of certain positions and encourage them to think for themselves. Nor are the various activities that Hampe associates with these concepts mutually exclusive. They all have their place in a comprehensive understanding of philosophy. Nevertheless, Hampe is right to notice a big tension in this set-up. For a conflict arises as soon as one considers what the ultimate goals of these activities are. Different kinds of philosophers, whom I will refer to as theoreticians or critics, differ in how they believe this conflict should be resolved.

The final goal of a theoretician is to solve problems. For him or her, theories are tools that we invent for this purpose. Any attempts at asserting, explaining and arguing take place within the framework of such theories. This gives these activities an overriding and final purpose. When it comes to defending his or her preferred theory, the theoretician becomes a critic of competing positions. But – and this is the crux of the matter – for the theorist, criticism has only an indirect purpose: it serves to improve his or her own theory.

This distinguishes the theoretician from those who espouse a non-doctrinal philosophy. They consider criticism – including self-criticism – as the essence of philosophizing; constructing a theory is just an opportunity to immediately question it critically. In this way, critics are prepared to question everything: the prevailing morals, political ideologies, or religious superstition. Initially, the European Enlightenment focused on the critique of moral and religious prejudices, but non-doctrinal philosophy did not stop there. Today, the critics have also turned against science and the world view it upholds.

Against this background, it is much more difficult today to distinguish between an old-fashioned and a progressive philosophy. From the theoretician’s point of view, progress comes in the form of better solutions to traditional problems.  Critics reject the alignment of philosophy and science that this idea of progress implies. But how can they do this without advocating an anti-progressive philosophy? To defuse this conflict, we need a framework within which we can compare different forms of progress. Let us now turn to Austrian philosophy, which is well suited to developing such a comparative framework.

A pluralistic concept of progress

The idea of progress does not have a good reputation in Austrian culture. The Nestroy quote that Wittgenstein chose as a motto for his Philosophical Investigations is symptomatic of this: “The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is.” It is therefore all the more astonishing that philosophy was nevertheless believed to be capable of changing not only the sciences, but also society. In my opinion, the decisive factor here is an idea that could be formulated based on the beginning of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Every old-fashioned philosophy is similar, but every progressive philosophy is progressive in its own way.

Let me try to put this idea in more concrete terms. As announced at the outset, I will now intersect the two distinctions that I have so far introduced. For not every targeted hedgehog is progressive in the same sense; it also depends on whether he or she is a theoretician or not. Conversely, not every theoretician is progressive in the same sense, because he or she could also be an explorative fox, etc.  In this way, four possible notions of philosophical progress emerge, which I provisionally label P1, P2, P3, and P4.

When looking for examples of these categories, we do not need to leave the small circle of the Austrian tradition of philosophy. For there we find four philosophers who all pursued major reform projects, but who took very different paths. These four philosophers will serve as examples for my four concepts of progress.

Bolzano: a targeted theoretician

Bernard Bolzano is the representative philosopher in category P1 for two reasons. First, Bolzano’s entire philosophy revolves around one central idea: there are objective truths that stand in objective relations of justification to one another. Unlike many philosophers, Bolzano therefore has no problem answering the question “What is philosophy?”. His central idea provides him with the answer: “Philosophy is the science of the objective connections between all those truths with respect to which we set ourselves the task, in order to become wiser and better, of exploring their ultimate grounds, wherever possible.”[6]

This does not mean, as I emphasized in section 1, that one cannot also find foxy qualities in a hedgehog. For example, Bolzano has been called the “Bohemian Leibniz” because of his versatility. However, in my view, his specific theoretical ambitions demonstrate that, in his case, the hedgehog prevails. For Bolzano, exploring objective relationships meant deriving theorems from premises. This is why, for example, there is a supreme moral law in his moral philosophy from which all other ethical propositions can be derived. In other words, there is a supreme moral law to which every moral justification can refer. Bolzano therefore rejects ethical theories that do without such a law or whose supreme principles are too weak to derive all commandments or prohibitions from them.

The P1-concept of progress, which Bolzano’s philosophy embodies, is thus a strictly rational concept. Philosophy should make us wise, says Bolzano, but not just by awakening in us an enthusiasm for the true, the good, and the beautiful. When it comes to improving people, Bolzano relies on reason alone. We are wise when we understand why a statement is true, why people are happy or unhappy, or why a work of art is sublime. Progress in philosophy means being able to give better answers to these questions.

Brentano: an explorative theoretician

Like Bolzano, Franz Brentano was an optimist when it came to our cognitive abilities. Both were convinced that we are fundamentally capable of solving even the most profound and difficult problems of philosophy. But Brentano was also an empiricist and a historian who looked back on the history of philosophy with a skeptical eye. For, according to Brentano, philosophers were rarely guided by the purely theoretical interests that were the prerequisites for a strictly scientific philosophy. After short phases of upswing, in which philosophy made rapid progress, there were always long phases of decline, in which philosophy fell flat.[7]

Brentano’s reform project was concerned with ending such a phase of decline in philosophy. His project had multiple goals: he wanted to reform Aristotelian logic, put psychology on a scientific footing, and defend a realistic metaphysics so that it could withstand the attacks of German Idealism. Brentano was unable to complete any of these projects. This may have been due to external circumstances, but it also has to do with the fact that Brentano – like Tolstoy – was too much of an empiricist who preferred to be guided by concrete experiences rather than abstract ideas. I therefore consider Brentano to be an explorative theoretician.

For Brentano, too, criticism was only a means to an end. As in the scholastic model of disputatio, Brentano practiced criticism by first examining the reasons that speak in favor of a position. Like every theorist, he wanted to use criticism to gain knowledge. This is particularly evident in his debate with English empiricists. What these philosophers recognized, according to Brentano, was that philosophy can only progress with the help of psychology. Without recourse to the insights of psychology, philosophy will not be able to realize its rational potential. Brentano’s P2-concept of progress can therefore be classified as a naturalistic concept.

Feyerabend: an explorative critic

Michael Hampe counts Feyerabend (as well as Wittgenstein) among the leading figures of a post-doctrinal philosophy, which renounces the goal of solving philosophical problems. This is a premise that underlies both Bolzano’s rational concept of progress and Brentano’s naturalistic concept of progress. If these were the only concepts of philosophical progress to exist, then post-doctrinal philosophy would be a radical rejection of the idea of progress. I do not think, however, that this is the only reading of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein. We can also understand them as critics who tried to give a new meaning to the idea of philosophical progress.

As far as Feyerabend is concerned, we can assume that he continues to understand philosophy as a scientific discipline. What Feyerabend rejects above all is the idea that science works according to precise rules and that the task of philosophy is to make these rules explicit. Such a conception of science and philosophy contradicts the idea of freedom, which Feyerabend strongly defends. Just as art has the greatest freedom, so should science. It does not need to adhere to any rules imposed by philosophy. Under these changed conditions, there is nothing to be said against understanding philosophy as a part of science.

To his critical thesis that science is not a process governed by rules, Feyerabend adds the positive idea that science should be understood as a democratic process.[8] In science, too, better decisions can be made if as many people as possible can participate on an equal footing, and if this group of people is as heterogeneous as possible. Experts in a particular field should not be the only ones to decide what data to collect and how to evaluate it. This is a new understanding of scientific progress, in which it is not so much the result that counts, but the way in which the result is achieved. This is the radically new idea with which Feyerabend tries to reform our understanding of science, and it applies to philosophy as well. The P3- concept of progress that emerges from Feyerabend’s critique is a procedural concept of progress.

Wittgenstein: a targeted critic

My final example is Wittgenstein, who, according to Hampe, is a second leading figure of a post-doctrinal philosophy. In the case of Wittgenstein, this description is accurate because Wittgenstein explicitly distanced himself from the idea that there are any genuine philosophical theses. According to Wittgenstein, the only claims that are worth making as a philosopher must be theses that are immediately obvious. This rules out that Wittgenstein adheres to a rational or naturalistic concept of progress.

It still leaves open, however, the possibility of understanding Wittgenstein as a philosophical reformer who developed a different concept of progress. However, we must bear in mind that, unlike Feyerabend, Wittgenstein was not a philosopher of science. If there is a new concept of progress in Wittgenstein, we must take it from his concept of language criticism (“Sprachkritik”).

The following point seems important to me: language criticism, as Wittgenstein understood it, is not a hermeneutic activity that aims to weave the richest possible semantic network. This would be a form of criticism as it is practiced by an explorative fox. For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the aim is to reach a semantic level at which all expressions have their ordinary meaning. This is the goal that gives Wittgenstein’s critique a clearly defined direction, which is why I read Wittgenstein as a targeted critic.

The question remains as to what concept of progress, if any, can be derived from this form of criticism. There is a great temptation here to paraphrase Wittgenstein and say that philosophical progress consists in showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. But Friedrich Waismann has already warned against overestimating the significance of this metaphor.[9]  How about we leave the fly bottle aside and compare language to a spacious glass house in which everything we need for our intellectual life is available. We just have to learn how to use the available resources carefully. Seen in this way, Wittgenstein’s P4-concept of progress can be described as an ecological concept of progress in the broadest sense.

Conclusion

At the beginning I spoke of two mistakes that I would like to avoid: One mistake was the black-and-white painting of which one is guilty if one thinks that there is only one kind of good philosophy, but many kinds of bad philosophy. The other mistake was to confuse pluralism with arbitrariness. Pluralism means accepting different views of philosophy as equally valid. It does not mean extending this attitude to all possible kinds of philosophy. So how can we avoid these pitfalls?

The schema I have proposed here to develop a pluralistic concept of progress provides two answers: One answer would be that the types of philosophy depicted in my schema and the concepts of progress associated with them are equivalent. Therefore, the meta-philosophical task is completed by committing oneself to this pluralism. The other answer would be that this commitment is not enough, because each of the four options has its own strengths and weaknesses. The goal should therefore be a synthesis that combines the strengths of all positions. But since no such synthesis is in sight, let us content ourselves with the first answer.

Notes

[1] It is my great pleasure to dedicate this article to Gianfranco Soldati, whom I count among the best friends of pluralism in philosophy.

[2] Isaiah Berlin: The Hedgehog and the Fox. An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. Orion Books Limited 1992, p.4.

[3] Joshua L. Cherniss and Steven B. Smith (eds.) “Why Berlin. Why Now?” Editors Introduction in The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin. Cambridge University Press 2018, p. 1.

[4] Berlin, ibid., p.11.

[5] Josha L. Cherniss and Henry Hardy: “The Life and Opinions of Isaiah Berlin”, in: Joshua L. Cherniss and Steven B. Smith (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook to Isaiah Berlin. Cambridge University Press 2018, p. 19.

[6] B. Bolzano: “What is Philosophy”, reprinted in St. Roski und B. Schnieder: Bolzano’s Philosophy of Grounding. Translations and Studies. Oxford University Press 2022, p. 213.

[7] See F. Brentano: The Four Phases of Philosophy and Their Current State. Trans. B. M. Mezei and B. Smith. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1998. (originally published in 1895).

[8] See P. Feyerabend: Science in a Free Society. NLB 1978, p.96ff.

[9] See F. Waismann: How I See Philosophy. Macmillan 1968, p.32.

Pour Gianfranco, en remerciement de ta présence philosophique, bienveillante et amicale depuis notre première rencontre.

Confronted with the question “Why philosophy?”, my initial reaction is to reply, as for any other long-standing human activity, “Why not?”. I am aware that this flat-footed reply won’t do for at least two reasons. First, it is a dubious reaction to some long-standing human activities. Second, it will not satisfy Gianfranco. I know firsthand. In Geneva, we often practice philosophy in something like the way Mr. Jourdain was writing prose – this is not to say that we philosophize without realizing that we do, but we rarely raise up to the meta-level. This is why Q&A sessions after talks in Fribourg often felt like being pushed into the elevator whilst uncertain about the floor layout. So, I need to make an effort. The simplest, and perhaps the best, way of defining philosophy I can think of is to come back to its origins and to remind myself that “philosophy began when some people started publicly trying to understand the world around them by the use of reason.” (Magee 2009, p. 57) Why try to understand the world around us by the use of reason? Given that understanding presupposes the use of reason, the alternative is not to try to understand the world at all. The less flat-footed reply is that this alternative goes against some of the deepest and most stable motives and emotions (awe, curiosity, etc.) that characterize many members of our species. I know that Gianfranco will agree.

Perhaps he will also agree that no philosopher has gone farther than Descartes in trying to understand the world around us by relying on his reasoning powers. As Descartes himself lucidly puts it in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind,

“J’ai l’esprit ainsi fait, je l’avoue, que j’ai toujours considéré comme la plus grande volupté de l’étude, non point d’écouter les raisonnements d’autrui, mais de les découvrir moi-même par mes propres ressources […].” (AT X, 403)

The diverging verdicts on his achievements and failures that we find in the philosophy of the past four hundred years are a telling testimony to the seduction and risks in an attempt at reason-based understanding. Voltaire’s, in philosophical letter fourteenth, is perceptive and balanced:

“Il se trompa, mais ce fut au moins avec méthode, et avec un esprit conséquent ; il détruisit les chimères absurdes dont on infatuait la jeunesse depuis deux mille ans ; il apprit aux hommes de son temps à raisonner et à se servir contre lui-même de ses armes. S’il n’a pas payé en bonne monnaie, c’est beaucoup d’avoir décrié la fausse.”

One key domain, dear to Gianfranco, in which Descartes applied his immense reasoning powers to good effect is that of our own mental activities. In what follows, I want to explore one of these mental activities, judging, for which, it seems to me, Descartes “a payé en bonne monnaie”. I shall start (§1) by presenting the Cartesian theory of judgement, which revolves around two claims: judging (i) builds on a state of neutral conception and (ii) is a voluntary act. In §2, I shall discuss these two claims.

Cartesian judgement

Descartes expounds his theory of judgment in the fourth meditation, in which he attempts to reconcile divine goodness and error. To that end, he relies on a two-stage strategy. First, he distinguishes what is from what is not. What is results from God’s activity and is for that reason good. What is not is not the result of divine activity. Second, Descartes assimilates errors to what is not. The underlying idea is difficult to grasp. Descartes is well aware of this, and adds further details:

“Ainsi je connais que l’erreur, en tant que telle, n’est pas quelque chose de réel qui dépende de Dieu, mais que c’est seulement un défaut ; et partant, que je n’ai pas besoin pour faillir de quelque puissance qui m’ait été donnée de Dieu particulièrement pour cet effet, mais qu’il arrive que je me trompe, de ce que la puissance que Dieu m’a donnée pour discerner le vrai d’avec le faux n’est pas en moi infinie.” (AT IX/1, 43)

Descartes seems to reason as follows. Error is characterized by the lack of something. We might e.g., think that being mistaken is not possessing truth (someone who is mistaken has a false belief) or knowledge (during a complicated calculation, two errors can cancel each other out; we then stumble upon truth by chance and our belief does not constitute knowledge). Descartes therefore identifies, in this context, absence of knowledge and error, as he indicates a little later, when he writes:

“et si j’assure ce qui n’est pas vrai, il est évident que je me trompe ; même aussi, encore que je juge selon la vérité, cela n’arrive que par hasard, et je ne laisse pas de faillir […].” (AT IX/1, 47)[1]

An error, i.e., a belief that is not knowledge (because it is false or true by chance), is therefore a belief in which something is missing. This is why we must not locate the source of the error in a real capacity of the subject. Suppose you believe that Geneva is the capital of Switzerland. According to Descartes, we should not locate the source of your error, say, in a capacity to make geographical errors that, having a positive existence, would have been created by God. The explanation of human errors lies rather in the finitude and imperfection of our capacities. This explanation refers to what does not exist, i.e., infinite and perfect human cognitive capacities.

Before tackling Descartes’ theory of judgement, which will enable us to clarify these ideas, let me observe they are far from being self-evident. Consider memory, for example, and assume for the sake of argument that an infinite and perfect memory would preserve unaltered all the information to which you had access. This suggests that, if memory generates errors, it is because of its finite and imperfect nature. Descartes seems to claim that this explanation refers to what memory is not (infinite and perfect) rather than what it is (finite and imperfect). At this stage, this statement is perplexing. Is claiming that a geography error is due to the fact that human memory is neither infinite nor perfect so different from claiming that it is due to aspects of actual psychological processes such as the fact that the memory traces of phonetically similar names tend to be confused? Doesn’t Descartes look like someone who would explain that a bridge has collapsed by saying that it was not strong enough, and then try to contrast this explanation with the one that refers to the actual structure of the bridge? In this case, as with memory, it seems that the latter explanation is the one wearing the trousers: there are memory mistakes because memory functions in a given way, and the bridge collapsed because it had a given structure. In the context of the theodicy of error developed by Descartes, it should also be admitted that a lawyer who would try to exonerate an engineer by arguing that a bridge did not collapse because of the positive features with which his client endowed it, but because of its lack of solidity, would not merit his robe. Shouldn’t we apply the same remarks to God’s case? We will come back to this issue after having addressed other aspects of Descartes’ solution, and will see that the preceding remarks do not take sufficient account of Descartes’ conception of errors.

Whatever we may think of the implication of what is and what is not in the origins of errors, the fact remains that we do make errors and that they must be reconciled with God’s goodness. Since God is not only good, but also all-powerful, He could have seen to it that we did not make any. It is in this context that Descartes sets about developing the most interesting aspect of his discussion, i.e., his conceptions of error and judgement. He writes:

“Je trouve que [mes erreurs] dépendent du concours de deux causes, à savoir, de la puissance de connaître qui est en moi, et de la puissance d’élire, ou bien de mon libre-arbitre : c’est-à-dire, de mon entendement, et ensemble de ma volonté. Car par l’entendement seul je n’assure ni ne nie aucune chose, mais je conçois seulement les idées de ces choses, que je puis assurer ou nier.” (AT IX/1, 45)

A judgment results from the exercise of two capacities: the understanding and the will. Descartes’ claim is that these capacities collaborate in a way that reconciles divine goodness and error.

Before examining how he reaches that conclusion, observe that this theory of judgement relies on the distinction between psychological content (what we think) and mode (how we apprehend what we think). Descartes claims that the function of the understanding is to provide ideas or thought contents, which do qualify neither as knowledge nor as errors. Take the proposition that the Earth is flat. Thinking this content is not to commit an error. You are not mistaken if you think it in the context of a reductio ad absurdum or in order to examine the consequences that follow from it. Since the function of the understanding is solely to provide thought contents, it cannot make mistakes. Admittedly, our understanding is limited: some propositions are unthinkable because of their logical complexity or because we do not master the relevant concepts. However, ignorance is not error and the finiteness of our understanding explains the former, not the latter. Descartes has thus reached the negative part of his theodicy of error: the finite understanding with which God has endowed us is not the source of our errors.

Let us now turn to the will, the second faculty to which Descartes refers. He observes that

“Je ne puis pas aussi me plaindre que Dieu ne m’a pas donné un libre arbitre, ou une volonté assez ample et parfaite, puisqu’en effet je l’expérimente si vague et si étendue, qu’elle n’est renfermée dans aucunes bornes.” (AT IX/1, 45)

The source of our errors cannot be located in the finitude or imperfection of the will, which is infinite and perfect. In article 35 of the first part of his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes indicates that our will is in some way the reflection of divine perfection in us (AT IX/2, 40). The link between this statement and the idea of God is never clearly established by him. He is more forthcoming about the relation between the will and freedom:

“Car, afin que je sois libre, il n’est pas nécessaire que je sois indifférent à choisir l’un ou l’autre des deux contraires ; mais plutôt, d’autant plus que je penche vers l’un, soit que je connaisse évidemment que le bien et le vrai s’y rencontrent, soit que Dieu dispose ainsi l’intérieur de ma pensée, d’autant plus librement j’en fait choix et je l’embrasse.” (AT IX/1, 46)

Descartes did not develop a detailed conception of freedom, but we can still extract the following claims from his remarks. When we act freely, “nous agissons en telle sorte que nous ne sentons point qu’aucune force extérieure nous y contraigne” (AT IX/1, 46). Descartes understands the absence of such a constraint as a precondition for praise and blame, epistemic or otherwise.[2] In his letter to Mesland of February 9, 1645, he specifies that this absence of constraint also characterizes situations in which “une raison très évidente nous porte d’un côté” ; when we are aware of such reasons, “bien que, moralement parlant, nous ne puissions guère choisir le parti contraire, absolument parlant, nous le pouvons.” (AT IV, 173) So, if the reasons we possess clearly indicate that an option is the best, it is surely possible to ‘put on a brave face’ and resist it, but this attitude is artificial and forced.[3]

Another well-known aspect of the Cartesian approach is to think that freedom is a matter of degree (we are more or less free) and to associate these degrees of freedom with the reasons in our possession. “Le plus bas degré de la liberté” (AT IX/1, 46), as Descartes puts it, is the freedom of indifference – the freedom to choose between options for which we have no reason or equal reasons. And the more reasons we have in favor of a given option, the freer our choice. This thesis is closely linked to the Cartesian conception of reasons, not as ‘external forces’ that impose a choice on us, but as ways of convincing us or winning our support. Such a conception of reasons aligns quite well with our pre-theoretical conception of action if we approach it in the light of the phenomenology of decisions. We do not feel free when the reasons available to us fail to convince us. Suppose, for example, you had to decide whether to change jobs. The reasons – security, ease and weariness on the one hand, novelty, challenge and risk on the other – might seem equally distributed to you, so that no decision stands out. If time is short and you choose to stay in your job, you will no doubt feel some form of constraint. In these conditions, we often say that we are striving to make a choice, which entails hesitation, procrastination, and so on. Consider now a situation in which you are fully convinced by one of the options. It seems obvious to you that the security of your job is limited, that the ease of your tasks is of little importance in the face of weariness and that your colleagues are unbearable: you have to leave. The choice leaves no room for doubt, you embrace it unambiguously and your conviction that it is the right choice is not felt as a constraint.

According to Descartes, this conception of freedom applies not only to the practical realm of decisions to act, which we have used as an illustration, but also to theoretical judgements. Every judgment is an act of the will, a kind of decision about the truth or falsity of a content presented by the understanding. If an option seems best to us, we choose it. Similarly, if a proposition seems true to us, we accept it or judge it true.[4] Furthermore, deliberations often precede practical and theoretical decisions. As Descartes points out:

“Et cette indifférence ne s’étend pas seulement aux choses dont l’entendement n’a aucune connaissance, mais généralement aussi à toutes celles qu’il ne découvre pas avec une parfaite clarté, au moment que la volonté en délibère ; car, pour probables que soient les conjectures qui me rendent enclin à juger quelque chose, la seule connaissance que j’ai que ce ne sont que des conjectures, et non des raisons certaines et indubitables, suffit pour me donner occasion de juger le contraire.” (AT IX/1, 47)

The practical or theoretical decision at the end of a deliberation can be more or less happy. Let us remember that the aim of the first meditation is to make us aware, through accumulating reasons for doubt, of how uncertain most of our beliefs are. And it is striking to note how many similarities Descartes perceives between the domains of the good and the true.[5] In the first meditation, he acknowledges the existence of two standards: certainty for philosophical enquiry and probability for action. This does not call into question the idea under discussion, according to which reasons function in a similar way in the theoretical and practical domains as data for a deliberation preceding a voluntary act. We may explain the existence of these two standards by the fact that many practical decisions are taken in an emergency (this is Descartes’ solution). Alternatively, we may explain it by the fact that the two domains are structured differently: we act or do not act in a certain way (not choosing one option means choosing another), whereas we can accept, deny or suspend our judgement in relation to a proposition.[6] These two explanations are not incompatible.

We have everything we need to tackle Descartes’ theory of error, which he presents as follows:

“D’où est-ce donc que naissent mes erreurs ? C’est à savoir de cela seul que, la volonté étant beaucoup plus ample et plus étendue que l’entendement, je ne la contiens pas dans les mêmes limites, mais que je l’étends aussi aux choses que je n’entends pas ; auxquelles étant de soi indifférente, elle s’égare fort aisément, et choisit le mal pour le bien, ou le faux pour le vrai. Ce qui fait que je me trompe et que je pèche.” (AT IX/1, 46)

Errors stem from the fact that we misuse our abilities and decide in unsuitable conditions because of our limited understanding: rather than being convinced by good reasons, we decide in the dark. For example, we take the statements of self-appointed experts at face value, fail to check our first impressions calmly, or overlook considerations to the contrary that are known to us.

If we come back to Descartes’ aim to reconcile divine goodness and human error, we see that he is led to conceive of error as something negative and, therefore, not created by God. Descartes goes on to clarify his thinking:

“Car en effet ce n’est point une imperfection en Dieu, de ce qu’il m’a donné la liberté de donner mon jugement, ou de ne le pas donner, sur certaines choses dont il n’a pas mis une claire et distincte connaissance en mon entendement ; mais sans doute c’est en moi imperfection, de ce que je n’en use pas bien, et que je donne témérairement mon jugement, sur des choses que je ne conçois qu’avec obscurité et confusion.” (AT IX/1, 48)

The central thesis defended by Descartes is therefore that to make good use of our will is to judge when the conception provided by the understanding is clear and distinct. When we judge a proposition that is clearly and distinctly conceived, we judge in a self-evident way and with the highest degree of freedom. To apply the phenomenological considerations sketched out above, our assent does not then seem to us to be constrained, but carried along by reasons that convince us.

The Cartesian theory of judgement revolves around two main theses: (i) judging is assenting to a conception that is logically prior to it, and (ii) judging is a voluntary act. We can appreciate, then, that our example of the lawyer trying to exonerate an engineer by referring to the lack of solidity of the bridge, rather than to the qualities with which the engineer endowed it, does not sufficiently heed the specific features of the case before us. According to Descartes, God is exonerated because our errors are explained by acts of will based on ideas that are neither clear nor distinct, in a way that we could have avoided. God has created a finite understanding and an infinite will; the explanation of error must of course refer to this. However, an essential part of the explanation is that our will enables us to suspend our judgement whenever our ideas are not clear and distinct: we can and must exercise a sort of epistemic vigilance in order, for example, to remember the reasons that run counter to a given judgement. This is a fundamental asymmetry with the two explanations given in the lawyer’s example. A better parallel is that of a judge who refuses to consider the fact that an engineer’s master has given him imperfect skill as a mitigating circumstance – he would be right to refuse if that skill, though imperfect, was sufficient to build solid bridges.

Two claims about judgement under scrutiny

Descartes’ approach to judgement revolves around two main claims. To judge is (i) to give assent to a conception that is logically prior to it and (ii) this assent is a voluntary act. In this section, we will examine these two claims.

The first claim, according to which conception is logically prior to assent, was the target of a famous criticism by Spinoza, who wrote:

“I deny, that a man does not, in the act of perception, make any affirmation. For what is the perception of a winged horse, save affirming that a horse has wings? If the mind could perceive nothing else but the winged horse, it would regard the same as present to itself: it would have no reasons for doubting its existence, nor any faculty of dissent, unless the imagination of a winged horse be joined to an idea which precludes the existence of the said horse, or unless the mind perceives that the idea which it possess of a winged horse is inadequate, in which case it will either necessarily deny the existence of such a horse, or will necessarily be in doubt on the subject.” (Ethics, II.XLIX, corollary, note)

Spinoza is the precursor of an approach according to which the fundamental psychological states are position-takings such as beliefs and judgements rather than neutral apprehensions such as conceptions.[7] Consider the relatively simple case of seeing. According to this approach, seeing is partly believing: if Gianfranco sees a chalet on a mountain slope, he believes that there is a chalet on that slope. It is only when Gianfranco has real or apparent reasons for thinking that things are not as they perceptually appear, Spinoza insists, that the belief is not formed. This is the case, for example, if, knowing that a western is being shot in the area, Gianfranco suspends his judgement that there is a chalet on the slope – it may just be a facade put up by the set designers. Or, to come back to Spinoza’s example, if you had a visual impression of a winged horse, you would withhold your assent only because you had many reasons for thinking that winged horses do not exist. For Spinoza, Descartes is more generally wrong in thinking that the neutral apprehension of a proposition (conception) has logical priority over judgement. The misleading impression that neutral apprehension exists results from the interaction of two more fundamental psychological states that are in themselves position-takings: in our example, these are the visual state that contains the judgement that a chalet is there and the belief that a movie is being shot in the area.

We cannot do full justice here to this disagreement between Descartes and Spinoza. Still, a few remarks are in order. First, the thesis that perceptual states contain beliefs or judgements is difficult to defend convincingly. For example, we often perceive things to which we pay little or no attention – do we form judgements about them?

Second, the act of judging requires the subject to possess the relevant concepts: Gianfranco needs to have the concepts of chalet and mountain slope to judge that there is a chalet on the mountain slope. But can’t a young child who doesn’t have these concepts see the chalet on the slope when these objects are in its visual field? These considerations, though far from conclusive, suggest that if perception ‘affirms’ the presence of its content in a way that distinguishes it from, say, imagination, this affirmation does not amount to assent or judgment.[8]

Third, neutral apprehensions are required to explain the psychological states of supposition and imagination. We often assume that a proposition is true for the purposes of theoretical or practical reasoning. There is an element of pretense in these situations: we reason ‘as if’ our friends’ train was late or ‘as if’ Borromini did not die in Rome. What should lead us to conclude that suppositions affirm their content in a way that we resist thanks to the reasons we possess? The answer is far from evident and insisting on the presence of resistance to position-taking seems to betray the spontaneous way in which we so often engage in supposition. Similar remarks apply to many forms of imagination.[9]

Fourth and finally, the distinction between the content of psychological states (the conception) and the strength (or attitude) that accompanies this conception seems necessary to understand what several psychological states of different strengths have in common. Suppose that Renato wants to own a country house, Benedetto believes that he does, Elisabetta doubts it and Goffredo fears it. The most natural way of understanding the situation is to say that these four subjects conceive of the same thing, but have different attitudes to what they conceive. It is less convincing to say that Renato only comes to want a country house by capitalizing on the reasons in his possession to counteract his tendency to think he owns one.[10]

For these reasons, it seems that we should agree with Descartes and distinguish a neutral state of apprehension – conceiving – that is logically prior to a position-taking – judging – that we sometimes form on its basis.

Let us now turn to Descartes’ second claim, according to which judging is a voluntary act. This claim is difficult to understand in a way that is convincing and faithful to the texts. The first, natural interpretation – this is how many scholars have understood it – is to see Descartes as advocating a fundamentally voluntarist conception of judgement: all judgements would be acts that are directly subject to our will. This view has been widely criticized in light of a major difference between judgements and actions, or at least basic actions.[11]

Unlike basic actions (moving your arm, for example), judgements are not directly subject to the will: you cannot decide to judge in the same way as you decide to move your arm. The following example illustrates this difference. In a game show produced by wealthy epistemologists seeking to disprove pragmatism, you are offered a million Swiss francs on condition that you judge that Ticino is in Italy. Naturally, epistemologists are not going to be satisfied with a trick that consists of asserting in a convinced tone that Ticino is in Italy. We all know that publicly asserting is one thing, judging another; otherwise we would not be able to understand what a lie is. To judge is rather to acknowledge the truth of a proposition, to admit it as a premise of reasoning, and so on. It is this act, and the disposition it often creates – belief – that is not directly subject to the will. This is why our epistemologists will retain their million-dollar status.

This example reveals that there are different kinds of reasons for judging. The fact that judging Ticino to be in Italy would allow you to win a million is a pragmatic reason for judging, since this sum would undoubtedly favour your interests. There are also moral reasons to judge: the fact that a person is a friend is a moral reason not to judge him guilty of the crime he is accused of. Finally, epistemic reasons refer to considerations indicating that the proposition is true – for example, a visual impression of redness is in normal circumstances an epistemic reason for believing that an object is red.[12]

A plausible claim is that judgement is directly influenced only by epistemic reasons: we cannot judge for a pragmatic reason that Ticino is in Italy, because we have every epistemic reason to think that it is in Switzerland. Similarly, it is the absence of epistemic reasons for believing our friend guilty, as well as the epistemic reasons that seem to us to make him incapable of a crime, that explain our position. Judgment is thus only indirectly subject to the will. We can, e.g., exert a long-term influence on our judgements by (not) paying attention to certain things, so that the epistemic reasons available to us gradually bend in a certain direction. However, this strategy is fragile: when we realize that we do not have good epistemic reasons, we are led to suspend our judgement. This is Descartes’ objective in the first meditation, an objective underpinned by his thesis, recalled here, that certainty is the norm of judgement (“car, pour probables que soient les conjectures qui me rendent enclin à juger quelque chose, la seule connaissance que j’ai que ce ne sont que des conjectures, et non des raisons certaines et indubitables, suffit pour me donner occasion de juger le contraire” (AT IX/1, 47)).

Does Descartes endorse the unconvincing voluntarist view of judgement that we have just discussed? In what exact sense does he think that the will is involved in judging? The answers to these questions are far from obvious. One consideration against a strong voluntarist interpretation is the fact that it is difficult to reconcile with the Cartesian thesis that clear and distinct ideas rationally force assent. As Pascal Engel argues, Descartes’ claim about the relation between the will and judgement is probably more reasonable than strong voluntarism, if only because it is not meant to cover all judgements.[13] Moreover, if we interpret Descartes as a strong voluntarist, we should wonder why he attaches such importance to the method of doubt in the first meditation. Aren’t the many epistemic reasons for suspending our pretheoretical beliefs that he presents in it so many signs that he thinks that we do not exercise direct control over judgments and that we need to have epistemic reasons for or against a proposition in order to be able to judge it to be true or to suspend our judgment about it? This is what Descartes indicates in a letter to Clerselier, where he observes that there is

“de la difficulté à chasser ainsi hors de sa créance tout ce qu’on y avait mis auparavant, partie à cause qu’il est besoin d’avoir quelque raison de douter avant que de s’y déterminer (c’est pourquoi j’ai proposé les principales en ma première Méditation) […].” (AT IX/1, 204)

However, if one denies that Descartes advocates strong voluntarism, what does he mean when he writes, in his letter to Mesland of February 9, 1645 quoted above, that “bien que moralement parlant, nous ne puissions guère choisir le parti contraire, absolument parlant, nous le pouvons” (AT IV, 173)[14]? He seems to admit here the existence of a substantial control over judgment. Can he be interpreted satisfactorily without falling into the difficulties presented above? To this end, Engel offers an attractive interpretation that distinguishes two questions. The first concerns our adherence to the norms of epistemic rationality: is this adherence subject to the will? The second concerns what happens once these norms have been accepted: can we then deny what seems obvious to us, for example? According to Engel, what is described as morally possible in the letter to Mesland relates to the second question: Descartes would argue that once the norms of epistemic rationality are endorsed, we cannot reject what strikes us as obvious. On the contrary, what is possible “absolutely speaking” would concern our adherence to the norms of epistemic rationality: we can reject them in order to affirm our freedom, for example. This interpretation has the advantage of not attributing to Descartes an unconvincing claim concerning the relation between judgment and the will, since the only thing subject to the will would be the endorsement of the norms of epistemic rationality.

This conclusion leads directly to the following question: is this endorsement directly subject to our will? Several scholars have recently emphasized the relation between the Cartesian approach and the epistemology of virtues. The epistemology of virtues can be developed in a variety of ways, but we will concentrate on the central idea that knowledge is based on traits of the subject for which he is responsible.[15] Within this framework, Descartes’ approach can be understood as based on virtues specific to what Bernard Williams (1985) has famously called the perspective of the pure inquirer. This perspective is characterized by the disappearance of most, if not all, of the pragmatic considerations ordinarily weighing on belief formation. I suggest that we understand Descartes’ strategy in the Meditations as an attempt to instil in his readers the epistemic virtue required by this inquiry, a virtue that according to Descartes takes the form of a love of certainty. Like all virtues, love of certainty is subject to the will in an indirect way. To speak of the progressive acquisition of an epistemic virtue that attaches us to certainty corresponds well to the Cartesian approach: the first meditation exposes the deceptive character of naïve certainties, while the following meditations attempt to constitute a set of truly certain beliefs.

Within virtue theory, we often come across a specific category of virtues, the so-called “regulative” virtues that allow us to control responses that are natural to us. Courage is one such virtue: it regulates the effects of fear and in particular its tendency to make us flee from danger. For the beginner, the acquisition of this capacity can take the form of an insistence on the shameful nature of fleeing from some dangerous situations, and on what is put at risk if he does not face them. The love of certainty to which Descartes exhorts us allows us to control the natural inclinations that lead us to accept the uncertain data of the senses or, more generally, obscure and confused ideas that are subject to doubt. This control is exercised indirectly over judgment through an epistemic vigilance anchored in the possibilities of errors revealed by the method of doubt. To the question of the role of the will in our adherence to the norms of epistemic rationality, the advocate of an epistemology of virtues will be tempted to give a nuanced answer, since the possibility of rejecting them recedes according to the intensity of our love of certainty.[16] The will would therefore be involved in two distinct and indirect ways in judgment. First, in the progressive constitution of epistemic virtues and vices and, second, in the epistemic vigilance that allows us to modulate our assent through the awareness of our fallibility.[17]

Whether or not one subscribes to this attempt to understand Descartes through virtue epistemology, our discussion has led us to the following conclusions. While there is no doubt that the will indirectly influences judgment, the influence of epistemic reasons should lead us to deny that judging is voluntary in a strong sense. However, if Descartes’ goal is to allow praise and blame to apply to judgment, an indirect influence is enough to achieve it. After all, we can be rightly blamed when we find ourselves, because of our lack of caution, in situations in which our will can no longer be exercised – for example, when an advanced state of intoxication renders us incapable of acting to avoid a tragedy. Similarly, our lack of love of certainty or, more generally, of knowledge, can lead us to make mistakes that we would not have made otherwise.

Conclusion

I have argued that Descartes’ two central claims about judgement – judging is based on a state of neutral conception and is an act involving the will – are convincing. In this area at least, he successfully navigated the risks inherent in reason-based understanding. I am not sure whether Gianfranco will endorse this conclusion, but am confident that he will admit that following something like the Cartesian method is the only wise reaction to our longing toward understanding our inner lives.[i]

Notes

[1] The fact that, according to Descartes, knowledge and luck are incompatible is emphasized in Sosa (2015, pp. 233ff).

[2] See article 37 from the first part of Principles of philosophy (AT IX/2, 40).

[3] We shall come back below to the Cartesian contrast between moral and absolute possibilities.

[4] The Stoic origins of this conception are nicely brought to the fore in Portalier (2013). It is a novel feature of the Meditations, since Descartes does not defend this view in his previous writings.

[5] This aspect of Descartes’ position is emphasized in Wilson (1978, chap. 4).

[6] On this second explanation, see e.g., Schroeder (2021).

[7] Armstrong (1968), Pitcher (1971) and Dennett (1991) are three famous more recent advocates of this view.

[8] Dretske (1969) contains an illuminating discussion of the relations between perceptual states and concepts. Let me mention in passing that the observations in the text are in tension with Descartes’ own theory of perception, according to which the intentionality of perception derives from judgements.

[9] Spinoza’s claim according to which we would assent to our imaginative states if we did not have reasons to think that they are not true is also difficult to verify. It would be indirectly confirmed if toddlers had, because of their more limited acquaintance with their surroundings, a hard time distinguishing imagination from reality. Empirical data do not support this contention, however (see e.g., Woolley (1997) et Rakoczy et alii (2004)). Thanks to Steve Humbert-Droz for these references and a discussion of this issue.

[10] For an examination of the distinction between psychological modes and contents, see Searle (1983).

[11] For an examination of the links between judgement and the will, see Alston (1988) and, for a discussion of Descartes’ position, Price (1969, chap. 10).

[12] On these different reasons, see e.g., D’Arms and Jacobson (2000).

[13] See Engel (2019, p. 313ff). In his letter to Mesland from May 2, 1644 (AT IV, 115-116), Descartes seems indeed to limit his claim to situations where the relevant proposition is not clearly and distinctly conceived and, so, where there are reasons for doubt. This evidence is indirect, since Descartes talks in this letter of the relations between desire and the good. But we have seen above that he is prone to see many parallels between the good and the true.

[14] Some scholars think that Descartes changed his mind between the Meditations and this letter, which would defend a stronger variant of voluntarism, see e.g., Portalier (2013).

[15] Two different virtue epistemologies are developed in Sosa (2007) and Zagzebski (1996).

[16] This idea is compatible with the interpretation according to which, when Descartes speaks, like in his letter to Mesland from February 9, 1645, of what is “morally impossible”, he means what is very unlikely. On this issue, see Embry (2018), who reveals the Scholastic origins of this use of the term.

[17] These claims should be assessed in light of Descartes’ (brief) observations on the virtues, which are to be found in his letter to Elisabeth from August 4, 1645 (AT IV, 263-268) and in articles 144, 148 and 153 of Passions of the Soul (AT XI, 436ff).

[i] My thanks to Edgar Phillips for his comments on a previous version of this paper.

References

Alston, W. (1988), The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification, Philosophical Perspectives 2, 257-299.

Armstrong, D. (1968), A Materialistic Theory of the Mind, London, Routledge.

D’Arms, J. and Jacobson, D. (2000), The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(1), 65-90.

Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston, Little, Brown & Co.

Dretske, F. (1969), Seeing and Knowing, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Embry, B. (2018), Descartes on Free Will and Moral Possibility, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96(2), 380-398.

Engel, P. (2019), Les vices du savoir. Essai d’éthique intellectuelle, Marseille, Agone.

Magee, B. (2009), My Conception of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 65, 57-70.

Pitcher, G. (1971), Theory of Perception, Cambridge, Mass., Princeton University Press.

Portalier, F. (2013), Assentiment et liberté de l’assentiment chez Descartes et Épictète, in L. Jaffro (ed.), Croit-on comme on veut ? Histoire d’une controverse (pp. 117-136), Paris, Vrin.

Price, H. H. (1969), Belief, London, Allen and Unwin.

Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M. and Striano, T. (2004), Young Children Know That Trying Is Not Pretending: A Test of the ‘Behaving-As-If’ Construal of Children’s Early Concept of Pretense, Developmental Psychology 40(3), 388-399.

Schroeder, M. (2021), Reasons First, New York, Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1983), Intentionality. An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Sosa, E. (2007), A Virtue Epistemology, New York, Oxford University Press.

Sosa, E. (2015), Judgment and Agency, New York, Oxford University Press.

Wilson, M. (1978), Descartes, London, Routledge.

Woolley, J. (1997), Thinking about Fantasy: Are Children Fundamentally Different Thinkers and Believers from Adults ?, Child Development 68(6), 991-1011.

Zagzebski, L. (1996), Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

In recent years, the venerable main metaphilosophical question – what is philosophy? – has received a lot of attention. Starting ideally from Tim Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007), Quine’s (1960) idea that philosophy is contiguous with science, to be reconceived as the claim that philosophy is a sort of enterprise that discovers necessarily a posteriori truths via the faculty of imagination has regained force. As is well-known, this idea goes against a received exceptionalist view that, following Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), tells philosophy apart from science and equates it with conceptual analysis, aimed at yielding judgements that, if true, are such necessarily yet a priori (cf. Voltolini 2022).

Yet paradoxically speaking, another question in the vicinity; namely, what is philosophy for, viz. the question of the role of philosophy, has attracted less attention. At least, if this question is meant as asking whether philosophy has any sort of practical utility, rather than a theoretical one (which can be answered by saying that philosophy produces an advancement in the most general knowledge, as in the classical Aristotelian stance on philosophy). For it is a commonplace to say that philosophy has no such utility (as is shown in the pejorative use of the term “philosophy”, which equates philosophy with lovely yet idle chaters that solve no real problem).

Yet is this commonplace right, or does it merely reflect a bias against the philosophers’ activity? In this paper, I will try to show that the commonplace is wrong. For not only philosophy helps in clarifying matters that are involved in ordinary human transactions, but also it may help to solve the problems that such matters arise.

The Practical Utility of Theoretical Philosophy

That philosophy has a practical utility can be easily seen to be an upshot of discussions in so-called practical philosophy, which aims at investigating what is the status of our values (aesthetical, ethical, and also political ones), as well as the domain of their application. Yet interestingly enough, even theoretical philosophy, which aims at capturing the overall structure of reality as regards both the issue of what entities figure in the overall realm of beings (ontology) and the issue of what is the nature of such entities, provided that there ary (metaphysics) (cf. Thomasson 1999), can turn out to be practically useful. Let me start with examples of the second kind, which are less expected, to move then on to examples of the first kind.

In metaphysics, a standard discussion concerns the issue of the criteria of identity for things of a certain (metaphysical) kind; namely, the issue of whether an item a and an item b are the very same item of a certain kind (for example, the class of things having a heart (chordates) and the class of things having a kidney (renates) are the same set, for two sets are the same set just in case they share the same members, as is the case with the above classes). Curiously enough, this kind of discussion may be useful in order to settle a series of practical issues, as the following examples may clarify.

First of all, in Summer 2024, during the Olympic games, an intense discussion occurred in the media as well as in the public audience as to whether the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif were eligible to play in a woman boxing category. For it seemed to be unclear whether she is really a woman, in some sense of the term. Now, as regards this discussion, philosophy may be useful in drawing a distinction between being female, which is a biological category that is individuated in terms of primary sexual traits (those traceable to an individual’s DNA) and secondary sexual traits (e.g., genitalia), and being a woman, which is a cultural category having to do with the role played by certain individuals, not necessarily females in the biological sense, in the society (on this distinction, cf. e.g. Tripodi 2011). So, depending on whether as regards a sport competition the first or the second category is the relevant one, the above discussion has an easy solution.

Moreover, a well-known problem with artworks is plagiarism. Some years ago, the Italian writer Pia Pera, who had written in Italian a novel called Diario di Lo, was prevented from publishing an official English translation of it. For a jury held that the protest by Nabokov’s literary executors, who claimed that Pera’s novel had plagiarized Nabokov’s literary masterpiece, Lolita, was justified. Yet this claim is actually disputable. Although Pera was certainly inspired by Nabokov’s novel, her intent was to narrate again the Lolita story yet not from the perspective of Lolita’s main protagonist, Humbert Humbert, but from the perspective of Lolita herself. Now, depending on which metaphysical theory one endorses on fictional characters, the two positions at stake, in favor and against Pera’s plagiarism, can be respectively defended. Clearly enough, the identity of a literary work depends on the identity of the fictional characters whose deeds are narrated in the work. Change a character and you will get a different work: if the paladin Roland is no longer pious and wise but irritable and mad, you will have moved from Chretien de Troyes’ Song of Roland to Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Enraged. But what does the identity of a fictional character consist in? According to artefactualists on fictional characters, who take that a fictional character is an abstract (non-spatiotemporally located) artefact created by its author, what counts for such an identity is basically the character’s original author. In writing a literary work, this chap creates a native character, which can however survive in other such works as an immigrant character, provided that those works’ authors have the right intention to tell further the story of that character with which they are acquainted (cf. Thomasson 1999). According to such a criterion, Dante’s Ulysses is the same as Homer’s Ulysses, since Dante had the intention to tell further the story of Ulysses after his return to Ithaca. According to this account, if Pera had similar intentions, the characters of her story, Lolita and Humbert Humbert, are the same as Nabokov’s characters, hence the probability that her story had plagiarized Nabokov’s story is relatively high. Yet suppose that one suscribes to a different metaphysical account of fictional characters, the neo-Meinongian one. According to this account, two fictional characters are set-theoretical items; namely, they are correlates of sets of properties, the properties that are ascribed to them in the relevant stories (cf. Parsons 1980). Hence, two fictional characters the same iff they precisely share those properties. If one sticks to this account, then Nabokov’s Lolita and Pera’s Lolita are different fictional characters, for they are ascribed different properties in the respective stories. Hence, the probability that Pera’s story has plagiarized Nabokov’s story are relatively low. All in all, therefore, the Pera-Nabokov controversy can be solved by scrutinizing which metaphysical theory on fictional characters is the best.

Finally, consider another sort of case. According to a widespread recent account, food and beverages must be considered as cultural artefacts of some sort (cf. Bonadio and Borghini 2024). Again, as such they must be individuated in terms of certain criteria. As regards wines, the alleged necessary and sufficient conditions in order for something to be a wine of a certain kind are (to simplify a bit): i) its grape variety; ii) its production conditions, iii) its organolectic features; iv) its production terrain. For example, a wine is a Morellino di Scansano iff it comes from Sangiovese grapes at least in its 85%, it follows a certain vinification procedures, it smells and tastes in a certain way and it is produced in a certain area of the most southern province of Tuscany; namely, the area around the city of Scansano, in the Grosseto province. Yet one may legitimately wonder whether all such conditions are on the same footing. Suppose that, due to climate change, the terrains in the Grosseto province became too dry, so that the wine production had to be moved up northwards. Suppose moreover that people found a soil whose chemical composition is very similar to the soil in the Grosseto’s province around Scansano. Would the wine that were produced in the new terrain no longer a Morellino, simply because it is no longer produced in the Grosseto’s province around Scansano? If a wine were equated with a food, it is quite likely that the answer would be in the negative. Kiwi fruits, which were originally produced in New Zealand only, are now also produced in various parts of Italy, while still being Kiwi fruits.

The Practical Utility of Practical Philosophy

Once one has been able to show that theoretical philosophy is practically useful, it will be easier to show that practical philosophy is practically useful as well. Here an immediate example comes to one’s mind; namely, how the discussions about abortion, animal rights, and robots’ rights are influenced by settling whether foetuses, animals and robots may be assimilated to persons, where what is a person must be accounted in philosophical terms. So, let me look for less notorious cases.

To start with ethical matters, consider the problem of surrogate motherhood, which is very much at stake nowadays, since Parliaments in different countries are now ruling whether this form of motherhood is legimate or not. Without pretending of course to solve such a complex problem in a few lines, consider how the discussion about it may drastically change depending on which notion of body is involved. In the phenomenological literature starting from Husserl (1989), it is commonplace to distinguish between a physical notion of body, the physical body occupying a certain portion of spacetime (Körper), and a phenomenological notion of body, the living body (Leib), whose scope is determined by the scope of one’s internal sensations (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). Now, one may cash out this difference in various ways. Yet for the purposes of the present discussion, one may limit oneself to note that, while one can borrow one’s physical body – actually, some of its parts; for example, I can borrow you my physical finger to press a button – one cannot borrow one’s living body, or parts of it, since the former is a public entity while the latter is a private one. Now, depending on which notion is taken to be more relevant in this debate, surrogate motherhood will turn out to be more or less acceptable. One can certainly borrow one’s physical uterus, but can one bear that one’s internal sensations will be dominated for nine months by one’s pregnancy, whose outcome will however be of interest for someone else?

But also aesthetic matters can be usefully approached philosophically. Consider the following question. Must a landscape be kept as it is forever, as a sort of Ruskinian anti-industrial conservatism suggests, or is it aesthetically appropriate to alter it for some reason or other (typically, practical needs) (on this question, cf. D’Angelo 2021)? One may start giving an answer to this question by noticing that a landscape has not only natural, but also artefactual features, as the phenomenon of framed landscapes suggests: a framed landscape is a landscape that one can see through a frame, as if it were a scene presented by a picture having that frame as its borders, thereby constituting a pictorial artwork. Insofar as it has the latter kind of features, a landscape can be modified, provided that the modifications are compatible with its aesthetically relevant characteristics. A Romanic church may remain a nice church even if Gothic and possibly even Renaissance and baroque adornments are added to it. Likewise, a Medieval castle somewhere in the hills may remain a nice castle even once it is surrounded by windmill blades built on such hills.

Finally, even political matters can be clarified and possibly settled under the light of philosophy. In many countries, there is a lively discussion as to whether languages must be reformed in accordance with gender balance. According to some people, the linguistic masculine gender in its neutral use must be replaced by some other form that bears no trace of gender inequality – whether this use extensively occurs in languages that have no neuter gender like French and Italian (cf. the Italian “cari tutti” used to mean dear all, whether men, women, or people belonging some other gender), or it merely occurs in anaphorical reprises of previously used neuter terms, as in English (cf. “the philosopher … he …”). Yet according to some other people, precisely because that use is neuter and not gender-based, there is no need to make that linguistic reform (for a nice survey of the controversy cf. Iacona 2022). Here philosophy may serve in order to assess the reasons that are given both in favor and against that reformation: are they good reasons or not?

Conclusions

Examples could be multiplied, but I think that my point is clear enough. Against a widespread bias, one can see how philosophy is practically useful by realizing how philosophy can shed light, or even contribute to solve, various problems that occur in ordinary human transactions, so that they taken by almost anyone to be relevant for human life. As a further consequence, an overall training in philosophy addressed not only to philosophy scholars, but also to a wider audience, is of the utmost importance. For once one is endowed with philosophical reflection as well as its capacity to argue in favor or against received views and theses, one may see the world of the everyday life under a new light.

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