"A man arrived at the emergency room with both of his ears badly burned," Swara began again, after saying Basmalah and Salaam. “'How did this happen?' the doctor asked.
'I was ironing my shirt when the phone rang, and I answered the iron by mistake,' explained the man.
'Well, what about the other ear?' the doctor inquired.
'Oh—that happened when I called for the ambulance.'"
"Julian Baggini writes in prologue of his 'How the World Thinks', " Swara proceeded, "'Philosophy’s birth between the eighth and third centuries BCE is described by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers as the ‘Axial Age’. It was a period of gradual transition from understanding the world in terms of myth to the more rational understanding of the world we have today. Rational understanding didn’t supplant early folk beliefs and myths so much as grow out of their values and tenets. World views, while shaped by the demands of cool reason, were not always led by it.
Although the classical philosophies of India, China and Greece differ in important ways, there are some highly significant commonalities. Each started with a basic assumption that everything is one. Whatever it is that explains human life must also explain the universe, nature, and anything else beyond. As William of Ockham would famously put it in his principle of the ‘razor’ much later, in the fourteenth century, it is never rational to postulate the existence of more things than are necessary. You start with the simpler explanation–that everything is governed by the same principles–and only complicate matters if that turns out not to work. The earliest philosophers were therefore implicitly following a rational principle that none had yet articulated.
Also, the project of understanding the universe only makes sense if the universe is understandable. If we thought that there was a motley collection of mechanisms and principles governing different parts of reality, with no connections between them, then the universe would be a less comprehensible place. Assuming a kind of unity is a prerequisite for any serious attempt at systematic understanding.
The unity of human knowledge was more evident in the Axial Age than it is today. For the Greeks, everything we consider the humanities or sciences was a part of philosophical study. Nor were there fundamental divisions of knowledge in China or India. As human inquiry grew, so different branches reached further from the trunk, but they are still fundamentally part of the same tree.
Another commonality was the assumption that a satisfactory account of the world must speak to reason. Attractive stories and myths are not enough: we need to articulate an intellectual case that supports the view we adopt. Reason—meaning rationality—is in essence the giving of reasons, ones which can be scrutinised, judged, assessed, accepted or rejected. Humans have always had ways of understanding the world, but it is only since the dawn of philosophy that they have seriously attempted to provide and defend reasons for these.'
Baggini then gave a comparison description in the first chapter, 'At an international school in Maastricht in the Netherlands, a pair of bright and precocious teenagers are going through the answers to a quiz they have set their peers. They admit they can’t be 100 per cent sure they’ve got their facts right. But they can assure us that everything is correct ‘according to the Internet’.
The question of what grounds our knowledge, what justifies the confidence that our beliefs are true, is one of the most fundamental in philosophy. That for a whole generation the answer might be ‘the Internet’ is frightening. It’s one thing to have too much faith in Wikipedia, which is after all just one site with a pretty good record of integrity. To take the Internet, a motley collection of diverse sites with vastly different pedigrees, as an authority on truth en masse looks reckless.
Throughout history people usually haven’t held their beliefs for philosophical reasons. People generally take on the beliefs that surround them, and only a minority rebel wholesale.
Nonetheless, Baggini writes, at a societal level—if not the individual level —there are always some justifications for belief which carry more weight than others; reasons why some things are accepted as true and others rejected as false. Every culture has an implicit, folk epistemology—a theory of knowledge—just as almost every philosophy has an explicit one and these formal and informal epistemologies are connected.
The international students who cite the Internet as their source of knowledge, provide one piece of evidence that folk and formal epistemologies are linked. Underlying the students’ gullibility that the Internet is a trusted repository of truths, is a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that is widely taken for granted today yet was not shared by others at different times and places in history. Their trust in the Web, reflects a culture that has for several centuries, understood knowledge as collectively produced by human beings with different areas of expertise. In their understanding, genuine knowledge is comprised of the most up-to-date true facts that can be listed and collected. If properly recorded, anyone with time and resource can discover this knowledge for themselves. Truth is not owned by elites, it has been democratised.
Ordinary people have not always been deemed competent to find out and understand truths for themselves. Human inquiry has not always generally been seen as the sole legitimate source of knowledge – divine revelation has often been taken to be far more reliable. Nor has being ‘up to date’ always been seen as a virtue. In fact, many traditions still assert that the deepest truths about human nature were revealed to ancient sages, prophets and seers.'
Then Baggini writes more, ' ... the Buddha, like Confucius, was explicitly not concerned with ultimate questions of metaphysics, reflecting a fault line that runs through the world’s philosophical traditions. David Hall and Roger Ames describe this as the difference between ‘truth-seekers’ and ‘way-seekers’. Western philosophy is characteristically truth-seeking. It seeks to describe the basic structure of reality, logic, language, the mind. One example of this is the Western emphasis on science for science’s sake. For truth-seekers, disinterested learning is the best kind, while for way-seekers to be disinterested is as nonsensical as driving a car without caring where you end up.
The Chinese are predominantly way-seekers, who, according to Chenyang Li, ‘typically do not see truth as correspondence with objective fact in the world; rather, they understand truth more as a way of being a good person, a good father, or a good son. For them, truth is not carved in stone, and there is no ultimate fixed order in the world.’ Whereas Western truth is ‘absolute, eternal and ultimately true’, the Chinese dao ‘is not present; it must be generated through human activity’.
Philosophy in the West, Baggini writes, has always aspired to be more of a science: rigorous, precise, describing reality as it is. In the East it is more of an art of living.
Is philosophy fundamentally about pinning down the world or attempting to navigate through it? These two projects are related, of course. You understand the world at least in part to get around it, and you can’t have an interest in getting around it without also knowing something about the way it is. But the difference of emphasis is important. If you are a truth-seeker fixed on getting your understanding of the world right, you are not going to be satisfied with conceptual vagueness, unclarity or ambiguity. If you are a way-seeker more concerned with how you live, you might not only accept such limitations but embrace them. You might find that engaging in the world with less reliance on concepts or language helps you to feel closer to it, more engaged.
Both way-and truth-seeking have their downsides. The risk for truth-seekers is that the pursuit of knowledge becomes something valued purely for its own sake, with no concern for its practical effects or benefits. Arguably this has been the fate of much Western philosophy, which has attracted a lot of people with ‘Rubik’s cubetype minds’, as Owen Flanagan colourfully puts it. However, truth-seeking has been remarkably fruitful for science and technology. There has been plenty of academic head-scratching and speculation as to why modern science emerged in the West rather than in China, which was for a long time better educated, richer and more advanced than the West. Edward Slingerland suggests one plausible reason was China’s ‘deep-seated suspicion of abstract thought for its own sake and a corresponding failure to develop a disembodied, instrumental stance toward the world’.
The way-seeker/truth-seeker distinction was devised with China and the West in mind. But how does India fit in? Perhaps it doesn’t. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad suggests a different way to distinguish between global traditions, between those who use language as a guide and those who use it as reference. He argues that in India, as in the West, language is understood chiefly as referential: words pick out aspects of reality. In China, language is primarily a guide. It is there to tell us how to live, not what there is. He says, for example, that ‘Mozi appears at no point to use language to refer to things in the world, and confines himself to using it for guidance alone. In this, too, he is no different from Confucius.
Distinctions between way-and truth-seeking, Baggini proceeded, between language as guide and reference, between art and science are not neat, and there are aspects of each in all cultures. ‘Any philosophical tradition will in some measure seek both knowledge-that and knowledge-how,’ says Ram-Prasad, ‘but there are differences in emphasis.’ We should remember that way-seeking and truth-seeking are not incompatible. It should be possible for us to see the strengths of both and give both due emphasis. Your chances of finding the right way are improved if you are willing to see the world as it is, independently of your values. And your chances of making the most of the truths you discover are higher if you constantly try to bring those truths to bear on what most matters for human life. Truth is useless unless it allows us to move forward and we cannot move forward unless truth illuminates the way.
These broad differences in approach are a warning that differences between the world’s philosophical traditions run deep. It is easy to assume that each tradition offers a different answer to the same question, when often they are asking different questions. For example, the nature of the question of how we know, how we define knowledge, is changed within different traditions because their interests in asking this question are quite different.
Not everyone believes that unaided human reason has much chance of telling us anything important about the world or how to live in it. All these versions of ‘How can we know?’ are asked in all traditions, but some with greater emphasis than others.'"
"Now, let's try to examine some of the thinkers of the 20th century," said Swara. "Our contributors mention quite a few names: Edmund Husserl, Jane Addams, Henri Bergson, John Dewey; George Santayana; Bertrand Russell; Max Scheler; José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Gilbert Ryle, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Arne Næss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, John Rawls, Thomas Kuhn, Jean-François Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. So, let's begin,
Edmund Husserl, 1859–1938, the founder of Phenomenology, one of the most important and influential movements in 20th-century philosophy, which set out to directly explore the structures of consciousness. He was born into a Jewish family in Prossnitz, Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire but now within the Czech Republic. One of the major influences upon Husserl was the German philosopher, psychologist, and priest Franz Brentano. Husserl attended Brentano’s lectures in Vienna in 1884 and was particularly impressed by his ideas on the 'intentionality' of consciousness, an idea with its roots in medieval philosophy. Its fundamental premise is that consciousness must always be consciousness of something. This became a central idea for Husserl in how he developed his explorations of the structures of consciousness.
Husserl taught at the University of Halle, Germany, from 1887 under the guidance of Carl Stumpf, professor of philosophy and psychology, who had also been a student of Brentano’s. His inaugural lecture, 'On the Goals and Problems of Metaphysics,' showed the transition of his interests from mathematics to philosophy. When he was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg in 1916, Husserl was able to fully develop his ideas on Phenomenology.
When Husserl retired as professor in 1928, Heidegger was his natural heir. Over the following years, however, Husserl became displeased with his protégé for his radical rethinking of Phenomenology.
In one of his most famous works, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (French: Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie) (1931), Husserl writes that anybody who wants to do philosophy must once in their lives try to withdraw from all opinions and begin again from scratch—in other words, if we want to do philosophy, it is necessary to put aside all of our assumptions about the world so that we can build a system of knowledge that is free of biases. In this, Husserl followed the lead of 17th-century philosopher René Descartes.
Since its beginnings, philosophy in the West has drawn a distinction between what is the case (what Immanuel Kant calls things-in themselves, noumena), and what appears to our experience (phenomena). Husserl goes further than Kant. He argues that we should rigorously stick with phenomena—with things as they appear to consciousness—and study these phenomena more systematically, completely putting aside concerns with things-in-themselves. If we do this, we might be able to succeed where Descartes failed and build absolutely certain knowledge free from previous assumptions. For Husserl, the task of philosophy is the systematic description and mapping of our conscious experience from the inside—without making any claims about the existence or nonexistence of the world. If we can give a complete and systematic description of the world of experience, then we will have a complete system of philosophy that is free of any assumptions about the world in which this experience arises. Husserl’s ultimate goal was for his Phenomenology to become a completely rigorous science, but he was hugely frustrated in his ambitions. Three years before his death, Husserl wrote the following words, 'Philosophy as a science … the dream is over.'
Jane Addams 1860–1935, an American social reformer, activist, and feminist and is considered by some to be the founder of social work in the US. She was also a prolific thinker and writer in the philosophical tradition of US Pragmatism. In 1919, Addams founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which worked for world peace and disarmament. Addams was not only an activist and reformer, but also a hugely prolific writer. As a philosopher, she was firmly in the US Pragmatist tradition and was a friend and correspondent of John Dewey—an influence that flowed in both directions. One of Addams’s key ideas is that of 'sympathetic knowledge.' For Addams, this knowledge arises out of a social connection with others from different backgrounds. When we are brought into contact with people who have radically different experiences from ourselves, this has the power to positively disrupt our lives, opening up new possibilities for empathy. Once we can empathize, then we find ourselves acting for the sake of those we care about. And this—for Jane Addams—lies at the very foundation of democratic society.
In 1910, Yale University awarded her an honorary degree, and in 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on peace activism. By this time, Addams was already in poor health and unable to travel to Oslo to accept the prize. She died 4 years later, in 1935.
Henri-Louis Bergson, 1859–1941, the most famous French philosopher of the early 20th century, Bergson valued intuition over intellect and lived experience over logical analysis. His works were admired for their literary quality as much as for their ideas. He was born in Paris in 1859, the son of a Polish Jewish pianist and an Anglo-Irish mother. After an elite education at the Lycée Condorcet and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he published his first essay, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness), while teaching at a provincial lycée in 1889. In his second major work, Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory) (1896), Bergson rejected the scientific description of memory and other aspects of mind as functions of the brain, arguing for a fundamental division between mind and matter. The celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a cousin of Bergson’s wife, Louise Neuburger. Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), in which he slows down and magnifies experience and consciously flouts clock time, was extensively influenced by Bergson’s ideas.
Although criticized by rationalists, Bergson’s philosophy chimed with the innovative spirit of the early 20th century, providing inspiration for Modernists revolutionizing art and political radicals bent on transforming society. Bergson’s reputation waned after World War I, when he unwisely argued with physicist Albert Einstein over the nature of time, a debate that left him looking illinformed about contemporary science.
In 1927, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and, in 1930, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’Honneur. His last major work, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion) (1932), argued for a creative open society and for faith based on mystical experience. Bergson was attracted to Catholicism but refused to convert because he did not want to abandon his Jewish identity in the face of mounting anti-Semitism in Europe, 'I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted.' He died of bronchitis in 1941, soon after the Nazi occupation of Paris. Bergson’s radical ideas on 'duration' exerted their influence on Cubists such as Picasso, Braque, and Gris, who sought to explore the dimension of time by capturing an object from several perspectives at once.
John Dewey, 1859–1952, philosophically a Pragmatist, he also took an active stand in democratic politics and progressive education. Widely admired, he came to be seen as a standard-bearer of the US liberal tradition. In the field of education, Dewey applied his ideas to oppose rote learning in schools in favor of the development of pupils’ skills and abilities through problem-solving and interaction with their teachers. To put his views into practice, he helped to establish the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, initially accepting children through preschool up to 12th grade. The schools, which still operate to this day, became flagships of the progressive education movement, which always encouraged students to be active participants in the learning process. Dewey wrote extensively on psychology and built a reputation as a leading educational theorist with books such as The School and Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902). He wrote his most influential academic work, Experience and Nature in 1925. Philosophically, Dewey was—along with C. S. Peirce and William James—one of the three leading US Pragmatists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dewey’s was an empirical, outward-looking worldview, well in keeping with the dynamic optimism of the US at the turn of the 20th century.
George Santayana, 1863–1952, despite his Spanish birth and his many years in Europe, Santayana saw himself as American. A poet and novelist, as well as metaphysician, he was a key figure in the golden age of Harvard University’s philosophy faculty. His first major publication, The Sense of Beauty (1896), addressed aesthetics, defining the pleasure we experience from contemplating beautiful objects as a quality of the objects in themselves. Santayana’s great work, The Life of Reason, praised as much for its poetic expression as for its message, came out in four volumes in 1905–1906. In it, he sought a rational basis for morality, regretfully rejecting religion on intellectual grounds; nonetheless, he continued to feel affection for the faith in which he grew up, leading him to be described as a 'Catholic atheist.' Politically, he was suspicious of the demagogic aspects of democracy, but argued strongly for equality of opportunity for all. He continued to write into old age, releasing his autobiography, Persons and Places, in 1944, at the age of 80—despite his progressive deafness and partial loss of sight—he wrote well into old age, publishing his last major work, Dominations and Powers, in 1951.
Bertrand Russell, 1872–1970, admired by philosophers for his work on logic and the foundations of mathematics, Russell was famous among a wider public for his radical stance on social issues, from free love to nuclear disarmament. Born in 1872, Bertrand Russell was by birth a member of the British liberal aristocracy. His father, Lord Amberley, was the son of Lord John Russell, a political reformer and twice-serving British prime minister. English philosopher George Edward Moore was a friend of Russell’s at Cambridge and a considerable influence on his early philosophical thought.
Alongside Russell's philosophical work, he engaged in political issues and movements for social reform. After being locked up for 6 months in Brixton prison in 1918 and was dismissed from his fellowship at Trinity College, Russell continued his philosophical investigation of the basis of knowledge and the nature of the world in works such as The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918) and An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), but from the 1920s onward, much of his writing was journalistic, and he was more involved in social and political issues. Unlike many other activists, Russell was not an admirer of the communist state in Russia. A visit there in 1920, during which he met Lenin, convinced him that communism would become a form of oppression rather than a liberation. Russell’s projects for social reform thus focused on sexual morality and education rather than on political revolution.
Separating from his wife, Alys, in 1911, Russell became a campaigner for sexual freedom and a liberal approach to child-rearing. In 1921, he married Dora Black, a young socialist and feminist who shared his views on 'open marriage' and birth control—then a highly controversial issue. Together with Dora, Russell founded the highly progressive Beacon Hill school in Hampshire. The school was a coeducational establishment run on progressive principles, offering sex education but no religious instruction and an almost complete absence of discipline.
Russell’s ideas about society found expression in popular works such as On Education (1926) and Marriage and Morals (1929), but in reality, some of the practices that he promoted proved problematic. His History of Western Philosophy, one of the bestselling philosophy books ever written. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. In 1961 he was imprisoned for a week—at the age of 89—for his part in anti-nuclear protests in London. Russell died in February 1970, aged 97.
Max Scheler, 1874–1928, was a German philosopher associated with Phenomenology and with philosophical anthropology, which attempts to provide a philosophical account of what it means to be a human being. Max Ferdinand Scheler was born in Munich in 1874 to a Jewish mother and a Lutheran father. In his teens, he committed himself first to Marxism and then to Catholicism, which led to his estrangement from his family. His personal life, however, was stormy. Munich newspapers reported allegations of affairs with his students.
Scheler met Edmund Husserl in 1901, and was impressed by the idea of Phenomenology as a systematic exploration of consciousness. Phenomenology’s starting point is the attempt to understand consciousness from the standpoint of ourselves as conscious beings. In other words, it is an attempt to understand human beings—and the world of which we are a part—from the inside. Phenomenology is an immensely diverse field—so diverse, in fact, that it is arguably more useful to see it not as a single movement, but as a set of experiments in philosophizing, all of which proceed from the basic question, 'What is it like to be a conscious being?'
Scheler’s most important works, including Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass (On the Phenomenology and Theory of Sympathy, and of Love and Hate) (1913) and Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value) (1913). In Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Man’s Place in Nature )(1928), among other works, Scheler addresses what he considers to be the most important philosophical issues: what does it mean to be a human being? According to Scheler, human beings are distinguished from other animals by their unique ability to detach themselves from their animal impulses.
For decades, Scheler was celebrated as one of Europe’s most important philosophers. However, his personal life continued to be turbulent, and in his later years, his health declined rapidly, in part as a consequence of his heavy cigarette smoking. He died of a heart attack in 1928.
