Philosophy's Foreignness

I have written a few blogs about the differences between philosophy and science. I chose science as my career path, because my inherent tendencies leaned in that direction. With a science background, however, I have struggled to parse the writings of philosophers, as they are rather foreign to the thinking of a scientist. That is a fascinating fact to me, since both science and philosophy are about knowledge and understanding; you'd think they might be more similar. In fact, a couple of millennia ago they were considered to be the same. Science arose out of the discipline of natural philosophy, but like close family members, after they go their own way, they have had many family squabbles ever since.

By definition, philosophy is, at its etymological root, the “love of wisdom”. Those who immerse themselves in philosophy are constantly examining and evaluating the nature of human ability to know. Philosophers explore the big, general questions that we often cannot answer, given our present state of knowledge.

This inability to currently know what the nature of the universe is, is in direct contrast to science's task: to describe what we do know. Science is practical and systematic. Scientists want to describe precisely what we know about our world. Philosophers often ask the questions about what we don't know. Science is more about today. Philosophy is more about what we might someday come to understand.

I just finished an online course on philosophy, presented by a professor at MIT. What drew me to try this course was its being offered by what many people consider to be the premier technical university in the world. So I hoped to learn better how to understand philosophy from someone teaching in a technical environment... maybe it'd be less foreign to me.

One beneficial result of my struggling through this course of introductory philosophy was finally arriving at the professor's last lecture. With my head spinning from the foreign (to me) way that philosophers express their ideas, he pointed out one of the major functions of philosophy: to be asking and pondering the big questions about knowledge that cannot be answered by what we currently understand. In other words, to ruminate on those questions that science cannot yet answer.

His example was to look back at the ancient Greek philosophers of two millennia ago. One of the central questions for them was, What are things made of? What is the fundamental essence of matter? Some suggested water, some air, some fire. A few prescient individuals (Democritus was one of them) suggested that there existed fundamental building blocks, which they called “atoms”—meaning individual entities that could never be further split. The insight into which of those alternative answers were correct required nearly another 2,000 years for humanity to generate—as science came into its own and was finally able to demonstrate the existence of atoms.

So philosophers today are often raising questions that we cannot answer today. Is there a God? What is knowledge? What does it mean to know? What is consciousness? What is free will? Science—let alone philosophers—cannot yet provide answers... maybe some day. In the meantime philosophers will debate and discuss.

I think that a crucial role that philosophy plays in civilization is to ask these and other unanswerable questions. Moreover, with today's understanding we often don't even know how to properly ask the questions. So maybe it's the job of philosophers to debate the issues, if only to frame good questions. If so, philosophy and science need not lock horns, but recognize that their disciplines are complementary and collaborative.