Statement on Philosophy
Statement on Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of how we must think
about reality (metaphysics) and knowledge (epistemology).
It is an abstract, a priori discipline, along with logic and
math; empirical inquiry and data are not conclusive in establishing or
overturning philosophical claims. Instead, philosophy
appeals to the data from reason, from reflective inquiry.
To articulate a consistent and comprehensive set of basic necessary commitments
about reality and knowledge is to articulate a world view.
And a world view tests and is tested by the different areas of culture,
with their accumulated knowledge, symbol systems, acknowledged possibilities
and impossibilities, and areas of discourse. So, we also
have the philosophical study of the areas of the culture: philosophy
of science, of math, of art, of religion, of psychology, and the like.
We may speak of this study as the philosophy of culture. All
humans are acculturated within a world view, and all humans function within
the limits of that world view. We have philosophical
commitments, whether we know it or not. Humans are inescapably philosophical
beings.
I contend that philosophy in all of its facets
is one integrated discipline. Metaphysical claims must
be tested against epistemological claims, and vice versa; metaphysics
and epistemology are correlative enterprises. And they
in turn are held accountable to, and hold up to account, the philosophy
of culture. Therefore, I understand philosophy to be
a systematic discipline, not a set of relatively unrelated subdisciplines.
To do philosophy well, one must work in many areas of philosophy.
Any philosophical conclusion is tested partly by how well its implications
work out throughout the discipline.
Rational inquiry comes in many forms.
In philosophy reason proceeds in an unusual, indirect manner. The
problem is that we can approach philosophy's goal only obliquely.
We cannot get at the necessary structure of reality and knowledge directly;
we must tease it out by investigating how we think and must think about
some subject matter. And since we best grasp and analyze
our thinking through the language that reports and expresses thought, we
look to how we speak, and to what it does and does not make sense to say,
about some subject, in order to tell us how we think about that subject.
Philosophy therefore works by means of a rigorous analysis of language.
We reason from how we do think to how we must
think. The linguistic analysis philosophy employs seeks to establish
necessary presuppositions, what have been called "categorial" presuppositions.
Ultimately we are after necessary presuppositions of basic features of
human existence such as knowledge, thought, reason, experience and action.
These presuppositions are basic to being a human being and provide grounds
for an objective world view. My research is on the nature of
presupposition and the nature of necessary presuppositions.
Philosophy has always been a search for fundamental commitments, so my
research contributes to my teaching of philosophy.
Among those who engage in cultural analysis and
criticism, there is considerable agreement that the dominant world view
in our modern Western civilization is a scientistic one. We
have taken the way of thought of modern natural science and raised it into
a scientific philosophy. There is also considerable agreement
that our civilization is fragmented, self-destructive, out of control,
dehumanizing, and deeply inconsistent.
Through teaching and research I will present
and defend instead a systematic humanistic philosophy, a philosophy of
the humanities. A world view unified on the basis of humanistic
thought could repair our fragmented culture. Its humanistic
conception of personhood would reshape our view of education, the economy,
religion, morality, authority, politics, indeed much of the culture.
Just as Scholasticism in the Medieval era stood in need of correction by
the Renaissance, so too our world view stands in need of a humanistic renewal
based on a firm intellectual basis of humanistic philosophy.
