A Student's Guide to Philosophy
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A Student’s Guide to Philosophy examines these questions: Who is a philosopher? Can philosophical thought be avoided? What have philosophers written over the ages? And why should we care? In this critical essay, these and other questions are posed and answered by one of America’s leading philosophers, Ralph McInerny of the University of Notre Dame. Schools of thought are examined with humor and verve, and the principal works of philosophers and scholars are recommended.
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A Student's Guide to Philosophy - Ralph M. McInerny
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ISI GUIDES TO THE MAJOR DISCIPLINES
GENERAL EDITOR
JEFFREY O. NELSON
EDITOR
JEREMY BEER
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHY BY RALPH M. MCINERNY
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO LITERATURE BY R. V. YOUNG
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY BY JOHN LUKACS
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO ECONOMICS BY PAUL HEYNE
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO LIBERAL LEARNING BY JAMES V. SCHALL
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE CORE CURRICULUM BY MARK C. HENRIE
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO U.S. HISTORY BY WILFRED M. MCCLAY
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY BY DANIEL N. ROBINSON
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO CLASSICS BY BRUCE S. THORNTON
A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT BY GEORGE W. CAREY
A Student’s Guide to Philosophy
RALPH M. MCINERNY
WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX BY JOSHUA P. HOCHSCHILD
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE
CONTENTS
An Introductory Note
The Pursuit of Wisdom
Getting There
Common Sense?
Plato or Aristotle?
Confused Certainties
Sophistry Confronted
Philosophy in an Age of Science
The Fact/Value Split
Philosophy and Religion
Why I am a Thomist
APPENDIX: A Bibliographical Essay
AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE
TO ASK WHETHER OR NOT one should philosophize is already to philosophize.
When Aristotle said that he might have meant that doing philosophy is something like speaking prose—although you have been doing it all along, it still comes as news to be told that you are. Inevitable though it may be, philosophy has had a long and checkered career since its beginnings in the sixth century B.C. How a philosopher regards that history can tell you a lot about what kind of philosopher he is.
Modernity begins with the assumption that philosophy has yet to begin. Descartes first doubts everything he has been told. No judgment can cease to be suspect until it has passed a number of methodological tests that he devises. It is not sufficiently emphasized that this means that no one can claim to know anything until he has subjected it to methodic doubt. If methodic doubt begins with Descartes, as he claims, then philosophy had no pre-Cartesian history. Or its history is simply a record of error and deception.
Since Descartes, philosophers have vied with one another to seek an originality that would distinguish them from the rest of the pack. The drive for originality usually entails a very negative attitude toward one’s predecessors, and the history of philosophy inevitably loses its interest. When I was a graduate student I was urged to read Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. For Reichenbach, philosophy began with Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century since all pre-Kantian philosophy involved a fundamental mistake. More recently, we have been told that moral philosophy is based on a mistake and, in 1903, G. E. Moore showed to his own satisfaction that all previous moral philosophy was fallacious. In the 1930s A. J. Ayer looked back a few years to when philosophy had really begun. Later still, a linguistic turn was taken and, we were assured, philosophy could now at last get started.
From this and my opening remark, you can conclude that a sure sign that one is doing philosophy is to claim that it has never been done before. There is a tradition of denying tradition, in other words. There are inventive ways of handling previous attempts, however. Heidegger undertakes a destruction of the history of ontology in order to work his way back to the point where things first went wrong. This suggests that, while the past of philosophy was brief, it did occur.
In the Nietzschean phase we have now reached, philosophers are urged to forget about truth and become strong poets.
The remark suggests an odd conception of poetry