Our digital age suggests a useful analogy to further explain the role of philosophy in intellectual life. Philosophy is analogous to an operating system (OS), a software platform that enables specialized applications (apps)—other academic and professional disciplines—to operate. The philosophical method, philosophical argument, enables orderly, persuasive discourse in any academic or professional discipline that relies primarily on language.
The OS loaded on your computer can support everything from a sober spreadsheet program to a virtual-reality first-person shooter. The same is true of philosophy. While, in and of itself, philosophy is merely a method, it is a method that has launched revolutions —revolutions in thought, in morality, in science and technology, in religion, and in social organization. It is a method, though orderly and persuasive, that has also helped to launch wars. Philosophy is a powerful method, and, like a digital operating system, an indispensable one.
As philosophy disciplines and organizes thinking, facilitating or even enabling operations in many other fields of intellectual endeavor, so those who decide to make use of it have, in essence, chosen to prepare, condition, and discipline their minds, so that they can apply them more effectively to whatever questions and intellectual tasks are put before them. This is a choice every successful philosophy student makes. It is both a basic requirement of a philosophy course and the greatest benefit such a course offers.
As we will see in a moment, one of the branches of traditional philosophy, epistemology, is expressly devoted to mind, thought, perception, and the definition of truth or, put another way, the theory of knowledge. Nevertheless, always remember that philosophy is first and last a method—an interface, an operating system—for systematic thought. It is not about mind in the way that psychology and neurobiology are. Rather, it is about how to use mind to understand the mind itself and every other “ordinary” thing most of us take for granted.
For a philosopher, and even for a beginning philosophy student, it is not enough to master the philosophical method. Nor is it enough to amass a store of knowledge drawn from the course syllabus. In fact, it is not even a sufficient achievement to know—in philosophical terms—what you are thinking. No. Your objective is to equip yourself to apply thought to knowledge and the real world—consciously, rationally, and accountably. If this helps you to decide to vote for candidate A rather than candidate B in the next presidential election, or if it enables you to rationally justify your position on the legalization of marijuana, or if it gives you the moral ground you need to practice civil disobedience in protest of an unjust law, you can call yourself a philosopher.
We are about to discuss the branches of philosophy, which are tremendously varied in
their scope. Nevertheless, they all share certain methods, including:
- Use of the analytic method to examine, understand, and challenge even our most basic (“ordinary”) assumptions
- Use of the critical method to specifically challenge received wisdom and traditional beliefs
- Use of the synthetic method to bring together (“synthesize”) views into a coherent vision
- Use of the rational method, which demands that reasons be given for whatever we assert as true or false, and that these reasons be presented simply, consistently, and coherently
- Use of the imagination, which drives us to search for fresh and novel ways of examining philosophical problems
- Reliance on resourcefulness, which “requires us to consider what is logically possible but asks only that we act as circumstances allow.”
