Philosophers ask questions and think about things that most people take for granted. So, philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, mind, reason, language, and values. Strange but true, it is the general and fundamental things that most people take for granted and therefore do not question. Why is this so? That is precisely the kind of question a philosopher would ask. Maybe you should consider asking —and answering—it in an essay for your philosophy class.
Another way to express the business of philosophy and philosophers is Thinking about Ordinary Things, which is the title of an excellent “short invitation to philosophy” by the Czech philosopher Jan Sokol. It is a provocative title in that it provokes a question: What’s the use of thinking about ordinary things? If that question crossed your mind when you read the title of Sokol’s book, you are already starting to think like a philosopher. If you decide next to pursue an answer to that question, you are in fact thinking like one.
That puts you in ancient and distinguished company. When Democritus, a Greek philosopher who was born about 460 BC in Thrace, looked around him at ordinary things, the things most people never thought about, he saw great diversity, of course, but asked what all these diverse physical things had in common. His answer was the “atomic hypothesis,” the idea that everything is composed of atoms. Atomos is the ancient Greek word for “indivisible,” and Democritus hypothesized that matter (every physical thing) is composed of tiny indestructible atoms, between which is empty space. The atoms are in continuous motion, he said, and they are of infinite number and kind, differing in size and shape. Brilliant and incredible! Democritus described atoms some 2,200 years before the British scientist John Dalton (1766-1844) introduced atomic theory into chemistry in 1805 as part of his explanation of an “ordinary thing” called the absorption of gases by water and other liquids.
Dalton, by the way, probably did not call himself a scientist. From the era of another Greek philosopher, Aristotle (364-322 BC), to at least the mid nineteenth century, people we today call scientists called themselves “natural philosophers”—essentially, curious individuals who asked questions about the ordinary things around them (in other words, nature). You should know, then, that philosophy and science share not only a common root but a common trunk, which began growing distinct philosophy and science branches less than 200 years ago.
To this day, both philosophers and scientists can still be accurately described as people who think about things that most people take for granted. No wonder the “natural philosophers” did not stop thinking about matter and atoms. In the late nineteenth century, an Irish physicist, George Johnstone Stoney (1826 1911), theorized that atoms were not, in fact, indivisible, but contained subatomic particles. In 1897, another physicist, J. J. Thomson (1856-1940), discovered one of those particles, the electron. Ever since, even more natural philosophers/scientists asked questions about this most fundamental aspect of matter, the atom, and not only were numerous subatomic particles identified, but nuclear fission— “splitting” the supposedly indivisible atom—was discovered and even induced artificially both to generate power in peace and, in war, to destroy entire populations.
What is the use of thinking about ordinary things? Well, doing so has a way of producing extraordinary new insights. If you are the kind of student who believes that “learning” should be about something more than acquiring existing knowledge, that it should also create new knowledge, new perspectives, new ideas and insights, then you have within you the makings of a successful philosophy student.
As the history of atomic theory proves, new insights can be pried out of knowledge that has been around even for thousands of years. Here’s a tip: Question everything—especially the most ordinary, and fundamental things, the things you think you know, the most familiar things practically everybody thinks they know. Go ahead, be annoying.
