ABSTRACT
What is philosophy? I once asked this question of a group of students who had just begun studying at the University of Edinburgh. After a thoughtful pause, one of the group suggested, ‘There ain’t nothing to it but to do it.’ Now, taken by itself this answer is, perhaps, not terribly informative. But nonetheless I think it’s importantly right. Philosophy, as we’ll see in this chapter and in this book, is an activity. And so to find out what it’s all about we need to do more than just try to describe it – what I’ll attempt to do in this chapter – we need to get stuck in and do it. So, if you want to find out what philosophy is, the best thing to do is to work your way through the book in your hands. By doing so you’ll get a good idea of the sorts of questions philosophers ask, both today and throughout history, and of the distinctive ways they try to answer them. More importantly, if this book does its job, you should find yourself actively engaging with those questions – puzzling over them, articulating your own thoughts about them, and considering how you might defend those thoughts in response to those who don’t agree with you. So, philosophy is an activity, and you’ll find examples of, and invi-
tations to, this activity within the pages of this book. What else can we say about it? The goal of this chapter is to see if we can characterize philosophy in more detail. I’m going to suggest that philosophy is the activity of working out the right way to think about things. In the rest of this chapter I’ll try to say a bit more about what this means, and why I think it’s right. We’ll start by thinking about how this characterization of philosophy relates it to other subjects. Then we’ll note some features of philosophy that follow from this characterization of it, and consider how philosophers go about looking for ‘the right way to think about things’. And finally we’ll consider why philosophy, as I describe it in this chapter, might be an interesting or important thing to do.
