What Is Philosophy in Simple Words? #157

And an invitation to discuss with me!

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

sorry for the slightly delayed communication this week — it’s end of term here in Hong Kong, and we’re all busy with our classes.

Before we begin, let me remind you of the Aristotle book, which has been published last week and which you can still get as a present just for being a member of this list. This will only work for another three days, and then you’ll have to buy the book :) Just follow this link:

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/razgighpxg

If you like the book and you’d like to support Daily Philosophy, please do leave a short review on Amazon. It only takes two minutes:

https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=B09LWJVR8K

Thanks a lot! This is very important so that Amazon shows the book to other potential readers.

Let me also remind you that we have a Facebook discussion group, in which we already started talking about cooperating with an Arabic-language philosophy website, about how the Aristotle book was created, and about how the new book on Fromm is coming along. In order to not pollute this email list here with too many small updates, I will keep all such smaller discussions and reveals to the Facebook group and keep posting only once a week here on Substack. You are all invited and very welcome to have a look at the Facebook group if you’re interested to participate more in the day-to-day running of Daily Philosophy, in helping me choose interview partners, in peeks behind the scenes of DP and much more. Just go here and subscribe with the email address you are already using for this newsletter:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1018717508965189

In the past week, we had a number of great posts on Daily Philosophy. If you have not seen them, you might want to have a look.

Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides sent us a very well-researched article (warning: it’s a bit on the scholarly side) on a topic she totally owns (a Google search on Plato and inebriation returns essentially only her work): “Plato and the Ancient Politics of Wine.” From the article:

Plato recommends the Test of the Wine in the context of a discussion about civic virtue which sees him employ a series of metaphors, including that of humans as divine puppets tossed over the imaginary line that divides goodness from wickedness and the metaphor of the soul as a city.

Informed by contemporary medical theories, which appreciated health as the balance of opposing elements in the body (to which I return later in the piece), Plato advocates an understanding of virtue as the attempt to find equilibrium between the experiences of pleasure and pain.

If you are interested in a deep dive into Platonic philosophy, then just click here to read the whole article!

Michael Hauskeller, philosophy professor and writer of surprising scifi short stories, sent us a new story about a possible future: Mother knows best.

The problem, you see, was human nature, our atavistic stone age moral psychology that evolved many thousands of years ago when we still lived in small groups and didn’t have to worry about future generations or people living in other parts of the world. We had been mentally shaped by evolution for a world that no longer existed, a world in which all that mattered basically happened here and now. We were not made to deal with global problems because we weren’t made to take any serious interest in them.

Click on the link above to read it!

In an introductory series to philosophy and critical thinking (which is what I am, among other topics, teaching in my university classes), I posted an article on “What Is a Fallacy?”. The article also discusses a list of the ten most common fallacies: Equivocation, slippery slope, ad hominem, appeal to fear, and many more. Read it all here!

And, last but not least, we have another brilliant interview with Luis de Miranda, founder of the Philosophical Health movement, who here talks to us about the history of the “Esprit de corps” concept, which he researched in a fascinating book. Luis:

When I started researching about esprit de corps, I had no idea how important the phrase was in the modern history of the West. Some people wondered why I was working on what seemed to them to be a niche topic. I confess my first reason was purely a philosophical fascination for the explosive combination of the two ideas in the same phrase, spirit and body in French.

Read the whole interview here.

I’m just now preparing the second book (on Fromm) for publication, and I’ll add chapters on the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse, because these fit well with the book’s topic. If you’re interested to know more in advance, or perhaps to read the book chapters in advance and give me your opinion, or to help me choose a cover for the book, please head over to the Facebook group where we will be discussing all these things:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1018717508965189

And a last short announcement: Daily Philosophy is preparing to launch a merchandise shop with all kinds of philosophy-related gifts: sofa pillows with Stoic quotes on them, Daily Philosophy themed T-shirts, coffee mugs and much more. Please tell me what kinds of things you would like me to offer there. Do you have a favourite quote that you always wanted to see on a T-shirt? A favourite philosopher whose face you’d like to have on your morning coffee? Tell me and I’ll see what I can do. Either reply to this email, or leave a comment below, or head to the Facebook group above for a more sustained discussion. Thanks!

Today, we will briefly pause the Stoic articles series to have a look at a question that I’m often asked by students or strangers who learn about my job: What is philosophy?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. So here is my take on it. Do you agree? Do you have a better idea? Please feel free to tell me what you think by leaving a comment below!

(If you prefer to read on the web, you can find the same article on DP here).

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Philosophy and its main areas

“Philosophy” sounds like a daunting topic to many, something incredibly complex and boring. But, in its most basic form, it is very close to what we all did as children: ask questions about the world.

Philosophy is a field of study that attempts to answer questions that cannot be answered by providing some fact, but that require a deeper understanding of the question itself. For example:

• What is the meaning of “beauty”? (Aesthetics)

• Which actions do we consider to be right or wrong? (Ethics)

• How can we make correct arguments and avoid mistakes in thinking? (Critical Thinking)

• What it means to really “know” something? (epistemology)

• What is science and what is the proper way to do science? (philosophy of science)

• What is the ultimate nature of things? (metaphysics)

• What is a good state or government? (political philosophy)

Philosophy’s aim is to clarify the questions we ask

Because of this focus that philosophy puts on asking the right questions, it has sometimes been labelled “the study of asking the right questions.” This is particularly important because we sometimes tend to ask questions that cannot be answered because the question itself is asked in the wrong way. For example:

“Does God exist?” This question cannot be answered like that. We first would have to clarify what “existing” means for a being like God. We can see and touch physical, material things, but not everything exists in the same way as a bottle or a table. For example, numbers. The number 42 certainly exists, but where is it? I cannot point at anything in the material world that is the number 42.