Professional Documents
Culture Documents
dishonesty that we may have displayed, we may react in genuine discomfort, a case in which we are inclined to say: our conscience is bothering us. But it could very well be that at bottom, what is really at work here are certain values we have acquired now surfacing and, as it were, asserting them. Apart from values, we also have some very basic metaphysical and epistemological notions. We know the difference between shadows and rainbows, between what is called a physical/material object and ideas, thoughts or images. We are able to separate the true from the false, or the true from the merely probable, the real from the unreal. As some philosophers have noted, some of our conceptual difficulties are rooted in some woolly metaphysical notions, e.g., some may think that when we talk about something, there ought to be something in reality, in the external world, we are talking about. A more sophisticated formulation of this, in the form of a theory of language, is that our statements divide neatly into subject and predicate; and, if at all the statement is true then the subject must refer to something in reality. But we get into some difficulties working our way through the statement that Square circles do not exist for then if this is true, there ought to be in reality, in the external world, such things as square circles which are non-existent. Concerning epistemological notions, when a farmer teaches his son how to use the plow, the farmer has certain ideas on how best to transmit knowledge. He also has certain beliefs about the value of this knowledge. If someone were to given him a piece of information, he may on occasion, doubt its veracity and thus raise questions leading to its verification or confirmation relying mainly on his own criteria of epistemological validity. All these underlying ethical, metaphysical and epistemological notions make up an individuals personal philosophy. To be sure, this philosophy does not, as a rule, surface to the persons consciousness, but just the same, it provides shape and directions to his beliefs, actions and expectations. **** This activity of reflection, i.e., of objectification and analysis is itself a kind of philosophy. In fact, some philosophers incline to the view that the activity of objectification and analysis is what philosophy all about. My own view is that to objectify and analyze the foundation of our values, including the roots of our metaphysical and epistemological belief is to engage in philosophy. But certainly it is something else to delimit philosophy to only this type of activity. At any rate, we not that while the ordinary man as a rule engages in this philosophical reflection on a piecemeal fashion, others go at it in a more systematic and comprehensive manner. The latter
include the professional and academic philosophers, and those who have systematically reflected to human life. Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Russell, Ayn Rand, Herman Hesse, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Radhadkrishman, Newton, and others stand out. **** Analysis, is one thing, the effort to engage in reconstruction is another. Our activity of reflection finds broader meaning not merely in showing the error of our ways, the implausibility of our ordinary beliefs, but in putting things together in the proper perspective. Many of the philosophers I have mentioned, and certainly there are others, did not exhaust themselves merely on analysis. On their own they looked for more viable foundations for our ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. Russell's own work in the field of mathematical logic represents an achievement in philosophy, so is Kant's Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals or the famous Analects of Confucius. There is, I suppose, a stirring within every philosopher to come up with a systematic treatise, a more comprehensive view of the universe; although, perhaps, at this stage of our knowledge, in particular our academic disciplinal orientation, the formulation of a truly comprehensive philosophy shall remain no more than a dream. What our intellectual centers turn out are specialist in specific areas: law, medicine, engineering, including education, political science, sociology and philosophy itself. The true philosophers are those who can go beyond the confines of a particular discipline. Perhaps it is necessary that the philosopher (by this term I do not mean the professional, academic philosopher but the person, the intellectual or academic who seeks a more systematic and comprehensive view of the world) acquires a detailed knowledge of every discipline, from anthropology to zoology. If we assume that all our knowledge rest upon some common foundations, then a reflection on these and the related effort at reconstruction would amount to some form of comprehensive philosophy, or at least a reconstructed philosophy that would serve as the unifying frame of all our knowledge, beliefs and actions. But all these rest on 'ifs,' on certain conditions which philosophy must itself validate. In the foregoing, I have in effect separated three senses of the term 'philosophy'. Clearly, we may use philosophy to mean the whole range of our intellectual presuppositions, on which is rooted our epistemological, metaphysical and ethical judgments, beliefs and actions. We may also use the term to refer to the reflective activities directed at these presuppositions. And finally, we may use it to mean the reconstructed belief or value system, which for some, should show a universal and comprehensive character.
The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Muse Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle.[1] It is often used to represent philosophy.