Introduction: Definition of Terms, Purpose and Summary

Summary

Philosophical Orientation

Practical philosophy asks what to do with liaposfe, while taking responsibility for one&s role in society (Hubert Dethier 1993, 525). From philosophical pragmatism (Peirce, James and Dewey, see Malachowski 2013) I adopt the view that ideas are to be evaluated by the implications they have for practical life. Peirce, an early pragmatist, ‘called Jesus a pragmatist and proposed that the saying “By their fruits ye shall know them” was an early version of the pragmatic maxim’ (Nicholson 2013, 251).

Philosophers call this orientation towards a goal intentionality. Even microbes have it, in moving towards a source of food. People, in contrast with most animals, have ‘second-order intentions’ (Okrent 2013, 150), in seeing their intentions as their own, in self-awareness and possibly changing them. This allows people to consider not only what is actual but also what is possible, and to consider one's death. In a practice, things are connected, and this leads to a view of the world as a connected whole. Practices change, in adaptation to a changing world, and this leads to a process view. We come to the world with a potential for development of ideas in interaction with things in the world, especially people.

With pragmatism, focusing on the usefulness of individual things, one may neglect the wider system, in not seeing the wood for the trees. Something that is useful for a single thing may be harmful to the system it is in. Damage to the natural environment is an obvious example. This is akin to the notion, in economics, of ‘externality’: The environment is taken for granted, and one is unable to take into account the cost of pollution. One neglects the totality of the environment.

A wider task of philosophy is to discuss issues that are otherwise not questioned, are taken for granted, in daily life and science, of which there are many that we are hardly aware of. An example is in the understanding of puzzles that arise in modern physics, discussed below.

The puzzles yield the urge to come up with new ideas, in new thought, as pursued, for example, by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. In other words: Philosophy tinkers with fundamentals.