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The Human Significance of Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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Although he was not the first Western philosopher, Plato was the first to define clearly the aim that has characterized Western philosophy since its beginnings. The principal capacities in which the human being acts are scientific, moral, mathematical, artistic, political, and religious, and the aim of philosophical activity was to achieve a standpoint providing complete explanation and justification by finding and eliminating the elements of dogmatism, unrealized ignorance, and mere hypothesis by which, in the capacities mentioned, the human being is influenced. The ideal envisaged was the self-inclusive understanding, achieved by the understanding's successive advancement and containment of all conceivable criticism of itself. The criticisms by Parmenides and Zeno of Ionian and Pythagorean physics and Socrates’ criticism of various aspects of Athenian life were excellent examples.
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- Copyright © 1976 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 On the beginnings of Western philosophy, see J. LaLumia, "From Science to Metaphysics and Philosophy," Diogenes, Winter 1974, No. 88.
2 The Republic of Plato, tr. F.M. Cornford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1951, pp. 221-226.
3 J. LaLumia, op. cit., pp. 10-27, 33-35.
4 This is evident in the design for the reconstruction of metaphysics Kant says he set himself in writing The Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the Preface to the Second Edition (1787), and it is evident in the sense of his criticisms of metaphysics, particularly in the section of the same work devoted to Transcen dental Dialectic, especially theology.
5 " If this is so, will a true lover of wisdom who has firmly grasped this same conviction—that he will never attain to wisdom worthy of the name elsewhere than in the next world—will he be grieved at dying? Will he not be glad to make that journey? We must suppose so, my dear boy, that is, if he is a real philosopher, because then he will be of the firm belief that he will never find wisdom in all its purity in any other place." - Phaedo, tr. Hugh Tredennick (in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton and Cairds, Pantheon, 1966), p. 50.
6 It is true that Kant explicitly denies his conception of the noumenon is self-contradictory and that he calls the conception problematical and limitative, that is, a conception intended merely to indicate that phenomenal knowledge "does not extend to all that the understanding thinks" (The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Meiklejohn, London, Dent, p. 188). Nevertheless, he has no doubt there are things-in-themselves and that these have a causal relationship to phenomena, and this seems contradictory as well as dogmatic to me.
7 "The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding before he can arrive at the notion of the sound human understanding. If in the midst of life we are in death, so in sanity we are surrounded by madness." - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1956, p. 157.
8 I say "beginning with Kant" because of the great influence of Kant's having emphasized a therapeutic function for philosophical activity (or "criticism," as he called it), but this is not to deny that Socrates, as represented in Plato's dialogues, had a similar conception of philosophy.
9 St. Anselm, Basic Writings, tr. S.N. Deane, LaSalle, Ill., Open Court, 1964, pp. 7-9 (Ch. II, Proslogium).
10 J. LaLumia, op. cit., pp. 10-19.
11 Kant has several criticisms of the Ontological Argument, but the only criticism he makes which seems to me to be applicable to Anselm's formulation in contrast with Cartesian formulations is the following: "If, in an identical judgment, I annihilate the predicate in thought and retain the subject, a contradiction is the result… But if I suppress both subject and pre dicate in thought, no contradiction arises, for there is nothing at all, and therefore no means of forming a contradiction" (Kant, op. cit., p. 348). The hypothetical atheist's predicament in Anselm's argument is that, on the one hand, he cannot "suppress" the conception of God and also use it to state his position, whereas, on the other hand, he cannot use the conception of God and also avoid contradiction. But Anselm fails to see that "the unconditioned necessity of a judgment does not form the absolute necessity of a thing" (Kant, op. cit., p. 345), that is, he confuses a finding of logical self-consciousness for a finding of heteroconsciousness or a finding that critical philosophy might be expected to make for a finding of science.
12 Cyril Connolly, Previous Convictions, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1963, p. 406 and p. 414.
13 J. LaLumia, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
14 See Karl R. Popper's essay "A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein" in Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge, Text and Critical Essays, ed. by C.M. Turbayne, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1970.
15 See Jean Hyppolite's remarkable essay "Hegel's Phenomenology and Psycho analysis" in New Studies in Hegel's Philosophy, ed. by Warren Steinkraus; New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1971, pp. 57-70.
16 For example, see C.A. Mace, "Representation and Expression," Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 3, and "Metaphysics and Emotive Language," Analysis, Vol. II, Nos. 1 and 2. Also, A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, New York, Dover, 1946, pp. 44-45.
17 See J. Bronowski, "The Logic of the Mind," in The American Scholar, Spring 1966, pp. 233-242.
18 "…Every advance in religion is therefore a deeper self-knowledge…But the essence of religion, thus hidden from the religious, is evident to the thinker, by whom religion is viewed objectively, which it cannot be by its votaries." Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, New York, Harper & Row, 1957, p. 13.
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