In this extract, Radcliffe Richards, Savulescu and Coady present philosophy as a mode of “enquiry” about/“reflecting” upon/“analysing” the “state of the world” – the subject matter of philosophy is infinite as philosophy is not only concerned with “a lot of subjects” (such as Mathematics), but also with the “basic assumptions of society”. Because of this, the authors present philosophy as a form of rationalising about the world to effectively learn more about it, “our circumstances” and “ourselves”. In this essay, I will analyse the similarities and differences between the three philosophers’ arguments by providing my own experience and understanding of what is involved in doing philosophy, before making an overall judgement about each philosopher’s argument and synthesising what the activity of philosophy is.
The similarities presented by the three philosophers in their argument are consistent with my experiences and learnings from IB Philosophy, as although I may not agree with Savulescu’s argument that we are all “rational animals” capable of gaining knowledge, the idea that we are to rationalise about the world, the meaning of life and ethical issues resonates with my own definition of the purpose of philosophy. In the IB Applied Ethics unit, I engaged in a mode of “enquiry” about, “reflecting” upon and “analysing” the political crisis of refugee problems, more specifically why countries were not accepting refugees and what their ethical arguments were. Through this investigation, catalysed by the basic ‘subject’ of international relations, I learnt more about “ourselves” as human beings – my “basic assumption” that humans were inherently benevolent was countered by the politically-realist theory of Egoism, thus informing my view of our human nature. Furthermore, I agree that those who philosophise are seeking “to understand the world”, and therefore “how we should act”, but I don’t believe that everyone has the innate capacity to “rationally reflect” or “gain (objective) knowledge” as we are not born universally as “rational animals”.
Savulescu is the only philosopher who explicitly states the word “rational” in his argument – I don’t believe that all humans are born rational as this is not our human nature. From my experience in IB Philosophy, I have been exposed to a multitude of theories about Human Nature, and after multiple Socratic Seminars and presentations about different theories, I now believe in the Hobbesian approach to the concept of innate characteristics. I don’t believe that all humans are born rational animals because – as I discovered in my presentations on political realism and Hobbes’ Leviathan – one in 26 people possess sociopathic tendencies, thus showing that we are not all rational beings who are able to modulate our appetites using reason. Because of this, I disagree with Savulescu’s argument about rational knowledge gaining as if we are not always able to act universally rational as a human race, how can we assert that our “rational reflections” about human behaviour and the world isn’t inherently subjective, not objective? How can we learn the pure truths about “oneself and the state of the world” when education programs all over the world are controlled by governments who censor diverse views and are largely Western-centric?
Although these philosophers do largely agree with the purpose of philosophy being to understand the world and to gain knowledge about our presuppositions about life, they do have conflicting views when it comes to the distinction between science and philosophy. Radcliffe Richards states that philosophy involves “the kind of questions where you’re not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together.” Moreover, he goes onto argue that philosophical questions arise from a variety of subjects, thus implying that science can give rise to philosophical questions and delineating the distinction between philosophy and science: philosophical questions are not to be explored/answered in a manner analogous to how we would tackle scientific questions. I myself have observed this trend in IB Philosophy and Global Politics as observing the way that epidemiologists approach the ‘science of pandemics’ and therefore shape public policy introduced me to the conundrum of Herd Immunity and the ethical dilemma of Utilitarianism versus Deontology. This dilemma further served as a catalyst for my IB Philosophy Internal Assessment where I analysed Thanos’s ‘snap’ (Avengers: Infinity War) through the lenses of Kant and Bentham to evaluate whether we should ever kill for the greater good. I believe that both the natural and social sciences have repeatedly served as stimuli for philosophical questioning, and this notion is somewhat mirrored by Savulescu who states that philosophy “employs the empirical sciences, but it’s not a version of science” – both philosophers distinguish between science and philosophy quite a lot in their explanations of philosophy, but Coady does not.
Coady states that philosophy is a “science of presuppositions” – this therefore implies that philosophy employs an analytical, closed-ended-response approach to questions, rather than the open-ended and rationally critical approach to philosophical questions that Savulescu and Radcliffe Richards assert. Furthermore, Coady’s entire introduction to philosophy focuses on the “analytic” approach to philosophy, neglecting the distinction between philosophical analysis and scientific analysis. By not further distinguishing between science and philosophy in his explanation, Coady’s exploration of philosophy doesn’t seem to match my experience in IB Philosophy. In our Socratic Seminar discussing the Mind & Body problem, we were immediately introduced to the striking divide between philosophy and science – as an IB Biology student, I initially attempted to critique the theory of Idealism through a closed-ended response largely focusing on only neuro-biological fact and not conjecture, completely ignoring the fact that philosophical questions cannot have conclusive answers. Philosophical questions, at nature, are unanswerable through science – this is the main lesson I have learnt from multiple discussions about the Mind & Body problem and is why I must disagree with Coady’s phraseology in his argument. Philosophy may be “a science of presuppositions”, but we must further distinguish between empirical sciences and the natural sciences, figurative sciences and the applied sciences – by not distinguishing between philosophy and the sciences further, Coady has presented me with a definition of philosophy that is not consistent with my experiences in IB Philosophy.
In conclusion, all the philosophers have valid arguments, but I must contend that philosophy and science need to have a boldened distinction and we cannot make irrational claims that every person in the world is a “rational animal”. Therefore, I argue that the activity of philosophy is a mode of enquiring about, critically reflecting upon and reasonably analysing multiple subject matter (such as science) to learn more about the world, ourselves and how we should behave.
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