On the Relationship Between Religion and Philosophy

The School of Athens, by Raphael

We learn from the history of last 2500 years that philosophy and religion have mostly marched hand in hand. In the treatises of a good philosophy we usually find some theological components, and a good theological system always reveals some elements of sound philosophy. Almost all the great philosophers of the past, including Aristotle, were religious, they believed in some kind of divinity; some, like Thomas Aquinas, were theologians and had a completely religious worldview.

Religion and philosophy are so deeply integrated that whenever a philosophical movement tries to get rid of religion, it also loses its philosophy.

Etienne Gilson, in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience, rightly says, “We gain nothing by destroying one in order to save another, for [philosophy and religion] stand and fall together. True mysticism is never found without some theology, and sound theology always seeks the support of some philosophy; but a philosophy that does not at least make room for theology is a short-sighted philosophy, and what shall we call a theology wherein no provision is made for at least the possibility of mystical experience?” (Page 36)

I am not saying that people ought to become religious or that philosophical movements ought to be dominated by theologians. There is no doubt that any good philosophy has to be secular and based on reason. But religion is a way of explaining the universe and man’s place in it—it’s essentially a form of philosophy. Therefore philosophical movements should not be contemptuous of religions—they should accord the theological doctrines the same consideration that they would accord to any other philosophical system.

Aristotle was Not a System-Builder

Plato (left) and Aristotle
in Raphael's fresco, The School of Athens

Aristotle is often seen as a system-builder. But he never attempted to create a system. He was a great thinker, he addresses a wide range of problems, but he philosophizes piecemeal and his philosophy is not free from internal contradictions. In fact, Aristotle does not boast of having said the final word on any branch of knowledge.

Aristotelian scholar Johnathan Barnes points out that Aristotle’s philosophy is essentially aporetic, and that he was not a system-builder. Here’s an excerpt from Barnes's book Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction (Page 59-60)):

Some scholars, however, have disputed this view of Aristotle. They have denied that he was a system-builder. Themselves distrusting the grandiose claims of systematic philosophy, they find Aristotle’s virtues to lie elsewhere. For them, Aristotle’s philosophy is essentially ‘aporetic’: it consists in the posing of particular puzzles or aporiai, and in the development of particular solutions to them. Aristotle’s thought is tentative, flexible, changing. He does not sketch a grand design and then fill in the details; nor does he follow a single method towards a single goal. Rather, the details are all; and the methods and modes of argument vary with the topics to which they are addressed. Aristotle works piecemeal.  

The anti-systematic interpretation of Aristotle’s thought is now widely accepted. It has much to be said in its favor. Book III of the Metaphysics, for example, consists of a long catalogue of puzzles, and much of the remainder of the Metaphysics is given over to their solution. Or consider the following passage: ‘here, as elsewhere, we must set down the phenomena and first go through the puzzles; then we must prove the reputable options about these matters  — if possible, all of them, if not, the majority and the most important’. First, set down prevailing views on the matter (‘the phenomena’, or ‘the things which seem to be the case’, are the reputable opinions on the subject); then go thought the puzzles which those views raise (because they are obscure, perhaps, or because they are mutually inconsistent); finally, prove all or most of the views to be true. That is no recipe for system-building; yet it is a recipe which Aristotle commends and which he sometimes follows. 

Barnes notes that we may look at Aristotle as a systematic thinker because the ideal of systematic thinking is ever present in the background of his philosophy even though the same is never achieved in his surviving treatises.

On the Disparity Between Medieval and Ancient Philosophy

Philosophy seated between the seven liberal arts
Hortus deliciarum of Herrad von Landsberg (12th century)

Why is ancient philosophy better known than medieval philosophy? Is it because ancient philosophy has greater merit or has history been unjust to medieval philosophy? Some historians suggest that medieval philosophy has less merit because it has very little original thought in it. They hold that the medieval philosophers have merely helped themselves to carefully selected bits and pieces of philosophy to serve the purpose of their theology.

Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump have a different point of view. In their Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, they blame the renaissance humanists for the disparity between medieval and ancient philosophy. Here’s an excerpt:

The unwarranted disparity between medieval and ancient philosophy as regards not only their texts but also their apparent relevance to post-medieval philosophy has its historical roots in the achievements of the renaissance humanists. The intellectual gap between ancient and medieval philosophy seems to have been a natural consequence of the cataclysmic historical events associated with the barbarian invasions, the fall of Rome, and the rise of Christianity. But, more than a thousand years later, an even wider gap appeared between medieval and modern philosophy that can be attributed not to historical events on the grand scale but to the humanists' attitudes shaped by broad cultural considerations more than by specifically philosophical positions. The humanists extolled the ancients, naturally condemned the medieval scholastics against whom they were rebelling, and arrived on the European scene simultaneously with the development of printing, which gave their views an immediate and lasting influential advantage over those of their medieval predecessors. The humanists' views divided medieval from modern philosophy not only by rejecting scholasticism as literarily benighted and hence linguistically, educationally, and intellectually barbarous but also by portraying the philosophy of their own day as the first legitimate successor to the philosophy of antiquity, especially to that of Plato. Of course, many views promoted by the humanists have gone the way of their insistence that education consists almost entirely of the study of the Greek and Latin classics. The effect of their wholesale rejection of medieval philosophy on cultural grounds lasted longer partly because it was reinforced by the Protestant reformers' simultaneous and equally vehement rejection of medieval philosophy on the basis of its association with Catholicism, and partly because the rejection coincided with a growing disaffection toward traditional Christianity among many of the educated elite. 

It is certainly true that the popular philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mention the medieval philosophers only to denigrate their thought. Modern philosophy owes lot of unacknowledged debt to the scholastics.

On Feser’s Argument for the Aristotelian Proof of God

Roman copy in marble of a
Greek bust of Aristotle by Lysippus

Edward Feser, in his essay, “The Aristotelian Proof,” (Chapter 1; Five Proofs of the Existence of God), argues that Aristotle’s First Cause is an argument for God. Here’s a brief summary of the argument that Feser is making for the Aristotelian proof:

We have seen that it cannot coherently be denied that change occurs, and we have noted that change can occur only if things have potentials which are actualized by something already actual. Hence, the hot coffee has the potential to be cooled, and that potential is actualized by the coolness in the surrounding air. We have also argued that while a linear series of changes and changers might in principle extend backward in time without beginning, the members of these series must depend at any moment at which they exist on a hierarchical series of actualizers, and that such a series must terminate in a purely actual cause or actualizer of their existence. And it has now been argued that any such cause must be one, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, fully good, intelligent, and omniscient—that is to say, it must have the key divine attributes. In short, the things of our experience can exist at any moment only if sustained in existence by God. 

Feser breaks down this summary into a formal argument consisting of 50 points. He acknowledges that there are a number of problems in his argument and more than half of the essay is devoted to answering these problems. The essay ends with this assertion, “But so far we have seen that the objections that might be raised against a specifically Aristotelian argument for a divine First Cause will fail.” I liked this essay because Feser is not using faith or some kind of mystic revelations to prove the existence of God; he is using philosophical arguments.

Five Proofs of the Existence of God

The ultimate philosophical problem is the problem of God. Does he exist? If he does, then what is his nature? Is he the ultimate cause of everything? In the last 2500 years, several important philosophers have philosophized on who or what is God and how his existence can be proved.

Today I started reading Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. This book offers a defense of the five philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof. In the book’s Introduction, Feser asserts that the claims of natural theology are right, and that the real debate is not between the atheists and the theists, but between the theists of different stripes.

I am reading this book mainly because I am interested in knowing about Feser’s perspectives on the Aristotelian proof and the Thomistic proof, and the arguments that he uses to counter the objections of the major skeptics.

Philosophical Wisdom Versus Scientific Creed

Etienne Gilson

Good philosophy has to be based on knowledge of reality but it cannot be developed by adopting a purely scientific method. Etienne Gilson proves this point through several examples in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience. In chapter 11, “The Breakdown of Modern Philosophy,” Gilson writes:

The first article of the scientific creed is the acceptance of nature such as it is. Far from making up for the loss of philosophy, the discovery of the scientific substitutes for it leaves man alone with nature such as it is, and obliges him to surrender to natural necessity. Philosophy is the only rational knowledge by which both science and nature can be judged. By reducing philosophy to pure science, man has not only abdicated his right to judge nature and to rule it; but he has also turned himself into a particular aspect of nature, subjected, like all the rest, to the necessary law which regulates its development. A world where accomplished facts are unto themselves their own justification is ripe for the most reckless social adventures. Its dictators can wantonly play havoc with human institutions and human lives, for dictatorships are facts and they also are unto themselves their own justification. 

The sacrifice of the philosophical method will not improve the prospects for scientific progress. If philosophy is lost, then we must be prepared for the dissolution of science, reason, and logic, which means, civilization itself.

Adam Smith’s Tribute to David Hume

An engraving of David Hume

Adam Smith, David Hume’s closest friend, wrote a letter to publisher William Strahan, after Hume’s death on August 25, 1776. In the letter, Smith talks about Hume’s last days, death, and character. Smith ends the letter with an interesting paragraph:

Thus died our most excellent, and never-to-be-forgotten friend; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will no doubt judge variously, every one approving or condemning them according as they happen to coincide, or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion. His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known. Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity. It was a frugality founded not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency. The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind, or the steadiness of his resolutions. [xl] His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good-nature and good-humour, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight even those who were the objects of it. To his friends, who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities which contributed more to endear his conversation. And that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime, and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.

Smith looked at Hume as an exemplar of wisdom and virtue. Several passages in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations are inspired by Hume’s political and economic thoughts. In Book 3 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith makes the climactic claim that the promotion of liberty and security are the most important effects of commerce, and he acknowledges his debt to Hume. He writes: “Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.”

The Absent-minded Mr. Adam Smith

Portrait of Adam Smith

Adam Smith was remarkably sharp as a professor and a philosopher of economics, politics, and morality, but in his day-to-day life he was often absent-minded. Lady Mary Coke, a high society hostess, entertained both David Hume and Adam Smith when they were in London in 1767. In her journal, she describes a breakfast with Adam Smith:

"I said many things in his [Adam Smith’s] praise, but added that he was the most Absent Man that ever was ... as he was going to breakfast, and, falling into discourse, Mr Smith took a piece of bread and butter, which, after he had rolled round and round, he put into the teapot and pour'd the water upon it; some time after he poured it into a cup, and when he had tasted it, he said it was the worst tea he had ever met with." ~ (The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke)

I think that Smith's intellectual life was so hyperactive that he often lost touch with his physical environment.

The Disciples can be a Philosopher’s Worst Punishment

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

For a philosopher, his disciples can be a reward as well as a punishment. Etienne Gilson, in his The Unity of Philosophical Experience, (Chapter 9: “The Physicism of Kant”) says that in the initial days the master and his disciple may find nothing but pure joy in their mutual intercourse, but a stage comes when the relationship deteriorates. He gives the example of Immanuel Kant and his foremost disciple—Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Here’s an excerpt:

Who can read without emotion those pages of his Diary where the young Fichte tells us how, penniless and unknown, he went to the great Kant and asked from him both advice and money. Kant had no money to give, but he gave advice. In order to attract his attention, Fichte had written a Critique of All the Revelations, and sent it to Kant as a letter of recommendation. What joy when Kant declared that it should be printed! Fichte wanted to revise it; but Kant said: "It is well written." "Can this be true?" Fichte asks himself in his Diary, “and yet Kant says so.” 

But in 1794 Fichte wrote his Fundamental Principles of the Science of Knowledge in which he attempted to solve the problem of gap between sensibility and understanding that is there in Kant’s the Critique of Pure Reason. The solution that Fichte had come up with was accepted by most notable Kantians of that period, including Reinhold. But Kant refused to endorse Fichte’s solution and disavowed him. However, Fichte continued to assert that either his solution to the Kantian problem is correct or the Kantian philosophy is meaningless.

Gilson says that what usually brings the friendship between a philosopher and his disciple to an end is that, whereas a master holds his conclusions as conclusions, his disciples receive them as premises, with the consequence that their own conclusions can never be the master's conclusions. Fichte in turn was punished by his favorite disciple Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. They had an acrimonious breakup because Fichte felt his work was being misinterpreted by Schelling, whereas Schelling thought that his ideas were being stolen by Fichte.

Arguments Against Direct Realism and How to Counter Them

In his essay, “Arguments Against Direct Realism and How to Counter Them,” Pierre Le Morvan discusses the argumentative strategies that can be used to counter eight arguments that are often used against Direct Realism.

In the conclusion to the essay, he lists seven points that the Direct Realists should accept to avoid falling prey to the arguments directed against their position:

(i) distinguish causal indirectness from cognitive indirectness and maintain that the causal indirectness of perception does not entail that it is cognitively indirect;
(ii) concede that we cannot (given the laws of physics) directly perceive external physical objects or events without a time lag, however minute, without conceding that this entails that we cannot directly perceive physical objects;
(iii) reject the notion that perceiving a physical object requires perceiving all of its spatial or temporal parts at once;
(iv) maintain that physical objects can appear differently than how they are;

(v) be wary of question-begging reifications of appearances by their opponents;
(vi) concede that doubts can be raised that we are perceiving physical objects without conceding that this entails that we do not perceive physical objects;

(vii) treat sensible qualities as modes of perceptual awareness rather than as objects of awareness. 

The essay ends with a brief account of the debate in scholastic philosophy between the Perceptionists (who are today known as the Direct Realists) and the Representationists. Descartes did not agree with the scholastic Representationists but the Cartesian system that he devised was to a large extent in agreement with their thought. 

On Wisdom and Power

If we think that someone is wise enough to conceive of something, then we must assume that he also possesses the power to create that thing. Wisdom and power go hand in hand—if a person is wise enough, then he is powerful enough.

Thomas Reid makes this point in his book Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Essay 4, Chapter 8):

Every indication of wisdom, taken from the effect, is equally an indication of power to execute what wisdom planned. And, if we have any evidence that the wisdom which formed the plan is in the man, we have the very same evidence, that the power which executed it is in him also.

What Reid means is that a wise man is a man of action. He knows how to create value and he takes the appropriate steps to create it.

Is Ayn Rand’s Objectivism a Philosophy?

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand’s novels, like the works of a few other great thinkers, have a stunning impact on the mind when you read them for the first time. You get mesmerized by the larger than life characters that you discover in her novels, and the notion that philosophy has practical consequences gets inscribed in your memory.

Most people become acquainted with Rand by reading her novels and if they make inquiries about her, they learn that she is the founder of a school called objectivism. After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1958, she decided to become a philosopher—with a band of inexperienced youngsters, she launched objectivism. She didn’t have any expertise or interest in philosophy; she had no clue what it takes to philosophize like a philosopher. Much of the work that she has done in the name of objectivism consists of short articles on the political and cultural excrescences of her own time. Her articles are of great interest, but they are not philosophy.

Rand’s objectivist followers claim that her novels are an elucidation of the objectivist philosophy. But I believe that her novels are works of fiction; they are not philosophy. You can find in her novels an inspiration for a healthy sense of life, and a sense of the critical role that philosophy plays in the rise and fall of civilizations and in an individual’s life—but all this is not philosophy.

Philosophy, like physics, biology, and mathematics, has a methodology of its own. You can discover the philosophical truth only by following the philosophical method. You can’t do it by following a literary way—but that is what Rand tried to do. She developed objectivism by following a literary methodology and she could not produce a single treatise on any area of philosophy. The contrast between the massive scope of her novels, and the pettiness, ignorance, and dogmatism that we find in objectivism is so blatantly obvious that only the most dogmatic acolytes can claim that all is well in objectivism.

Etienne Gilson’s thought provoking words in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (page 7) come to my mind:

I wish I could make clear from the very beginning that in criticizing great men, as I shall do, I am very far from forgetting what made them truly great. No man can fall a victim to his own genius unless he has genius; but those who have none are fully justified in refusing to be victimized by the genius of others. Not having made the mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, we cannot be tempted to submit all questions to the rules of mathematics; but our very mediocrity should at least help us to avoid such a mistake. There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian. 

Taking an inspiration from Gilson’s words, I will say that there is more than one excuse for being an Ayn Rand, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being an objectivist. I am not trying to debase Rand as a fiction writer; she has written great novels—she took philosophy seriously and was devoted to finding the philosophical truth. But she failed to create any value in objectivism because she was a fiction writer and not a philosopher.

The Mathematicism of Descartes

René Descartes

Etienne Gilson’s elucidation of René Descartes’s philosophy is very interesting. He points out that Descartes marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. Here’s an excerpt from his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Chapter 4, “Cartesian Mathematics”):

although mediaeval thought had already been slumbering for two centuries when Descartes began to write, he was the first to build up a new system of ideas and to open formally a new philosophical era. His predecessors had done little more than to distrust scholastic philosophy, and, as they knew no other one, to extend their distrust to philosophy itself. Descartes brought to the world the unexpected revelation that, even after the breakdown of mediaeval philosophy, constructive philosophical thinking was still possible. Ever since the fourteenth century there had been men to criticize Aristotle, but Descartes' ambition was quite different: it was to replace him.

In the next paragraph, Gilson says that Descartes marks the transition from the Renaissance, rather than from the Middle Ages, to the modern world. He qualifies the statement by noting that Descartes does not mark the transition from the whole Renaissance to the modern world, “but, quite exactly, from the scepticism of Montaigne to the modern period of constructive thinking in philosophy.” He says that Cartesianism was a direct answer to the challenge of Montaigne’s scepticism.

Gilson goes on to explain the connection between Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Montaigne’s Essays:

The long list of passages of the Discourse on Method that are but an echo of the Essays, clearly shows how conversant Descartes was with the work of Montaigne. What can be more modern, for instance, than the opening sentence of the Discourse? "Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess." Was not this the first article of the charter of independent thought? If, as Descartes immediately added, good sense, or reason "is, by nature, equal in all men" why should it ever submit to authority? True, but the fact remains that the first lines of the Discourse are borrowed from Montaigne's essay On Presumption (Essays, Bk. II, Chap. 17) : "of all the gifts made to man by Nature, the most justly distributed is judgment (or sense), for no man is ever displeased with what amount of it he may have received." I quite agree that Descartes read his own thought into the text of Montaigne, but rather than an objection to my thesis, it is the very point I hope to make: the philosophy of Descartes was a desperate struggle to emerge from Montaigne's scepticism and the very form of the Discourse on Method is enough to suggest it. 

Descartes was a skeptic, because it was the fashion of his time to be a sceptic, but he was skeptic who was looking for something better than scepticism. Gilson says that Descartes’s scepticism amounts to a kind of Mathematicism (a philosophy that progresses by the method of mathematics).

The Consequences of William of Ockham

William of Ockham

Richard M. Weaver, in his 1948 bestseller Ideas Have Consequences, says that the scholastic logician William of Ockham paved way for the dissolution of the Western civilization by giving birth to nominalism, which is a doctrine that denies the existence of the Universals.

Weaver begins the Introduction to his book with a dramatic denunciation of Ockham’s role in the fourteenth century:

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

A paragraph later, Weaver directly mentions Ockham in connection with the propagation of nominalism:

For this reason I turn to William of Occam as the best representative of a change which came over man’s concep­tion of reality at this historic juncture. It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we arc on the road to modern empiricism. 

Weaver's perspectives on Ockham's philosophy is similar to what Etienne Gilson has said in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937). The Chapter 3, “The Road to Skepticism,” in Gilson's book is devoted to exploring the consequences of Ockham’s nominalist philosophy. Gilson writes: “as a philosopher, it was Ockham’s privilege to usher into the world what I think is the first known case of a new intellectual disease.”

Platonists Write Utopias; Aristotelians Write on Politics

In his The Unity of Philosophical Experience, (Chapter 3, “The Road to Scepticism”), Etienne Gilson says:

Begotten in us by things themselves, concepts are born reformers that never lose touch with reality. Pure ideas, on the other hand, are born within the mind and from the mind, not as intellectual expressions of what is, but as models, or patterns, of what ought to be; hence they are born revolutionists. And this is the reason why Aristotle and Aristotelians write books on politics, whereas Plato and Platonists always write Utopias.

In the Chapter 3, he blames the philosophy of William of Ockham for introducing skepticism in the study of Aristotelian philosophy in the fourteenth century. Ockham’s philosophy took deep root in the European universities and led the scholastic philosophers on the straight road to scepticism.

Scholastic philosophers then began to mistrust their own principles, and mediaeval philosophy broke down; not for want of ideas, for they still were there; or for want of men, for there never were more brilliant intelligences than at the time of that glorious sunset; mediaeval philosophy broke down when, having mistaken philosophy for reality itself, the best minds were surprised to find reason empty and began to despise it.

A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952)

The Ethical Problem in Philosophers

The Four Philosophers, by Rubens

There is an ethical problem in philosophers—they want to find the truth, but they will not accept it. Etienne Gilson comments on this problem in Chapter 3, “The Road to Skepticism,” of his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience. Here’s an excerpt:

There is an ethical problem at the root of our philosophical difficulties; for men are most anxious to find truth, but very reluctant to accept it. We do not like to be cornered by rational evidence, and even when truth is there, in its impersonal and commanding objectivity, our greatest difficulty still remains; it is for me to bow to it in spite of the fact that it is not exclusively mine, for you to accept it though it cannot be exclusively yours. In short, finding out truth is not so hard; what is hard is not to run away from truth once we have found it. When it is not a "yes but," our "yes" is often enough a "yes, and . . ."; it applies much less to what we have just been told than to what we are about to say. The greatest among philosophers are those who do not flinch in the presence of truth, but welcome it with the simple words: yes, Amen.

When the philosophers are unable to practice what they are preaching to others, the credibility of their entire philosophical system goes down.

Philosophy Cannot be Obtained from Pure Logic

Peter Abailard

Etienne Gilson, in his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience, (Chapter 1, “Logicism and Philosophy”), says that the philosophy of the Middle Ages was mainly an endeavor to solve one problem—the problem of the Universals. He talks about Peter Abailard, the logician of the Middle Ages, who philosophized extensively on the problem of the Universals, but was unable to find a solution to the problem and ended up being mired in skepticism.

According to Gilson, Abailard’s mistake was that he used logic to answer a philosophical question (which is the question of the Universals), and the answer that he got was a logical one and not a philosophical one. The consequence of this was that Abailard found that the question of the Universals is unanswerable and is like a pseudo-question. Here’s an excerpt from Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Chapter 1):

My point is that Abailard mistook logic for philosophy; but what about logic itself? Abailard was a logician trespassing on philosophical ground because, as they knew practically nothing else, the natural approach of twelfth-century men to philosophy was logic. Yet, before studying logic, they had always learned something else; namely grammar, with the unavoidable result that grammar was their normal approach to logic. The consequence of such a procedure was that Abailard was just as tempted to mistake grammar for logic as he was to mistake logic for philosophy. Now, what is the subject matter of grammar? It is language. Language itself is made up of words. It is the proper task of the grammarian to classify the various kinds of words of which our common speech is composed, to define their respective functions and to formulate the laws that determine their connections. As a distinct science—and it is for talking beings the most fundamental of all—grammar knows nothing but words. If you ask a grammarian a question, and if he answers it as a grammarian, your problem will inevitably be reduced by him to a mere question of words. Hence Abailard's famous sentence: "Now, however, that reasons have been given why things cannot be called universals, taken either singly or collectively, because they are not predicated of many, it remains to ascribe universality of this sort to words alone." 

Gilson is of the view that if Abailard had been “in a position to understand the import of that problem and to realize its specific nature, he would at last have discussed a philosophical problem in a philosophical way.” The ultimate result of Abailard’s mistake was skepticism.

In Chapter 2, “Theologism and Philosophy,” Gilson talks about the reason for which the philosophers of the Middle Ages became so enamored to the logical way. He points out that “when in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries mediaeval men rediscovered logic, they became intoxicated with the wine of formal reasoning and the abstract beauty of its laws. Hence their natural tendency to deal in a purely logical way with all possible questions. They did this in philosophy and, as was to be expected, they did it also in theology.”

On the History of Philosophy

Etienne Gilson

Etienne Gilson begins the preface to his book The Unity of Philosophical Experience with an interesting thought on the importance of the history of philosophy. He notes that in order to make a good progress in the study of philosophy, you must first read history of philosophy. Here are the opening lines of the preface:

The history of philosophy is much more part of philosophy itself than the history of science is part of science, for it is not impossible to become a competent scientist without knowing much about the history of science, but no man can carry very far his own philosophical reflections unless he first studies the history of philosophy. In point of fact, the First Book of Aristotle's Metaphysics is also the first known History of Greek Philosophy, and it remains a perfect example of how such a history should be written. For indeed it is a philosophical history of philosophy, whereas too many modern histories of philosophy are written in an unphilosophical way. Unless it may be shown as exhibiting some intrinsic intelligibility the endless chain of mutually destructive systems that runs from Thales to Karl Marx is less suggestive of hope than of discouragement. 

Gilson’s aim in the book is to show that the history of philosophy makes philosophical sense, and is a part of the general philosophical knowledge.

On the Relation Between Metaphysics and Epistemology

Here’s an excerpt from Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Page 30):

…metaphysics is prior to epistemology. One way in which this is the case is that absolutely every epistemological theory rests on metaphysical assumptions—including Hume’s when he begins with the supposition that there are impressions and ideas, and including the naturalist’s when he supposes that our cognitive faculties are at least reliable enough to make natural science an objective enterprise. Naturally, these metaphysical assumptions cannot be justified by reference to the epistemological claims they support without begging the question. When the critic of metaphysics insists that the metaphysician establish his epistemological credentials before making any metaphysical assertions, he is making a demand that is incoherent and to which he does not submit himself.  

Another way in which metaphysics is prior to epistemology is that our knowledge of various metaphysical truths is something with which a sound epistemology must be consistent, so that if an epistemological theory is not consistent with our having knowledge of these truths then it must be rejected. In the limiting case, an epistemological theory that was inconsistent with its own metaphysical assumptions would obviously be for that reason something we must reject. 

Feser’s notes that there are several metaphysical truths that cannot be coherently denied, and if naturalism and scientism are not facilitating our knowing of such truths, then we can regard naturalism and scientism as false doctrines.

On Learning a Philosopher

To learn a philosopher, should you rely wholly on the works of that philosopher or should you also study the commentaries on his philosophy? Here’s a perspective from Edward Feser (from the “Prolegomenon” to  his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction):

"It has become something of a cliché, rather thoughtlessly repeated by well-meaning people of a certain generation, that to learn Thomism one ought to read Thomas himself and ignore the Thomist commentators and manualists who built on his work. I couldn’t disagree more. No great philosopher, no matter how brilliant and systematic, ever uncovers all the implications of his position, foresees every possible objection, or imagines what rival systems might come into being centuries in the future. His work is never finished, and if it is worth finishing, others will come along to do the job. Since their work is, naturally, never finished either, a tradition of thought develops, committed to working out the implications of the founder’s system, applying it to new circumstances and challenges, and so forth. Thus Plato had Plotinus, Aristotle had Aquinas, and Aquinas had Cajetan – to name just three famous representatives of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism, respectively. And thus you cannot fully understand Plato unless you understand Platonism, you cannot fully understand Aristotle unless you understand Aristotelianism, and you cannot fully understand Thomas unless you understand Thomism. True, writers in the traditions in question often disagree with one another and sometimes simply get things wrong. But that is all the more reason to study them if one wants to understand the founders of these traditions; for the tensions and unanswered questions in a tradition reflect the richness of the system of thought originated by its founder."

The Myth of a Complete Philosophical System

The School of Athens, by Raphael

Several major philosophers have attempted to create a system of philosophy that is complete, fully-integrated, self-consistent, and capable of offering a credible view of man’s place in the universe. But most of these philosophers have achieved the opposite—they have created doctrines that are full of glaring inconsistencies while also containing a few truths.

The works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant are full of flaws and inconsistencies, and yet these philosophers have made highly fruitful contributions in the development of our modern world. There is no reason to believe that a self-consistent system will contain more truths than the one that is not self-consistent. In fact, most self-consistent systems in history are totally false (like the religious doctrines).

One of the most important lessons of history of philosophy is that a philosophical system without any inconsistencies is unattainable, and those who try to create such a system often end up creating a cult (religious or secular).

Paul Guyer's Thoughts On Kant as a Stoic

Descartes and the Rise of Individualism

A Portrait of Descartes

Not only valid philosophical opinions, but even the errors, can prove useful in the progress of philosophical thought. René Descartes’s proposition, “Cogito, ergo sum,” ("I think, therefore I am”), is incorrect by itself, but it has led to the penetration of individualistic thought into philosophy.

Bertrand Russell makes this point in his The History of Western Philosophy:

Descartes's fundamental certainty, "I think, therefore I am," made the basis of knowledge different for each person, since for each the starting-point was his own existence, not that of other individuals or of the community. His emphasis upon the reliability of clear and distinct ideas tended in the same direction, since it is by introspection that we think we discover whether our ideas are clear and distinct. Most philosophy since Descartes has had this intellectually individualistic aspect in a greater or less degree.

Descartes was not a philosopher of individualism, but his Cogito led to individualism becoming one of the central concerns in philosophy.

Russell traces the origin of individualistic trends to Ancient Greece, where individualism arose as a reaction to the loss of political liberty in the time of Alexander. While the Platonic and Aristotelian schools in Greece saw man as a member of the community, the Cynics and Stoics were supportive of individualism. The Christian mystics, who were influenced by the Stoics, kept individualistic trends alive in Christian ethics. The coming of Protestantism further strengthened the individualistic tendencies because for the protestants truth is not a social but an individual enterprise.

On The Industrial Revolution

For several years, I have been of the view that the Industrial Revolution which began in the 1760s did not end in the 1840s; it is still continuing. Modernism, postmodernism, and all the big or small political movements that the world has seen in the last 200 years, are minor forces in comparison to the Industrial Revolution. Now while reading Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, I find this interesting point on the Industrial Revolution (Chapter 8: “The Drive for Power”):

"Where would a man like me be, where would you be, if we had been born before 1800? We still live in the middle of the Industrial Revolution and find it hard to see its implications, but the future will say of it that in the ascent of man it is a step, a stride, as powerful as the Renaissance. The Renaissance established the dignity of man. The Industrial Revolution established the unity of nature."

Russell’s Tirade Against Nietzsche

Russell; Nietzsche

In his A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell gives Friedrich Nietzsche an extremely cruel treatment. He makes fun of not only Nietzsche’s philosophy but also of Nietzsche’s frail health and reclusive lifestyle. On page 767, Russell suggests that Nietzsche was a sickly recluse who would be deprived of his whip by nine out of ten women. Here’s the passage:

Speaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "Forget not thy whip"--but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.

On page 764, Russell says that Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra is pseudo-prophetical and full of unnecessary rants against women:

He [Nietzsche] is never tired of inveighing against women. In his pseudo-prophetical book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says that women are not, as yet, capable of friendship; they are still cats, or birds, or at best cows. "Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly." The recreation of the warrior is to be of a peculiar sort if one may trust his most emphatic aphorism on this subject: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip." 

On page 767, he questions Nietzsche’s sense of life and is disapproving of Nietzsche’s philosophy:

It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His "noble" man—who is himself in day-dreams—is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says: “I will do such things—What they are yet I know not—but they shall be the terror of the earth.” This is Nietzsche's philosophy in a nutshell.

He goes on to note that Nietzsche’s superman lusts for power because he is full of fear:

It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize over them. Men who have conquered fear have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche's "artist-tyrant" Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the inevitable palace revolution. I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible.  

So is it possible to make sense out of Russell’s tirade against Nietzsche? I think Russell’s tirade must be seen in light of the fact that A History of Western Philosophy was published immediately after the Second World War, in 1945. In those days most intellectuals saw Nietzsche as the philosophical godfather of Nazism. In my opinion there is no intellectual connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis—but Russell, when he writing his book in the 1940s, was convinced that Nietzsche spawned the Nazis, and therefore he had to rant against Nietzsche.

On the Origin of Wars

Statue of Genghis Khan in Mongolia

Jacob Bronowski, in his book The Ascent of Man, says that “the largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.”

But the rise of the settled communities, which were creating surplus produce through agriculture, led to conflicts between the settlers and the nomads. Bronowski traces the origins of war to this conflict. The nomads wanted to survive by stealing the surplus agricultural production and the settlers wanted to preserve the product of their labor, and they had no choice but to fight.

The invention of agriculture twelve thousand years ago did not establish the superiority of the settled way of life, but the discovery of the method of domestication of animals—sheep, goat and then the horse—energized the settled communities. Ironically, the domesticated horse also gave a significant advantage to the nomadic tribes, enabling them to travel to vast distances. Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol dynasty, made use of the horse to propel his army into China, Middle East, and Central Europe. Bronowski sees the wars of Genghis Khan as the final attempt to prove the superiority of the nomadic way of life, but the attempt failed.

Here’s an excerpt Bronowski’s book:

Genghis Khan was a nomad and the inventor of a powerful war machine — and that conjunction says something important about the origins of war in human history. Of course, it is tempting to close one’s eyes to history, and instead to speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not human instinct. It is highly planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that we saw in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower. That is the beginning of war.  

Genghis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving way of life into our own millennium. From AD 1200 to 1300 they made almost the last attempt to establish the supremacy of the robber who produces nothing and who, in his feckless way, comes to take from the peasant (who has nowhere to flee) the surplus that agriculture accumulates. 

Yet that attempt failed. And it failed because in the end there was nothing for the Mongols to do except themselves to adopt the way of life of the people that they had conquered. When they conquered the Muslims, they became Muslims. They became settlers because theft, war, is not a permanent state that can far sustained. Of course, Genghis Khan still had his bones carried about as a memorial by his armies in the field. But his grandson Kublai Khan was already a builder and settled monarch in China… 

Civilization is always created by settled people, while the nomads, the people who are lacking in productive, social, and cultural roots have always been the war-makers.