Some quotes about philosophy

" Philosophy-no problem too trivial, no answer too obscure."

This is a t-shirt from the UT philosophy department. I saw a philosopher wearing it both Saturday and Sunday. How do I know it was a philosopher? Let's just say the image conformed to my stereotypical view of the philosopher making his way in a non-academic setting.

The shirt is funny in a way, clearly analytic philosophy making fun of itself here, which is better than when it simply takes itself seriously, but it does speak to a fundamental difference in various approaches to philosophy that are worth thinking about at some length.

Analytic philosophy does tend to view the philosophical task as a set of problems to be solved and the answers and indeed, the problems themselves can get pretty obscure. What is a philosophical problem you might ask? You know free will and determinism, the problem of evil, the mind body problem, turing tests, chinese boxes, possible worlds..is time travel possible? Zeno's paradox, the Euthyphro problem.

By the way, If you want to read a very funny blog written by the wife of a UT grad student go here to the philosologist blog a few posts back she has a totally hilarious characterization of the various strains of philosopher

I am not an analytic philosopher. Never have been. The problems approach is not what drew me to philosophy, though I do remember testing out Zeno's paradox on the playground in second grade. Plato's dialogues drew me to philosophy. I simply fell in love with them. (this is a very short version of a long story, the first installment of which will be published soon).

By and large, the students in my most excellent Plato seminar are here for the analytic philosophy. Baylor was not always a hot bed of analytic philosophy, but it has moved steadily in that direction for over a decade now and I would say it has solidly arrived in its promised land, as demonstrated by rankings on various reports.

I really don't mean to undermine this achievement in anyway. Truly, it is quite remarkable. If you build it, they will come. Baylor went about building it, and it is built very well, in a remarkably short period of time.

However, the current state of affairs presents something of a challenge to me pedagogically. As a group, individually and collectively they are by far and away the most intelligent group of graduate students I've worked with in my twenty years of teaching. There are no weak links in the chain. They are well bonded and conversation flows easily. And that in and of itself, is simply a lot of fun. It is fun teaching super intelligent, highly engaged students. At the same time, the majority of them, not all, simply do not do philosophy in the way that I do it so I'm having to present my way of doing philosophy along with presenting Plato and my way of doing Plato.

Now some analytic philosophers are interested in Plato, indeed, the dominant mode of Plato scholarship is done by analytic philosophers, but they tend to be interested in the arguments in the dialogues or differently put, the problems that arise when considering the arguments in the dialogues.

Plato and Socrates were more philosophy as a way of life philosophers. They tended to view philosophy as an ongoing process of self-examination that led one to a deeper understanding, of self, other, world, society, and the fundamental principles that under gird reality. They did not so much see this process as a set of problems but sustained inquiry into the nature of who am I and what is.

Here are a couple philosophical problems that Socrates was concerned with "What sort of creature am I?" "What sort of wisdom do I have that the oracles says no one is wiser?" They are problems, sure, but they are problems that are inexorably bound to the meaning of life for him. When I was in high school, the cross country team had a great t-shirt. it is a quote from the Phaedo. "How curious is this thing called pleasure and how closely related to pain." Again, a sort of problem, the relationship of what we take to be opposite experiences, but it is what Socrates remarks when reflecting on the chains that hold him in his prison cell as he awaits the moment for his death by hemlock.

One of my former teachers Carl Vaught often said that "philosophy is not a set of problems to be solved but a paradox to be deepened." A paradox to be deepened over the course of a lifetime.