IB Philosophy 9.3.1 Nature of Philosophy Notes

What Is Philosophy?

1. The question "What is philosophy?" is itself a philosophical question. Scientists broadly agree on methods and evidence, but philosophy has no single agreed method. Philosophers have been arguing about what their subject even is for over two thousand years.
   1. In the Western analytic tradition, philosophy is typically understood as the pursuit of conceptual clarity through logical argumentation. On this view, the philosopher's task is to analyse concepts (justice, knowledge, truth, beauty), identify hidden assumptions, and construct or evaluate arguments using rigorous reasoning.
2. The Continental European tradition, by contrast, has often understood philosophy as a way of grappling directly with what it means to be alive. Thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir pursued philosophy not as abstract logic-chopping but as a confrontation with the raw facts of human life: anxiety, freedom, and the certainty of death.
3. Socrates, often regarded as the founding figure of Western philosophy, practised philosophy as a form of dialogue and self-examination. His method of elenchus (cross-examination) was not aimed at delivering answers, but at exposing ignorance and pushing people to think more carefully about what they claimed to know.
4. Plato extended Socratic inquiry into a systematic search for eternal, unchanging truths (the Forms). For Plato, philosophy was the highest intellectual activity because it alone could grasp how reality truly is, rather than merely how things appear to our senses, which can deceive us.

Plato, Wittgenstein, and Conceptual Analysis

1. Plato's Allegory of the Cave dramatises this vision. Prisoners chained in an underground chamber see only shadows cast on a wall and mistake them for reality.
   1. When one prisoner breaks free and ascends into sunlight, the pain of adjustment gives way to seeing the real world directly. Returning to the cave, the freed prisoner struggles to convince others that their shadow-world is an illusion.
   2. The philosopher, for Plato, is this freed prisoner: someone who has grasped the Forms and now bears the difficult obligation of guiding others toward the truth.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed two radically different views across his career. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), philosophy's task was to clarify the logical structure of language.
   1. In the Philosophical Investigations (1953), he argued that philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of how language works in everyday contexts, and the philosopher's role is therapeutic: to dissolve rather than solve problems.
   2. The key takeaway from Wittgenstein's later view is that instead of hunting for definitions, the philosopher's job is to notice how language misleads us and to clear up those tangles. This challenge to definition-hunting is explored further in 9.3.3.

Aristotle and the Diversity of Philosophical Traditions

1. This variety of views explains why there are so many disagreements about philosophy's methods. Each tradition starts from different assumptions about what counts as a genuine philosophical question and what a good answer looks like. That shapes everything that follows.
   1. These questions of method are explored further in 9.3.3.
2. Aristotle had yet another view: philosophy starts with wonder (thaumazein) and aims at understanding everything that exists. He divided philosophy into three branches: theoretical (asking what is real), practical (asking how to live and govern), and productive (asking how to make things well). This three-part map shaped how Western universities organised knowledge for centuries.
   1. Consider a child asking 'Why is the sky blue?' The answer (light scattering) prompts a deeper question: 'But what is light?' That answer raises another: 'What does it mean to see?' Each response generates a more fundamental inquiry until one arrives at questions about the nature of reality itself. Aristotle's point is that philosophy begins in exactly this kind of wonder, where the familiar suddenly becomes strange and demands explanation.

Philosophy as Practice: Sadhana and Non-Western Traditions

1. One of the biggest contrasts in world philosophy is between philosophy as abstract thinking and argument (the dominant Western model) and philosophy as a lived practice, or sadhana, in Indian thought. This distinction challenges the assumption that philosophy only happens in books and lecture halls.
2. The six classical Indian schools (Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta) all combine careful logical reasoning with practical self-transformation. The goal is not just to understand reality but to achieve liberation (moksha) from suffering through direct personal insight, not just intellectual conclusions.
3. The Yoga tradition, systematised by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, exemplifies philosophy as sadhana. Patanjali's eight-limbed path includes ethical restraints, physical postures, breath control, and meditative absorption, all directed toward stilling the fluctuations of the mind (chitta vritti nirodha) and achieving direct knowledge of the self.
4. Buddhist philosophy similarly integrates theory and practice. The Buddha's Four Noble Truths are not merely statements to be studied but a practical guide for diagnosing and treating suffering.