Derek Matravers
About the author
Derek Matravers is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Open University. Before that, he was a Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge. He is the author of Art and Emotion (OUP, 1998) and numerous articles on aesthetics and ethics.
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Related programme
Six programmes, six philosophers: Arendt, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Marx, and Rousseau. But how representative of philosophy are these six? This is a more controversial question than it sounds. According to some philosophers they are representative, according to others they are hardly representative at all.
Let’s clear one issue out of the way immediately. All of these people had general thoughts at a reflective level and, to that extent, they were philosophers.
One might think that if that is all it takes to be a philosopher then we are all philosophers. This seems to me an altogether happy conclusion: we all do philosophy at least some of the time. To put things another way, philosophy is an activity, rather than a body of knowledge. What kind of activity? Thinking. What kind of thinking? Here there does not seem to be any hard-and-fast answer. I said above ‘abstract thinking at a general level’, but that could cover any number of things.
Of course, some people’s thoughts are 'better' than others in that they are more interesting, or more original, or more defensible, closer to the truth or whatever. In as much as all of our six figures had interesting, original, defensible, true abstract thoughts at a general level, so all of our six figures were good philosophers.
The question posed, though, was not whether they were philosophers, or even if they were good philosophers (we have answered ‘yes’ to both), but whether they were representative of philosophy. That is, representative of the academic subject as it is studied in the universities. This is controversial because there is no widespread agreement on which philosophers it is best to study. In Britain and America (and a number of other places) many philosophers see themselves as working within what they call ‘the analytic tradition’. This is, unsurprisingly, a tradition that has used the techniques of analysis. Quite what counts as analysis is controversial, but one central method that has been used is the breaking down of complex concepts into simpler components.
To take a typical philosophical example, one might start to wonder what ‘knowledge’ is. That is, what would the world have to be like for it to be true that I know that Tony Blair is Prime Minister? After a great deal of cogitation, philosophers returned the answer that three different things would have to be the case. First, it would have to be true that Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Second, I would have to believe Tony Blair to be Prime Minster. Third, the connection between the first and the second is not coincidence (roughly, I believe it because it is true). Only if all three of these hold can I be said to know that Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Knowledge, then, has been analysed into three simpler concepts: truth, belief and (roughly) justification. This helps in as much as it throws light on the concept of knowledge: if we were puzzled by what knowledge might be, the thought is that doing this kind of analysis helps.
Let’s clear one issue out of the way immediately. All of these people had general thoughts at a reflective level and, to that extent, they were philosophers.
One might think that if that is all it takes to be a philosopher then we are all philosophers. This seems to me an altogether happy conclusion: we all do philosophy at least some of the time. To put things another way, philosophy is an activity, rather than a body of knowledge. What kind of activity? Thinking. What kind of thinking? Here there does not seem to be any hard-and-fast answer. I said above ‘abstract thinking at a general level’, but that could cover any number of things.
Of course, some people’s thoughts are 'better' than others in that they are more interesting, or more original, or more defensible, closer to the truth or whatever. In as much as all of our six figures had interesting, original, defensible, true abstract thoughts at a general level, so all of our six figures were good philosophers.
The question posed, though, was not whether they were philosophers, or even if they were good philosophers (we have answered ‘yes’ to both), but whether they were representative of philosophy. That is, representative of the academic subject as it is studied in the universities. This is controversial because there is no widespread agreement on which philosophers it is best to study. In Britain and America (and a number of other places) many philosophers see themselves as working within what they call ‘the analytic tradition’. This is, unsurprisingly, a tradition that has used the techniques of analysis. Quite what counts as analysis is controversial, but one central method that has been used is the breaking down of complex concepts into simpler components.
To take a typical philosophical example, one might start to wonder what ‘knowledge’ is. That is, what would the world have to be like for it to be true that I know that Tony Blair is Prime Minister? After a great deal of cogitation, philosophers returned the answer that three different things would have to be the case. First, it would have to be true that Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Second, I would have to believe Tony Blair to be Prime Minster. Third, the connection between the first and the second is not coincidence (roughly, I believe it because it is true). Only if all three of these hold can I be said to know that Tony Blair is Prime Minister. Knowledge, then, has been analysed into three simpler concepts: truth, belief and (roughly) justification. This helps in as much as it throws light on the concept of knowledge: if we were puzzled by what knowledge might be, the thought is that doing this kind of analysis helps.
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