Last semester, I took Philosophy 1730: Intro to Moral and Political Philosophy. I had wanted to take a Philosophy class more real than the so-called epistemological TOK for quite some time, and college Philosophy courses sounded just douchey and intellectual enough to satisfy my secret inner hipster.
Philosophy soon came to be my least favorite class, which was definitely an unexpected turn of events. I'd seen it as a sort of reprieve from Astrophysics, Chemistry, and perhaps even my more analytical history class, but it soon morphed into the beastly bane of my second-semester existence. (Some hyperbole involved). If I had to put my finger on the reasons I came to despise the class, they would include the beaten-into-the-ground excuses 'the class was taught poorly', and 'the professor was uninspiring'. But what bothered me more was the way my very-involved and fairly inspiring TA graded my papers. Not to sound like a self-assured grade-monger, but I had always approached philosophy as a mostly subjective area, and I totally expected an easy A class I that could craftily apply my bullshitting skills to (thank you IB). That is, I assumed that you could pose whatever claim you wanted, as long as you had a solid argument on the foundations of accurate reasoning. However, many of my claims in every single one of my papers were disputed on the basis of being incorrect, which prompted me to go 'what the fuck, you can't do that!' about a billion times too many. I managed to re-mold my arguments to the ideas which my TA constituted as 'correct' while simultaneously being flabbergasted as to why his slightly reworded arguments were so much more correct than my original ideas, or how the hell he even knew he was correct? Was he puffing some philosophy grad-student magic fountain (dragon) of knowledge that I wasn't aware of yet?
Philosophy is a system of reasoning, though, and a field of study which fully encapsulates Newton's famous and much-used quote about how we have seen farther only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. That is, for anyone who is not writing a PhD thesis in Philosophy, it is taboo (for some reasons more understandable than others, which I will get to later) to challenge, ignore, be ignorant of, or contradict the claims of lauded predecessors who originated great ideas and schools of epistemology (see: everyone we studied in PHIL 1730).
I was watching the NOVA program the other day about string theory and the Theory of Everything; and I was struck by the seemingly vague way in which many of the physicists described their theories and how they came up with these theories (puffing on some magic fountain of knowledge (dragon), I'd have to say, couldn't have hurt). In consensus, they seemed to have been tripping around in their daydreams when they suddenly happened across completely implausible-seeming gems of ideas, which they then scribbled out into a few hundred equations on scraps of napkin, the fabled medium for inspired genius, and lo and behold! They had come up with devastatingly fantastic new theories, which had great implications for everything imaginable and made us all curl up into little balls of existentialism once more (does our vast knowledge only inspire us to be more cynical? Well, only to those of us who partake in this magic fountain of knowledge, or hop upon the back of the dragon train, if you will).
This is a gross oversimplification and misunderstanding of the ways in which theoretical physicists work, but maybe there is a hint of truth to it, because it's just how it was presented in NOVA. (See: it's totally not my fault). Anyhow, going back to the idea of Newton and standing on the shoulders of giants, these modern-day physicists don't actually like Newton all that much anymore, poor profound ginger. This is largely because Newtonian physics doesn't always apply in the throws of outer space. In comes relativity, that concept that it is so hard to wrap your mind around qualitatively, and perhaps harder to remember quantitatively. Modern day physicists stand on the shoulders of one Mr. Albert Einstein, who has never been wrong yet. Even when we thought he was wrong; such as with the neutrinos-traveling-faster-than-the-speed of light scare, it turned out we were wrong. Even when HE thought he was wrong; see: his introduction of the cosmological constant to account for the anomalous expansion of the universe, he was actually right! We later observationally discovered that the universe's waistline was hurtling outwards.
In a system of reasoning such as mathematics, which is indeed the basis of physics, none of these modern-day physicists write papers (at least, none that we hear about much) that contest ideas that their giant, Einstein, formulated. They do not form new 'arguments' that are grassroots-different from Einstein's. Perhaps what I was doing wrong was treating the discipline of Philosophy as a humanities subject, which would indeed render it open to interpretation and analysis much as you would apply to literature, and less as a science, which is now what I perceive it to be. Philosophy is, in fact, at a very unique and truly fundamental juncture between the humanities and the sciences, and as such earns both scorn and fear. I prefer to afford it the latter.
As a system of logic which forms the basis for all literary or historical analysis or the formation of scientific theory, therefore, I think it is important that everyone experiences one Philosophy class in the course of their lifetime, just so they can have the jarring experience I had when I realized that there are in fact concrete provenances and normative ways of reasoning in academia. These are norms that you would be fool to challenge, as stodgy as it makes me sound, because they are universally archetypal and accepted, whether for their tried-and-true nature or for their expediency. The idea is that we as humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and in this time we have realized our ideological consistencies, and clarified and unified them into a set of basic ideas and questions which have been repeated, understood, and accepted. Concretized.
It seems that most modern Philosophical research is not bent on coming up with insane new ethical theories that challenge and incite us, but rather on questioning and tweaking the theories of those who came before us. The few modern philosophers we touched upon in Moral and Political Philosophy such as Nozick or Korsgaard, were working on age-old theories; Utilitarianism and Kantian theory respectively; in order to question the validity of their intricacies and, in Korsgaard's case, present a manner in which Kantian theory might be more palatable and applicable to a human. ;). In the same way, theoretical physicists usually work within a provenance or a school of thought. They can challenge preexisting ideas, contradict previous assumptions, but even this is rare, and to strike out into the wild blue without any basis on the shoulders of giants seems to be pretty unprecedented.
I don't know if this is necessarily the best thing, in all aspects of academia. I have such a rudimentary grasp of fundamentalist subjects like Theoretical Physics and Philosophy that I would not be able to say whether this reliance on predecessors is expedient and good, or entirely narrow-minded and limiting in progress. There is an aspect of our education which makes it necessary that we completely lean on giants. But some of Einstein's most imaginative and unprecedented work was so devastatingly important just because of that: it was unprecedented.
Perhaps there is something to be said about the way we are educated these days, and how it places an even heavier reliance upon the giants of humanity than on personal exploration (because we are so far removed from, say, Aristotle, it is unlikely that in our high schools or universities you will find any students repeating his experiments, though I would argue that this is a much more thorough way to learn the material, and it actually exposes age-old 'facts' to open interrogation). That being said, we are, at large, deviating from a classical education to one more based on innovation. For proof, just look around and note how few schools are teaching ancient languages anymore; you'd be hard-pressed to find a high school that wasn't Catholic and taught Latin. And look at your Ivy League Universities; how many Classics majors are there anymore? I've heard from one previous-generation Harvard grad that many of his peers seemed to be majoring in fields like Classics. But now Engineering, widely considered more innovative, is taking an upper hand as far as educational allocation.
So my conclusion, because the provenances and giants of academic writing tell me I need to have one, is that Philosophy is a subject of fundamentalism. It presents the fundamental archetypal human questions and ideas, structures of reasoning, and argumentation that are used in ALL fields of academia, and perhaps beyond. And this is why I wasn't as successful as I thought I would be in the class I took: I approached each of my papers like literary analysis, because I didn't do debate in high school and frankly, TOK is some bullshit epistemology. And there aren't any sources other than (perhaps) debate that would teach one how to form and present a philosophical argument, or how to break down material that seems subjective, from an objective point of view. Indeed, many times my TA would leave comments on my paper about how my arguments weren't arguments as much as literary analysis to prove that Socrates wasn't making the claim that he claimed to be making (lol) in 'The Apology'. And he'd say that, while this was all very interesting in an English class, in Philosophy you must deal with the ideas of Socrates, which are pretty set in stone as philosophical provenance, and not with the minute details and internal contradictions of his writing or speech.
Philosophy as fundamentalism. Theoretical physics as fundamentalism. Let's think hard about the word fundamentalism, and where we hear it nowadays. Well, Islamic fundamentalism is the first thing that comes to my mind. The news sputters about it with disgust every day, talking about the latest deaths from car bombs and the like.
Islamic fundamentalism as a movement owes a lot to the great thinker and writer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Al-Afghani presented Islam as not merely a religion, perhaps not even a religion at all, but as a philosophy. He thought that Islamic civilization needed to be revived, and that the people of Islam were unique in their power because they possessed Islam. Islam is unique from other religions, even its two closest brothers, because of the Quran's detail in elaborating upon guidelines for every aspect of life: legal issues, domestic matters, governance, etc. And as such, al-Afghani argued, Islam constitutes a philosophy more than a religion. And since Philosophy is a fundamental science, the basis of everything, the unique, empowering philosophies of Islam which are, he argued, bent towards equity and justice by nature, could be applied to Islamic civilization in order to empower the civilization itself. He eloquently argued that philosophy was the basis of interpretation, and that Islam as a philosophy was therefore inherently open to science, technology, and innovation, contrary to popular positioning. He argued that these innovations are useless without a science of ethically interpreting and applying them; and this is where philosophical fundamentalism entered into the picture for him. As a philosophy, therefore, al-Afghani probably would have agreed that Islam is fundamentalist; though certainly not in the connotation of 'fundamentalism' for the masses now, with terror and violence.
Think about the presence of Islamic, Christian, and other forms of fundamentalism in our world today, and tell me it is not meaningful. Although these movements, including Islamic fundamentalism, have deviated greatly from their founding philosophies (which must now be nothing less than unearthed), they exist and they are prominent. This is the power of Philosophy: as a foundation and a scaffolding for any idea that is to be deemed great, in this lifetime or the next.
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