Professional
Responsibility
Mediations on Philosophy
What Is Philosophy?
"Philosophy is not an answer to anything.
Nor, on the other hand, is it merely the technique of asking questions
and criticizing assumptions. Philosophy is not clever. It is not cold.
It is not angry. Yet it is disturbing, troubling. Moreover, the trouble
it brings will never disappear, will never have an end. Why? Because no
sooner does a man remember than he immediately forgets. Therefore, over
and over again, he must be reminded--and such reminders are not always
pleasant." [Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy 4-5 (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1982)]
"[Philosophy is] a way of contemplating,
examining, or thinking about what is taken to be significant, valuable,
beautiful, worthy of commitment." [Maxine Green,
Teacher as Stranger 7 (1973)]
"To do philosophy is to explore one's
own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth."
[Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good 46 (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1970)]
"We can determine the nature of philosophy
only by actually experiencing it." [Karl Jaspers,
Way to Wisdom 13 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951)]
"What is characteristic of philosophy
is the piercing of that dead crust of tradition and convention, the breaking
of those fetters which bind us to inherited preconceptions, so as to attain
a new and broader way of looking at things. It has always been felt that
philosophy should reveal to us what is hidden." [Friedrich
Waismann, quoted in Charles Frankel, The Pleasures of Philosophy 299 (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1972)]
"[T]he role of metaphysical inquiry is
to uncover the patterns and assumptions underlying our own outlook on
the world, testing them for adequacy and coherence and, if necessary,
devising new categories, models and conceptual schemes to serve us better.
. . . It [metaphysical inquiry] becomes a kind of self-critical assessment
of our own habitual ways of looking at the world and of classifying and
organizing experience." [Roberto Mangabeira Unger,
Law in Modern Society 38 (New York: Free Press, 1976)]
"Philosophy is an attitude of mind towards
doctrines ignorantly entertained. . . . [Philosophy] reverses the slow
descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace." [Alfred
North Whitehead, Modes of Thought 171, 174 (New York: Free Press, 1968)]
"No tidy barrier can enclose moral philosophy.
Its proper autonomy is not a matter of detachment from other ways of thinking,
or of restriction to a few special abstract areas. Instead, like other
enquiries, it gains its individuality from a special kind of interest,
which dictates its own suitable methods--a peculiar determination to take
conflicts seriously and try to resolve them by putting them in their wider
context and consider (as Plato put it) 'how to live,' as a whole. The
more narrowly philosophical question, 'how we ought to think about how
we ought to live,' is only an aspect of the first question, since thought
is an aspect of life. The question as a whole is one for everybody. .
. ." [Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder:
What is Knowledge For? 59 (New York: Routledge, 1991)]
