A Metametaphilosophical Remark
Brian Leiter has recently posted a pointer to a collection of photos of philosophers by Steven Pyke, largely taken for use by Oxford University Press. While the photos themselves are gorgeous, Pyke also asked each philosopher to provide a 50 word account of their personal conception of philosophy. Some do not have a remark; many are longer than 50 words; all of them are fascinating.
To me, the take home message of these remarks is that the philosophical enterprise is a very personal one. Every philosopher gets into the discipline for slightly different reasons and these reasons manifest themselves in terms of who they read, how they interpret works, and ultimately in what they publish. These personal differences come out in the remarks.
Ruth Millikan quotes a famous passage from Sellars:
The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
Steven Stich provides a largely naturalistic conception:
The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their "intuition", or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.
Leiter points out that Michael Dummett, John McDowell and Delia Graff Fara hold completely antithetical views. Writes Fara:
By doing philosophy we can discover eternal and mind-independent truths about the real nature of the world by investigating our own conceptions of it, and by subjecting our most commonly or firmly held beliefs to what would otherwise be perversely strict scrutiny.
Arthur Danto emphasizes the historical component of philosophy. Iris Murdoch calls for a revival of moral theory, which has taken a backseat to post-Nietzschean determinism in her view.
Unsurprisingly, Rorty makes note of philosophy in the conversation of mankind (to borrow a phrase from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature):
Just as poetry in English is a conversation between Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, and the rest, so philosophy in the West is a conversation between Parmenides, Plato, Augustine, Hume, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rest. To be a philosopher in our part of the world is to get in on that conversation.
But enough summary; you can read all the comments in the above link.
The point I want to make is this: the variety of these conceptions of philosophy supports the metaphilosophical thesis that philosophy has no distinctive subject matter. If such a subject matter existed, we would expect much more agreement in these remarks than we do in fact see. Obviously this analysis is very far from scientific, but I believe the evidence strong enough to falsify the claim that philosophy does have a distinctive subject matter.
Compare this to mathematics. While many practicing mathematicians are platonists at heart, there would still be some disagreements in their philosophies of math: why they do math, what they believe mathematical objects to be, etc. But mathematicians know mathematics when they see it. There is no dispute whether something is mathematical or not (although I've heard a practicing mathematician describe logicians as "weaving spiderwebs in the basement of a cathedral").
Such is not the case for philosophy. While there are obviously texts that everyone would agree are philosophical, there is no clear demarcation between philosophy and non-philosophy as there is for many other disciplines. Do literary works such as Slaughterhouse Five count? Certainly there are philosophical viewpoints about (among other things) war, politics, and the nature of time. One easy approach would be to adopt a naturalistic criterion, a la Ross and Ladyman on science: philosophy is what gets recognized by journals, departments, etc. This approach, however, will fail for even more reasons than it does in science.
At this point, I am rambling (and may revise the post a bit in the future). I personally find great comfort in Epicurus' conception, quoted by Martha Nussbaum: "Philosophy is an activity that uses reasoning and rigorous argument to promote human flourishing." To me, philosophy is more of a mindset than a discipline: every philosopher I've met has similar dispositions and a similar desire to find answers to big questions. Perhaps this view will change as I encounter more and more philosophy, but let this be a snapshot in time.