Introduction

At some stage in their lives, most thoughtful people wonder about philosophical problems. Can one arrive at adulthood without questioning whether God exists, whether there is life after death, or what our existence on earth is good for? A reflective young adult can hardly fail to ask whether human life has a purpose, and if so, what it is, or to query what a good life is and how it should be lived. Many people are liable, at some time or other, to wonder what truth is, and if they succumb to the deceptive appeal of the excesses of postmodernism, they may take perverse comfort in thinking that there is no absolute truth, only your truth and my truth and the truth of the ruling classes. We are singularly ill-equipped to handle such deep questions and to confront such dogmatic and intellectually pernicious relativism without assistance.

Great philosophers throughout the ages have struggled with them. It is not the purpose of this short book to give an account of their struggles. Such accounts are to be found in fine histories of philosophy such as Anthony Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy. The great philosophers of the past adopted a wide variety of methods of philosophical enquiry. These different methods have been well surveyed in numerous publications and another such survey will not be essayed here, even though this is a book concerned with methodology. Indeed, it is written to advocate a particular method or interconnected set of methods for solving, resolving, or dissolving problems in philosophy. But it is a method or methods altogether distinct from the those practiced in most current university departments. This book presupposes little philosophical knowledge, but only curiosity and an open mind. It demands only a willingness to learn not doctrine but method, and the courage to suspend judgement and to challenge received ideas.

Given that we are going to be deeply concerned with method in philosophical enquiry, it might seem that we should start our investigations with a brief and uncontroversial statement of what philosophy is, as one might start a book on methodology in biochemistry with a clear, brief characterization of what exactly biochemistry is. But to try to characterize philosophical problems on the first page of a book concerned with philosophical method would be to rush in prematurely, leaving the angels behind. There are few problems more controversial in philosophy than the problem of what precisely philosophy is and what exactly a philosophical problem is. That itself is an interesting fact, for no other academic subject suffers from such omphaloskepsis (navel-gazing). Physicists do not write lengthy and controversial papers on what physics is. Chemists and biologists do not write passion-provoking books on what chemistry or biology are. Nor do economists or experimental psychologists quarrel over what their subject is, as opposed to how to do it. But what philosophy is, is a perennial philosophical problem. It will not be confronted now, although by the end of this book something of an answer will have emerged.

My purpose in this book is not only to try, by considered argument, to demonstrate to readers what they should think on some deep philosophical problems, but also to show them how they should think productively. Indeed, my intent is to do the former by means of the latter. I have selected fifteen perennial philosophical topics for scrutiny (Essays 1-15). Many alternatives might well have been chosen, but these struck me as particularly revealing. They should be of concern to any thinking person, and the results of the methods of enquiry are often both striking and unexpected. The essays fall into three groups: (i) the nature of the mind, the mind/body problem and the nature of consciousness, our knowledge of other people; (ii) epistemological problems concerning knowledge, belief, memory, imagination, thinking and dreaming; (iii) the roots of value, the nature of moral goodness, and the differentiation between the bad, the wicked, and the evil; and so as not to end on so grim a subject: the characterization of human happiness.

Each of these essays (with the exception of the one on dreaming) gives a highly compressed overview (between 11 and 13 pages) of a very much longer and far more comprehensive discussion of these topics in a tetralogy on human nature that I published with Wiley/Blackwell between 2007 and 2021: Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (2007), The Intellectual Powers (2013), The Passions (2018), and The Moral Powers (2021). My purpose in the tetralogy was to provide a comprehensive survey of all the characterizing conceptual connections of the salient features of human nature that I had come across in fifty years of philosophical study. It was intended to be, among other things, a repository of logico-grammatical truths pertinent to the philosophical investigation of human nature (what Kant called 'philosophical anthropology' and the British called 'the moral sciences'). For it seemed to me absurd that these should be lost from generation to generation and have to be laboriously discovered afresh. To be sure, philosophy is not a progressive subject: there are advances and regresses, but that does not mean that we cannot salvage enduring insights from the wreckage and pass them on to future generations. The tetralogy employed the methods I had learnt from my betters and from decades of study and writing, but it was not a treatise on method. It was a treatise on human nature.

This short book, however, is a treatise on method. But method before practice is like recipes before dinner. The strategy of the book is to display the methods in practice before examining the theory of the practice. But as the various logico-linguistic techniques are employed in the essays, their use and the fruitfulness of their use are recurrently emphasized. There is a degree of deliberate repetition in the methodological comments - one cannot teach a technique, such as playing the piano, without reiteration. A comprehensive overview and systematic defence of the methods of connective, contrastive, and contextual analysis is given only in the long concluding Essay 16. There, criticisms are rebutted, misconstruals are corrected, and misunderstandings are clarified.

It will quickly be noticed that this book lacks all the usual critical apparatus characteristic of academia. There are hardly any footnotes sprouting at the bottom of the page, very few contemporary philosophers are mentioned and fewer still are explicitly confronted in the thrust and riposte of debate. This is no coincidence. Everything has been pared away in the interests of clarity of ideas and transparency of argument. Who actually holds the ideas among our contemporaries and how many variations on a given idea can be found in what goes by the name of the 'literature' is of little moment for my purposes. What matters are the ideas, perspicuously displayed. Any competent philosopher can build yet more epicycles on erroneous orbits of misplaced planets - but these are of mere scholastic, not substantive, interest. Similarly, who advances a given misguided argument in the bustle of today's philosophical bourse is irrelevant to the display of its invalidity or inadequacy in a book on methodology (a Prioritätstreit [priority dispute] over truth may be forgivable, but surely not over error). One consequence of this economy of expression is that the discussions are often extremely condensed. Each essay should be read slowly and more than once.

The methods advocated are at odds with much philosophical practice in the Anglophone world today. It is perhaps an exaggeration to assert that contemporary students of philosophy, both undergraduates and graduates, are instructed to approach any given philosophical problem by reading the last decade of journal publications that discuss it, and perhaps a handful of chapters or extracts from current books. But it is not far from the truth, as is exhibited in current philosophical journals, companions to philosophy and philosophical handbooks, Wikipedia, and encyclopedias of the Internet beloved by students of philosophy and philosophical journalists. Are these not the official repositories of human knowledge in the twenty-first century? This popular pedagogic principle of economy of effort is not arbitrary, only parochial, cleaving to passing fashions that will be obsolete within a decade or two. It is based on the natural sciences, the general form of which is progress. No physicist is likely to be told to read Galileo or Copernicus for an essay, and no biologist is instructed to read Galen or Vesalius for a tutorial. Teamwork, led by a powerful professoriate, with incessant bureaucratic demands for immediate research results characterizes contemporary methods of scientific research at universities. Following this example is eroding philosophical excellence in the academy.

The pedagogical emulation of the sciences in philosophical method guarantees:

1. the domination of current philosophical doctrines and the reinforcing of current preconceptions and prejudices
2. proliferation of -isms and -ists
3. the relative neglect of twenty-five centuries of struggle by philosophers of genius with problems many of which differ but little from those with which we currently engage.
4. the assimilation into philosophy of methods of research alien to the nature of the subject and inimical to the achievement of its intellectual goals - no matter how satisfactory for...