Introduction

Perhaps you are reading this book because you're interested in knowing more about how philosophy might be relevant to your life and your understanding of the world around you. Perhaps you are reading this book to help you decide whether to study philosophy more formally; maybe you are wondering which courses to take at university. We firmly believe in the value and interest of philosophy at every stage of every walk of life. Philosophy matters.

Philosophy matters because it seeks and promotes understanding and clear thought and because it is practically helpful, intrinsically interesting, and culturally and historically significant. Those are grand claims, but in this book we'll show you why we think they're true. Philosophy is not the only valuable discipline, of course, and each has its role in the collaborative effort to understand the world, but philosophy has an important and distinctive part to play, as we will see.

As well as being important, philosophy is also misunderstood: it might not be what you think it is. The good news is that philosophy is all around you and there's a strong chance you've asked yourself distinctively philosophical questions already even if you didn't know that's what you were doing. If you've ever asked yourself whether parents should be allowed to demand risky and expensive medical procedures for their children; had a passionate argument about whether Rachmaninoff is really better than Rage Against The Machine; puzzled over how we can tell whether our elected leaders are lying to us for their own gain and whether we should be concerned if they are; wondered whether you can believe that physics tells us how the world really is and also believe in God; speculated about whether we have free will and some measure of control over our actions or are at the mercy of unconscious natural processes - just like when you slip on the ice or the leaves fall from the trees - then you've taken your first steps in philosophy. All of these are philosophical questions and all of them are questions that might occur to you as you make your way about the world.

We can engage with these questions to some extent without any deep knowledge of philosophy. Most people do just that, but it is also possible to engage with them more fruitfully, more fully, and more satisfyingly once you know a bit about the philosophical theories and methods that define the questions and constrain the sorts of answers we can reasonably give. Philosophy allows you to be interested in all the things that already fascinate you but to engage with them more deeply. This is why philosophy matters to you. Once we all engage more deeply with the sorts of questions that face us we can live more richly and we can start to expose the sort of sloppy thinking that works against the smooth running of the world and is used by some people to maintain positions of power and influence over others. This is why philosophy matters to everyone.

There are a variety of fair reasons why you might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick about what philosophy is. Perhaps philosophy wasn't taught at your school; it isn't very widely taught in schools. It is just well enough known in the public imagination for it to have been lampooned, without being well enough understood for the jokes always to be recognized as jokes. It concerns itself with abstract questions that don't always lend themselves to casual conversation.

As a result, you might think that philosophy is just a matter of expressing your opinion, or that it involves sitting around all day wondering whether your chair exists. You might think that philosophy is really just like theology or some other religious pursuit, or that it mostly involves meditation. You might even confuse philosophy with psychology. Historically that's not ridiculous, since psychology started out as a branch of philosophy, though they parted ways more than a century ago now. Or you might think that philosophy is something that was only done a long time in the past or that, though it's still done today, it is only indulged in by people in dusty libraries where they can't do any harm or get in the way.

There is a common usage of the word 'philosophy' that people have in mind when they say things like '"Seize the day", that's my philosophy!' or they ask, 'So what's your philosophy, then?' We can make sense of those uses of the word, but that's not what philosophers mean by it. Philosophers also don't mean the same by 'philosophical' as you might if you reported that someone was being very philosophical about receiving some bad news.

What philosophers do mean by 'philosophy' - and we know this isn't going to be very helpful right now - is just that collection of principles, theories, techniques, methods, and questions that we're hoping to give you a sense of in the rest of this book. It's a collection that is bound by some common themes of rational inquiry, critical reflection, and systematic thought, but its subject matter, as we'll see, is splendidly varied.

What's important to remember is that there is no kind of person with a monopoly on philosophical potential. Look in the mirror: if that's not already a philosopher you're looking at, it's a potential philosopher. Whether you're considering taking up the formal study of philosophy, you're already studying philosophy, or you're just interested to see why these wouldn't be ridiculous things to do, this book is for you.

You might expect a book about philosophy to be chock-full of names of philosophers and lists of their achievements, but we've trimmed that right down here because what is important is seeing how you can take the methods and techniques of philosophy and apply them to things that you care about or are interested in. It's not about people, it's about ideas.

It would be wrong to suggest that only those who study philosophy in a rigorous and managed way are capable of indulging in philosophical thoughts, or that the benefits of philosophy are open only to those people. As we've said, the beginnings of philosophy are already all around you. What is true is that there is a body of knowledge and a collection of systematic methods that it's possible to learn; it's possible to be better or worse at the skills of philosophical reflection and analysis. This isn't a textbook outlining the body of philosophical knowledge, or the history of philosophy from its beginnings in the ancient world, and it isn't a book about one particular great philosophical tradition among those that developed in Greece, India, or China.

At its root, philosophy is about the systematic understanding of our ideas and the logical assessment of our arguments. It encourages serious reflection, rigorous thought, and the clear expression of sometimes complex and difficult ideas. If we want our lives to be intelligible, if we want to discuss and debate coherently with other people about questions across the wide range of issues we've already mentioned and more, we need to be able to be confident that the terms and concepts we employ in these conversations are themselves coherent and that we don't accidentally contradict ourselves or talk past each other. Some of these terms have a clear impact on very important social questions. If we do not try to clarify what the terms 'right' and 'wrong' mean, we cannot understand what is going on in a debate about whether a proposed invasion of another country is right or wrong, or whether it is right or wrong to provide a publicly funded service allowing people to choose to die by euthanasia. If we do not critically assess what makes something a work of art, we cannot fully judge, compare, or appreciate some of the most important contributions made to civilization by some of our finest minds.

Or to take another example: we usually assume that we have free will. Perhaps you've never explicitly thought about that, but it's an assumption in the background whenever we deliberate over important decisions, or spend time planning what to have for dinner. We think we can make genuine choices, and we tend to assume that this involves being able, prior to choosing, to go either way. It turns out that reconciling this belief with other philosophical and scientific ideas that seem plausible is surprisingly difficult.

Doing justice to our intuitive beliefs about the world whilst at the same time doing justice to our scientific understanding; deciding how to modify our political inclinations in the light of our ethical commitments; understanding the difference between belief and knowledge to help us decide which ideas to commit ourselves to: all these, and more, are philosophical questions.

As we've said, the importance of these activities is not confined to the formal study of philosophy, but one of the things a formal study of philosophy can give you is an expertise in and a familiarity with a set of techniques, strategies, and intellectual tools that can be developed and honed and which can positively inform discussion and debate in many different arenas.

The chapters in this book take a series of general themes - aspects of our lives or the world around us that we might want to try to understand more fully - and explain how philosophy can contribute...