In Part One of The Examined Life (Radford, 1989) I recalled certain episodes from my childhood and youth in which, as I came to realize later, I had been exercised by a philosophical problem. By so doing I hoped not only to convey to non-professionals what philosophy is—or is like—but to show them that they too were philosophers, i.e., had been exercised by philosophical questions. In Part Two I gave some examples of how such problems may be treated by a professional, in articles.

The impulse to philosophy is often provided by leprechauns, mischievous little sprites who lurk at the end of fine chains of reasoning and make trouble. They delight in absurdity and paradox, and are especially happy to help ambitious thinkers dig their own graves. Philosophers spend much of their lives trying to put a stop to leprechauns or fencing them out with the aid of reason. But in truth the relationship is symbiotic. If a realm of thought can be made fully coherent, there is no work for philosophers to do in it. Science is the obvious case but the remark applies, paradoxically, to philosophy itself. A philosopher who solved all the problems of philosophy would be about as popular as a huntsman who shot the fox or a theologian who proved the existence of God. Luckily there is no serious risk. At least on the view of philosophy to be taken here, there will always be leprechauns to keep us busy.

My title is intended to recall a well-known aphorism about philosophy, which runs something like this:

When a clergyman loses his faith he abandons his calling. When a philosopher loses his he redefines his subject.

There is probably a correct version of this aphorism somewhere and an author to whose intentions what follows will do less than justice. I want to pick it up much as a composer might pick up a dimly remembered melody and I am going to develop it and produce my own variation on it. My topic is not centrally about loss of faith as generally understood, though it is centrally about the changing definitions of philosophy. My concern is with at least some of the reasons people have for doing philosophy and, in particular, about how their motives for doing philosophy connect with what philosophers think their subject is. My hope is that some light is thrown on this question by considering cases where people have changed their conception of philosophy–where, in other words, they have redefined their subject.

We have the idea that philosophy is an unemotional way of considering human knowledge and testing its reliable logics. Is it not an essentially impersonal attempt to discover abiding truths and their orderly, more or less necessary, connection? The philosophers we are incited to respect are those whose logic is least susceptible to charges of idiosyncrasy and whose arguments are clean of rhetoric. When Russell remarked ‘the worse the logic, the more interesting the results,’ was he not warning us against looking to him for entertaining theories or pyrotechnic display? Flashiness, we were intended to gather, is not a happy method in philosophy; the brightest are those who are not ashamed to be dull; our passion is best reserved for the dispassionate. Roughly speaking, one gathers, all philosophical objects are colourless.

Some people think that the impulse to philosophise begins in early childhood: Gareth Matthews, for instance, in his Philosophy and the Young Child (1980). His book begins ‘TIM (about six years), while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’” ‘Tim's puzzle,’ he tells us, ‘is quintessentially philosophical. Tim has framed a question that calls into doubt a very ordinary notion (being awake) in such a way as to make us wonder whether we really know something that most of us unquestioningly assume we know.’

The various ‘impulses to philosophy’ which are the subject of this series of lectures, include a fascination with the general process of reasoning and argument—with the ‘game of logic’. We are all aware of the importance of reasoning in our lives and how difficult it can be to tell ‘good’ reasoning from ‘bad’.

Sometimes when artists talk about painting one finds what they have to say interesting: because they are talking about something they have lived with, something in which they find meaning. At other times one feels that it would be better for them to paint rather than talk about painting.

I take the phrase ‘congenital transcendentalism’ from Santayana who defined it as ‘the spontaneous feeling that life is a dream’. ‘The loneliness which is the truth about things’ is a phrase of Virginia Woolf's. The thesis I will advance is that many expressions of doubt or denial of the shareable world are self-misunderstood manifestations of the state indicated by Woolf's expression. But the loneliness of which Woolf speaks must not be construed as the kind of loneliness which can be assuaged by family, friends, lovers or company. Nor is it the loneliness which a convinced solipsist might experience. It is rather the loneliness of ‘that “I” and that “life of mine'” which is ‘untouched whichever way the issue is decided whether the world is or is not’ (Husserl, 1970, 9.)

Is philosophy like plumbing? I have made this comparison a number of times when I have wanted to stress that philosophising is not just grand and elegant and difficult, but is also needed. It is not optional. The idea has caused mild surprise, and has sometimes been thought rather undignified. The question of dignity is a very interesting one, and I shall come back to it at the end of this article. But first, I would like to work the comparison out a bit more fully.

So stellt der satz den Sachverhalt gleichsam auf eigene Faust dar.

Foreword. Towards the end of this paper I refer to the work of A. J. Smith who died suddenly on 11 December 1991. His last book, Metaphysical Wit, was published in January 1992 by Cambridge University Press. I would like this paper to be thought of as a small tribute to the man and his work.

Until I was five I shared a bed with my sister, 3½ years older than me. After our parents had switched out the light we would chatter away in the darkness until we fell asleep. But I could never afterwards remember falling asleep. It was always the same: one moment I was talking to my sister in the dark, and the next I was waking up in a sunlit room having been asleep all night. Yet every night there must have come a time when I stopped talking and settled down to sleep. It was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience that, and never remembered it.

In a once-famous article, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language’, first published in 1932, Rudolf Carnap (1959) wrote:

The harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the music of Mozart. And when a metaphysician gives verbal expression to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this attitude in an adequate medium? Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.

Philosophy, as I conceive it, is a journey and a quest. Conducted individually, it is nevertheless a collective attempt on the part of human beings from differing cultures and times to make sense of the arbitrary contingency of human existence, to find meaning in life. So understood, the impulse to philosophise needs no explanation or apology. It belongs to us all, and it exerts its own categorical imperative. Here I may quote the words of a wise woman, an invented contributor to this debate, who spoke of the common mind, the common store of wisdom which has the power to outlast the individual. ‘For this’, she said, ‘is what philosophy is: not an esoteric discipline, but the common endeavour of the human race to understand and come to terms with its own perilous, fragile and ultimately ephemeral existence’ (Almond, 1990, 185).

When Wittgenstein moved from Manchester to Cambridge he was following a path from the study of the natural sciences to the study of philosophy which was then not unusual, and has since become increasingly common. Russell had preceded him in that intellectual emigration and many more were to follow. Of the three philosophy departments I have been in, two were headed by natural scientists (and the third by an historian). Both my research supervisors in philosophy were natural scientists (as I was myself). Less surprising, but still significant, a considerable proportion of Presidents of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science were originally trained as natural scientists. Yet it is a subject still unrecognized by the Royal Society. The editors of both the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and the journal Analysis were both originally natural scientists. Eminent scientists seem to feel impelled to discuss there own subjects in a wider context of philosophy. Bohr, Schrodinger, Kilmister, Hoyle, Hawking and Penrose, are but a few from a long list.