How to Do Philosophy

September 2007

In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college.
I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the
less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job
training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively
impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes
or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms
of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion.

But I had some more honest motives as well. I thought studying
philosophy would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. All the people
majoring in other things would just end up with a bunch of domain
knowledge. I would be learning what was really what.

I'd tried to read a few philosophy books. Not recent ones; you
wouldn't find those in our high school library. But I tried to
read Plato and Aristotle. I doubt I believed I understood them,
but they sounded like they were talking about something important.
I assumed I'd learn what in college.

The summer before senior year I took some college classes. I learned
a lot in the calculus class, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy
101. And yet my plan to study philosophy remained intact. It was
my fault I hadn't learned anything. I hadn't read the books we
were assigned carefully enough. I'd give Berkeley's Principles
of Human Knowledge another shot in college. Anything so admired
and so difficult to read must have something in it, if one could
only figure out what.

Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. I have
a nice edition of his collected works. Will I ever read it? Seems
unlikely.

The difference between then and now is that now I understand why
Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. I think I see
now what went wrong with philosophy, and how we might fix it.

Words

I did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. It
didn't work out as I'd hoped. I didn't learn any magical truths
compared to which everything else was mere domain knowledge. But
I do at least know now why I didn't. Philosophy doesn't really
have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other
university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must
master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various
individual philosophers have said about different topics over the
years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten
who discovered what they discovered.

Formal logic has some subject matter. I took several classes in
logic. I don't know if I learned anything from them.
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