Philosophical Problems
Early Philosophy
The tradition of western philosophy began around 2,600 years ago when a few people who lived near the Mediterranean started devoting their lives to such questions.1 They would discuss life’s big questions in public spaces and at private parties. Schools of philosophy were founded so that people could explore questions together, share their understanding, and pass on their methods of enquiry.
The range of topics explored grew and grew. 2,400 years ago, Aristotle wrote about logic, ethics, politics, public speaking, literature, physics, biology, astronomy, and the nature of knowledge. His teachings were so influential that they were barely questioned for nearly two millennia.2
From Philosophy to Science
When Aristotle was investigating matters of biology, physics or astronomy, he would observe the phenomena he was exploring as carefully as he could. A few philosophers who followed in his wake rooted their thinking in observation too. But around the year 1600, people began using observation in a new way. They would actively try to disprove their own favourite ideas. Communities of investigators could use the rigours of experimentation to differentiate between the ideas that captured reality successfully and the seductive ideas that didn’t.
As this ‘natural philosophy’ evolved, it morphed into ‘science’. Investigators developed new ways to capture the complex patterns that their observations revealed. Whereas Aristotle had used simple words to describe motion — faster, slower, pushing, pulling, pushing together, pushing apart, carrying, rotating, combining and separating3 — Newton used mathematics to model movement. He had come across Descartes’ revolutionary new ‘analytical geometry’, which used numerical coordinates to describe the position of a point in space. He developed integral calculus to work with the coordinates and, combining this approach with concepts such as force and his three laws of motion, he was able to describe how objects move through space with an uncanny predictive power. Everything could be calculated, from the trajectory of a bullet to the orbit of a planet, or even the trajectories a spacecraft might follow to take people to the moon.
Universities and governments began funding science and people worked out how to apply scientific methods to an ever wider range of phenomena. Anything that was observable and repeatable entered the remit of science.
The Leftovers
For all science’s power, there are questions people like to ponder that it is unable to tackle. It has no methodology for handling one-off events or the idiosyncrasies of individual lives. Nor can it cope with questions that probe beyond the objective and observable and ask about what is good, or right, or valuable.
Increasingly, the people who devoted their lives to philosophy were employed by universities. They left the questions of natural philosophy to their colleagues in the science faculties and focused on the conundrums that were left. As Bertrand Russell put it in 1912, “those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy”.4
It is unclear what progress, if any, philosophers made with the residue questions they worked on. As the philosopher A J Ayer wrote, “Problems which were raised by Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BC are still discussed, and the work of all the intervening centuries has brought us no nearer to finding a solution of them which even a majority of contemporary philosophers would accept.”5
The Problem with Theory
Ludwig Wittgenstein was an exceptional philosopher who worked in the first half of the 20th century. He came to believe that philosophy’s lack of progress stemmed from philosophers having a fundamental misconception of their discipline.
Academic philosophers devise theories and write articles for peer-reviewed journals as if they were trying to find answers to scientific questions. They develop new theories and build on the theories of other philosophers. But, Wittgenstein realised, these theories aren’t about anything specific. They’re not about what is the case within the world. So they can’t gain validity from describing reality successfully. Nor can they have the validity of mathematics and logic, which deal purely with the abstract realm of self-consistent thought. So constructing philosophical theories is a profoundly nonsensical activity. There is nothing that it can achieve.
Yet Wittgenstein still felt a compulsion to ask philosophical questions. He was still vexed by a need for further clarity about some of philosophy’s most fundamental issues.
A New Approach
When a person searches for answers to a philosophical question but is unable to find a satisfying answer, they run up against a philosophical problem. Something seems amiss, either in their understanding of the world or in the world itself. They become uncomfortable. They get an urge to think and explore until a satisfactory answer appears.
Wittgenstein saw that an entirely different approach to philosophy was possible. The traditional way to dispel philosophical problems was to try to devise philosophical theories that a consensus would accept as correct. Wittgenstein saw that, though this couldn’t work, the philosophical problems could instead be dissolved. Ways could be found to see the relevant parts of the territory of philosophy where everything made sense and nothing problematic appeared.
Wittgenstein started to see his philosophical mission as working towards the dissolution of all the problems of philosophy. In his own words, “The clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.”6
If all philosophical problems were dissolved, we could examine any aspect of life and no sense of the philosophically problematic would appear. We’d be comfortable with the world as it revealed itself to be, with our knowledge of the world, and with our understanding of how we should act within it.
Building On Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein died in 1951. Since then, it has become far easier to put together perspectives that are relevant to philosophical questions. We now have ready access to countless fields of scientific knowledge and to the insights of people from many cultures and many disciplines.
It’s now become possible to build upon Wittgenstein’s work by defining three distinct families of problems and, for each family of problem, showing how problems of that type can be dissolved. Each family is made up of problems that overlap or that have traits in common.7
Each requires a different method of dissolution.
First-family problems
These problems can appear when we ask about what the world is like or about how we can be confident in our knowledge of the world.
They dissolve when we accept that the relationship between idea and reality works fine, within limits.
Second-family problems
These problems appear when we look at the world through the lens of fixed ideas and get stuck in an incoherent pattern of thinking.
They dissolve when we realise that they aren’t genuine problems after all, merely paradoxes, and that we can simply put the unhelpful lenses aside and search for better ways to understand the world.
Third-family problems
These problems spring from concerns about how we ought to live and related matters such as value, purpose and duty.
They dissolve when we stop looking for general answers — rules and principles that would apply to any person in any situation — and instead focus on how an investigation that explores specifics can give people the clarity they seek.
- Thales of Miletus, who was philosophising around 600BC, is often considered the first philosopher in the Western tradition. This is what Aristotle said of him, “Thales, the introducer of this sort of philosophy, said that [the principle from which other things arose] was water (that is why he declared the earth to be sitting on water), perhaps drawing this supposition from seeing that the nourishment of all creatures is moist, and that warmth itself arises from this, and that it is by this that all creatures live (and the assumption that that from which a thing comes is its principle in all cases).” Aristotle, Metaphysics: Book Alpha, London: Penguin, 1998, 983b.
- “Until the end of the 17th century, Western culture was Aristotelian.” The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, 2002, p. 55.
- Aristotle, Physics, VI:2 (a25 - a33) and VII:2 (a15 - b7)
- Bertrand Russell, The Problems Of Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 90. (First published in 1912)
- A J Ayer, Philosophical in the Twentieth Century, London: Unwin, 1990, p. 1-2.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, §133.
- “I can think of no better expression to characterise these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family a build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth a overlap and criss-cross in the same way.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, §67.