What is Philosophy?
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
April 13, 2026 · Episode 35 · 24:45
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/what-is-philosophy/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today I have for you the first in a three-part series answering the question, what is philosophy? That's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the files. Super delighted here to be able to address this question, what is philosophy? I've been doing philosophy here on the files for I don't know, multiple months now off and on with other topics of course, but uh philosophy is kind of what I do and what I enjoy doing and um and so being able to address the question, what is philosophy, is near and dear to my heart and I think it's going to help us go forward together.

I am planning a deep dive into many, many philosophical topics in the coming year here. And so I'm kind of looking at this series, this tripartite series of three of three lectures as a ground clearing and a clarification and and really setting the stage for the many, many lectures to follow this year. So if you're tracking with me, you're going to be able to see a development. I'll be referring back to these themes that we've discussed in these lectures many, many times in the coming year. And so that interests you, you're going to listen closely. What I have for you in these series of three lectures were three lectures I delivered, oh, I don't remember, maybe maybe 5 years ago. I've lost track of time on exactly when these were made, but my position on these issues hasn't changed. And so, that's hopefully that's going to be super helpful to you. Now, in terms of today's lecture, the big takeaway here is the definition of philosophy itself.

We're going to explore a variety of definitions that have been given through the ages. And that creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. But, in that cognitive dissonance, I am going to share with you a definition of philosophy that's so simple, so clear, once you hear it, no other definition of philosophy will ever resonate with truth with you. I mean, that's a little bit of an overstatement. All the definitions I'm going to share here and issues that we discuss here will resonate in some way, but this one is so good, so clear, that once you hear it, you really can't fail to remember it. It's that good.

And so, from that starting point, the next lectures will carry on and sort of develop that definition of philosophy. And I think it's very illustrative. It's going to be very helpful to you as we continue this trajectory of raising some big questions and answering them philosophically along the way. So, without further ado, let's go ahead and roll the first lecture answering the question, what is philosophy? Hi, I'm Dr. Chris L. Firestone, professor of philosophy. And this is the first of three lectures answering the question, what is philosophy?

I'm excited to jump into this topic because it is a entry-level topic, and yet philosophy is really important. We're seeing that in contemporary culture today as various philosophies vie for the public spaces and in intellectual marketplace of ideas, you might say. And so philosophy, although under siege in the last 100 years in some ways, has become even more important in the 21st century. Well, when I raise the question what is philosophy or I ask a student, "What do you think of when you encounter somebody who maybe another student who says they're a philosophy major?" I get all sorts of answers to that question. Some of the first ones I get are the etymology, right?

Uh phileo meaning love or brotherly love and sophia, of course, meaning wisdom. And philosophy is the love of wisdom. Well, that's the uh sort of dictionary answers. Like when you look up philosophy, you get certain terms, you get certain definitions. This goes back in a circle. And um doesn't really get us all that far. Yes, philosophy is the love of wisdom and we would really have to do a study of the term wisdom uh to take us any further with that question or that definition. More commonly, a student will say a philosopher is a deep thinker. I get that a lot in classes. Philosophy is involves deep thinking.

And certainly does involve deep thinking. I know in writing a number of my books, it's taken what I thought was going to take months ended up taking years. And um and it's it's about writing and rewriting. It's about conversing and and arguing and then recomputing and reformulating your arguments and so forth. Um involves a lot of deep thinking. No doubt about that.

But deep thinking, of course, is not unique to philosophy. Anybody who has made a difference in any field is a deep thinker. Scientists, let's say Albert Einstein or pastor theologians like Martin Luther King, um they're deep thinkers. Uh they need to be deep thinkers in order to make a difference in their respective fields. So deep thinking itself is not a you know, unique to philosophy even though it it is certainly a characteristic of philosophers generally speaking. Uh another answer I often times will get is it's the field of many questions. Philosophers just ask questions. It's you can't really even say anything without them hair splitting and asking more questions.

And of course there's a uh there's a degree of truth to this as well. Philosophy is about asking questions, not standing pat with the answers that we've been given. Um uh I some basic assumptions we make about the world can always be questioned. You know, I remember uh reading uh Bertrand Russell's book on the problems of philosophy and he talked about um observing a table. And you know, you might observe the table if you're not being philosophical and say, "Well, it's about 3 ft tall, it's rectangular, made out of wood, and uh maybe it's gray in color."

And then Bertrand Russell does an analysis of those and he says, "Well, there's really not an angle that he can come up with where the table's actually rectangular and it certainly is not gray, it's multicolored depending on lighting conditions and so forth." And he asks all sorts of questions that trouble us because it makes our common sense approach to the world seem problematic. So philosophy is about asking many questions. But again, that's not unique to philosophy. I think people are being philosophical in other fields when they're asking questions. They're not accepting the status quo answers and so forth. But it's not necessarily unique or or or definitive of philosophy as such.

Um the other I think assumption that I often times will hear from students is that philosophy is a field with no definite answers. Like you know, you get ask a different philosopher, you get a different answer. There's no definite answers. It's like um I think Stephen Fry, the uh the the actor once said it's like trying to grab a a wet salmon, you know, as soon as you think you got it, it squirts away. Um and uh you know, there's no there's nowhere you can go, you know, where you can land on an answer we can all agree upon. And I would suggest to you that that's simply false. Anybody who's done philosophy for some time realizes the problem is really quite the opposite. The problem is not that there are no definite answers. The problem is that there's too many definite answers.

There's too many perspectives from which to view something. And when we get a a unified set of answers to some question, that breaks off into another field of inquiry and it's no longer under the purview of philosophy. The problem with philosophy, anybody who's done philosophy knows this, is that you can see it from you can see the question and look at the answers from many different perspectives and uh often times they're true. But the question is are they meaningfully true? Do they give us perspective on which we can live our lives? Do they really answer uh important questions or are they somewhat trivial questions and so forth?

So the problem I as I would put is that it's not that there are no definite answers. The problem is there are too many definite answers and what we really aspire to do in philosophy is to consolidate them into some kind of optimal answer, some meaningful answer, something that can help us to live our lives better. Okay. Well, those are a few of the misnomers about philosophy or philosophers um that I often times hear. Where do we go to begin to formulate the actual contours of what philosophy is?

Well, one of the things I always do in my classes is to look to the ancients, you know, so sometimes you don't have to reinvent the wheel in order to make some headway on a question and and it's often times better to read up first than it is to try to formulate something for yourself. So, I'm going to take a brief look here with you at the three great Greek philosophers, sometimes called the gang of three, uh Socrates, his disciple Plato, and then his disciple Aristotle. Now, Socrates famously um argues that uh philosophy is something like the intentional process to come to self-knowledge. It's well-known that the Oracle at Delphi had up on the up above the doorway um know thyself.

And Socrates was all about searching into himself and to other men, which is what he calls the philosopher's mission. So, if you uh read the apology, Socrates defines the philosopher's mission as searching into myself and other men. You have probably also heard the definition of you know, not definition, but the statement, if you will, um the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, you can go through life doing the motions, right? Just uh time can go by. I don't know if you've ever driven on the highway. Sometimes you go into a zone and you like an hour or 2 hours can pass and you can have no cognitive remembrance, if you will, of the the the vast stretch of roadway that you've just driven through.

If you've had that experience, you kind of have the experience that Socrates is kind of warning us about that we could go through our whole lives without really knowing ourselves, without having that conversation with ourselves to figure out who we are and what our purpose is in the world. And Socrates thinks that if you go through life that way, well, what's the point? Well, his disciple Play Plato now, if you know anything about Socrates and Plato, you know it's a little bit difficult to determine where Socrates ends and Plato begins and the reason is Socrates uh has no existing writings.

The only thing we know about Socrates really is what Plato tells us about Socrates and of course Plato's own philosophy comes through the mouthpiece of Socrates. But scholars think that they can determine somewhat, at least, probably do a whole PhD on this, where Socrates ends and Plato begins. But clearly Plato is what uh what you'd call an idealist. And that is philosophy's primary role is to discover um ultimate reality or absolute truth. The Greeks were very much aware. This goes all the way back to pre-Socratics like Heraclitus, for example, that what's here today is gone tomorrow. And Heraclitus was famous for saying, um you can't step into the same river twice. And all of the Greeks had a heightened sense of awareness that a major question of philosophy is what is permanent when all else fades away and things will fade away. What remains? What is fundamental? What is simple? What is basic to the universe?

And Plato, of course, lands on the notion of the universal realm of forms where ideas are ultimately real and so forth. My point isn't necessarily to land with Plato or to talk about his metaphysics, but my point is to talk about the nature of philosophy. For Plato, philosophy is all about trying to figure out what is permanent. What remains when all else fades away, and he thinks that's a primary task of philosophy. And of course, that resonates throughout the history of philosophy, throughout the whole period with metaphysics as first philosophy.

His disciple Aristotle comes along and says, "No, philosophy is really about moving from that state of wonder in the recognition of ignorance, which is something that's Socrates and Plato had taught to Aristotle, moving from that recognition of ignorance to find out the basic principles on which the universe is governed." And so, it's moving from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, if you will. So, at least often times thought of as the first scientist in the ancient Greek world. So, here, very early on in the earliest stages of the birth of the university and the birth of philosophy in the Western intellectual tradition, we have three different takes.

Who am I or what is my purpose in the world as a fundamental task of philosophy for Socrates? What is the nature of ultimate reality, which is a definition what you may call metaphysics, is the nature of the fundamental task of philosophy, or it's finding its fundamental causes or principles, that those things on which the universe is based and that kind of govern the happenings in the universe. And so, we have these these general approaches to the nature of philosophy that emerged from the ancient world.

Well, if we fast forward that, let's say to the 20th century, 21st century, we get some different perspectives on philosophy and part of that has to do with all that intervening period. And philosophy in attempting to address these questions actually does solve some of these uh problems and breaks off into other disciplines. So, when the university was born and Christianity comes on the scene, uh philosophy begins to separate into other fields. And uh by the 19th and 20th centuries, we have a different situation for philosophy.

So, what I want to do here in this introductory video is kind of bookend philosophy and then the next uh in the next uh um lecture, we will look at some of the specific historical understandings of philosophy with an attempt to land on a definition of philosophy and then we'll we'll look at uh some of its specific parts of philosophy today. So, let's fast forward for a moment. We'll bookend our historical analysis and we'll go back to it in lecture two and then try to wrap things up in lecture three. Uh so, um we have uh different understanding different definitions of philosophy. One of the definitions that I remember is Henry Sidgwick from uh Cambridge University.

He says that a philosopher's task is to coordinate the most important general notions and fundamental principles of the various sciences. You see, by the time we get to the 20th century, philosophy is broken into a whole set of other fields. And so, we see uh you know, uh in the late, let's say, 16th, 17th century, we have basically philosophy, theology, medicine. That's pretty much the university.

But by the time we get to the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, philosophy has broken into a variety of sciences from mathematics, you know, to chemistry, to psychology, and other fields. Um And by the time we get to the 20th century, Henry Sidgwick says, "Look, we philosophy has in a sense um morphed or broken into um a variety of different fields, and those fields are now sort of self-sustaining. And the philosopher's job is something like a referee today. That is they want to make sure that all the various disciplines are playing fair in the sandbox, as it were.

And so philosophy's main role in the 20th, 21st centuries will be kind of like a referee in a game, not really participating per se, but he's making sure that they're grounded, they're playing by the rules, they're not incoherent one with another, and so forth. And so that's uh that's uh Sidgwick's definition of philosophy. And that that's been a fairly influential take on philosophy as we move into the 21st century. We'll talk about that in the next lecture, but it really is part of the the beginning of the end of philosophy's self-conception uh by the time we get to the 21st century.

Um another person that comes to my mind is Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich says that philosophy is that cognitive approach to reality in which reality as such is its object. And I think of that, man, that's that's hard for me to get in my mind, but I think what Paul Tillich wants to say is is that there is a deep irony to philosophy. And when we study philosophers, we recognize this irony. And and that is this, that philosophy studies the nature of reality, but it is immersed in it. That reason itself, that the mind, are immersed in it. It's like we're trying to analyze water while we're swimming in it like a fish.

Um and what is the nature of reason? What is what is the nature of reality when reality is such as the object? And so we're trying to do this cognitive sort of life of the mind sort of approach in philosophy to answering some of the big questions. And yet the mind itself is part of the study. And so that's an interesting, I think, kind of irony and a and deep insight um by Paul Tillich. John Passmore, philosopher of the 20th century, says, "Philosophy distinguishes itself among critical discussions in that it is a critical discussion of critical discussion."

And I think to myself, "Hold on. A critical discussion of critical discussion?" If you've ever been in a board meeting, let's say you're you're in a board meeting and you're trying to figure out what the ethics of the company are going to be all about. And somebody says, "Well, we're going to be about the customer. We're going to be about fairness. We're going to be about um uh uh um you know, being uh um straight shooter with the the customer and so forth." And then somebody says, "Oh, time out a second. How do we decide what the virtues of the company are going to be?"

Well, now you're having a critical discussion of the critical discussion. Same thing happens in athletics when coaches say, "You know, what's our team going to do?" Well, "We're about courage." Or "We're about winning." Or "We're about um you know, overcoming obstacles." Or "We're about" and it just goes on and on and on. And then you have to land on one or two or three of them that are going to define what the team is all about. Well, how do we make that determination? When you start asking those preliminary questions, says uh John Passmore, you are doing a critical discussion about the critical discussion, and you are doing philosophy.

So, philosophy's never going to go away because it's always that primary or primordial discourse that goes into um any important conversation that we have, whether it be in business or sports or any other any anything else in between. A philosopher named uh Harold Netland, this philosopher of religion, says that philosophy is the systematic, rational, critical assessment of basic human beliefs and desires that perennially occur in human cultures. Or something along those lines. And um this definition's great definition, but it captures so much. One wonders whether or not it actually gives us anything concrete. Philosophy is the systematic, rational, critical assessment of basic human beliefs and responses to ultimate questions which perennially occur in human cultures.

Yes, is all I have to say to that. And yet, do is that give us something that we can really understand philosophy and its nature um with? Well, I'm going to make the argument in these in these brief lectures that philosophy is really rather simple. That philosophy at its core is the perspective of the spell of the self based on reason and freedom. Let me say that again. Philosophy is the perspective of the self based upon reason and freedom.

Now, when we get to the next lecture, I'm going to try to make a case for that definition of philosophy. But the bottom line is, anytime you are thinking you an issue for yourself and giving your perspective on that issue with reasons for it and defending the position that you are holding without appealing to other authorities you are in fact being philosophical or you're doing philosophy and everybody has to do that. All right. Well, that's my brief introductory lecture to this topic. When we turn to the next lecture, we'll look at some historical manifestations of philosophy and see if we can give evidence for the definition we just gave.

Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone.

Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.