First of all, I will distinguish between doing philosophy and teaching philosophy. If I ask you a question like ‘Should you do or be good?’ or ‘Are you in control of your life?’ I am inviting you to think about a philosophical question. If you do so, in a suitably philosophical spirit, then you are doing philosophy, whether you know it or not. If I explain to you what philosophers have said about these questions over the years or even explain and attempt to transfer to you the methods philosophers have used to answer such questions, then I am teaching philosophy to you. In the former case, I am teaching philosophy as the history of ideas and in the second, philosophy as methodology. But, like singing, philosophy is something humans can begin doing without knowing any of the history or methods of philosophy. Philosophy emerges from humans being human, and some would say that it emerges from one of the features that, like cooking and storytelling, sets us apart from other animals: namely, contemplation. This means that, like singing, we can begin doing philosophy from an early age. Many (children and adults!), when asked a question such as the questions above, might answer, ‘Of course!’ or ‘Obviously!’ and then not give it another thought. In which case, they are not doing philosophy, though we may consider the question to be – potentially, at least – philosophical.
So, what is a suitably philosophical spirit and how can it be taught? I would suggest that it is not merely responding to a problem or question but doing so reflectively and using reason to progress. I would also argue that this is not sufficient, one must also inhabit a disposition of re-evaluation and the reasoning employed always has in view the subject(s) (the thinker or thinkers) in some way: in other words, ‘What do I/you/we think?’, ‘Why do I/you/we think it?’, ‘Am I/you/we right to think it?’ and so on. And lastly, these considerations are largely conceptual (‘What is X?’, ‘How are X and Y related?’, ‘What does X imply or allow for?’ And so on).
What is essential to all this is presence of mind. And this is one reason why philosophy is valuable: because of the way in which it ‘insists on’ and encourages presence of mind or self-consciousness. When doing philosophy one cannot – by virtue of what it is to do philosophy – ‘zone out’ (by contrast, it is possible to ‘zone out’ when being taught the history of ideas or philosophical method). In short, the practice of doing philosophy attends to attentiveness. This attentiveness is also essential for the development of metacognition (or ‘learning to learn’). Metacognition is a cognitive attitude ‘at a remove’; self-conscious, self-aware monitoring and control of one’s learning. Given that doing philosophy is essentially a self-conscious endeavour, doing philosophy is a good way to develop the basis of good self-learning; to regularly inhabit a position of remove, to reflect and to re-evaluate, critically and conceptually.
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"Professor Michael Hand has made a case for philosophy being included as part of compulsory education. However, I would like to make a similar case for something all other subjects contain but do not properly address and are not properly equipped to address: epistemology"
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27th August 2017
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