Hi everybody, I am Professor JP Smit. I'm from the Philosophy Department at Stellenbosch University.
And I'm here to tell you a little bit about philosophy so you can figure out if you should
take the subject next year when you're at OUR university.
Clearly, I'm strongly in favour of you taking this subject, and I hope to convince you that it's something that you should take.
And the nice thing here is I'm right, it really is something that you should take.
And so we're going to mostly be talking about the question of what is philosophy.
Philosophy is a very strange sort of subject in that sense.
If you ask 20 philosophers the question of what is philosophy you typically will get 20 different answers,
because the question of what is philosophy is itself, in a sense, a philosophical question.
Now we like to tell that to the first years but of course,
that doesn't really help you right, you don't know anything when I've told you that.
So I'm going to try to give you some sort of answer, one that you know personally I quite like, that covers most of
the discipline and that gives you, most of what you need to know.
Now, this is important because there's something strange about philosophy.
So, most people don't think, "well you know... I'm really a sociologist" or "I'm really a historian",
or "I'm really an economist" or really "a physicist", but an awful lot of people think they're really philosophers, right.
And they think that you know if you've ever sat around a campfire and you've looked at the stars and you thought, you know,
"we're so small", then you know that makes you a philosopher.
It’s not completely false, but it's not really, really what it's about. There’s a lot more discipline to it than that.
And that's why I will say here, you'll notice on the Powerpoints on the first page here, I said,
philosophy is the discipline that tries to ask the most basic questions.
Basically, we're going to be asking questions that occur to any thinking human being, philosophical questions
are such - that people are right when they think everybody is a bit of a philosopher.
These are questions that will occur to pretty much any thinking being.
And what we try to do is we try and slowly, systematically, rationally work our way through those questions
to get somewhere that is better, hopefully, than what people typically tend to come up with themselves.
Now, the other important part here in this point in the Powerpoints points is
philosophy is the discipline that tries to ask the most basic questions.
When I mean basic, I mean the sort of most abstract.
Another way to think about it, the questions that in some sense seem to ground other questions
or the things that are presupposed.
In philosophy in a certain sense there are certain things which most of your life, most people,
you know, they've taken for granted their whole lives, then philosophy tries to first determine
what those things are, and then to study them in a sort of systematic question.
When we say, basic questions, we say we're studying what is presupposed in other questions.
Let me give you an example right. So let's say you're a physicist; you’re doing physics,
you're trying to explain how certain bodies move through space. Now a typical philosophical
question is to ask, well okay, you're trying to explain how a certain body moves through space,
but what is it to explain something? We're always trying to explain stuff, but when is it to explain something.
Now that itself is not a question in physics, that's a question in philosophy.
That's the sort of meta-question, the next level question, the question about what's presupposed,
and it's studying something we call the philosophy of science,
specifically the philosophy of physics, that's something you do in second-year and in fact,
I'm the lecturer for that course that's why you know I'm giving this example. To give you another example.
Economists want to measure the gross domestic product of a country. Now when you
measure the gross domestic product of a country, you're applying numbers to social phenomena,
namely, you know society and economy and so on. So philosophers are the kinds of people who
think okay, but can we apply numbers to social phenomena or for that matter any phenomena?
When we apply numbers to the world, whether it be social, whether it be natural or otherwise,
what exactly are we doing? What are the conditions under which you can do it? And it's surprisingly
interesting because you get different kinds of numbers that apply to different kinds of things
and it's far from obvious that we don't often get it hideously wrong in standard well-accepted
practices, you know in normal human life.
So to give a very, very brief example.
There's something in the world called happiness studies. They're doing economics and psychology.
They go around the world asking people, are you happy? Rate your happiness on a scale of one to ten.
And they've produced some incredibly interesting results. Google "happiness studies" if you don't
believe me, but obviously, there's a big question there. Can we talk about happiness as this sort
of thing as saying you know this morning, I woke up at three out of ten as per usual, had coffee,
immediately went to eight out of ten, then I opened my email, fell back to five, and that's
sort of how my day went. So is that sort of thing okay? So that's one part of philosophy, right,
and it always boils down to try to ask the most basic question, the question that's
presupposed in everything else. But it's not only factual questions, sort of deep abstract factual questions.
It's also a normative question. That's a huge part of philosophy, in fact currently it's
the biggest part of philosophy, probably. So by normative we mean questions about value judgments.
So a question like how should I live my life, you know? What is the valuable life to live?
Or like Socrates asked you know, what should I do, basically? But of course,
you can also ask about an individual human life. You can ask how should I live my life,
but you can also ask it about society. You say, “well, how should society be ordered, what kind
of society is a good society, what kind of society do we want to be in, do we want to move towards.
I mean this is the typical sort of topic that you know, at every South African dinner party,
at some point it comes up and then that's three hours of conversation. So in that sense, it's
something everybody already does. What philosophy does it takes those questions, tries to in a
systematic rational way go through them and you know, bring a little bit of order to the chaos.
Of course then philosophy doesn't only ask the question, ‘well, how should I live my life’.
Then there's the meta-question. We're always interested in the deeper question, sort of meta-question.
Namely, are there any facts about what we should do or is it just arbitrary?
So you might think if you're what we call an ethical ontological nihilist, you might think
well there are no facts about right or wrong, and so you know all this discussion is just,
you know, what first years typically call opinion or you know there are a whole lot
of other views on this topic, that's a very long question we are going to be talking about.
That's something you actually tackle in first term with Professor Vasti Roodt, in Introduction to Systematic Philosophy.
She actually takes you through essentially that question.
So that's philosophy right. We try to ask the most abstract questions, both about the sort of factual
claims about the world, then also normative claims about what we should do, should not do.
It should be obvious to you now that that means there's a philosophy about pretty much everything.
I made a list here. These are all topics you'll discuss in Stellenbosch philosophy if you do
three years of philosophy. Of course, it's not all you'll do, you’ll do a lot of other stuff.
There is the philosophy of mind. That’s where you are asking the question well what is the mind,
is it in some sense, just the software of the physical system the brain,
or is it irreducible to the brain, stuff like that.
There is a philosophy of religion. There is the philosophy of language.
I myself am a philosopher of language, so that’s my primary thing. There’s philosophy of society,
philosophy of gender, race, there's the philosophy of science - that's again something I teach - then
philosophy of economics and most everything you can think of. There are philosophies
about almost everything. And why is that, well because every discipline that studies the world
has certain presuppositions and philosophy studies those presuppositions. You can think about it this way.
Physicists want to know about the physical world, sociologists want to know about society,
we take one step back and we think okay what are they doing when they study the physical world?
What are they doing when they study society? We're always that discipline that tends to take one step back.
We'll ask both questions about well, they say these things exist. Do they really?
That's called ontology. Then we'll ask the question well and can they really know the things they claim to know.
That's called epistemology. Oh, philosophy is also great for intimidating terminology right,
if you will need to sound smart at a dinner party or whatever to impress someone, it's fantastic for that.
The terms ontology epistemology, you know, intimidate the hell out of normal people.
And they could not be simpler. We'll teach you little tricks like that in first-year,
specifically in the logic course, which I historically taught.
Although I'm not teaching it this year, this year I'm doing a different setup.
So that's philosophy right. Now what can you do with philosophy? That's always what we're asked.
Well, normally at the Open Day, the way it works is we stand there, you show up with your parents,
you come, and typically if you're at the philosophy stall, you're very enthusiastic about the subject.
So you're there and you're all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and asking about,
"Can I do this?", "Can I do this?", "Can I do this?". Then behind you is sort of petrified
parents, thinking, "Oh, dear Lord, my kid is going to be unemployed forever". And then we
have to explain to the parents well this is not, you know, the sentence of doom,
why philosophy is actually useful. So, here's our answer to that question right. What can
you do with philosophy specifically if you only do philosophy specifically?
Well, philosophy is not like that. I mean obviously, you can be a philosophy lecturer, but you know that's only
going to be one out of every couple of hundred, three hundred, four hundred people so that's not,
you know, a fantastic career goal. Philosophy doesn't train you for anything specific,
rather it's like mathematics. All of you have done mathematics in your life at some point right,
you need to work out the tip at a restaurant, you need to figure out how many kilometres away
something is, you need to figure out how to do your budget for the rest of the month,
rest of the year, how much of your mortgage to pay. You'll get there one day, trust me.
So you do use mathematics with other things in other things. Philosophy is like that.
Mathematics gives you a skill that you can apply everywhere. Philosophy is the same thing. It gives
you an abstract skill and an ability that is useful in combination with other skills.
Philosophy in a certain sense, think about it this way, it's like the mathematics of thought.
Historically also there is a very close link, interestingly enough between philosophy and mathematics.
An awful lot of famous philosophers of all time were also fantastic mathematicians,
sometimes mathematicians of genius.
There are close links to philosophy and mathematics, also philosophy and music.
An awful lot of famous philosophers even came from music or had a deep interest in music.
In any case, so what philosophy does is it develops your conceptual ability.
The topics we study are interesting, they're fascinating.
Most of you, or probably all of you, have some deep interest in them.
But it doesn't give you only the content, also method. It gives you a skill.
It makes you better at abstract thought. Think of it as mental gymnastics, right.
So no matter what you end up doing in the world, you should be better at that thing because you're
supposed to be better at thinking. You're more rigorous, more clear, you express yourself better,
you're able to analyse an idea better, and you're able to reason about it in a more rigorous way.
You're also more creative. Because you're comfortable at this abstract level, you find
your way around this abstract level in a sort of much easier way that frees you up to be able to
deal with it, take charge of it in a much sort, more, what they normally call a sort of internal locus of control way.
So more rigorous, more creative and comfortable at that abstract level.
So that's why in a certain sense philosophy in most universities in the world, not all, are in the wrong place.
They're in the sort of humanities faculty which works out well for humanities students, because they get the benefit of it.
But what really should happen,
like some universities in the world do, is everybody's got to do a little bit of philosophy
doesn't matter what you're studying, because no matter what you're, doing the ability to be better
and more rigorous, more creative, more abstract thought is going to be useful.
So philosophy itself is not training you for anything specific just like mathematics doesn't,
rather it gives you a skill that will be sort of applicable everywhere. And we also see this in our students.
They seem to do just fine. Some of them do remarkably well.
And if you ask me, what sort of jobs they get, I've got to tell you, what sort of jobs don’t they I get.
You find people from everything from finance, to media, to management, to business, to politics,
to everything in between, right. So it's something you do. It's a basic skill.
It's an ability that you all have, that you then develop, and then this ability over time is supposed to get better.
Right, so that's my spiel. I think you should do philosophy for a very simple reason: it makes you
better at thinking, and you know, thinking is what human beings are good at.
We don't have the option of seeking life as a plant.
We've got to work with what we have and what we happen to have these evolved pretty large brains.
If you want to find us once we're up and running, and we're actually live, you can come say hi.
We're on the sixth floor of the Arts and Social Sciences building.
You won't have any trouble finding us. You can join our Facebook group,
or you know, sort of stalk around there a little bit, see if you can puzzle out who we are.
Then I would also advise you to go on our web page, I've put the link there at the bottom,
but you can also just Google Stellenbosch philosophy and go to the tab for undergraduate.
The way it pretty much works when you study here, first year we've got to bring you up to speed.
So what we do is we get you the basics. We do a very quick run through the past few centuries of,
not centuries, millennia of philosophy. You do a couple of courses that teach you about the
great famous thinkers. You do a little bit of introduction to normative thought, to ethics.
You do a course in logic. Second year you do more themes: you do mind, you do science, you do religion, so on and so forth.
And then in third year, you do contemporary streams in philosophy.
So you do everything from continental philosophy to African philosophy to analytic philosophy
to critical social theory, and of course, by contemporary streams, we mean anything after 1880.
We have a very relaxed view about, you know, what counts as contemporary.
Right, if there's anything further you need to know, you can email me. I'm JP Smit.
You can call me professor, but you’re not in school anymore so you can also just call me JP,
and I'd be happy to respond to you.
Well, I hope to see you all next year. Thank you very much. Bye.