Philosophy is fundamental: it raises urgent matters and puts ethics in the foreground. Philosophy is a powerful tool to cast light on problems and find adequate solutions. Where is AI leading us? What is human today? Philosophy keeps fundamental questions alive; it is the only discipline that thrives through transmission. The more it is shared, the more powerful it becomes. Philosophy is a common language.

Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.' They may admit that in organic chemistry there is need of long words, and that quantum physics requires formulas that are difficult to translate into ordinary English, but philosophy (they think) is different. It is not the function of philosophy – so they maintain – to teach something that uneducated people do not know; on the contrary, its function is to teach superior persons that they are not as superior as they thought they were, and that those who are really superior can show their skill by making sense of common sense. No one wants to alter the language of common sense, any more than we wish to give up talking of the sun rising and setting. But astronomers find a different language better, and I contend that a different language is better in philosophy. Let us take an example, that of perception. There is here an admixture of philosophical and scientific questions, but this admixture is inevitable in many questions, or, if not inevitable, can only be avoided by confining ourselves to comparatively unimportant aspects of the matter in hand. Here is a series of questions and answers. Q. When I see a table, will what I see be still there if I shut my eyes? A. That depends upon the sense in which you use the word 'see.' Q. What is still there when I shut my eyes? A. This is an empirical question. Don't bother me with it, but ask the physicists. Q. What exists when my eyes are open, but not when they are shut? A. This again is empirical, but in deference to previous philosophers I will answer you: colored surfaces. Q. May I infer that there are two senses of 'see'? In the first, when I 'see' a table, I 'see' something conjectural about which physics has vague notions that are probably wrong. In the second, I 'see' colored surfaces which cease to exist when I shut my eyes. A. That is correct if you want to think clearly, but our philosophy makes clear thinking unnecessary. By oscillating between the two meanings, we avoid paradox and shock, which is more than most philosophers do.

Either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge of things is a practical knowledge aimed at the profit to be drawn from them, or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition.

Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought. It is for this reason and in this sense that philosophy is about the world.

As philosophy becomes academic and tends to repudiate its responsibility to the culture in which it flourishes, the layman in need of wisdom and vision turns to evangelic practicalists, who confirm him in his myopic prejudice that the exclusive end of moral philosophy is actually to direct social activity toward the concrete and immediate improvement of social conditions. But, since there is no way of knowing except by arduous philosophical criticism whether the ends to which a reformer would lead us represent genuine improvement, the practicalist’s impatience with theory is at best hasty.

Philosophy is the art of turning solutions into problems

Philosophy is not to relieve one of decisions, but to confront him with decisions. It is to make life not easy but, on the contrary, problematical.

I have not attempted in these papers to put forward any grand view of the nature of philosophy; nor do I have any such grand view to put forward if I would. It will be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the history of 'howlers', and progress in philosophy as the debunking of howlers. It will also be obvious that I do not agree with those who see philosophy as the enterprise of putting forward a priori truths about the real world (since, for one thing, there are no a priori truths, in my view). I see philosophy as a field which has certain central questions, for example, the relation between thought and reality, and, to mention some questions about which I have not written, the relation between freedom and responsibility, and the nature of the good life. It seems obvious that in dealing with these questions philosophers have formulated rival research programs, that they have put forward general hypotheses, and that philosophers within each major research program have modified their hypotheses by trial and error, even if they sometimes refuse to admit that that is what they are doing. To that extent philosophy is a 'science'. To argue about whether philosophy is a science in any more serious sense seems to me to be hardly a useful occupation. The important thing is that in spite of the stereotypes of science and philosophy that have become blinkers inhibiting the view of laymen, scientists, and philosophers, science and philosophy are interdependent activities; philosophers have always found it essential to draw upon the scientific knowledge of the time, and scientists have always found it essential to do a certain amount of philosophy in their very scientific work, even if they denied that that was what they were doing. It does not seem to me important to decide whether science is philosophy or philosophy is science as long as one has a conception of both that makes both essential to a responsible view of the real world and of man's place in it.

Philosophy is the science of estimating values. The superiority of any state or substance over another is determined by philosophy. By assigning a position of primary importance to what remains when all that is secondary has been removed, philosophy thus becomes the true index of priority or emphasis in the realm of speculative thought.

Philosophy has come to include, for us, a wide range of theoretical questions that typically look beyond what we can answer by experimental enquiries. While science asks how matter behaves, and tests its theories with observation, philosophy asks what matter is, or how observation can teach us anything. While mathematics asks what the sum of 2 and 7 is, philosophy asks what the number 2 is, and whether 2 plus 7 could ever make anything but 9.

Philosophy is a methodological endeavor. It is what philosophers "do." The methods of analyzing Native American thought will be no different than those used to analyze other forms of human thought.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

The history of philosophy enjoys, in some measure, the advantages both of civil and natural history, whereby it is relieved from what is most tedious and disgusting in both. Philosophy exhibits the powers of nature, discovered and directed by human art. It has, therefore, in some measure, the boundless variety with the amazing uniformity of the one, and likewise every thing that is pleasing and interesting in the other. And the idea of continual rise and improvement is conspicuous in the whole study, whether we be attentive to the part which nature, or that which men are acting in the great scene. It is here that we see the human understanding to its greatest advantage, grasping at the noblest objects, and increasing its own powers, by acquiring to itself the powers of nature, and directing them to the accomplishment of its own views; whereby the security, and happiness of mankind are daily improved. Human abilities are chiefly conspicuous in adapting means to ends, and in deducing one thing from another by the method of analogy; and where may we find instances of greater sagacity, than in philosophers diversifying the situations of things, in order to give them an opportunity of showing their mutual relations, affections, and influences; deducing one truth and one discovery from another, and applying them all to the useful purposes of human life. If the exertion of human abilities, which cannot but form a delightful spectacle for the human imagination, give us pleasure, we enjoy it here in a higher degree than while we are contemplating the schemes of warriors, and the stratagems of their bloody art.

From the preceding examples, we may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity.