Guidance for Readers and Format of the Volume

      Socrates of Athens famously declared that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, and his motto aptly explains the impulse to philosophize. Taking nothing for granted, philosophy probes and questions the fundamental presuppositions of every area of human inquiry. Although, in the modern academic world, it is studied in courses put on by professionalized departments, and although many of its contemporary practitioners employ a daunting array of technical terminology, philosophy can never quite fit the model of a tightly specialized discipline, like biochemistry or musicology. For part of the job of the philosopher is to keep at a certain critical distance from current doctrines, whether in the sciences or the arts, and to examine instead how the various elements in our worldview clash, or fit together. Some philosophers have tried to incorporate the results of these inquiries into a grand synoptic view of the nature of reality and our human relationship to it. Others have mistrusted system-building, and seen their primary role as one of clarification, or the removal of obstacles along the road to truth. But all have shared the Socratic vision of using the human intellect to challenge comfortable preconceptions, insisting that every aspect of human theory and practice be subjected to continuing critical scrutiny.

There are many ways of approaching philosophy, but sooner or later every student will have to come to terms with the great canonical classics by the founding fathers of the subject, including Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, Hume and Kant – works in which the fundamental problems of philosophy were defined and shaped. The main subject matter of the present volume consists in carefully chosen extracts from the writings of these and other ‘classic’ philosophical authors. Though most of the texts included here predate the twentieth century, it would be quite wrong to pigeonhole them as belonging merely to the ‘history’ of the subject. For philosophy has a unique relationship to its past. On the one hand it does not entirely match the pattern of ‘progressive’ scientific disciplines, which ruthlessly abandon old theories as new discoveries are made and better systems are developed; but on the other hand it is quite different from those antiquarian disciplines which aim to immerse themselves in the ideas of the past ‘for their own sake’. Rather, philosophers conduct their researches in a kind of perpetual living dialogue with the protagonists of the past; each new philosophical movement gains vitality and meaning by drawing on, and reacting against, previous approaches. In presenting the views of the great canonical thinkers this volume aims to serve not just as an introduction to the ‘history’ of the subject, but as an introduction to philosophy itself.

      Though this is a collection based on extracts from philosophical ‘classics’, it should certainly not be treated as an anthology of ‘sacred texts’, or definitive pronouncements by unquestioned authorities. It is integral to the very idea of philosophy that every philosophical doctrine, without exception, is there to be scrutinized and challenged. A good philosophy student will never rest content with knowing what the great philosophers said, but will want to form a considered and critical view of whether their arguments are justified, and what issues, if any, they illuminate. Most of the ideas contained in this book have been subject to endless analysis and discussion by generations of commentators, but they still have power to speak to us afresh, provided we approach them open-mindedly, and without undue reverence. Though it raises problems of its own, there is a lot to be said for Descartes’s famous observation that in philosophy the natural light of reason within each of us is a better guide to the truth than past authority. Philosophy is, of course, part of a continuing tradition, and there is much to be gained from seeing how that tradition originated and developed. But the principal object of studying the materials in this book is not to pay homage to past genius, but to enrich one’s understanding of central problems that are as pressing today as they have always been – problems about knowledge, truth and reality, the nature of the mind, the basis of right action, and the best way to live. These questions help to mark out the territory of philosophy as an academic discipline, but in a wider sense they define the human predicament itself; they will surely continue to be with us for as long as humanity endures.

      Format of the volume