Headmaster's Thoughts: October 2019

 
I teach all Seniors “Ethical Philosophy”, and have done it for many years. I do it for a number of reasons, not least that I enjoy the subject of philosophy and always have.
 
What I try and encourage is curiosity. Philosophy is unlike virtually any other subject. In the disciplines of science or math, each succeeding generation of scientists and mathematicians improves on the work of the previous one. They adapt and advance. In history, historians may disagree with previous interpretations of why the Battle of Hastings occurred, but they all agree that the date was 1066. In German, to take a language study, the verb “to be” is “sein”, no ifs, ands, or buts. But in philosophy, far from adopting and advancing on the work of the great philosophers of the past, each philosophic school created a new philosophy which, in most cases, was an absolute denial of the validity of accepted philosophies of the past. They did not build on previous thinkers; they created new ways of looking at things.
I would agree with those who say that rejecting Hegel or Marx requires having read them, and having read them, who can tell how much those readings have influenced the reader. But Hegel is now dismissed as is Marx, and although contemporary philosophers might possibly and grudgingly accept their influence (although I have not read of one who has), they would maintain that their philosophy is totally separate and distinct from those old philosophic volcanoes of the past whose lava is now cold.
 
Yet there is a common thread in philosophy. A commonality that is critical to thinking in philosophical terms, and that is curiosity. The same questions, just different answers. Why are we here? Is there a reason for our existence? And, in Ethics, why and how should we be good? It is this curiosity that I hope to inspire. I am not even sure that the religious can give a definitive answer, and indeed I am skeptical of anyone who gives a universal solution to these fundamental questions. But I am curious.
 
The year always begins with the trolleyology question. A trolley is careering out of control down a track and will kill five people bound on the line below unless you, and only you can do this, divert the trolley by switching it to a siding where it will just kill one man bound on the track. Do you pull the switch and divert the trolley? And the follow-up question involves the same trolley careering down the same hill towards the same five people, and the only way to save them is to physically push an obese man off a bridge into the path of the trolley, killing him but saving the five. Do you push him? And if yes to the first question and no to the second (as is true of most people when questioned) then why?
 
Let me be clear; there is no right or wrong answer. But we can examine what we think we would do and why we would do it. This is not, as often termed, a “thought experiment” because an experiment is an act that produces a result, and no-one is going to set up the scenarios I have presented to find out the result. So we can only conjecture. Using that problem as a template to try and see how different philosophers would have answered the questions raised, we embark on a historical survey of ethical philosophies. And we look at each with curiosity and skepticism. I am not sure those two qualities are so different. Bertrand Russell said it best when he said he had a “will to doubt.” Nowadays, the popular expression is “critical thinking.”
 
How one looks at issues affects possible outcomes. Let me give you an example of a question on a test that I took many years ago (I mean MANY, MANY, years ago). “Which one is the odd one out? A dog, a television, a car, a cat, or a radio?” It is easy to distinguish which one has the only quality that it has. The car is the only one with tires, the television a screen, and so on. But the question asks which one is the only different object and so the philosopher looks at what commonality four of the five have. And the correct answer was a cat, because, in England, all of the other four needed a license to own the object. It is not what distinguished the one, but what bound together the other four.
 
So to answer the question what makes Philosophy different from any other academic discipline, I would answer that the only requirement is curiosity, and that it is the only discipline where there is no such thing as the “right” answer. Hopefully our Seniors will stay curious throughout their lives.
 
Finally, to those of you kind people who read my September thoughts about aliens, you might be wondering if the same person wrote both of these.
'Curiouser and curiouser!'—said Alice
 
Ronald P. Stewart
Headmaster
York Prep School
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