The first Wikipedia philosophy article

Joseph Reagle has managed to reconstruct one of the earliest versions of Wikipedia (dating from 2001). As he says, it is a weird mixture of philosophy, geography, the United States and a huge collection of articles on Atlas Shrugged. I have copied the original article on philosophy below, probably written by Larry Sanger. It is an interesting question whether the article is better or worse than the one that exists now. While the present article has many more lists and extensive cross-references, the original article tries to get to the heart of what philosophy really is. Sanger mentions two standard theories about this. The first is that philosophy is essentially a priori. The natural habitat of the philosopher is the armchair, rather than the laboratory, or a field trip, or a museum. I think this is correct. The second is that the scope of philosophy has got ('gotten') much narrower over time. As problems got solved, they got moved out of philosophy and into the departmental sciences, until what is left is a core of apparently intractable problems (some or all of which may be solved in time, just as the problems of physics and psychology have been 'solved'). I don't think think this is correct. And more later, as I like to say.

Consider first how to distinguish philosophy from science -- from disciplines
like physics and chemistry. Well, it?s not part of philosophy to do
experiments. Experiments play little, if any, role in the solution of
philosophical problems. Now someone might object to this, if he knows much
about the intersection of philosophy and science. He might say, "But
philosophers are often referring to and interpreting the scientific work of
physicists, who do experiments about space and time and quantum mechanics.
And they are often referring to experimental work done in psychology when they
discuss philosophy of psychology."

There?s no doubting that
philosophers sometimes interpret and refer to experimental work of various kinds
-- especially in the philosophies of the different sciences. For example,
in philosophy of physics, or philosophy of psychology. But that?s not
surprising of course: the purpose of those branches of philosophy, branches like
philosophy of physics, is to help interpret the philosophical aspects of
experimental work. But at any rate it?s not the philosophers, in their
capacities as philosophers, who do the experiments.

There is a
basic historical reason why philosophy is not experimental. Originally,
"philosophy" meant simply "the love of wisdom." The "philo-" part comes
from the Greek word philein, meaning to love, and the "-sophy" part comes from
sophia, or wisdom. Originally the scope of philosophy was all abstract
intellectual endeavor. Even up until early modern times, the people we now
call "scientists" were referred to as "natural philosophers," i.e., philosophers
who study nature. Over the years, the scope of philosophy has gotten
smaller and smaller, as different sciences have spun off and become independent
disciplines in their own right. Some relatively early "spin-offs" were
physics and chemistry; more recently, just within the past 100 years, psychology
has spun off.

So of course one might wonder how thinkers knew or
sensed that a new discipline was to be treated as independent from
philosophy. The answer is that the discipline began to be prosecuted using
rigorous methods of observation and experimentation. Philosophy in its
core sense, the sense that remains today, is essentially something that one
should be able to do from one?s armchair, surrounded, at most, by some books
that scientists write. But be careful thinking about this. I
emphatically do not mean that philosophy is totally non-observational, or
non-empirical. Certainly philosophy makes use of, in a really essential
way, observations about the world. But they are, we might say, very
general observations -- observations like "It seems to me I make free choices"
and "It seems to me that killing another person, if ever necessary, requires a
really good excuse." Observations like this take a great deal of
investigation to make; they require careful attention. But most (not all)
philosophical topics require no more specialized knowledge than the average
educated person has; except perhaps specialized knowledge about philosophy
itself.

So philosophy is not experimental and its observations are
only very general, broad observations. And that is what makes it different
from natural sciences like physics, and social sciences like psychology.
So mind you, some people confuse philosophy and psychology, but they are
different. Philosophy does study the mind (and it also studies other
things besides the mind, too), just as psychology does. But the study of
the mind involved in doing psychology involves careful, specific observation of
particular mental phenomena, and experimentation; philosophers think about more
general aspects of the mind, questions like, "What is consciousness? What
is the mind itself?"

A priori and propter quid

In chapter 17 of Book III part 2 of Summa Logicae, Ockham gives a neat explanation of the terms propter quid and quia that shows how they are close, or even equivalent to the terms a priori and a posteriori respectively. I discussed this earlier. The translation is mine. (Sadly, I failed to get John Longeway's translation from our local Waterstone's, or indeed any Waterstones in the country, and had to resort to Amazon).

Separately, I am working on a translation of Buridans Questions on the Posterior Analytics. The translation of 'scire' is tricky, as both Ockham and Buridan use it with 'notare'. Both mean a sort of knowing. As they use it (and define it) 'scire' means a sort of reasoned knowing, the thing you get from understanding a demonstration, or 'syllogism that produces knowing'. Thus scientia, from which we get the English word 'science'. The modern and the medieval Latin meaning are closely connected. Understanding how they are different is a difficult matter that needs teasing out.

Latin	English
Propter quod oportet scire quod quaedam est demonstratio cuius praemissae sunt simpliciter priores conclusione, et illa vocatur demonstratio a priori sive propter quid.	On account of this we must know [scire] that one sort of demonstration whose premisses are absolutely prior to the conclusion, and this is called demonstration a priori or propter quid.
Quaedam est demonstratio cuius praemissae non sunt simpliciter priores conclusione, sunt tamen notiores sic syllogizanti, per quas devenit sic syllogizans in notitiam conclusionis, et talis demonstratio vocatur demonstratio quia sive a posteriori.	Another sort is demonstration whose premisses are not absolutely prior to the conclusion, and which are nevertheless better known to the syllogiser in this way, through which the syllogiser thus arrives at knowledge of the conclusion. And such demonstration is called demonstration quia or a posteriori.

Bat's eye view

Thomas' commentary on Book II of Aristotle's Metaphysics ("Alpha the lesser") is here. On reading it again, I was struck by Aristotle's comment here as well as by Thomas' lengthy comment on it from n7 to n14. Aristotle says (Ross's translation)

Perhaps, too, as difficulties are of two kinds, the cause of the present
difficulty is not in the facts but in us. For as the eyes of bats are to the
blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature
most evident of all.

Aristotle and Thomas are commenting on how reaching the truth is both difficult and easy. It is easy (according to Aristotle) in the sense that the sun is the most obvious and visible object in the world. It is so obvious, in fact, that the eyes of a bat are blinded by it, and cannot see it (Thomas mentions owls, and other translations have moles, I think). Thus, the truth is right before us, and in an obvious way. Yet we are blinded by it, and cannot grasp it.

Is that right? How is this idea related to the distinction between a posteriori and a priori that I discussed here? A priori reasoning is from what is logically prior to what is derivable from it. The exemplar is geometric and mathematical reasoning, and in that sense the truth must be easy, for we begin with self-evident truths, and move from them to other truths which are less evident, but logically deducible. A posteriori reasoning is from effect - typically observed effect - to cause. The exemplar being the truth attained by the natural sciences, which is clearly difficult to get hold of, as I suggested earlier.

But is that what Aristotle has in mind? Probably not. The difficulty of a posteriori investigation - from effect to cause - is precisely because the cause is not visible to us. This is clearly not like the case of the sun. Thomas interprets him as follows:

Obviously, then, the difficulty experienced in knowing the truth is due
principally to some weakness on the part of our intellect. From this it follows
that our soul’s intellectual power is related to those immaterial beings, which
are by nature the most knowable of all, as the eyes of owls are to the light of
day, which they cannot see because their power of vision is weak, although they
do see dimly lighted things.

The analogy is between the weakness of an owl's eye (or a bat's eye, or a mole's eye) and the weakness of our intellect. The difficulty is not a matter to be resolved by scientific investigation, i.e. natural scientific investigation. The problem (according to Thomas) is that the human mind cannot be elevated to the level of knowing the essences (quidditates) of immaterial substances because they are not on the same level as sensible substances. The difficulty is not in things but in us.

And here you have the fundamental problem of understanding the Metaphysics, indeed the problem of understanding the project of all Western philosophy. Is it a fundamentally rational project? But as Hugh Lawson-Tancred says in his excellent introduction to and commentary on the book, "it seems excessively implausible that mere rumination on some of the more elementary features of our quotidian experience could lead to a profound revision of our conception of the universe". Or is it essentially mystical, as the popular meaning of the word metaphysics suggests? More later.