Philosophy, it has been said, bakes no
bread. (It’s perhaps a station of the
cross for a professional philosopher that at least some time is spent working
as a quick-order cook!) It is perhaps
equally true that no bread would be based without a philosophy, for the act of
baking bread implies a philosophical decision of life is worthwhile at
all. People don’t invent philosophy,
but rather it emerges out of the culture and experiences of the person.
Classical philosophy sought to tackle
first-order questions such as the nature of being, causation, time, man,
spirit, reality, truth, and matter. Mortimer Adler, former professor of
philosophy at the University of Chicago, argues that Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, not much as been gained
in ethics or metaphysics since then. The
Thomastic view was that ideas are basic and immutable
concepts that give us such common denominators as good and justice. There is natural law, and we also see this
mirrored in the mathematical harmonies of the Pythagoreans, the logical ladder
of Platonic Forms, the logical pattern of Aristotle, the logos of the Stoics and the Christian churches. Concern for moral
improvement of the soul led Plato to his theory of forms and the belief that
God must be good—a view Aristotle echoes in his claim that everything has a
natural end. Hegel's idealistic
principle was that the material world exists only in relation to the Absolute
mind. “Metaphysics is a dark ocean
without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck,” said
Immanuel Kant. And this must be true of
the metaphysics of F.H. Bailey who denied—even during the course of an hour’s
conversation in an Oxford chamber the time and space have
objective reality. One reaction to this
came from the Vienna Circle of logical positivists of the 1930s
declared that the criterion of meaning was verifiable. If the meaning of a statement could not be
verified, it was nonsense. But, as
Bertrand Russell, pointed out, this criterion itself was a philosophical
principle. Other reactions included the
pragmatists, the existentialists, the analytical philosophers, and philosophers
in semantics and feminism.
