1. The poverty of philosophy as a s

1. The poverty of philosophy as a science
Throughout its history philosophy has been thought to be a member of a community of intellectualdisciplines united by their common pursuit of knowledge. It has sometimes been thought to be thequeen of the sciences, at other times merely their under-labourer. But irrespective of its social status,it was held to be a participant in the quest for knowledge – a cognitive discipline.
Cognitive disciplines may be a priori or empirical. The distinction between what is a prioriand what is empirical is epistemological. It turns, as Frege noted, on the ultimate justification for holding something to be true. If the truths which a cognitive discipline attains are warranted neitherby observation nor by experiment (nor by inference therefrom), then they are a priori. Otherwise theyare empirical. The natural and moral sciences (the Geisteswissenschaften) strive for and attain empirical knowledge. The mathematical sciences are a priori.
2. Philosophy as the midwife of the sciences
Many questions that were opened by philosophers were subsequently handed over to scientists, forexample questions concerning the constitution of things, the infinity or finitude of the universe, thenature of the stars, the origin of life, the innateness of ideas. Physics, although it continued to beknown as natural philosophy down to the nineteenth century, became independent of philosophy inthe seventeenth. Psychology broke free of philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, andmathematical logic is doing so today. This midwifery has been invoked (by Russell and Austin, forexample) to explain the poverty of the results of philosophy – namely that once questions aresufficiently sharply formulated to be answerable, they are handed over to an independent science,which then contributes to the extension of human knowledge.
The poverty of philosophy qua cognitive discipline cannot be explained as a consequenceof the fact that once knowledge is achievable the subject becomes a science.
3. ‘Philosophy has only just come of age’
There is another move here, that might, in honour of its recent advocates, be called the WykehamChair gambit. Thirty years ago, Professor Michael Dummett, Wykeham Professor of Logic at theUniversity of Oxford declared that ‘philosophy has only just very recently struggled out of its earlystage into maturity: the turning point was the work of Frege, but the widespread realization of the M. A. E. Dummett, ‘Can analytic philosophy be systematic and ought it to be?’, repr. in Truth and OtherEnigmas (Duckworth, London, 1978), p. 457. Frege died in 1925. Half a century later is 1975, two years after thepublication of Dummett’s, Frege’s Philosophy of Language (Duckworth, London, 1973). T. Williamson, ‘Must Do Better’, in P. Greenough and M. Lynch, eds. Truth and Realism (Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2005), p. 187.
significance of that work has had to wait for half a century after his death . . . ’
Recently, ProfessorTimothy Williamson, Dummett’s successor but one in the Wykeham Chair of Logic at the Universityof Oxford, declared that we have only now (in 2005) arrived at ‘the end of the beginning’ of philosophy.Well, one can blow the Last Trumpet once, but not once a generation.
When bombarded throughout the ages with incompatible claims about the subject and
unfulfilled promises of how this is going to be set right, the correct move is to challenge the
fundamental assumption that is taken for granted by all participants in the debate, namely the
assumption that philosophy is a cognitive discipline.

4. Philosophy as a quest for understanding rather than knowledge
Philosophy is not a contribution to human knowledge, but to human understanding. It is neither anempirical science nor an a priori one, since it is no science. The difficulty of philosophy does not consist in the difficulty of discovering new, let alone arcane, truths about the world; nor yet inproducing proofs concerning its existence, the existence of recherché ‘entities’ like universals , or ofcommon or garden ‘entities’ like events. It is a quest for understanding, not for knowledge.
Scientists seek to understand why the phenomena they investigate are as they are and behaveas they behave. They do so by way of empirical explanation, which may take various forms, e.g.hypothetico-deductive, inference to the best explanation, or explanation by reference to interveningmechanisms. All these are subject to empirical confirmation or refutation. To that extent it ismisleading to suggest that philosophy seeks not for knowledge of new facts but for an understandingof familiar facts – as if science did not satisfy that need. Philosophy cannot explain phenomena inthat sense at all. So whatever its quest for understanding is, it is not akin to the understandingachieved by the empirical sciences.
The kind of understanding philosophy pursues is distinctive. It can be described in variousmore or less misleading ways:
In the metaphysical mode: philosophy strives for an understanding of the a priori natures of thingsand of internal relations between things (but there are no ‘metaphysical facts’ to be discovered, andinternal relations are creatures of reason, not of nature).
In the conceptual mode: philosophy strives for an overview of the structure of (parts of) our
conceptual scheme and of logico-grammatical relations between its elements (but that does not makeconcepts the special subject matter of philosophy).
In the linguistic mode: philosophy strives for an overview of segments of our language that in oneway or another, give rise to conceptual problems (but philosophy is not in general about language).
5. Philosophy and conceptual investigation
Philosophy is a conceptual investigation. This assertion can easily be misunderstood. Does it meanthat philosophy has a subject matter after all – namely concepts? That would be misleading. Being aconceptual investigation does not mean being solely about concepts. The traditional questions ofwhether an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God who created the universe exists, whether wehave an immortal soul, whether we are free, are philosophical.
That philosophy is an a priori investigation does not mean that it is an a priori science.
Mathematics is a priori. But it is not a science after the manner of the natural sciences. It does notdiscover new facts about the realm of numbers and spatial relations as physics or chemistry discovernew facts about the realm of nature The mathematician is an inventor, not a discoverer. What heinvents are new forms of mathematical description. For mathematics is the grammar of number andspace. Its business is concept-formation by means of proof. A proof grafts a new conceptualarticulation onto the body of mathematics.



6. Philosophy and linguistic investigation
Philosophy is a conceptual investigation by means of which philosophical questions are answered, orshown to be confused or incoherent. Philosophy is concerned with questions that require, for their resolution or dissolution, theclarification of concepts and conceptual networks.

7. Philosophical understanding: elaboration and qualification
That philosophy is a quest for understanding, rather than for knowledge, needs elaboration andqualification. It is correct to say that philosophy cannot discover new empirical truths about theworld around us and can offer no theories about it on the model of the theories of the sciences.

8. Can there be progress in philosophy?
If, in the sense explained, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline, can there be said to be progress inphilosophy? Progress characterizes the sciences.
Precisely because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge but for understanding, what itachieves can no more be transmitted from generation to generation than virtue. Philosophicaleducation can show the way to philosophical clarity, just as parents can endeavour to inculcate virtuein their children. But the temptations, both old and new, of illusion, mystification, arid scholasticism,scientism, and bogus precision fostered by logical technology may prove too great, and philosophicalinsight and overview may wane. Each generation has to achieve philosophical understanding foritself, and the insights and clarifications of previous generations have to be gained afresh.