Curt Ducasse, Philosophy as a Science, 1941 Among the tasks of philosophy there is one that has no analogue among those of any of the other branches of knowledge. Consider, for instance, chemistry, and its relation to problems such as what the distinctive subject matter of chemistry is, what chemists seek to know about it, how it and the investigation of it are related to other sorts of human endeavor, what sort of value chemistry has for human beings, etc. Such problems are perhaps discussed by a chemist when he is called upon to give a public address or to set the stage for his introductory course at the beginning of his first lecture; but they are not problems of chemistry itself. They belong rather to the philosophy of chemistry, and persons other than chemists may easily be more competent to deal with them than chemists would be. Preface
The situation is the same in the other sciences, but in philosophy it is radically different. What subject matter is peculiar to philosophy, what questions about it are philosophical, what method is appropriate to the solving of them, how philosophizing is related to what chemists, mathematicians, poets, stockbrokers, manufacturers, etc., do, what philosophy contributes to the life of man -- all these are genuinely philosophical questions. They belong to a branch of inquiry which, although seldom explicitly included in lists of the philosophical disciplines, is unquestionably one of them. This discipline is the philosophy of philosophy. In other fields of knowledge nothing parallel to it is to be found: there is no such thing as, for instance, the chemistry of chemistry or the botany of botany. It is to this branch of philosophy that the present work belongs. It represents an attempt to formulate an answer more specific, more detailed, and more defensible than the common ones to the question the layman so often asks of the philosopher, viz., What is philosophy? Seldom, I fear, does the philosopher reply to it in a manner really satisfactory to his inquirer or even, I venture to say, to himself. It has plagued me for twenty years or more, and many are the attempts I have made to find for it an answer both clear-cut and of the truth of which I could feel confident. It seems to me now at last that I have succeeded, but of this the reader is to be the judge. The principal contentions argued in this book, which together define my answer, are that knowledge, in the same sense which the term has for the natural and other sciences, is what philosophy seeks; that philosophy therefore attempts to be, and that its method must accordingly be as scientific -- as truly knowledge-yielding -- as that of any other science, while its subject matter is distinct from that of any of the other sciences; that in philosophy as in the other sciences we have to distinguish between "primitive" and "derivative" subject matter, and that the primitive subject matter of philosophy is appraisal -- ethical, logical, epistemic, ontological, aesthetic, and other; that appraisals are always ultimately relative to persons; that in philosophy, as in any other science, observation of particular facts, empirical generalization of them, and theoretical explanation, systematization, correction, and supplementation of the empirical generalizations all are intrinsic parts of the knowledge-seeking task; that norms are generalized appraisals; that wisdom is knowledge of norms; that knowledge of norms may be either only empirical and correspondingly limited and precarious, or in addition theoretically systematized, supplemented, and corrected, and correspondingly comprehensive and firm; and that philosophy is the methodical search for wisdom, while the application of wisdom to the concrete problems of life is not philosophy but engineering. The bare recital of these contentions is enough to indicate that the theory of the nature of philosophy which they outline differs sharply from both of the accounts of philosophy that are perhaps most in the public eye today, viz., John Dewey's and Rudolph Carnap's. The various statements to be found in Dewey's writings as to what philosophy is or should be are not easy or perhaps even possible to integrate into one unambiguous and consistent account. But they seem to me in any case on the whole to describe not philosophy itself but philosophical engineering, and indeed chiefly or only the branch of philosophical engineering that concerns itself with concrete problems of the ethical and social kinds. The other account of philosophy attracting attention today is that of which Carnap has been the chief exponent. According to him, philosophy is the logical syntax of the language of science; and those of the traditional problems of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc., which are not syntactical are only pseudo-problems. Although I believe not only that Carnap does not prove these contentions but also that they are erroneous, I agree that some of the traditional problems of philosophy are pseudo-problems. Accordingly, I believe that the attack of the logical positivists upon traditional philosophy has been salutary, for their demand for strictness of statement and for the credmtials of the assertions one makes is tending to discourage the logically loose and empirically irresponsible sort of "philosophizing" which has only too often brought into disrepute the name of philosophy. Some of the material in this volume has already appeared, although mostly in somewhat different shape, as articles in philosophical journals. This is true of chapters iii, vii, xi, and xii, and of short passages in some other chapters. For permission to make use of the contents of these articles thanks are due, respectively, to the editors of the Journal of Philosophy, to the University of Chicago Press and the editors of Ethics, and to the editors of the Philosophical Review. To my collegues, Drs. W. C. Barrett and M. H. Hepp and Professors C. A. Baylis and R. M. Blake, I am under great obligation for valuable comments either on the manuscript itself or on some of the ideas contained in it, which they have heard me express at various times. I am conscious of a similar obligation also to the succession of able graduate students whom I have been privileged to teach over a number of years. One of them, Mr. Vincent Tomas, I have to thank also for the preparation of the index. C. J. Ducasse
Providence, R. I.
March 14, 1941
[Table of Contents] [Introduction]