The road to today's Philosophy
In two previous posts I compared the Greek beginnings with the recent regrettable state of the curious discipline we call Philosophy. I did so from a scientific angle and from a more irrational one and enlisted several shortcomings and a few recommendations. With this closing part I want to sketch out how a true and beneficial Philosophy would look like today and how to get there. So let's go back to the to the first years of our calendar and replay history in fast foreward to observe where things went wrong.
In the third century, when Christianity was still forming, Plotinus settled over to Rome and brought with him the Greek tradition of Platonism, that was then developing to another hight. It was adopted quickly, since it went well together with Christian theology. Both share a sense that the world beyond is more important than this and people have to better themself to reach it. And while Christ was more a target for devotion and adoration, Neoplatonism was the complementary food for thought . Also Plato's story oriented teaching style is not too different from that of Jesus. On a another level the adoption of Platonism also helped to establish an Christian, Roman identity and increase distance to it's Jewish roots. Rom saw Greece always as its cultural origin - in similar ways the United States see Europe today.
The early church father were learned people and well versed in the philosophies of the times. That stayed this way all the time and gets sometimes lost, when Religion is criticized as irrational. The often quoted Occam's razor is named after a monk and scholar that is also claimed by the church as one of their pillars. He was a monk and medieval monasteries were the places of learning and the preservation of knowledge, which included the classic philosophic literature. Of course there were limits in what was deemed right and wrong. Let us remember that universities were founded out of the urge of the church to centralize higher learning and to have a better control over it.
But over the times there was a shift happening anyway, from Platonism to the more rationalistic and thiswordly (sciency) Aristotelianism (Plato's pupil). Most people know about the disputes Galileo and Newton had with the church, but the trend was already visible in the thirteen and fourteen century, when supporters of Plato and Aristotle clashed at the universities in Paris, Cologne and elsewhere. One reason professor Thomas Aquinus is considered such a great mind and ''teacher of the holy church'' is that he could pacify this conflict for a while.
But let us also look at the university curriculum. There were only three topics worth studying. Medicine, Jurisprudence and of course Theology. To attend you had to graduate in the seven liberal arts, which often were taught in separate, boarding school type institutions. The first three arts were called the threefold. In Latin this is spelled Trivium and that is where we get our word trivial from, because there were the basis to learn anything. They are grammar, rhetoric and logic. In other words: you had to be able to write without spell checkers (the rules were much less strict these days), make arguments coherently and convincingly and think your arguments through before hand. Wouldn't it be great to make such courses mandatory again? Yes we had English or the language of the country in school. But in present universities important skills like reading and writing papers or giving a presentation are only thought on the side or in double purpose courses. If we want students participating in the scientific process and not just repeat their teacher we can not allow sloppiness here.
The Trivium (three fold) was followed by the Quadrivium (four fold) which is based on the topics already Plato considered the best entry courses to become a philosopher. These four topics are: mathematics, geometry, harmonics (let's say basic music theory) and astronomy (meaning astrology). While the last part took a huge hit credibility wise, the canon is an attempt to have a sence making system to put all knowledge into orderly relation.
We use Mathematics to quantify results more than ever. But because our leading principles of understanding got more and more abstract, harmonics and geometry got less important as meaningful ways to relate scientific information. Actually in recent decades happened a resurgence of a more abstract way of thinking in structures under the name of topology. But this is considered only a field in mathematics.
In wider society its rather computer science that takes care of structuring information. General science uses their products but only marginally their understanding. Math can only compare data on a microscopic level and data scientist just solve optimization problems for corporations. As a substitute for a fact based philosophy we have today cosmology as part of physics but that is only a shadow of what would be needed.
Mandatory training in the universal ways how to relate and structure information is something we dearly lack today. I think this was a crucial point in the development in our culture at the 18-19th century, when our forefathers tossed out the baby of the liberal arts with the water of a teaching holding the sciences togther. In my view universities then stopped being about an universal understanding and becoming higher trade schools. But this was only a consequence of another break two centuries earlier. Back then René Descartes and others demanded a discontinuation of medieval scholastics in favour of a precursor of todays scientific method. But already Martin Luther had its criticism as part of his unintended reformation and even in reading Occam we can sense a slight turn away from the scholastic school of thought.
What Descartes should have done, is a reformation in philosophy. I think it's inevitable that any scholarly tradition accumulates errors like our akademics for sure have done. Most important are mechanism to keep a tradition vital, that are installed to detect and push out known errors, without breaking with the fruits of much labour.
After the new start, so called philosophers of modern times have almost no clue about the details of natural sciences or formal logic (with notable exceptions). And the sciences do research without much wisdom, orientation or grand picture. They even ignore each others for the most part.
We need a new universal scholarly discipline that evaluates and structures the meaning of information. In order to see the bigger picture we need deep thinkers that challenge each other with complex arguments that are well rounded from multiple angles. To support them we need literature that is designed to bring their understanding on par with the leading scientists without having to read two hundert papers. Yes some researches did that all the time, out of a personal urge. A new scholarly culture to foster that would be of help.