The Subject Matter of Philosophy

It seems clear that subjects or fields of study are determined by the kind of questions to which they have been invented to provide the answer. The questions themselves are intelligible if, and only if, we know where to look for the answers.

If you ask someone an ordinary question, say, 'Where is my coat?', 'Why was Mr Kennedy elected President of the United States?', 'What is the Soviet system of criminal law?' he would normally know how to set about finding an answer. We may not know the answers ourselves, but we know that in the case of the question about the coat, the proper procedure is to look on the chair, in the cupboard, etc. In the case of Mr Kennedy's election or the Soviet system of law we consult writings of specialists for the kind of empirical evidence which leads to the relevant conclusions, and renders them, if not certain, at any rate probable.

In other words, we know where to look for the answer: we know what makes some answers plausible and others not. What makes this type of question intelligible in the first place is that we think that the answer can be discovered by empirical means, that is, by orderly observation or experiment or methods compounded of these, namely those of common sense or the natural sciences. There is another class of questions where we are clear about the proper route by which the answers are to be sought, namely the formal disciplines: mathematics, for example, or logic, or grammar, or chess, where there are certain fixed axioms, certain accepted rules of deduction, and the answer to problems is to be found by applying these rules in the manner prescribed as correct.

The hallmark of these provinces of human thought is that once the question is put we know which way to proceed to try to obtain the answer. The history of systematic human thought is largely a sustained effort to formulate all the questions that occur to mankind in such a way that they will fall into one or other of these two great baskets: the empirical, that is, questions whose answers depend, in the end, on the data of observation; and the formal, that is, questions whose answers depend on pure calculation, untrammelled by factual knowledge.

But there are certain questions that do not easily fit into this classification. 'What is an okapi?' is answered easily enough by an act of empirical observation. Similarly 'What is the cube root of 729?' is settled by a piece of calculation in accordance with accepted rules. But if I ask 'What is a number?', 'What is the purpose of human life on earth', 'Are you sure that all men are brothers?' how do I set about looking for the answer?

There seems to be something queer about all these questions as wide apart as those about number, or the brotherhood of man, or purposes of life; they differ from the questions in the other baskets in that the question itself does not seem to contain a pointer to the way in which the answer to it is to be found. The other, more ordinary, questions contain precisely such pointers built-in techniques for finding the answers to them. The questions about number and so on reduce the questioner to perplexity, and annoy practical people precisely because they do not seem to lead to clear answers or useful knowledge of any kind.

This shows that between the two original baskets, the empirical and the formal, there is an intermediate basket, in which all those questions live which cannot easily be fitted into the other two. These questions are of the most diverse nature; some appear to be questions of fact, others of value; some are questions about words, others are about methods pursued by scientists, artists, critics, common men in the ordinary affairs of life; still others are about the relations between the various provinces of knowledge; some deal with the presuppositions of thinking, some with the correct ends of moral or social or political action.

The only common characteristic which all these questions appear to have is that they cannot be answered either by observation or calculation, either by inductive methods or deductive; and as a crucial corollary of this, that those who ask them are faced with a perplexity from the very beginning-they do not know where to look for the answer; there are no dictionaries, encyclopaedias, compendia of knowledge, no experts, no orthodoxies, which can be referred to with confidence as possessing unquestionable authority or knowledge in these matters. Such questions tend to be called philosophical.

(From an article by Sir Isaiah Berlin in The Sunday Times, 14th November, 1962.)