The Volokh Conspiracy is a closet egghead's paradise. Not only have I found Eugene Volokh to be a source of some of the most rewarding reading I've found in years, but now his brother Sasha has sparked the ol' gray matter with an item questioning the way in which philosophy is studied.
A quick exchange of e-mails resulted, and although my initial response to Sasha's post was muddled, his reply helped me to focus my thinking.
Mathematics is about numbers. Economics is about values and exchanges. But philosophy is not about ideas.
It's about the consequences of ideas.
Any idea, no matter how long ago it was developed, is as valid today as it was then. That goes for Socrates on logic, or Euclid on geometry, or Adam Smith on economics, or Karl Marx on -- whatever the hell it was Karl Marx was blithering about. And so if all we were interested were the ideas themselves, we could simply divorce them from the historical context in which they were put forth. But simply studying ideas for their own sake gets us nowhere useful. What we need to know is what will happen if we apply these ideas.
Mathematical ideas can be tested in equations. Economic ideas can be tested in the marketplace. Where do we test philosophical ideas? The only laboratory available is human experience, of which the record is history. Furthermore, the consequences of past ideas create the milieu in which newer ones are conceived and offered for testing.
Philosophy as intellectual history is the only analog that such a discipline can have to the lab notes of a scientist testing a hypothesis. But unlike that scientist, we can never draw a final conclusion and close the experiment -- because like history, the evolution of ideas, and of the consequences resulting from them, will only end when humanity does.
In recent years we have been reintroduced to the notion of "unintended consequences." This is something we have had to rediscover only because the attempted divorce of ideas from consequences is fairly recent; generations of Dead White Males understood that ideas have consequences, both intended and otherwise -- which is why they took philosophy as seriously as they did.
What -- you wondered why our highest degree of learning is the Doctor of Philosophy?
