Philosophy

Hi, this may seem very strange but what do you love about philosophy (not specific areas, I mean essentially)? What is it to you? Please answer! Oooh I'd be so interested. I'm not trying to waste anyone's time!

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What I have always loved about philosophy is its openness to questions, including foundational questions. It's where you can take all the "deep" questions from other disciplines that active practitioners sometimes don't have time for, unless their discipline is at a sticking point. I don't love all of philosophy, but I continue to enjoy the points where it engages with other disciplines and can make a difference to them.

I like being in the grip of a very difficult problem, and wrestling with many possible solutions. All the better if the problem has some sort of personal or practical urgency, if it's something I feel I have to figure out.

I used to be very interested in the philosophy of mind. And the fascination was in trying to understand how our ordinary talk about the mind ("folk psychology" as we sometimes say) fits together with what explorations in neurobiology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence tell us.

These days, I spend most of my time thinking about the philosophy of mathematics. And again the fascination is trying to see how technical work in various areas of logic (and set theory, category theory, etc.) interrelates and throws on questions about the nature of the world of mathematics and our knowledge of it. How does it all hang together?

Some of us just like plugging away at pretty narrow areas of enquiry (doing specialist neurobiology, or the technical work in some area of set theory, say): others among us get gripped by the project of standing back a bit and trying to fit things from a number of narrow areas together into bigger pictures. The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars said that the task ofphilosophy is the latter, to explore “how things in the broadest possible sense ofthe term hang together in the broadest sense of the term.” That remarkis often quoted by philosophers, I guess because it chimes with how alot of us see what we are up to, and what grips us about the enterprise. Certainly, that's how it is with me.

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