Soul_Searching_1_.pdf

PATHWAYS TO PHILOSOPHY PROGRAMME B: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Searching For the Soul: Unit One ________________________________________________________________________________________________ (a) philosophy and the soul 1. A journalist once described an evening class the author was running as ‘soul-searching for ordinary people’. That snappy title inspired a train of thought of which these pages are the result. What has philosophy got to do with the soul? What does one mean by ‘the soul’? What, indeed, is philosophy? And, assuming that the philosophy has an idea of what it is searching for (if we allow the pun on the ordinary meaning of the term ‘soul-searching’), how does it go about looking? To paraphrase a worry once expressed by Plato, how can you look for something if you don’t already know what you are looking for? How will you know when you’ve found it? On the other hand – given that your search is a search for knowledge – if you do know what you are looking for then what’s the point of conducting the inquiry in the first place? 2. What is philosophy? Consulting etymology, we find, rather disappointingly, that the word itself has little significant meaning. The term has the appearance of a label invented for political purposes, like ‘social democrat’. The philosophers’ party wished to be known as the lovers of knowledge or wisdom: if you were against them then you had to be an ignoramus or a philistine. But what did philosophers do? It was clearly a risky occupation,