高中英语 a few words about the utility of philosophy素材.docVIP

A Few Words about the Utility of Philosophy Now let us see what intellectual virtues philosophy can provide in the subjects of ethics. The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful. A man imbued with philosophic spirit, whether a professional philosopher or not, will wish his beliefs to be as true as he can make them, and will, in equal measure, love to know, and hate to be in error. This principle has a wider scope than may be apparent at first sight. Our beliefs spring from a great variety of causes: what we were told in youth by parents and school-teachers, what either embodies or allays our fears, what ministers to our self-esteem, and so on. Any one of these causes may or may not lead us to true beliefs. Intellectual sobriety, therefore, will lead us to scrutinize our beliefs closely, with a view to discovering which of them there is any reason to believe true. If we are wise, we shall apply solvent criticism especially to the beliefs that we find it most painful to doubt, and to those most likely to involve us in violent conflict with men who hold opposite but equally groundless beliefs. If this attitude could become common, the gain in diminishing the acerbity of disputes would be incalculable. There is another intellectual virtue, which is that of generality or impartiality. I recommend the following exercise: In a sentence involving words that arouse powerful but different emotions in different readers, try replacing them by symbols, A, B, C, and so on, and forgetting the particular significance of the symbols. When, in elementary algebra, you do problems about A, B and C going up a mountain, you have no emotional interest in the gentlemen concerned, and you do your best to work out the solution with impersonal correctness. But if you thought that A was yourself, B your hated rival and C the schoolmaster who set the problem, your calculation would go askew, and you would be sure to find that A wa