Philosophy isn't...

... about how to think, act, or live well — however much we wish it were so 😢

My book Meta-rationality is about how to think well. My book Meaningness is about practical problems of meaning. Philosophy is neither of those things.

On social media, I’ve often said that I don’t do philosophy.

A common reaction is: “What you do is obviously philosophy! You must be deeply confused. Maybe you have some eccentric, non-standard idea of what that word means?”

This is a misunderstanding. I use the term “philosophy” in the normal, mainstream sense. It appears, rather, that many amateur enthusiasts have peculiar, mistaken ideas about what “philosophy” means. This section of “Undoing philosophy” explores those ideas. I think the explanations are clear enough that no reasonable person will remain confused.

What is philosophy?

Introductory philosophy courses often begin with that question.

All words are somewhat vague. This causes problems for rationalism, which therefore insists on precise definitions. The hope is that with a good enough definition, there would be an absolute truth as to whether something is in a category or not. I discuss the reasons for this, and why it can almost never be fulfilled, in “Are eggplants fruits?”

“Philosophy” is a more vague word than most. After some side-tracking, and delay for rhetorical effect: introductory courses may conclude that the question “what is philosophy?” is unanswerable. No definition is possible.

This holds equally for “fruits,” and for almost everything else, except in mathematics. Words do not have “true” or “correct” meanings.

Vagueness is a problem only when it is overlooked. Then people may talk past each other without noticing. That implies that we should try to use words in ways that are understood in context. We should check that our readers or listeners do understand what we mean. This usually implies using words in typical, standard ways.

Nevertheless, it’s common to make claims about philosophy that are accurate only according to some atypical and confused idea about what the word means. Non-professionals may insist that their conception of philosophy is the real philosophy, the True and Correct meaning of philosophy. Or, simply, to not notice that their use of “philosophy” is not what other people mean by it.

It’s a free country. You can use the word “philosophy” to mean whatever you think it ought to mean; but that might not be a good idea.

If you want to use the word “hippopotamus” to mean “web site,” no one can stop you.

Customer service representative: Hi, thank you for calling Dysfunctional Healthcare Insurance Inc.! How can I help you?

Me: Well, the government hippopotamus told me I have insurance with you, but your hippopotamus doesn’t know about it.

Representative: Uh… I’m sorry, I’m not completely sure I follow that. Could you say what the problem is again?

Me: The hippopotamus is hopelessly confused. I need you to tell your hippopotamus that I have health insurance before it is too late!

Later in “Undoing philosophy,” I analyze the category “philosophy” meta-rationally. That is a prerequisite to explaining why what I do isn’t that. We will explore the normal use of the word, and what counts or doesn’t, and why.

For now, this section offers preliminary explanations, sufficient to dispel some misconceptions, before moving on to more substantial concerns. It does not aim at a definition. It points out that some ideas about what “philosophy” means are both non-standard and intrinsically confused. They are better abandoned.

I will treat these in order of decreasing wrongness, and therefore increasing plausibility. You can skip ahead over any that do seem obviously wrong. They are:

• All conceptual thought is philosophy

• Philosophy is simply abstract, general thinking

• Philosophy is the “miscellaneous other” field of thinking

• Philosophy is the love of wisdom

• Philosophy is the study of how to think well

• Philosophy is the field concerned with problems of meaning, such as purpose, ethics, value, and the self

Each of these has been asserted in response to my saying “I don’t do philosophy.” By these definitions, what I do would count as philosophy.

All these definitions are unambiguously wrong. That’s not because they disagree with some arbitrary academic dictate. It’s also not because they differ from my personal opinion about what the word “philosophy” ought to mean.

Rather, they are too broad. They include many things everyone would agree aren’t philosophy. Some of these attempts are also too narrow: they exclude much of what normally counts as philosophy. I expect every reasonable person will agree that these are mistaken ideas, given counter-examples.

Because I’ve listed these misconceptions in order of increasing plausibility, they require increasingly detailed clarifications. My treatments of them below are increasingly lengthy.

Also, as they seem increasingly plausible, their wrongness becomes increasingly consequential. The last two ideas—that philosophy is the study of thinking well, and that it is the field concerned with meaning—can completely mess up your life. In fact, they unavoidably do mess up all our lives, sometimes catastrophically. That’s the topic of the next chapter, explaining why philosophy is so harmful.

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Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. It’s changed my writing from a surprisingly expensive hobby into a surprisingly remunerative hobby (but not yet a real income).

Most conceptual thought is not philosophy

Some people on social media, in response to saying that what I do is not philosophy, have asserted that all conceptual thought is philosophy. I can imagine a reasoning process that would arrive at this conclusion, but it’s obviously just wrong. This is not what anyone uses the word for ordinarily.

You are looking into the refrigerator, first thing in the morning, and thinking about what to have for breakfast. In a muzzy mental haze, you pass up the pastry because calories; the bacon because cholesterol; and the yogurt because it seems too sour for first thing in the morning. You remember making pancakes a few weeks ago. That was good, but too complicated to deal with this time. You settle for fat-free milk and oat cereal, which you remember is supposed to be healthy, because something something heart disease.

This is extensive conceptual thinking, and not philosophy.

Most abstract, general thinking is not philosophy

“All conceptual thought” was much too broad. A narrower, less wrong idea is that philosophy is abstract, general thinking. It’s true that philosophy is that. In fact, that is part of the reason philosophy is usually bad: it fails to connect to concrete, specific reality. This conception is still far too broad to define philosophy, though.

All academic thinking, in every field, involves extensive abstract, general thinking. So does all professional and technical work. Chemistry, finance, and electrical engineering are not philosophy. You can do philosophy of chemistry, finance, or electrical engineering, but Philosophy of X is not the same field as X.

A common rejoinder is that “all the sciences and other disciplines began as philosophy, and only split off into different fields as they became professionally specialized, so they are really philosophy.”

However, words mean what they mean now. “Egregious” once meant “exceptional, outstanding, extraordinarily good.” Now it doesn’t. Insisting that this is still the real meaning of “egregious” would be silly. Insisting that “philosophy” still means what it did in Ancient Greece is silly.

Furthermore: we all use abstract, general thought in everyday life, in ways that would never have counted as philosophy.

Should we get little Yuzuki a pet for her birthday?

Do you think she’s responsible enough yet to take care of one?

“Pet” is an abstract, general category. Many quite different animal species can be pets, so it’s general, not specific. In fact, you might even say you have a cactus as a pet. Tamagotchis are pets in some sense, as are pet rocks. What makes something a pet has more to do with your relationship to it than what it is intrinsically. This quality of relationship is highly abstract. Responsibility, caring, and maturation are also highly abstract, general concepts.

Discussing whether to get your daughter a pet is not philosophy.

When I say rude things about philosophy on social media, amateur enthusiasts often reply:

By criticizing philosophy, you are making a philosophical argument, therefore philosophy is inescapable, therefore it is good!

Somehow this is supposed to be a triumphant gotcha?

I can’t follow the logic here. Maybe it depends partly on the idea that all abstract, general thought is philosophical by definition.

Or, it may be based on a particular experience, rather than logic. When sensible people see friends getting sucked into philosophy, and try to rescue them, they often get fooled into arguing about it. Arguing is what philosophy tries to make you do. It is the fundamental philosophical method. Enthusiasts love arguing about philosophy, which never goes anywhere. Once they are in a philosophical frame of mind, they will argue in favor of any absurdity, and nothing friends say can snap them out of it. Philosophy enthusiasts may be be used to enjoying the feeling of “defeating” criticisms of philosophy by making nonsensical and absurd arguments until their interlocutors simply drop it.

Don’t get tricked into this. Don’t let yourself get dragged into arguing against philosophy. That is doing philosophy! So it is bad. As well as annoying and pointless.

It’s best just to ridicule it.

By writing “Undoing philosophy,” I’ve gotten dragged as far as explaining how philosophy is bad. That’s probably a mistake; I should have stuck just to insulting it. Still, explaining is often useful, whereas arguing almost never is.

Philosophy is not thinking’s wastebasket taxon

A sengi, once classified with shrews in the wastebasket taxon Insectivora. Actually more closely related to elephants. Image courtesy B kimmel.

In biological taxonomy, a “wastebasket taxon” is an artificial “other” or “miscellaneous” category for species that don’t fit well anywhere else. Creating an “other” category is often useful in other fields as well. It’s better to flag the not-fitting-ness than to force items into boxes where they don’t belong.

A wastebasket taxon for thought might be a good thing! When I was an undergraduate, MIT had a “design your own major” program, where you could study whatever you liked, without being restricted to any of the established departments with their rigid degree requirements. I was all over that! Unfortunately, it got shut down a year later, which was a big problem for me, because I wanted to learn everything.

What to do?? I figured out that the math department had the fewest specific required courses, so I went with that. It left me time enough for classes in Ancient Greek language and literature, developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, economics, and materials science.

There’s a common idea that philosophy just means thinking about whatever things that don’t belong in any other university department. In other words: philosophy is the wastebasket taxon of thought. There’s a historical reason for this. It’s the observation, again, that “philosophy” was a much broader category in ancient Greece than it is now, and many of the other academic specialties split off from it. Each developed a separate identity as people found better methods for addressing particular sorts of problems. (Better, that is, than arguing about them metaphysically.) “Philosophy,” on this line of thinking, now refers to whichever problems got left behind—because no good way to make progress on them has been officially recognized by academia.

“Philosophy is the study of whatever isn’t studied in other academic departments” might be good if true. There are many worthwhile sorts of thinking that you can’t get credit for in universities. But you can’t get credit for them in the philosophy department, either. The stuff I do wouldn’t be acceptable there, for example. Philosophy is not a general wastebasket.

In fact, “philosophy” refers to a fairly specific, fairly short list of topics—in academia, at least. It is a collection of specialized esoteric games, each with their own pointless, intricate, self-referential rules.

You can also do “Philosophy of X” for almost any X; but only by passing over most actual details of X and discussing its Ideal Form instead. “Philosophy of X” is usually slipshod applied ontology, done without sufficient expertise in X to create something that would be useful to those doing X. (So what’s the point?)

There’s a specific risk of harm here. Those of us who think about things for which there is no academic field may get misled into thinking that this means we are doing philosophy. Or that, if we aren’t, we should be. Then we might think “oh, so probably philosophy has some useful way of thinking about this,” and read some of the stuff. That leads us into metaphysical Neverland, where we get lost, and we may never return to reality.

Philosophy is not the love of wisdom

Philosophy has been centrally concerned with the question “what is philosophy?” from the beginning. Introductory treatments often begin by explaining that the word originally meant “the love of wisdom.” Sometimes philosophy enthusiasts insist that, therefore, this is the real meaning of the word.

This is an egregious error. Words mean what they mean now.

Anyway, the obvious next question is “what do you mean, ‘wisdom’?” That is an exceptionally vague and abstract word. The question was asked even in Ancient Greece. Philosophers asked it more in the mode of “wtf are we even talking about” than “let’s use rationality to get a really precise definition for this commonsense concept we understand quite well already.”

At this point, an introductory course may assign Plato’s Apology to read about that. It is a fictional version of Socrates’ defense speech at his death-penalty trial, supposedly for religious impiety and “corrupting the youth” with philosophy. (Historians’ consensus is that these charges were a pretext. The actual issue was that Socrates had supported the Thirty Tyrants, a brutal oppressive military puppet government forced on Athens by Sparta, against the democratic native government. They couldn’t try him for that, because a general amnesty was declared after the Tyrants were deposed.)

According to Plato’s story, an oracle had proclaimed that no man was wiser than Socrates, but as far as he could tell he had no wisdom other than knowing he didn’t have any. “WTF is wisdom? I have no clue!” So he tried to find out by asking around, and failed. The further discussion of the meaning of “wisdom” in the Apology is supposedly very wise, but actually makes no sense at all. I guess that’s a good introduction to philosophy, since most of it can be characterized as “clever-sounding verbiage that actually makes no sense, too often in support of morally dubious activities.” As Socrates’ jury concluded.

Anyway, philosophers have become none the wiser concerning wisdom since then. And even if we had some rough definition of “wisdom,” would it be accurate, useful, or meaningful to say that philosophy is the “love” of it? Is chemistry the love of chemicals? It is unlikely, though theoretically possible, that you could choose to learn about chemistry because you love chemicals. However, just loving chemicals is not chemistry itself, nor does chemistry require that. You are far more likely to choose to learn about chemistry because you love chemistry, not chemicals. Do you learn about philosophy because you love wisdom, or because you love philosophy? Or because you have been misled by clever-sounding verbiage that actually makes no sense?

When I say “philosophy is bad, and I don’t do it” enthusiasts respond:

You can’t be against wisdom! Wisdom is good, right! The highest good, in fact! You must love wisdom, or you’d be a very bad person. Therefore, you are really a philosopher (or else a very bad person).

The natural response is:

Yes, but wisdom is just good by definition—if some idea or act turns out to have been bad, then it wasn’t wise, was it? But this makes “wisdom” a content-free term. If you have some more specific idea of what “wisdom” means, then we could evaluate what that has to do with what philosophy.

In any case, almost none of the material that’s normally counted as “philosophy” is explicitly concerned with wisdom. You might insist that it is, nevertheless, about wisdom “really.” But then you are probably just using “wisdom” to mean “whatever topics philosophy is about.” Then “philosophy” means “the love of whatever philosophy is about.” This is not useful, because it’s circular. It’s somewhat accurate, though, in view of philosophy’s tedious and sterile self-involvement.

Philosophy is not the study of how to think well

“Being able to think well” might be a plausible definition of “wisdom.” Some people say that philosophy is the study of how to think well. That would be great, if true! But it isn’t.

Some people believe that teaching you to think well is one of philosophy’s main purposes, even if not its definition. Some philosophy departments advertise that as a reason to purchase their products. It may be an intended function of some introductory courses, but it’s not the main overall purpose of philosophy.

In fact, philosophy teaches you to think badly. It teaches particular patterns of thinking that mostly don’t work—other than to produce more philosophy. The type of thinking employed in philosophy is actively misleading for other purposes. That is sometimes catastrophic, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

Good non-philosophical ways of thinking

There are many other types of thinking that do work, in different ways for different purposes.

For example, engineering education teaches you patterns of quantitative reasoning concerning tradeoffs between conflicting goals. It also teaches patterns of structural reasoning about relationships between functions and mechanisms.

These ways of thinking are effective in engineering practice. They may also be valuable in other domains, including your everyday life. You can structure your home environment and life-routines to go smoothly and efficiently. You can optimize your use of time and money to get more done with greater enjoyment and less hassle. Over-applying this approach, or applying it where it doesn’t work, may also cause dysfunction and misery.

There are other, quite different patterns of thinking you may learn from other disciplines. Studying clinical psychology helps you understand emotions and personal relationships—your own, and other people’s. This is not mainly a matter of learning facts, concepts, or theories, although it includes those. It is a way of being overall. It includes broad patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, which are quite different from the engineering way of being—and from the philosophical way of being.

The ways of thinking and being of the writer, entrepreneur, and performing artist are different again.

Philosophical thinking is awful in ordinary terms

Philosophy is taught mainly by example. You read the Great Philosophers, and philosophy means “doing things like that.” Most of the Great Philosophers were terrible thinkers.

Michael Huemer is among the best contemporary philosophers. In “Great Philosophers Are Bad Philosophers,” he writes:

My introduction to philosophy was largely through the great philosophers of the past—the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant. From the beginning, I was struck by how bad they were at thinking. Sometimes, they just seemed to be bad at logic, committing fallacies and non sequiturs that even an undergraduate such as myself could quickly see. Other times (almost always!), they seemed to have extremely poor judgment, happily proclaiming absurd conclusions to the world, rather than going back and questioning their starting points. I wondered why that was. Were these really the best philosophers humanity had produced?

This is a common observation, and should be obvious. I pointed out several glaring examples in the previous chapter, “Philosophy doesn’t work.” Huemer details many more, and suggests a reason—different from the one I propose—that Great Philosophy is so bad. Paul Graham’s “How to do philosophy” makes the same observation, and gives another explanation, closer to mine. David Stove’s “What is wrong with our thoughts?” enumerates extreme examples, and is extremely funny (although I disagree with his conclusion). These are recent criticisms, but people have been pointing out that philosophy is nonsense from the beginning, and ever since.

It’s easy, and instructive, to collect more examples yourself. Just open any philosophical text (preferably a Great one), adopt a hostile attitude, and ask “does this make sense? is it true? is it useful? would acting on this make things go better?” and expect the answer “no.”

Reading it this way dispels the aura of sacredness around philosophy, the special attitude you have been taught toward it, the extreme charity it expects you to exercise:

Maybe this doesn’t seem to make sense, but if you are a sufficiently special person and know how to read it philosophically, dropping your ordinary reasonable habit of objecting to nonsense, you will find that it is truly wise.

Most philosophical writing, particularly including The Greats, exemplifies and advocates plainly bad thinking. It leads to false, harmful, incoherent, or irrational conclusions. This means “philosophy is the study of thinking well” is mistaken.

Philosophy is actively harmful to thinking. Many people do study it with the expectation that it will teach them to think well. Then they may think extra badly. People who think badly due to their study of philosophy may do enormous harm (as we’ll see in the next chapter of “Undoing philosophy”).

Logic is the branch of philosophy supposedly concerned with thinking well

Most of philosophy isn’t about thinking. That’s overly narrow as a definition. So “philosophy is the study of thinking well” would be inaccurate even if it didn’t teach you to think badly.

Philosophy does contain a relevant subfield: logic. That was originally supposed to be a general study of thinking well.

Logic was named and first codified by Aristotle. His system didn’t work, for multiple reasons:

• It’s extremely weak; it doesn’t allow you to make any correct inferences that aren’t obvious anyway. (All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. You don’t say!)

• Logic depends critically on the metaphysical claim that all propositions are either absolutely true or absolutely false. In fact, nearly nothing outside mathematics is either absolutely true or absolutely false. That means that applying logic in real-world situations allows you to derive wrong conclusions using the method of contradiction.

• Aristotle’s system had some technical flaws, internal inconsistencies, that were recognized for centuries but went unfixed. Logicians made little progress beyond his work until the nineteenth century.

Despite logic’s uselessness, philosophers held it in high theoretical regard for millennia.

Finally, in the mid- and late 1800s, Boole and Frege fixed the bugs and greatly increased the power of logic. Modern logic allows you to make correct, non-obvious inferences. However, logic still depends on absolute truth, so it is mostly useful only for thinking about mathematics.

I love logic. As a student, I took every class in logic available to me, six or seven half-year courses, most of them at an advanced graduate level. It’s glorious, both as an intricate, elegant artistic construction, and for the surprising conclusions about mathematics it demonstrates.

All of these courses were offered by the mathematics department, not by the philosophy department. For the past century, logic has occupied an ambiguous place. It only marginally counts as a subfield of philosophy. It’s much more like mathematics, but most mathematicians don’t like it. They use it as little as possible, and wish it would go away. Some experts now consider logic an autonomous field in its own right, not part of either discipline.

Outside mathematics, logic is slightly useful in computer science (although mostly only in theory, not much in current practice). It can also occasionally be used in other technical fields. That works only if you are careful to reality-check its conclusions, because they hold only to the extent that the approximation of absolute truth holds.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophers hoped and believed that logic could be applied much more generally, particularly in science. This was the logical positivist movement, which conclusively failed by the middle of the century. The first half of Part One of Meta-rationality is about that, starting with "Positive and logical.”

So, the upshot is that this sort of logic is not a good account of thinking well.

Well then, some philosophers thought, we still ought to have an explanation of how to think well. That’s at least part of what philosophy should be about!

So, they tried to come up with some sort of “informal logic” that would be much more like the way we actually do ordinarily think well—except that it would be philosophical, and therefore somehow better. This effort has, thus far, yielded nothing of practical use. It is pretty generally regarded as misconceived, and so a failure from the outset.

Critical thinking is not philosophy

“Critical thinking” is primarily an educational movement. In the 1980s-90s, education theorists recognized that students weren’t being taught to think well, and therefore thought badly. Prior attempts had taught the basics of mathematical logic at the advanced high school or introductory undergraduate level. That didn’t work, because logic is mostly useless.

Recognizing this, the movement sought to synthesize diverse empirical research on how people actually do think well, and to teach that. Courses in “critical thinking” are now widely available, again at the advanced high school or introductory undergraduate level.

So long as the material taught actually is accurate and useful, this sounds great! I know almost nothing about the details, so I have no informed opinion. However, my goals for Meta-rationality seem aligned. Maybe it should be counted as an advanced textbook in critical thinking?

Critical thinking does not count as philosophy. It began as a rejection of philosophy’s theories. It was developed in education departments, not philosophy departments. It is not a research area in philosophy. (Philosophy departments may teach early-undergraduate-level courses in it, when they don’t fit well elsewhere the departmental structure.) With a single exception (Boston University), no school offers advanced courses in critical thinking. It’s considered a basic study-skills development course. It’s treated as a supplemental side-show to the real, substantial business of serious university education.

This seems a pity. Learning “how to think real good” is valuable and important—unlike philosophy.

Philosophical thinking is metaphysical thinking

Philosophy begins when you ask:

What is a pet, really?

“Really” opens the magic portal into Plato’s Formal Realm. That is where the Ideal Form of Pet abides. It gives the True Meaning of Petness to all specific pets, which are mere shadows of that Reality.

“Really” means the exact opposite of what it sounds like. It announces that you are abandoning the real world. You are entering the domain of metaphysical fantasy instead. That is thinking philosophically.

Alternatively, following Aristotle, you may ask:

What is a pet, essentially?

For essentialism, all pets share the same immaterial, metaphysical, intrinsic essence, and containing this essence of petness is what makes something a pet, rather than just a blob of matter. But there are no such essences. And this style of explanation particularly fails in the case of “pet,” which is relational, and so couldn’t possibly be intrinsic.

In the analytic tradition, you ask:

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions that make something a pet?

These are predicates that, asserted of a particular entity, form a set of propositions, each individually either absolutely true or absolutely false, whose conjunction implies that the entity either absolutely is, or is not, a pet. Propositions are impossible metaphysical entities, and there is no absolute truth outside mathematics (and possibly fundamental physics).

All these ways of thinking are fundamentally, unfixably bad. They don’t work. They can’t work. They should be abandoned.

And thinking in such ways is what philosophy teaches you.

All philosophical thinking is metaphysical thinking. That is what it means to think about something philosophically. You relate whatever the thing is to imaginary metaphysical entities, and spin fantasies about what that relationship implies. Every branch of philosophy is an application of metaphysics.

This could be a provisional first-cut definition for philosophy. However, it mostly just replaces one dubious term with another: “metaphysics.” That is a famously vague category, often characterized as a grab-bag list of diverse subject matters. Metaphysics also shades off into other branches of philosophy, such as ontology, and into entirely other disciplines, such as theology.

What are “metaphysical entities”? Many imaginary entities, such as fictional characters, are not metaphysical. They cause no significant philosophical problems. How does the category relate to “supernatural entities”? How about non-transcendent gods? How about numbers? Are numbers metaphysical?

A later chapter will work through a better understanding of what does and doesn’t count as philosophy, and why. And, in another, we may need to clarify the relationships among myth, math, and metaphysics—all concerned with imaginary entities, but of different sorts, with different consequences.

Philosophy has no monopoly on meaningness

Augustine. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect he’s turned the voltage up enough to violate OSHA safety regulations.

Meaningness, the book, advertises itself as:

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

This is what many people want philosophy to be. It’s what many people believe philosophy is. This may be the main reason the stuff I do gets confused with philosophy: I address some of the same issues. However, philosophy is not defined by its topics, but by its methods. My work uses non-philosophical ones, and so isn’t philosophy. (We’ll discuss that at length in a later chapter.)

Also, much of philosophy isn’t about these topics at all. (So, as a definition, “the study of problems of meaning” would be too narrow.) Much of philosophy is about technical pseudo-problems internal to the discipline, which are of no intrinsic interest. They can be fun to read about, but they aren’t relevant to your life, except in some distant, unhelpful, theoretical sense.

Also, there are many other fields that take these topics as their subject matters. Religion and psychology both claim dominion over all such questions. Although I’m not a proponent of either, I believe both offer better approaches than philosophy. Other fields, such as sociology, study some of these topics as well. So, as a definition of philosophy, “the study of problems of meaning” would be too broad, because it would try to include much or all of several non-philosophical disciplines. At most, it is a study of these topics.

Nevertheless, many amateur philosophy enthusiasts insist that this is what philosophy really means. They dismiss contemporary academic philosophy as meaningless, a field that lost its way long ago, now devoted to purely self-referential technical intellectualization, with no relevance to the meaning of life. I mostly agree about academic philosophy, and I agree that philosophy (if it is to have any value) ought to help us live better. But that is not what actually-existing philosophy does, nor for the most part does it attempt that.

Most amateur philosophy enthusiasts are mainly inspired by Ancient Greek philosophy—because that was primarily an attempt to answer the question “how can we live a good life?”

Unfortunately, the attempt conclusively failed, in its own terms. The failure was not just due to internal technical difficulties. Ancient philosophy couldn’t give practical advice about how to think, feel, and act better. Its theories didn’t work. This was widely recognized by the beginning of the first millennium.

Christianity offered better answers to problems of meaning, self and society, ethics, purpose, and value. For decision-makers in the Roman empire, its main competitors were not so much pagan cults, but philosophies: primarily Neoplatonism and Stoicism. Those were dead ends. Neoplatonism regarded the real world as entirely and irremediably defiled and defiling. It advised disengaging completely, to escape into intellectual contemplation of metaphysical fantasies. Stoicism, similarly, took its highest good as ataraxia: being unaffected by reality. It recommended accomplishing disengagement through apatheia, emotionlessness.

Christianity rapidly trounced these pale, weak alternatives; and so the classical project of philosophy ended.

However, Christian theologians recognized that philosophy was primarily a collection of tricks for convincing people of obviously false things. Now, that was something they could use! Commoners in the empire’s hinterlands, and elsewhere as Christianity’s evangelical aspirations expanded, were far more devoted to their gods than the Roman elite.

The Early Church Fathers reworked philosophy as a tool of apologetics: arguments for the superiority of Christianity. This project was completed by Augustine around 400. For the next thousand-plus years, philosophy was subordinated to theology. That era of philosophy is of interest only if you are serious about understanding the history of Christian doctrine.

(If you’d like to learn more about this transition, it’s the subject of Chapter Three in Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay. In contrast with my polemic, his explanation is sober, reasonably detailed but reasonably concise, and academic but readable.)

Most texts of pre-Christian philosophy were suppressed and lost in Europe during the period of theological hegemony. However, they were preserved by Islamic philosophers, and became increasingly available and influential in the West after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Philosophy was once again repurposed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. It became a tool for challenging Christian dogma. At first only details; but eventually the whole of the religion. By the 1700s, the aim of philosophy was to create a secular Grand Unified Systematic Theory of Everything, which would subordinate all other intellectual fields. (And, implicitly, shove religion out of the picture.)

This project, like the Greeks’, completely failed. Philosophy of the era still appeals to a particular sort of intellectual, including some enthusiastic amateurs, who are inspired by Big Ideas and are willing to overlook their being obviously wrong. However, Grand Systematic Big Idea philosophy also ignored all the petty details of real life that most of us actually care about, in favor of sweeping irrelevant metaphysical abstractions.

In the late 1800s, God finally died, and philosophy was looking mighty ill. That opened space for new projects. These were phenomenology and existentialism. They returned to the real world, and to questions of meaning that we actually care about. They were hugely influential in popular thought in the mid-twentieth century. This philosophical era has the second-greatest amateur appeal, after the Greeks. My own approach is significantly influenced by phenomenology and existentialism; particularly via Heidegger’s synthesis of the two.

Both existentialism and phenomenology considered themselves anti-philosophical, or at minimum anti-metaphysical. That was good. It made some progress possible. Unfortunately, both were still contaminated with philosophical patterns of thinking. Consequently, they failed, and fizzled out by about 1960.

Phenomenology’s introspective methods were inadequate to the job. However, it significantly influenced two other fields with better methods. (Both have been major influences on me.) Phenomenology was one source for ethnomethodology, which observes meanings in activity, rather than in consciousness. Ethnomethodology is, however, definitely not philosophy, and has serious limitations of its own. Similarly, the last major work in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, could be regarded as founding the “4E” approach in cognitive psychology. That too is not philosophy, and has serious limitations.

Can we at least agree that Camus was hot?

Existentialism holds that meanings are purely subjective, which is false. It holds that meanings must be chosen by each individual in an authentic transcendent act, which is impossible. Attempting and failing at it reliably leads to nihilism. Existentialism is, therefore, actively harmful, not just limited. This was understood by leading existentialists (notably Camus), and as a serious project it ended around 1960. However, it has persisted as long-half-life toxic philosophical waste. It remains hugely damaging to our common understanding of our selves, society, ethics, purpose, and value.

In this century, academic philosophy has shriveled into a narrow, lifeless academic backwater. Philosophy avoids questions of meaning by denigrating them as naive and trivial; topics exiled to Agony Aunt advice columns, not serious research.

Pop philosophy remains popular, partly for lite intellectual entertainment, and partly for telling people falsehoods they want to believe. It promotes attractive, harmful ideas that were thoroughly discredited long ago.

Meanwhile… our activities constantly orient to our selves, societies, morals, purposes, and values. Mostly, fortunately, we do that without reference to philosophy. Mostly we do it without reference to any intellectual discipline. We apply everyday, improvisational reasonableness, which usually works well enough. The idea that accurate, effective action derives from theoretical contemplation is a rationalist delusion.

Meaningness, the book, promises “better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.” Better than what? Better than the ones promoted by philosophy, religion, psychology, and so forth. Our everyday practice is already better most of the time. It is fallible, but responsive to specifics of purpose and context, which the intellectualized alternatives aren’t. When it goes wrong, it is often because toxic philosophical, religious, and psychological theories poison our way of being.

We can do better. Meaningness and Meta-rationality are non-theoretical explorations of everyday and technical practice, respectively. They aim for improvement. In part, that is by dispelling wrong philosophical ideas. Mainly, though, their method (rather like that of ethnomethodology) is close observation of what we actually do, with an eye to doing it better. They are primarily about activity, and ways of being, and only incidentally about thinking.

This is why I am writing “Undoing philosophy.” If you read my stuff as philosophy, you miss the point: which is to refocus attention away from theorizing, toward engagement with practice. The final chapter of “Undoing” is about that.

There are other non-theoretical ways of engaging with meaning, and of improving our thinking, feeling, and acting. Stories are one. Myths, novels, films, and video games have much to teach that philosophy, religion, and psychology won’t. Narrative can engage with the dense specifics of living, which theoretical accounts can’t.

This was already noted in Ancient Greece. From the story of Oedipus, we get a visceral understanding of tragedy. It teaches that we may discover we have done terrible things, unknowingly. That summary doesn’t convey our sickening feelings in less extreme situations: for example, accidentally making public an embarrassing fact about a friend that we had thought was already common knowledge. No theoretical explanation could add useful information here. The details of the Oedipus myth reveal shades of horror that philosophy can’t reach.

From the video game Witcher 3, I learned much about heroism, responsibility, and the meaning of maturity in a marital relationship. Most of that I couldn’t articulate, and any philosophical account of such matters would be simplistic and childish in comparison.