Many people have seen philosophy as a problem. The moment you tell someone you are studying philosophy, the next question they ask is: do you believe in God? These people already concluded that philosophers do not believe in God.
The discipline itself has many problems that it has not been able to solve. Issues in philosophy are open-ending – that is, they are always open to further criticisms. There are many problems I met in philosophy as a student and like every philosopher, we always try our best to solve them knowing fully well that another scholar would re-evaluate them and point out the flaws in them.
Our concern as philosophers is to raise fundamental questions rather than always trying to answer these questions. The more questions you can raise the more you open the discourse for further philosophical expositions.
Some of the problems of philosophy are:
- Problem of freewill and determinism
- The existence of God
- Problem of evil
- Mind and Body
The problem of freewill and determinism :
I have theorized on determinism in one of my post where I argued against destiny. There is the view that man is a free being and is capable of making his own decisions. At the same time, another view claim that such freedom is a mere illusion because our actions are being controlled by unknown forces.
John Hospers maintains that human freewill is nothing but an illusion. He writes:
We talk about freewill, and say for example, the person is free to do so-and-so if he wants and we forget that his wanting is caught up in the stream of determinism, that unconscious forces drive him into wanting to do the thing in question. The analogy of the puppet whose motions are manipulated from behind in wires… is a telling one at almost every point
The problem here is whether human beings are free or determined! If man is free, to what extent? If he is not free, what is responsible for that? That is, who or what is controlling him to act contrary to how he wishes to act?
This is still a problem in philosophy. No matter how science or anybody tries to solve this problem, there will always be new questions to ask.
The existence of God
Many of my readers are familiar with this particular problem because some of them have asked me the question. The question about the existence of God is something we do under philosophy of religion. The questions philosophers ask are: who is God? Does He exist? If He does, can we call God a ‘It’, ‘He’ or ‘She’? What created God – considering the law of logic that nothing creates itself? What is His nature?
This particular problem started in the medieval period. The was the time of St Augustine of Hippo, St Thomas Aquinas, St Anselm, etc. These scholars used theology to answer this question and in most cases they ran into inconsistencies.
The question of God’s existence is always new to every philosopher because as a philosopher in the embryo, you must theorize on the topic. This is another problem in philosophy which directly gave birth to the problem of evil.
The problem of Mind and Body:
Many people who are not in the realm of 'philosophy' believe that man is made up of two components: body and soul. According to the layman, man is both body and soul. His soul is eternal while the body is pure material.
This is similar to what we have in philosophy. It is a problem created by Rene Descartes when he argued that man is both material and immaterial. He believes that body extends and is destructive while the mind does not extend.
Philosophers have been trying to differentiate mind actions from bodily actions. They try to see if mind and body can influence one another and how. This is another problem that every new philosopher must try to solve.
The question is can they be solved? I doubt that because if they are ‘solved’, it will be for a while. It will be like the case of ‘justified true belief’ where a scholar maintains that once a belief can be justified then knowledge is involved. This was the case before Edmund Gettier came with just three pages paper to destroy the claim and 'justified true belief' stopped being the yardstick of judging knowledge.
This is the beauty of philosophy and something I love about the enterprise called philosophy.
Thanks for reading. Your boy @smyle the philosopher.
I think all the problems listed above could be solved by solving the existence of God. But to the best of my ability God really exist but Mortal lacks the capacity to dig deeper into this personality, form emergence, works, abode etc.
But the existence of God 'can't' be solved! If you agree that apriori knowledge or knowledge by intuition or reason cannot tell us more about God, then, same knowledge cannot solve the problem of God's existence.
Thanks for your contribution!
Whenever i tell someone i study philosophy the first question they ask me is, "what do you want to do with that?" I tell them a philosophy factory just opened up down the street and i will be putting in my application soon.
😂😂😂😂
Lols! You really got me with that! Very funny!
Some have asked me similar questions too. I guess they are just naive about the discipline.
So, what are your plans for post-grad?
Become a better person like Philosophy was originally intended to do.
Right, but how do you intend to go about that?
As a side note: philosophy was intended to do many things at its beginning. I am a firm believer that Socrates was just a really good sophist
I personally ascribe to the teachings of Stoicism.
Wasn't Sophism one of the charges levelled at Socrates.
Yes it was, however, he vehemently denies it.
If you live around the NY are you might be interested researching CUNY,;there is a professor there who is really into Stoicism
Massimo Pigliucci? If so, I have heard of him and I read his blog How to Be a Stoic.
good shit, i havent read anything by him. A friend of mine reccomended him to me
Is it a question of the more you think you have arrived, the more you discover you have not. Even creation itself tells you there is a supreme being. So, he alone can answer all the questions. As for man, he is even incapable of knowing himself. The bible tells me that when we meet with God in the God realm, questions will get answers. I believe in the bible as the word of the almighty. Do you?
Thank you for writing a thoughtful post. I am going to respond to each through the lens of Stoicism.
Problem of freewill and determinism
In Stoicism we are taught and practice the Dichotomy of Control. The Dichotomy of Control teaches us that there are things that are under our control and things not under our control. Things that are under our control are our judgments of external impressions and our voluntary actions. Whereas, everything else is outside our control. Thus, Stoics would argue that freewill and determinism are not mutually exclusive but coexistent. Furthermore, Stoicism teaches that for those things that are under our control we need to act in a virtuous manner and for the things outside our control we need to be as indifferent as those things are to us. So I guess a Stoic would question why there is an argument to begin with.
The existence of God
Does the existence or non-existence of God in any way impact acting virtuously with what we have control over? No.
Does the existence or non-existence of God something that is in my control? No.
To a Stoic, at least in a modern sense, the existence/nonexistence of God is not really an issue. After all, if God exists and I act in a virtuous manner consistent with the nature that God created me then it is a petty God that condemns me to Hell for not worshiping him and him alone. If God doesn't exist then I still have a responsibility to fully realize the attributes that evolution has granted me.
Problem of evil
To a Stoic, no act is evil in and of itself. What makes an act evil is our judgment of the act. However, there must be a somewhat universal standard by which we can collectively classify certain acts. In my opinion, the best methodology to do this with is Classical Liberalism and/or a constant reminder of the following quote from the Meditation of Marcus Aurelius "We were born for cooperation...So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition." The former values individual rights chief amongst which are life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness (to blend both Locke and Jefferson) whereas the latter so that anything that puts us in opposition with our brethren is unnatural and a vice.
Mind/Body issue
This is a non-issue to a Stoic because it is not under our control and in no way affects our ability to act virtuously.
I happen to be among those who view philosophers as those who never believe in God but like you said, overtime especially from you i found that they are people who are very logical in their reasoning and stir up questions requiring further and sufficient proof to existence of anything. I ran a programme and philosophy of education was one of the courses, i t was my bane in that programme, never knew how i passed it.But you chew philisophical issues like bread, i respect you always for that sir
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