What is philosophy and why do we need it?

Thesis: Philosophy is the activity of clarifying our thinking.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The idea is that thinking clearly is generally thought to help us do well and flourish. This is not such a silly idea. If humans are -above all- thinking creatures and if their way of thinking is what makes humans human and helps them develop into humans doing good things for themselves and their environment then thinking clearly is about getting the best out of yourself and your environment as a human being.

What I mean with ‘well’ in the phrase ‘doing well’ is:

1. that the intention behind what we actually do matches the result at any stage of the way of what we have done. If the result disappoints or indeed surprises pleasantly, more thinking is required.
2. that the intention is worthy of our idea of ourselves and our environment. This bit gets us involved in concepts like the good and the bad, wisdom, care, duty and evil.

There are a number of things in the world-we-have-conceived that we can think about.

We can think about what there is in the world-we-think-about, how it works, and how it all fits together.(remember that the world-we-think-about using its twin: the world-we-have-conceived-in-our-thinking must also include us and our thinking. This relationship can get a little tricky and confusing, more about that elsewhere) Anyway, all this involves observing the world and the way it works, conceiving that world and its workings as wholes made up of parts and making sure that the conceptions we thus develop to describe and relate everything, fit together well and reflect the behaviour of the world-we-think-about accurately. Generally we use the notion of predictability to test any theories we come up with. If a description (in word, image, number or gesture) helps us make accurate predictions of what will happen if such and such is the case, we feel we have an accurate frame of reference.

example: this is true for high brow scientific calculations about the exact orbit of planets and satellites, but it is also true for everyday experiences such as the satisfaction we experience when we find ourselves in the right place at the right time for a rendezvous at an unfamiliar place.

That leads me to the next thing we can think about. We can think about what is possible and what is necessary. This involves using what we understand there to be, and how we have modelled that conceptually by setting up counterfactuals of the sort: “If it weren’t raining, what would we be doing now?” These are important because they give us what we think of as freedom of choice. I will deal with freedom extensively elsewhere but the gist of it is this: Only if we can conceive of possibilities do we achieve choice and only when we know something to be necessary and therefore inevitable can we rest in that inevitability and make other plans within the area of the possible. The trick here is to be able to imagine accurately how our counterfactuals reflect what would be the case.

We can also think about how the various possibilities or inevitabilities matter to us as using subjects and to our environment subjected to use. This involves using our understanding and our knowledge of what is possible and necessary and relating all that to a personally held, but communally constructed view about what is good and what is bad. This personal view or perspectival view relating everything to the acting subject would have to provide a clear idea about what we are, what we could possibly be, what is desirable and what is undesirable. Here we get into deep and muddy waters. It is not easy to develop a taste in things, because that is essentially what we do at this stage of things. We develop a set of ready-to-hand positions regarding all sorts of issues relevant to us politically, economically, judicially, existentially, you name it. This taste manifests itself in statements like: “I vote for that party”; “I find this of great value to me”; “I do not think that is fair!” or “I don’t think that’s normal, do you?”; “I would be prepared to die for this principle.” As I said a taste is built within communities whose size are determined by the reach of their communications, and whose form is determined by the way they interact.

Lastly we can think about what we can do and how we must go about achieving what we would like achieve in the light of the previous paragraph. This too is not easy. It is not easy to develop a style of doing things. I suppose that this last topic of what we think about is best captured by the 1939 songline (which I know from Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition because of my parents) : “‘Taint what you do, it’s the way that you do it…” Having said that, the song is not strictly accurate of course. It must always be about both and more: It is about what you do, why you do it, and how-and-when you do it. Within the topic of the previous paragraph we build values and norms and create an image of what we might want, and at this level we think about how to go about achieving what it is we want: the aligning of means and ends that is what this is about.

If we look at these four subjects of thought we get an idea of what philosophy must do to clarify thinking:

1. It must develop adequate concepts to reflect the behaviour of the universe in terms of things, relations, processes and events or situations.
2. It must dress these concepts with properties (themselves held in the form of concepts) creating a conceptual construction of concepts we may refer to as a Frame of Reference (here capitalized because it features as an important concept in this system).
3. It must investigate and explore the inferential traffic that one’s personally held but communally constructed conceptual frame of reference allows. It must clarify the conditions that make the inferential traffic between networks of concepts within a frame of reference as well as various frames of reference work well.
4. It must clarify the conditions that make the judgments that allow conclusions to be reached interrupting that inferential traffic and making it stop or change direction, work well.
5. It must objectify the subjectively observed so that we acquire a reliable understanding in which our own interests, concerns, projections and assumptions are carefully analysed and bracketed and not allowed to interefere with our proper understanding of things. This is necessary to arrive at a value and norm-free understanding of the working of the world, which then becomes of immense value because of its reliability when re-subjectifying the thus objectified for the purposes of use. With this I mean it must analyse objectively what appears to us as observing subjects and it must criticize the resulting objects of thought in relation to us as using subjects as well as our environment as that which is subjected to use.
6. It must investigate and clarify the workings of the norms and values that together and in working together form a taste regarding all choices to be made that motivates action and describe the conditions that obtain relating a norm to a certain kind of action.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.