How to Teach Philosophy to Your Dog is intended as a welcoming introduction to the world of philosophy. As with walking the dog, there are always different routes you can take in this sort of enterprise, varying in the direction, the distance, and even the purpose. Is it exercise, entertainment, or merely a quickie to get your business over and done with as efficiently as possible? Some introductions to philosophy simply start at the beginning, with the speculations of the earliest Greek thinkers in the sixth century bce, and gradually work their way through the ages, until we reach whatever the ‘now’ is for that author. Others are more biographical, sugaring the pill with anecdotes about the eccentricities and oddities of the philosophers. More recently, it has become popular to take a purely thematic approach, breaking the subject down into questions or themes, with an emphasis on topics that are still ‘hot’.
These different approaches reflect the fact that philosophy has an oddly hybrid nature – it’s less of a purebred Afghan, and more of a labradoodle. English literature is a subject that essentially consists of its history. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Austen and George Eliot are not read for their historical interest, but because their writings are still living works of art. Furthermore, their greatness lies not in some ideas that could be abstracted and summarized, but in the language: the words and sentences and paragraphs and longer, deeper, musical movements of the texts.
Mathematics and physics, on the other hand, are subjects that can be taught without ever mentioning the backstory. To calculate the area of a circle, you don’t need to know that pi was first roughly computed by the Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, and then brought to seven decimal places by Chinese mathematicians in the first millennium ce: you just need a pocket calculator. And Newton’s laws of motion have a meaning and importance that have nothing to do with the words in which he expressed them. Aristotelian physics, with its abhorrence of the void, its straightforwardly wrong conception of motion and its ingrained cosmology, with the Earth at the centre of a static universe frozen into a series of concentric crystalline spheres, is of no use whatsoever to a modern scientist, other than to make her feel superior.
Philosophy spans both these worlds. It’s certainly possible to discuss the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein without ever quoting them. In this sense, they are like Newton. However, the problems of philosophy tend not to get solved. They are news that stays news. Professional philosophers today still engage with Aristotle and Descartes, still argue with Locke and Bentham, in a way that no scientist would think to dispute with Archimedes or Copernicus. And so the history of philosophy never goes away, never becomes irrelevant.
It’s also a fascinating story in its own right. And so, in this book I have tried to capture that crossbred labradoodleness of philosophy. The form I have adopted tips a hat to the history of the subject. It is structured as a series of walks, which connects to Aristotle’s practice of teaching while on the move – a habit that gave the name Peripatetic, from the Greek word meaning to walk about, to his school. And on these strolls my dog Monty and I, in the dialectical tradition of Socrates, discuss the central problems in philosophy, taking the broad subject divisions of the field as our guide.
After the introduction, the first three walks are about ethics and moral philosophy. We then have a couple of minor side-strolls, one dealing with the concept of free will, and another on logic. Next, there are three walks in which we discuss metaphysics, those knotty questions around the nature of reality and existence. After that we stroll our way through three walks on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. Four walks, really, as there’s also a discussion of the philosophy of science. Finally, there’s a chapter on the meaning of life, which also briefly examines some of the proofs for the existence of God.
Although this broad structure is thematic, within each subject we look at what the great philosophers have had to say about it. My hope is that this will both help the reader to understand the problem, and also to give a real sense of the history and development of thought.
I should say that this is a very partial history of ideas, in that I have concentrated on the Western philosophical tradition. This is not because of a parochial disdain for Islamic or Chinese or Indian philosophy, but simply because these are vast and complex fields in which I have no expertise, and it would have been insulting to add snippets, merely to make this work seem more diverse. Each of the great non-Western traditions deserves a Monty of its own…
Finally, this is not one of those introductions to philosophy that gives the reader bullet points to help revision. It is arranged as a series of walks, and just as on a walk, there are times when we wander off the path, beat around for a while in the undergrowth, disturb a rabbit, feed the ducks. There is the occasional dead end. And sometimes, you have to walk beside a busy road, or through a field of stubble, before you get to the good bits, that lovely clearing in the woods, or the stream with the kingfisher.