Introduction: A Philosopher Works from Home

Ever since upholstery, philosophers have worked from home – specifically, from armchairs. In fact, we philosophers are the cinematic inspiration to civilian armchair stiffs everywhere – models, if you will, of how to do things in a pandemic season, when armchair and even bedroom work is less roundly condemned than normal. Philosophers do our thing in our heads, where sanity checks are by design in very short supply. And despite the solemn, even funereal effigies of philosophers, ours is a joyous discipline!

The armchair is a place where one can give imagination the lead – and follow it even against the cautions of sober evidence and durable logic. The armchair artisan scorns sobriety, since fancy plays much better there. Anathema too is toil in the gathering of stone-cold facts – unless it's for a good garnish. Facts are cheap. The place of honor, as everyone knows, is reserved for storytelling, particularly in the drawing room (substitute ‘family and/or TV room’ if that's what you've got).

At a time when so many people are stuck at home, philosophy will surge up. Much philosophical progress will be made, as we range over the entire spectrum of thought. Let us then, in these all too precedented times, set a good example of how to work whilst hobbled, by disease, buffoons or dirty tyrants. And thereby we shall make our way out of hell! All the while making sure to keep good records of the journey.

Note to the postal service: I am working from home. What do you mean, you attempted to deliver my package yesterday but ran into an issue? My home exists at my address. What, precisely, did you attempt to do?

A Philosopher Does Etymology From Home

Words, being the building blocks of narrative architecture, from the Corinthian to the Byzantine, are philosophers’ tools. The back stories of words, using other words, are known as etymologies. But where does the word ‘etymology’ itself come from? To ask this question is to do what philosophers like to call ‘going meta’ – which means to turn the principle or tool on itself, as one would to commit suicide.

On its face, the word ‘etymology’ sounds frankly and openly philosophical, with origins in, like, ancient Greek thought. But sometimes the DNA of a word, unlike its face, will speak of another origin. Hm. ‘Etymology’ looks like two words smashed a bit too close together for comfort (less than six feet), without sufficient breathing room: ‘etym’ and ‘ology’. That much is easy to see right off, sitting comfortably in an armchair. ‘etym’ . . . ‘etym’. Never saw anything like that before. But ‘ology’ is familiar. It's everywhere: cosmology, biology, neurology, cosmetology. There should be a catalog of ologies – some website or podcast or something. Still, rising up from the armchair to search for an actual catalog is inconvenient – and indeed would be extra-armchair. So much the worse for it then.

But we can mull about the ologies we have already heard of: ologies are, like, fields or the objects lying in them that you can mess about. And you can be an expert in a field if you muck about enough in it. So ‘etymology’ is the field of etyms . . . hm. Still dark. Maybe ‘etymology’ is a misspelling of some other word – people used to be so poor at spelling, you know, before they had dictionaries or even wrote things down! Well, that subject is chased up as much as possible, then.

A snooze or a smoke would hit the spot just now.

Refreshing! After a period of much blowing of smoke, the philosophical upsurge will be, not so much an answer to the questions going in, as a heap of other, new, and frankly more fascinating questions still. In this case, we now have these:

1. (1) Suppose everyone called you ‘Cratylus’ – would that be your name? I mean, they called you ‘Cratylus’ even though you asked them to call you ‘Gina’.

2. (2) Could you have a true name, one that nobody else knew or used? For example, could your true name be ‘Boy who picks nose’ or something?

3. (3) More to the point, what does it take for ‘etymology’ to be something's true name? Could ‘etymology’ be the true name of someone we know by another name – say ‘Archie’?

4. (4) Are ‘etymology’ and ‘Archie’ on a par, as names? Is ‘etymology’ a better kind of name, a truer one? If so, just what is wrong with ‘Archie’? (I mean, besides the obvious.)

5. (5) And what's a ‘true name’, anyway? Is it an epithet that gets at the real story behind something or someone? Like, ‘Boy with a cupcake tattoo’ or ‘Cooks with gas’? Could that be more real than ‘Archie’? Could a true name be, like, a superpower?

6. (6) How could one thing be MORE real than any other thing that's at least a little bit real?

Now that we have this excellent list of questions, let's give over those other questions, all about where this or that word (especially that loathsome ‘etymology’) comes from, to other people. May they be called etymologists! I don't think that term has already been taken – and it's a good term for someone doing something we philosophers don't want to do. Let it be the philosopher's superpower to confer questions, like gifts.

Ah, but we don't want to give away the store. We can still dabble in literally meaningful work from home on meanings of words, rather than their origins. After all, meanings are in your head, (right? after all, you can use the words in sentences, right from your armchair). So you should be able to reach into your head, as necessary, for the meaning of a word.

Whoa, hold on! Drat that Ludwig Wittgenstein! Saying that ‘meanings ain't in the head.’ (And what a dreadful mouthful his name is!) So what if it's true that, even if you are the most excellent of English speakers, but still among the medical laity, for example – the meaning of (say) ‘arthritis’ won't be in your head. You don't know arthritis from rheumatism from gout – though you've used every one of the terms in a sentence. Wittgenstein must have attained to his beloved dicta after a good long smoke in his armchair, and no mistake. Still, giving away the store – shocking behavior (yes, I'm looking at you, Ludwig!) I mean, it's shameful misconduct entirely, and someone should be laying on charges. The Royal Society for Philosophical Punditry should be alerted – they should be able to conduct their investigations from their own armchairs, surely, even in this time of pandemic. (Why has this not already happened?)

Well, if meanings have now been taken out of the head, then how about grammar? That's gotta be in the head? Like, for example, I should be able to reach into my head and determine (as I do!) that ‘get ’em while their hot!’ is poorly (their hot what??), just by looking inside my head – it's a thing to behold, I assure you. And didn't one of our company testify before that same pesky Punditry Board that grammar is native? That languages share a ‘universal grammar’ that comes pre-installed? Hm, what's that? He's not a philosopher but from another tribe? By what authority, I ask you, does he feel he can lark about around here then?!

Well, it's been a trying day. And since Wittgenstein gave away the farm, and other tribes have begun the confessedly honest toil of investigating grammar (where we philosophers prefer working smart), whether we gave it to them or not (not!), we shall have to turn our hand at other gainful employment from home . . .

A Philosopher Does Physics from Home

What are things made up of, how do they hold together as ‘bodies’, and how do they move? Why does something at rest come to find itself in motion? And why does something already moving in a westerly direction, for instance, ever end up going in a northwesterly direction? Is there a way of thinking about all and sundry such questions very generally, without knowing the identities of the moving/at rest bodies in question, or any of their specific movements? (That would be super handy, yeah?) Do different rules apply to toasters as apply to sandwiches, to billiard balls as to bulldogs? Are there, like, universal rules for moving around, patterns of movement that all things have to follow, no matter what they are? Let's call those rules ‘physics.’ (What ARE rules, anyway? And what does it mean for something to ‘follow’ them?)

Now Aristotle, contrariwise, thought that sandwiches and balloons don't have to follow the same rules, in spite of both being available for purchase at county fairs. He thought it would be best for rules to ‘discriminate’ among the things.

But we are allowed to diverge from that big oaf – after all, he thought that slavery was defensible and women are men, just not fully baked. The armchair provenance of our own thought will guarantee its authority, Aristotle notwithstanding: ours is a venerable venue from which to resolve questions. And since any pattern, if universal, has got to apply to everything, it won't matter whether we think about ships or sealing wax.

So let's begin: here's a piece of wax, cool as a cucumber. When cool it's solid and holds a shape – this one is cubical and thunks (pardon the technical term) when dropped to the floor. Also, it smells like flowers. When warm (let's put it close to the fire now) it's shapeless, moves on its own steam (haha, see what I did there!) toward the floor like a slow-moving waterfall, spreads across a wide section of my clothing, and there's no flowery smell. And just look at the mess!

If the cool-as-a-cucumber object, as was in my hand minutes ago, is the same thing as this stuff melted all over my lap, then it's got all of the following characteristics: hard, soft, self-moved, non-self-moved, fragrant, fragrance-less, cubical, shapeless. If it's one and the same thing, this wax, then it possesses all and sundry contrary qualities!

Is there a clue here to what holds ‘bodies’ together? Maybe it's time to question whether there's anything like universal behavior; or that a thing at one time can be reidentified with something at exactly that same place within minutes, even though nothing comes into existence to replace the first thing.

Physics is hard. Maybe best to leave that too for others. Sigh.

A Philosopher Does History from Home

History is interesting. It's all backstory. Understanding the backstory is, well, understanding the thing, am I right? Well, some people have said as much. Origin is destiny, no? Or, maybe no, so say others. Maybe nothing is destiny, if you believe in a first-class grade of freedom – which is something you've never enjoyed if you're a black man in America. The question of freedom, over determinism, is one of the Big 5 – the top-ranked, the perpetually refulgent questions of our discipline. Determinism is the idea that if you know how everything started, or even how they were in the middle, you can say how it all ends – history matters that much. So it's worthwhile doing this history thing, whether the things that happen are truly inevitable (as so often things seem) but perhaps especially if they're not.

In human history, we try to follow our ancestors’ lives and see how what they did, and how they lived, has given way to what we do and how we live now. Events narrated include actions of individual people, groups as such and nation states, generally what people have done, particularly when these doings have downwind large-scale consequences. Scales here run from days and weeks to generations and centuries, from people to entire historical periods.

By extension of the idea, evolutionary biology is also a historical discipline. It's the history of life. The ancestors in question are the ancestors of species, our own and others. And the way they live, collectively, is an ecology, which helps explain how what they did and how they lived then in the context of how things lived, gives way to how our species lives now in our own ecology. Some of the big events are speciation events when two species emerge out of one, cataclysmic changes in environment and events of species extinction. Scales here run from generations to millions of years.

Stars too have lifetimes and typical life cycles. And they interact, so there is something like an ecology for them too. Stellar evolution is a narration of the lives of stars, planets, solar systems, galaxies and many other things. The narratives here include events of star and planet creation, evolution from stars to black holes, the death stars and galaxies, among other things.

Now to proceed. All we need to do is to start narrating some events.

But how to know about such events from an armchair? One can't just think about it and know about how stars live and die. Ah yes, just get onto the internet, and tool around, find out what's happening. Can I trust what the internet says? How am I going to know when anything happened, if I can't even assume what I read is true? Hm, maybe there's something wrong with this methodology.

Yes, just a couple of hiccups. I'm sure I'll be able to iron out these problems to my satisfaction. In the meantime, I can take a moment or two to rest my eyes . . . (Also, what is truth anyway?)

Right, now a few questions about the current enterprise surge up:

And while we're talking about lifetimes, different objects could have different lifetime lengths – such as you'd want to measure them on different scales. Insects have lifetimes on the scale of hours or days; dogs live for years and turtles, if I remember college, live on the scale of hundreds of years; trees – now trees can live for millennia.

There's life, and then there's afterlife – that's like the party after the party. Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare and Aristotle – their after-parties are still going strong. Adolf Hitler's too – not to play favorites. But that guy who did that thing after that big storm way back before people were writing things down – that guy's after-party went home a long time ago. How long will your after-party go on? And does it matter to you? – Should it matter to you? If you thought that your after-party would not last long, would you do things differently?

Now, how does something that lives just a couple of days affect something that lives for centuries? Is there something disproportionate about significant things? And is there really such a thing as insignificance? Of course, if the universe comes to an end sometime, however far in the future, does that mean that everything is in reality maximally insignificant?

A philosopher should get busy with these questions, rather than get in the historian's way in pursuit of some narrative or other.

Now this coronavirus business, what sort of lifetime does it enjoy? What is its significance? Uh oh, I think we've missed something. We need to look into viruses first.

A Philosopher Does Virology from Home

Viruses are fun. What makes them viruses is that they're, well, they're like parasites – hanging out inside an organism and living high on the hog (if that's their venue of choice) at the expense of the organism that serves as its home. But viruses are not literally parasites – a literal parasite is a literal organism. And viruses are not literal organisms: they are not literally alive – they don't metabolize, and can't live a full life on their own. They go from being free-floating and largely inert to reproducing within a host – by using the host's own metabolic resources. They use living organisms to do the living for them – they use living organisms like copying machines.

A virus is more like a chemical catalyst than an organism: they set off or accelerate a process. (Right, doing chemistry from home, maybe not such a good idea, so let's skip it . . .) However, unlike a chemical catalyst – which literally hangs out in a disinterested way (OK, it hangs out metaphorically), and is not permanently changed in the process it catalyzes – the virus produces offspring in the process. It's a category all its own, then – the category of virus. Hence: virology.

The notion of idea-as-virus – the meme – is interesting too. Does it literally belong to the category of virus? It doesn't literally make anyone sick, but there are nonliteral (nonphysical) sorts of sickness. There is, of course, mental illness. But can an idea, as such, make anyone or any population sick? Dominance ideas – like for example, ‘I'm the boss of you in every way’ – surely have a right to the name of sickness, and certainly pose risks to public health, for instance in cases of domestic violence. More problematic still are racist ideologies, which can literally (OK metaphorically) deform societies; they cause anything but flourishing. Same with misogyny, antisemitism, and other forms of hate, which often lead to violence. They can deform life in societies. By making copies of themselves, they can turn a peaceful society into one that fissures, warps, wages war on itself – both literally and metaphorically. Forms of hatred are viruses in every sense, except that they are not physical things. Still, they seem to be infectious.

How is it possible for something nonphysical, something that doesn't even occupy space, to infect anything? That's a philosophical question. Or two.

Coffee Break: A Philosopher Does Biology for Fun

Life. How does it differ from non-life? Who answers that question anyway? And who answers questions about who answers which questions? That's too hard a question. Back to the question of life.

The history of all known life is, as we tell it, a history of our own origins, as a pinnacle or peak. (As they say, winners write history.) The philosophically important question is: how are different forms of life related? Aristotle wrote the first book on this question. His approach was to draw up a taxonomy that puts living forms together according to shared features and characteristics: dividing between plant and animal, he divided the plants by size of stem, and animals by where they live (land, water, or air).

Since Darwin, at least, biologists have been doing things a bit differently: they have been building family trees. Prevailing wisdom has it that life is better grouped according to its relatives, rather than the attributes it shares with other forms of life. This way of grouping says, for example, that I belong in a group with my brothers and sisters, my parents and their parents, brothers and sisters – and that my distance from any other individual can be measured in terms of distance between us on the family tree. Consequently I do not belong to any natural taxon (governed by Biology) that comprehends my grade school classmates, the people in the pub I used to meet up with, or the folks I see at work (I mean, via my internet channel). Yeah, that's the sharp end of Biology, while contrariwise the origin of species is very old news.

I don't know about you, but I don't look anything like my children – or if I'm honest what I mean is, they don't look much like their other parent. But today's biologists will look you straight in the face and say that the unseen – in the form of a couple of strands of DNA – is much more critical to you as an entity in the living world, both in body and in behavior (ugh!), than the seen. They will say that the qualities you have and might share with such folks as unrelated to you as Aristotle himself (in spite of resemblance by dint of profession) don't mean a hill of beans. I don't know about you, but I think that's quite edgy. It's essentialism of the most regressive sort!

Essentialism is the view that there are certain ‘core’ qualities that make you what you are. And biologists say that these qualities are intertwined with ecological origins. But I am inclined to rebel against the tyranny of origins! Like a good Existentialist, I strain against these chains. I don't have the right instincts. My heart's not in it. Between you and me, I'm only phoning this in. Merely ‘working from home’ on this one.

Time for Real Philosopher topics.

A Philosopher Does Philosophy

There's no question more emblematic of philosophy than the question of the relationship of mind to world. A philosopher can really work from home on that one!

Let's have another look at the wax from a while back, this time to focus on the relationship of mind to world. First off, it's clear that softened wax takes on the impression of what it comes into contact with. When the impression is good enough, we might want to say that the wax impression gives a good ‘representation’ of the original. An image in the mind is like that. Is the mind something that the world metaphorically ‘writes on’? That's at least part of the relationship of world and mind. But obviously the mind is nowhere as passive as wax.

An impression, even on wax, can represent without actually being any kind of image: the shape ‘Descartes’, or the equivalent in sound, represents the person named Descartes without looking anything like him (trust me on this, if you must). Minds can think ‘about’ things without actually producing images of them – and the ‘aboutness’ is perfect even when the image or whatever is not itself perfect. A mind can sort of mumble ‘Descartes’ and refer perfectly to Descartes. But it seems that's not a special magic of mentality, so much as a special magic of the ‘aboutness’ relation – it simply doesn't come in degrees.

And now we've done it: we tried to discuss the relationship of mind to world, and ended up talking about language again, coming full circle. Is it a virtuous circle, or more like: you're going through hell, but not going through it so much as around in it?

Language is an important facet of all these topics; at least for humans, it plays an important intermediary or medium in our world-to-mind relationship. Because language, like mind, has an ‘aboutness’ relationship to world. For instance, the word ‘Aristotle’ refers to a certain figure in the history of philosophy, of the world – and it does so all on its own, without our help. It doesn't matter who utters the word and under what conditions. It seems like the terms of language are autonomous, and connect to the world without our help – with no regard at all for what we do in our heads with language. But this appearance has got to be wrong! ‘Cause he could have been called ‘Chuck’ – and whether or not he gets to be ‘Chuck’ or ‘Aristotle’ – that's gotta be something to do with what people, some people or other, have done.

And then there's another angle on this ‘aboutness’. A mind can sometimes think about something, not as it is, but as it might (could, should, would) be. So it doesn't merely represent, but also reaches out to start changing things – it's an agent's very first ‘move’, by the logic of agency – to anticipate the world as she would like it to be. Minds aren't just passive; they are also active, and the origins of all true action. Ideally, anyway: think before you leap – ‘looking’ is only an intermediate step.

So now we move to thinking about how the world should be. Are there guardrails for this? Are there rules for thinking about how the world should be – rules for visionaries? We've heard that we should dream big. But we have not been provided with instruction in any kind of dreaming. Does dreaming a world as it might be give the dreamer permission to destroy the world as it is? Or even more powerfully: does dreaming require the dreamer to destroy? We've now gone from ‘might’ to ‘must’.

We enter this world without judgment. The way things are, is seen by the child as the way things ought to be. It is only as we mature that we become capable of judgment, of seeing the way things are and lamenting or condemning them. But it is one thing to deplore, and another thing to see how things might be otherwise. Which comes first? And how do we become able to see the world as it might be?

It's ironic that traditionally, when philosophers think about how the world should be, they do it in the context of asking the question: how ought we to live? In other words, what are our personal, moral obligations? Philosophers grapple with ‘must’. But they never give any serious attention to ‘might’.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that philosophers love to ride trolleys. But they soon encounter trolley problems. Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson finds herself driving a trolley through some narrow valleys in a tableau painted by earlier philosopher Philippa Foot:

Here Thomson is asking about what she ‘must’ do. She's also asking about what she has ‘permission’ to do. ‘Permission’ is as close as contemporary philosophers get to thinking about visions.

It's a very long way between coming up with an answer to what you ought to do when you find yourself at the helm of runaway public transport, or even what you are permitted to do, and dreaming of how things should be. What happened to visions? Visions are what we need to dig our communities out of the trenches of racism barb-wired with police brutality.

It's high time we start doing a little dreaming – after all, we're stuck at home, forbidden to take public trolleys. Maybe now we can turn properly to the question of how things might be.

Conclusion: A Different Philosopher Works from Home?

I hope you've enjoyed a few chuckles at this philosophical theatre. Still, we've stumbled, one way and another, onto some interesting questions, some moot or unanswerable (‘philosophical’, in the way that is used as a term of abuse), most still largely unsettled, and a couple quite fresh. If you are a philosophy graduate student, it is your job to decide which is which, while always maintaining a lively and playful attitude of openness to those questions that you take to be actually settled. It's critical that each generation play with all of the important questions, as they arise in their own context.

If you're paying attention, you'll have noticed that working from home involves a combination of playful thinking (calm but not necessarily free of anguish), an attitude willing to entertain and string together good questions as they link themselves one to another, an appreciation of questions for their own sake, and a willingness to hand off to others questions one can't answer oneself, working (as one is) from home. One good fresh question is worth 1,000 answers, however correct.

This romp was my theatre. My point of departure, something that might make others bristle or cringe, is that the highest use of philosophy is its service to knowledge in its most elevated form – namely, science. Philosophy investigates issues that orbit the intellectual foundations of science. That means that philosophy must cooperate with other disciplines to build the foundations of knowledge. That philosophy also can help us live lives of substance and dignity, is something of an accident. Living such lives is possible without philosophy – people do it all the time (Socrates’ dictum ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ notwithstanding). But a foundation to science that is shy of being fully thought through in philosophical terms is nothing short of a disgrace.

This was Aristotle's perspective. And it's mine too – unsurprisingly, since I'm primarily a philosopher of science, but not a slave to all of Aristotle's own conclusions. This science-oriented perspective has shaped, inevitably, the storytelling you've received from me in this drawing room. What would we get were this A Different philosopher works from home? That must be left for others.