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A Philosophical Agenda

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[Durant1953]
Durant, Will.  The Pleasures of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny.  Simon and Schuster (New York: 1929, 1953).  417pp.
     2002-02-14: I was enough taken by readings in the author's The Story of Civilization that I recently tracked down a complete used set of those volumes.  As I began reading from the beginning, I was also reading about social construction and I became aware of the particular viewpoint that shows up in the work, a viewpoint that doesn't find such ready agreement as the books may have encountered in the mid-20th century.  Even so, I find value.  I turned to this volume out of affinity and curiosity about Durant's personal philosophical journey.  I am struck by how much the questions that I might have thought to be recent are apparently not so recent at all.  I wonder if Durant is a bit indignant on some directions that philosophical inquiry has taken.  To comprehend his concerns, I will need to dig deeper than my tentative reading so far.

-- Dennis E. Hamilton
2002 February 14
p.4, concerned about usurpation of philosophy by other disciplines.
At the same time looks at epistemology and considers that "the relation between subject and object, of the mode in which the knower knows the known, of the objective and the subjective elements in knowledge, of the objectivity of space and time, and the degree in which the qualities which we ascribe to objects belong to objects or to the minds that perceive them--these, in their details, are puzzles for the science of psychology ... .  It is a villainous accident that one actor [epistemology] in the great drama of ideas should have usurped nearly all the roles, and mouthed nearly all the lines, in the play of modern philosophical thought."
 
p.5 concerning science and experience
"Technically, as we defined it long ago, philosophy is 'a study of experience as a whole, or of a portion of experience in relation to the whole.'
" ... The relation of science to philosophy needs no further clarification: the sciences are the windows through which philosophy sees the world, they are the sense of which it is the soul; without it their knowledge is as chaotically helpless as sensations that come to a disordered mind, making an idiot's lore."
 
p.8 accuracy and trustworthiness
"Of necessity philosophy is more hypothetical than science.  Science itself must use hypothesis, but only as its starting-point; it must, if it be science, issue in verifiable knowledge, objectively independent of individual utility or whim."
 
p.10 on stability in science and changing views
"Perhaps if we desire stability of mind and soul we shall have to seek it less in science than in philosophy.  The differences among philosophers are due rather to the changing terminology of their times than to the hostility of their ideas; indeed, in great measure they are due to the inconstancy of science itself, with its passionate devotion to some hypothesis for a while, and then its satiety, and apathy, and flight to the novel face of some younger theory."
 
p.11 Logic as the first realm of philosophy's kingdom, and the vestibule of her home.
 "How show we know Truth when we behold her, if we have not learned to picture at least her semblance, and have not pondered the tests and trials by which we shall assure ourselves of her 'real presence.'?
 
p.11 Home of the great dragon, epistemology
"... we must face this test too, and answer in some forgivable way the riddle of knowledge, the problem of the reality and honesty of the world that we perceive."
 
p.11 The lordly realm, metaphysics
"Here Nature hides her secret essence, and puzzles us with a hundred clues. ... Here we may ponder the problems of matter and life, of brain and mind, of materialism and spiritualism, of mechanism and vitalism, of determinism and freedom.  What is man? -- a thing of coils and springs and tangled wheels, moved from without by the blind forces of earth and sky? -- or, in his small and ridiculous way a creative god?"
 
p.12  Additional realms:
History, Esthetics, Ethics, Religion
 
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