Philosophy. Philosophy etymologically means love of knowledge . Due to its various meanings this word has always been quite vague. It is therefore necessary to accomplish two things in this article; 1. to give an historical account of the origin and the different meanings of this term; 2. to establish its meaning by a good definition.

1. What is called Philosophy today was initially called sophia or wisdom, and we know that the first philosophers were awarded the title of the wise. In previous times, the word meant what the word bel esprit means to us today; that is to say, it graced a large number of people who were worthy of nothing less than this magnificent description. In that time the human mind was in its infancy and one heard the word wisdom applied to all the arts that exercised ingenuity or that benefited society in some way. However since erudition, like knowledge, is one of the the principal ways to cultivate the mind, and since the sciences when studied and applied bring many advantages to the human species, wisdom and erudition became confused, and people came to view as being well-versed or instructed in wisdom he who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of what was known in the century in which he lived.

Among all the Sciences there is one that distinguishes itself by the excellence of its object; it is the one that treats of divinity, that forms our ideas and our emotions with respect to the Supreme Being and that tailors our worship of him. This study, wisdom par excellence, has given the word wise to those who have applied themselves to it; namely, to Theologians and to Priests. Even Scripture ascribes the quality of being wise to Chaldean priests , without doubt because they arrogated it to themselves and because it was a universally accepted usage. This was primarily the case in the nations we customary call barbarian ; it was far from the case, however, that one could find wisdom in all custodians of religion. The wisdom of the priests of this era was reduced to ridiculous superstitions, childish and sometimes abominable mysteries and to visions and lies destined to confirm their authority and to impose it on the blind mob. The most distinguished philosophers first tried to drink from this source: it was the goal of their journeys and their initiation into the most famous mysteries; but they soon became disgusted of it – and the idea of wisdom has only remained linked to that of Theology in the mind of these proud priests and their idiotic slaves.

Sublime geniuses engaged in their meditations sought to deduce solid wisdom and an unquestionable system resting on unshakable foundations from the ideas and principles that nature and reason supply. Nonetheless, even if they were in this way able to cast off the yoke of common superstitions, the rest of their venture did not have the same success. After having destroyed they did not know how to construct, similar in a way to those conquerors who leave nothing but ruins behind them. Hence the raft of bizarre and contradictory opinions that raise doubt as to whether there is any ridiculous idea left out there that no philosopher has yet dared to entertain. I cannot stop myself from quoting a passage from M. de Fontenelle, taken from his essay on the Ancients and the Moderns that perfectly addresses this matter. ‘Such is our condition’, he says, ‘that we are never permitted to reach anything reasonable, regardless the subject, all at once. Before this, it is necessary that we go astray for a long time and that we fall into various kinds of errors and varying degrees of impertinence. It should always have been fairly easy to become aware that the whole system of nature consists of figures and the movements of bodies; yet before reaching this point, it was necessary to try the ideas of Plato, Pythagoras’ numbers and Aristotle’s qualities; and only once all this was recognized as false were we obliged to adopt the true system. I say that we were obliged because no other system remained, and it seemed as if we had refrained from taking it for as long as we could. We had an obligation to the Ancients to exhaust the largest number of false ideas as we possibly could; it was absolutely necessary to pay to error and ignorance the tribute that they paid, and we must not lack gratitude toward those who have absolved us from this charge. The same is true for various subjects on which I know not what nonsense we would have produced if it had not already been written, and if we had not already, so to say, been relieved from having to do so. Nonetheless, there are still sometimes modern people who repeat it, perhaps because its silliness has still not surfaced to a visible level’.

This would have been the place to make a summary of the various opinions that have been fashionable in Philosophy , but the length of our article does not permit it. One can find the essence of the most famous opinions in various other places of this Dictionary under the headings that address them. For those who want to study the matter in depth, they can find abundant and satisfying information in the excellent work that M. Brucker first published in German and then in Latin with the title: Jacobi Bruckeri historia critica Philosophioe. à mundi incunabulis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta . One can also read the history of Philosophy by M. Deslandes.

Ignorance, haste, pride and jealousy have given birth to monsters whose existence is damning for Philosophy , and who have either turned some away from studying it or thrown others into universal doubt.

But let’s not exaggerate. The flaws of the human mind have not prevented Philosophy from making considerable advances and from tending toward the perfection that is possible here on this Earth. The Ancients said excellent things, especially concerning moral duties and even concerning what humans owe to God; and even if they were not able to live up to the beautiful idea that they formed of wisdom, at least they should be given credit for the glory of having envisioned it and of having attempted such a challenge. In their hands wisdom became a practical science that encompassed both divine and human truths; that is to say, everything that the understanding is capable of discovering about divinity and about that which can contribute to the wellbeing of society. As soon as they had given it a systematic form they began to teach it and schools and sects were soon developed. Since to make their precepts better received they dressed them up with eloquence, this imperceptibly became confused with wisdom, especially for the Greeks who attached great importance to the art of speaking elegantly because of its influence on affairs of the state in their republics. The word wise was thus distorted into those of sophist or master of eloquence , and this transformation very much caused a science that originally had contained much nobler ideas to degenerate. Soon the masters of wisdom were no longer listened to as a means to educate oneself in solid knowledge useful for one's wellbeing but to entertain the mind with idle questions, amuse the ears with rhythmic periods, and award a prize to the most tenacious simply because he remained master of the battlefield.

The word wise was too beautiful to accredit such people, or rather it is not appropriate for human beings: it is the privilege of divinity, the eternal and inexhaustible source of true wisdom. Pythagoras, who realized this, substituted for this magnificent denomination the modest title of philosopher , which established itself in the way that it has solely been used ever since. But the wise reasons for this change did not suffocated the pride of the philosophers, who continued to want to pose as the agents of true wisdom. One of the most ordinary means that they used to stand out was to have a so-called occult teaching which was only shared with their inner circle, whereas the crowd of listeners were fed on vague instructions. The Philosophers had doubtless taken this idea and these methods from priests, who would only provide an initiation into the knowledge of their mysteries after extensive trials; but the secrets of both groups were not worth the time that it took to obtain them.

In the philosophical works of antiquity preserved for us, though marked by many failures – especially the failure of a having good method – we nonetheless discover the seeds of most modern discoveries. The subjects that did not need any reinforcement from observations and instruments, like those of ethics, were pushed as far as reason could take them. As for Physics, favored by the assistance that the last centuries have given it, it not surprising that it today largely outruns that of the Ancients. We should rather be surprised that these men guessed so remarkably in such a remarkable number of cases, given that they could not see what we can see today. The same must be said for Medicine and Mathematics. As these sciences are composed of an infinite number of aspects and are largely dependent on the experiences that only chance can provide and never brings on demand, it is evident that our Physicists, Physicians and Mathematicians must naturally be more skillful than the ancient ones.

The word Philosophy always remained vague and contained in its vast breadth – other than the knowledge of divine and human things – the knowledge of laws, of Medicine, and of the various branches of scholarship, such as Grammar, Rhetoric, and Criticism, without excluding History and Poesy. A great deal more than that in fact: it appeared in the Church and Christianity was called holy philosophy, while the doctors of religion who taught its truths and the ascetics who practiced its austerities were termed philosophers .

The divisions of a science understood in such general terms were very arbitrary. The most ancient and the most accepted division was the one that related Philosophy to the consideration of God and to that of human beings.

Aristotle introduced a new division, as presented here: ‘ Tria genera sunt theoreticarum scientiarum, Mathematica, Physica, Theologica . [1] A passage from Seneca will indicate that of several other sects: Stoïcii vero Philosophiae tres partes esse dixerunt, moralem, naturalem, & rationalem: prima componit animum, secunda rerum naturam scrutatur, tertia proprietatis verborum exigit & structuram & argumentationes, ne pro veris falsa subrepant. Epicurei duas partes Philosophiae putaverunt esse, naturalem atque moralem; rationalem removerunt. Deinde cum ipsis rebus cogerentur ambigua secernere, falsa sub specie veri latentia coarguere, ipsi quoque locum, quem de judicio & regula appellant, alio nomine rationalem induxerunt: sed eum accessionem esse naturalis partis existimant... Cyrenaïci naturalia cum rationalibus sustulerunt, & contenti fuerunt moralibus, &c’. [2] Seneca, epist. 89 .

The Schools admitted four sections in the division of Philosophy : Logic, Metaphysics, Physics and Ethics.

2. It is time to proceed to the second aim of this article: to establish the meaning of the word Philosophy and to give a good definition of it. To philosophize is to give reasons for things or at least to search for them, because as long as we limit ourselves to observing and reporting, we are only historians, and when one calculates and measures the proportions of things, their magnitude and their values, then one is a mathematician; but he who stops to uncover the reasons for the being of things and for them being in a certain way and not another is the philosopher per se .

That said, M. Wolf’s definition of Philosophy seems to me to contain in its brevity all that which characterizes this science. It is, according to him, the science of the possible as possible. It is a science since it demonstrates what it puts forward. It is the science of the possible since its goal is to account for all that which is and all that which can be in everything that happens; the contrary could also happen. In other words I hate someone but could love him, a body occupies a certain place in the universe but could occupy another, and yet these different possibilities cannot exist simultaneously. A reason thus determines the existence of one rather than the other and it is this reason that the philosopher pursues and determines.

This definition embraces the present, the past and the future and that which has never existed and will never exist, such as all universal ideas and abstractions. Such a science is a true encyclopedia; everything is related to it, everything depends on it. It is what the Ancients felt when they applied the word Philosophy to all kinds of sciences and arts as we saw above, but they did not account for this science’s universal influence on all the other sciences. This influence is only made clear in the definition of M. Wolf. The possible consists of all the subjects that can occupy the mind or the industry of men, including all the sciences and the arts, which all have their own philosophy . It is clear that in Jurisprudence, in Medicine, and in Politics, everything happens – or at least should happen – for some reason. To uncover and to determine these reasons are thus the philosophy of the abovementioned sciences; just as the architect, the painter and the sculptor – and I would even argue, the simple lumberjack has his reasons for doing what and how he does and does not do it. It is true that most of these people work by routine and use their tools without consciousness of their mechanisms and their suitability for the work that they execute; but it is no less certain that every tool has its reasons, and that, if it were differently made, the work would not succeed. It is only the philosopher who can make these discoveries and who is able to prove that things are as they must be, or to adjust them when possible by indicating the reason for the changes that he wishes to make.

The objects of Philosophy are the same as those of our general knowledge and they establish the natural divisions of this science. They can be broken down to three main themes, God, the soul and matter . These three correspond to the three main categories of Philosophy . The first is natural Theology or the science of the possible in respect to God, namely, what one can conceive in him and by him. There are also definitions of the possible in respect to the soul and the body. The second is Psychology , which concerns the possible in respect to the soul. The third is Physics , which concerns the possible in respect to the body.

This general definition of Philosophy also admits of particular subcategories; below is M. Wolf’s way of envisaging them.

When we are self-reflective, we convince ourselves that there is a faculty inside us that forms ideas concerning possible things and we call this faculty the understanding ; yet it is not easy to know the extent of this faculty, nor how one should use it to discover truths unknown to us by our own meditation or to accurately judge those that others have already discovered. Our first endeavor should therefore be to investigate the powers of the human understanding and their legitimate use with respect to the knowledge of the truth. The branch of Philosophy that treats this subject is called logic or the art of thinking.

Among all the possible things it is of great necessity that there exist a being that subsists by himself; otherwise there would be possible things whose possibility for which one could not account, which would not make sense. Now this being that subsists by itself we call God. The other beings which owe the reason for their existence to this being subsisting by himself have the name creatures. Nonetheless, since Philosophy should account for the possibility of things, it is logical to place the doctrine that treats God before the one treating the creatures. I admit nevertheless that one should already have a general knowledge of the creatures, but we do not need to draw it from Philosophy since we have acquired it by our continual experience from childhood. Thus the branch of Philosophy in which one treats God and the origin of the creatures that spring from him is called natural Theology or doctrine of God .

Creatures either manifest their activity by movement or by thinking; the first are bodies, the latter minds. Because Philosophy attempts to provide sufficient reasons for everything, it should also examine the powers or operations of these beings that act either by movement or by thinking. Philosophy thereby shows us what can happen in the world by the powers of bodies and the strength of minds. We call pneumatology or doctrine of minds the branch of Philosophy that explains what minds can do; and we call physics or doctrine of nature the other branch that shows what is possible in virtue of the power of bodies.

The being that thinks in us is called soul . Now as this soul is in the category of mind and has, apart from the understanding, a will that causes a number of events, it is necessary that Philosophy explores what can happen as a consequence of it. What one teaches regarding the laws of nature, ethics and politics should relate to this.

But because all beings – either bodies, minds or souls – resemble each other in some way, it is necessary to also investigate what is generally applicable to all beings and what their general differences consist of. We call ontology or fundamental science the branch of philosophy that contains the general knowledge of all beings. This fundamental science, the doctrine of minds and natural theology compose that which is called metaphysics or first science.

Yet we are not satisfied with extending our knowledge to an understanding of the forces that produce certain effects in nature; we will go further and measure exactly the magnitude of these forces and their effects, so that it seems clear that a certain force produces certain effects. For example, a lot of people are content with knowing that air, when powerfully compressed in an artificial fountain, propels water to an extraordinary height; but others, who are more curious, make efforts to discover by how much the force of the air increases when the compression occupies no more than a half, a third or a quarter of the space that it filled previously, and by how many feet the water increases in each case. It is to extend our knowledge to its highest degree and to know how to measure everything which has size and magnitude that we have invented mathematics.

The true order according to which the branches of Philosophy should be organized is to start with those that contain principles that must be known in order to understand and demonstrate those that follow after them; it is to this kind of order that M. Wolf is faithfully true, as is shown in the quotation from him that I just provided.

This said, one can still divide Philosophy into two branches and consider it in two respects, one theoretical and one practical.

Theoretical or speculative Philosophy relies on a pure and simple contemplation of things and does not go further.

Practical Philosophy on the other hand gives rules for action with respect to its objects. It is of two kinds with respect to the two kinds of human actions that it tries to steer: these are Logic and Ethics. Logic steers the operations of understanding and Ethics the operations of the will. See Logic and Morals. The other branches of Philosophy are purely speculative.

Philosophy is also ordinarily understood to mean the particular doctrine or the invented systems of renowned philosophers who have had followers. Philosophy thus understood can be divided into an infinite number of sects, as many ancient as modern, such as the Platonists, the Peripatetics, the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, the Pyrrhonists and the Academicians; and those of our days, the Cartesians and the Newtonians. See the origin and the dogma of each sect in their respective articles.

Philosophy can also be taken to mean a certain way of philosophizing or certain principles on which all the investigations that we carry out by its means are dependent. This is why we say corpuscular Philosophy , mechanistic Philosophy and experimental Philosophy.

Such is a sound notion of Philosophy ; its goal is certainty and all its steps proceed towards it by way of demonstration. For this reason, what characterizes Philosophy and distinguishes it from everyday thought is that it does not admit of anything without evidence, it does not acquiesce in accepting erroneous notions, and it establishes the exact limits of certainty, probability, and doubt. It is not all talk and it explains nothing by occult qualities which are nothing else but an effect transformed into its own cause; it much prefers to confess its ignorance every time that reasoning and experience are not able to lead it to discover the true reason for things.

Philosophy is still a highly imperfect science and it will never be complete – because who could provide an account of everything possible? The being who has created everything that has weight and measure is the only one who has a perfect philosophical and mathematical knowledge of his work; yet human beings are no less praiseworthy for studying the great book of nature and for searching in it evidence of the wisdom and all the perfections of its author. Society also obtains great advantages from philosophical investigations, which have caused and perfected several useful discoveries for mankind.

The greatest philosopher is he who can account for the greatest number of things. This is how his rank is defined with precision, and in this way Philosophy is no longer in danger of being confused with erudition . Knowledge of facts is unarguably useful, it is even an essential prerequisite for explaining them; but to be a philosopher is not only to have seen and read a lot, nor to know the history of Philosophy and the sciences and the arts by heart – all this often causes no more than an undigested chaos – but instead to have solid principles and above all a good method to account for these facts and to draw legitimate consequences from them.

Two principal obstacles have for a long time delayed the progress of Philosophy , authority and the obsession with system [3].

A true philosopher does not see with the eyes of others, he only surrenders to convictions based on evidence. It is relatively difficult to understand how it can be that people who possess genius prefer to serve the genius of others in the search for truth rather than the one that God has given them. It is without doubt infinitely more enjoyable and more honorable to be driven by one’s own eyes than those of others, and a human being whose eyes are good can never take it into his head to close them or tear them out in hope of following another. It is however a fairly common practice; Père Malebranche provides various reasons for it.

1. The natural laziness of human beings who do not want to go through the trouble of reflecting.

2. The inability to reflect which one suffers by not having exercised one's faculties since youth, when the fibers of the brain were capable of all sorts of inflections.

3. The limited interest that one has in the abstract truths that are the foundations of everything that one can know on Earth.

4. The foolish vanity that makes us wish that we were esteemed scholars, since scholars are those who are widely read. Knowledge of opinion is more useful for conversation and for impressing vulgar minds than knowledge of true Philosophy , which is the fruit of reflection.

5. The excessive admiration that one has for the ancestors, which makes one imagine that they were more enlightened than one could ever be and that there is nothing to be done where they have not already succeeded.

6. Some respect or other mixed with a foolish curiosity makes us admire the things that are most remote from us more, the oldest things, the things that come from furthest away and even the most obscure books. Thus in the past we esteemed Heraclites because of his obscurity. We search for ancient coins although they be plagued by rust and we attentively preserve the lamp and slippers of our ancestors, whose antiquity makes them valuable. People apply themselves to the teachings of rabbis because they wrote in a highly corrupt and obscure foreign language. We have more esteem for the oldest opinions because they are furthest away from us; and without a doubt, if Nimrod had written the history of his reign, it would have included all the most refined politics and even all of the other sciences, just as some consider that Homer and Virgil had a perfect knowledge of nature. We have been told that it is necessary to respect antiquity; what, might Aristotle, Plato, and Epicurus – all these great men – have been mistaken? We do not believe that Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus were men like us and of the same kind as us. What is more, we do not believe that in our time – the world is two thousand years older – since there is more experience there must be more enlightenment; and that it is the world’s age and experience that allow truth to be discovered.

‘A good mind that is cultivated and of our age’, says M. de Fontenelle, ‘is so to speak composed of all the minds of the previous ages; it is but one same spirit that has been cultivated during all this time. Thus this being who has lived since the beginning of the world until now has had his childhood during which he was only occupied with life’s most essential needs; and his adolescence during which he was quite successful with imaginary things, such as poetry and eloquence, and during which he even began to reason, albeit with less truth than passion. He is now in the age of virility in which he reasons more powerfully and is more enlightened than ever. This human being, strictly speaking, will never be old, he will always be equally capable of the things which properly occupied him in his youth and he will be more and more capable of those suited to the age of virility, that is to say – to conclude the allegory – human beings never degenerate, and the sound opinions of all the good minds that are to come will always be added to those that preceded them.

These sound and judicious reflections ought to cure us of the ridiculous prejudices that we have adopted in favor of our ancestors. If our reason, supported by the vanity that comes so naturally to us, is not capable of removing such a truly misplaced humility, as if we had not the right as human beings to aspire to such a great perfection, at least experience will be sufficiently strong to convince us that nothing has stopped the progress of things and nothing has limited our minds as much as this excessive admiration for the ancestors. ‘Because we were devoted to the authority of Aristotle’, says M. de Fontenelle, ‘and we did not search for truth other than in his enigmatic writings and never in nature, not only did Philosophy not advance in any way, but it fell into an abyss of gibberish and unintelligible ideas from which we have had all the difficulties in the world to pull it out. Aristotle never made a real philosopher but he suffocated many of those who might have become one if he had been allowed. And the harm is that a folly of this kind once it gets established among human beings remains for a long time; we will need entire centuries to get over it even after we have recognized its ridiculousness. If one day we decided to get hung up on Descartes and put him in the place of Aristotle, more or less the same disadvantage would be the result.

If this excessive respect for antiquity has such a bad influence, how much more contagious does it become for their commentators? ‘What beauties’, says the ingenious author that we have just quoted, ‘would not be happy to inspire from their lovers the kind of vivid and tender passion that a Greek or a Roman inspire from their respective interpreters? If one says of Aristotle that he is the genius of nature ; if one writes of Plato that he is the divine Plato , then one does not comment their work per se ; it will always be the work of completely divine men, of men who were the admiration of their century. This is also the case with the subject that they treat: it will always be the most beautiful, the most sophisticated and the one most necessary to know. But since there have been many Descartes, Newtons, Leibnitzes and Wolfs, since we have allied Mathematics with Philosophy , our way of reasoning has been exceptionally improved.

7. The obsession with system does no less harm to the progress of truth. By obsession with system, I do not mean the approach that connects various truths to each other so to form proofs which is nothing else but the true philosophical mind – rather I mean to designate the one that makes plans and forms systems of the universe to which it then wants to adjust phenomena by will or force. One will find many good remarks on this in the second volume of L'histoire du ciel by M. the abbé Pluche. He has nonetheless taken them too far and it would be difficult for him to answer certain criticisms. It is certain that nothing is more praiseworthy than the practice adopted by the Academy of Sciences, to see, to observe, to set down in its registers observations and experiences, and to leave the desire to make a complete system for posterity when there is enough material for this; but this time is still far away, if indeed it will ever come.

What thus makes the obsession with system so opposed to the progress of truth is that it is no longer possible to correct those who have imagined a system that has some appearance of verisimilitude. They preserve and very tightly hold on to everything that can serve in any way to confirm it; and, on the other hand, they do not take into consideration almost any of the objections that are opposed to it, or rather, they rid themselves of them by some frivolous distinction. They draw inner satisfaction from the sight of their work and the esteem that they hope to receive from it; they do not concentrate on anything except the image of truth that emerges from their opinions. They fixate on this image but never pay any sustained attention to the other side of their feelings, the one that would reveal its falseness to them.

Add the prejudices and the passions to this. The prejudices preoccupy one part of the mind and infect the rest. The passions confuse the ideas in a million ways and they make us almost always see in objects everything that we desire to find in them: even the passion that we have for truth makes us err sometimes when it is too ardent.’

Notes

1. "There are three kinds of theoretical knowledge: mathematics, physics, theology."

2. “The Stoïcs say that philosophy has three parts: moral, natural and rational; the first addresses the soul, the second examines natural phenomena, and the third considers the meanings [or properties] of words, their structure and arguments which block lies from creeping in against truth. The Epicureans deem there to be two parts of philosophy, natural and moral; they did away with the rational. Then, when the facts themselves pressed them to discern between ideas, to expose fallacy lurking behind a semblance of truth, they introduced a category which they called ‘judicial and regulatory’ or — by another name — ‘rational', but they maintain that this is just an accessory to the natural part... The Cyrenaïcs eliminated the natural and rational, and were content with only the moral, etc.”

3. L’esprit systématique is sometimes left untranslated in critical and scholarly texts from this period, but given that it has negative connotations for our author I’ve chosen to translate it as obsession with system . It should be noted that whereas the expression in this article is used to mean the attitude of obstinately holding on to one’s hypothetical and speculative opinions as dogma and simultaneously disregarding any criticism or contrary facts on principle, it is used by D'Alembert in the Discours préliminaire in a positive sense to mean the art of systematically and logically reducing observed phenomena to their true essence and basic principles. In contrast, D'Alembert uses the expression "esprit de système" to mean the obsession with purely speculative truths criticized as "esprit systématique" here. See Discours préliminaire .