In an article published in March of this year, Colin McGinn argues that we should change the name of (academic) philosophy. Names are important things, and they provide a wealth of material for first impressions. A rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet, but you may very well never get near enough to smell it if I said it was called a "splurk." It seems indeed that critically reflecting upon the name of our practice is a wise thing to do, although I never really feel that critical reflection needs further motivation; it's good in itself.
Anyway, let's have a brief run-down of what McGinn has to say on the matter. He opens the piece by drumming up a scenario that is sickeningly familiar to anyone who works in/around philosophy, or (heaven forbid) calls themselves a philosopher. Any association with the word seems to bring up, to those unaffiliated with the field, images of old sages, replete with wisdom to share on a wealth of topics spanning the known and unknown universes. This association with self-help peddlers McGinn sees as a problem, because it not only demeans the discipline, but also leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.
He then goes on to explore the etymological heritage of the word "philosophy," which, as I've told a thousand undergrads if I've told one, comes from the Greek words "philos" and "sophia", meaning "love" and "wisdom," respectively. So philosophers, by definition, are supposed to be lovers of knowledge. However, there are plenty of lovers of knowledge that don't identify as philosophers. As a matter of fact, we need only look at our brethren in other academic fields to find some. (Though of course we must not look at their degrees, which suggest that they are indeed doctors of philosophy even if they would be ashamed to be so called. This situation makes me think of a child reticent to be associated with her parents, but whose surname just sticks to her like her shadow and refuses to cooperate and leave already.)
"Philosophy" does indeed pick out more than just the people we find working in philosophy departments, or seeking desperately and vainly to do so. However, an additional problem is that it also doesn't describe all of the people one finds in those very departments. There are some people who work in philosophy that are in fact quite fatuous and unbearable for the very reason that they just don't really care about philosophy. They can play the game, they've worked their way in through the system, but they're not very committed to their work or their ideas, and they really see philosophy as a job rather than a vocation.
Coming back to an idea I touched on briefly in my allusion to the child who just can't bear her parents, McGinn mentions that in fact much of what was once considered philosophy has since matured, left home, and become a respectable discipline of its own. Look no further than "natural philosophy," better known to contemporary audiences as good, old-fashioned, home-cooked science. All those disciplines have taken on new names, and ones that seem to pertain to their subject matter; philosophy ought to stop being such a square, take off those no-longer-fasionable togs (or togas) and keep up with the young upstart crowd.
So calling ourselves "lovers of knowledge" gets us confused for motivational speakers spouting pseudo-profound vagaries, it describes some people outside of philosophy very well in addition to describing some people in philosophy very badly, and it really doesn't say anything substantive about the subject matter of the discipline. But if we don't call ourselves philosophers, what should we call ourselves? McGinn suggests adopting the term "ontics" to describe our practice, which gives us nice words like "onticist" to describe ourselves and "ontical" as the adjectival form.
The word "ontic" by the way also comes from the Greek word meaning "being." That link to being also prompts McGinn to consider options such as "beology," which sounds positively revolting. One need not even mention the fact that such a ludicrous name only kindles the spark into flame—if people suspected we were shamans and wizards before, a name like "beology" would remove all doubt. What self-respecting discipline draws on English words to name itself anyway?
McGinn also says that ontics has a faint echo of physics about it, which he takes to be a virtue. McGinn, you see, believes that philosophy is a scientific, not a humanistic, endeavour. What is it to be a science? The author uses the following definition: "a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject." (This definition, by the way, is drawn from The Dictionary, which I find somewhat quaint. I only have Webster's dictionary, but not THE dictionary. Clearly my library is lacking. But I digress, parenthetically.) An organized body of knowledge seems a compelling definition of science, and in fact rings nicely with the German word for an analogous idea: "Wissenschaft." "Wissen" is the verb "to know" and "–schaft" is a suffix that qualifies the root as a collection or totality.
However, is science the only systematically organized body of knowledge? The Germans don't think so, which is why they use the term "Naturwissenschaft" to refer to natural science and "Geisteswissenschaft" to refer to humanistic science. (Note that the word "Geist" does not mean human, but lest the humanities be incriminated on the basis of too short a discussion, I won't mention that it often gets translated as "spirit.")
So given that we shorten "natural science" to "science" and "human(istic) science" to "humanities," where should philosophy go? Is it a science of the natural world, as McGinn suggests? It seems to me that it is indeed a science of the world, but of the natural world just as much as of the human world. Philosophy, so far as I conceive of it, doesn't investigate the world in the way that either physics or history does: it doesn't seem to discover what things are in the world, it seeks to discover what it is for a thing to be in the world. Metaphysics investigates what it is to be; epistemology investigates what it is to know; phenomenology does both of those things; ethics and aesthetics investigate what it is to be valuable (in different ways). Aesthetics doesn't seek to discover what the beautiful things are, but what beauty is.
One might pitch this distinction as investigations of the world as opposed to investigations of worldhood. Of course, that kind of language (i.e.: "worldhood") instantly suggests bringing Heidegger into the debate. He distinguishes between ontic investigations, like the sciences and humanities, and ontological investigations, like philosophy. This seems to speak pretty strongly against McGinn's suggestion. Philosophy investigates the world, yes, and aims at a systematically organized body of knowledge. But it is an investigation into the fundamental structures underlying what it is to be a world, rather than an investigation into the fundamental structures that unify/govern particular objects or classes of objects in that world. (I argued last week that the natural sciences couldn't overtake all questions; this post on naming philosophy hopefully adds more detail to what I said there.)
"Ontics" was a good suggestion, and I think put us on the right track. However, I find it misleading. A better name would be "ontology," but that's already a term for a subset of philosophy, and resistance to adopting it to characterize the whole discipline would be pretty strong. (Not to say, of course, that resistance means we wouldn't be on the right track in doing so.) "Ontology" is very loaded, even if I believe that ultimately it would be a more appropriate term.
Let's go back and look over the reasons for changing philosophy's name. McGinn wants to align us more closely with the sciences, which I've tried to argue is not an accurate portrayal of what we do. He points out that we end up getting confused for sooth sayers, and thereby "demean the discipline." I actually don't think that this is such a problem, or at least not in the way that McGinn does. Academic philosophy is far too often steeped in jargon, to a fault as I've tried to argue elsewhere. Perhaps the problem with being compared to the age's sages is not that philosophy cannot offer pearls of wisdom about how to live a better life (and what that even is), but that philosophers these days have moved so far away from doing that that they've forgotten philosophy could have that power. (Check out Philopolis, an event that aims to right that wrong and bring that aspect of philosophy back to the fore.) Leaving that void in society open, philosophers have allowed a bunch of yahoos to make a tidy profit publishing books and reading palms to satisfy the needs of the masses. Philosophers often bemoan the funding situation, so why aren't we publishing those books? Why aren't we reading those palms?
The problem seems to me not that philosophers are thought to have insightful views to share on life, but that they've abandoned that line of work and are now being unfavourably lumped in with the (often, but not always) terrible substitute that has come in to fill the void.
Where does that leave us in the name game? I'd say we should stick with the name we've got, proudly calling ourselves philosophers. The fear of being mistaken for public intellectuals started off this whole discussion, and I don't think it's a problem, or rather I believe it's a problem with our research rather than our name. The appeal of being drawn closer to the sciences is losing its case in the court of appeals. The problem of philosophers who don't love knowledge is one to fix through tenure and promotion decisions, not The Dictionary. And what of the problem of people outside of philosophy loving knowledge as well? What a wonderful problem to have. If only we had more of it.
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