Philosophy, or philosophia, from Greek via Latin, means love of wisdom, a love that seems always to have been present in human beings. Yet for all its lengthy history, philosophy appears to have achieved little in the way of settled progress. “Philosophy, from the earliest times,” Bertrand Russell wrote, “has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.” Scientists are wont to say that they stand on the shoulders of giants, their work built on the discoveries of their predecessors, but philosophers have been more likely to do their best to demolish the work of theirs. New philosophies enter the world as heresies, and heresy is at the heart of the activity of philosophy itself.
Traditional histories of philosophy tend to crush interest in the subject. Juggling all those “isms” (materialism, naturalism, idealism and the rest), distinguishing among the various “ists” (absolutists, positivists, pragmatists and the others) does not get one any closer to answering the questions that are likely to have brought one to philosophy in the first place: Why do we exist? How do we know what we know? Are there any ordering higher principles behind the discordant experiences we all undergo? What, finally, is the meaning of life?
