What is the philosophical attitude?

The philosophical attitude is the disposition of someone who does not close questions ahead of time. It's not about mastering a field, it's about mastering the art of continuing to learn in the face of reality.

The three dimensions

The philosophical attitude has three sides that function like a triangle: remove one and the whole collapses.

The first is curiosity: not the trivial curiosity of gossip, but the willingness to look at what everyone else looks at and ask what no one asks. That's what John Dewey called it reflective thinking, as opposed to routine thinking that applies ready-made solutions to familiar problems.

The second is questioning, the art of asking good questions. There are questions whose value lies not in the answer they produce, but in the territory they open up. Socrates spent his life asking questions because he knew that a good question does more for intelligence than a good answer.

The third is the search for truth. Curiosity and questioning have a direction, and that direction has a name. This is what prevents the philosophical attitude from dissolving into pure skepticism or relativism: the philosopher asks why he believes there is something to find.

The enemy: the premature response

The opposite of the philosophical attitude is not ignorance, which can be remedied. It is the premature response, the certainty that sets in before thought has worked. It appears in three forms: naive dogmatism, which accepts what it has received without examination; lazy skepticism, which gives up seeking before having sought; and cultural conformism, the bubble that confuses the echo with reality.

Socrates had a name for this: doxa, the unfounded opinion dressed as knowledge. And the greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance, it is ignorance that does not know that it is ignorance.

It's not a phase, it's a way of living

The philosophical attitude is not filed with course notes. It's a way of existing that changes how you read, talk, decide and believe. The Christian who thinks philosophically did not doubt faith: he took it too seriously to be satisfied with answers that do not survive examination.

This is the first attitude of anyone who wants to read the classics without reading in the dark. It was born from a class in our Training in Philosophy and Theology.

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