Many people have seen philosophy as a problem. The moment you tell someone you are studying philosophy, the next question they ask is: do you believe in God? These people already concluded that philosophers do not believe in God.
The discipline itself has many problems that it has not been able to solve. Issues in philosophy are open-ending – that is, they are always open to further criticisms. There are many problems I met in philosophy as a student and like every philosopher, we always try our best to solve them knowing fully well that another scholar would re-evaluate them and point out the flaws in them.
Our concern as philosophers is to raise fundamental questions rather than always trying to answer these questions. The more questions you can raise the more you open the discourse for further philosophical expositions.
Some of the problems of philosophy are:
- Problem of freewill and determinism
- The existence of God
- Problem of evil
- Mind and Body
The problem of freewill and determinism :
I have theorized on determinism in one of my post where I argued against destiny. There is the view that man is a free being and is capable of making his own decisions. At the same time, another view claim that such freedom is a mere illusion because our actions are being controlled by unknown forces.
John Hospers maintains that human freewill is nothing but an illusion. He writes:
We talk about freewill, and say for example, the person is free to do so-and-so if he wants and we forget that his wanting is caught up in the stream of determinism, that unconscious forces drive him into wanting to do the thing in question. The analogy of the puppet whose motions are manipulated from behind in wires… is a telling one at almost every point
The problem here is whether human beings are free or determined! If man is free, to what extent? If he is not free, what is responsible for that? That is, who or what is controlling him to act contrary to how he wishes to act?
This is still a problem in philosophy. No matter how science or anybody tries to solve this problem, there will always be new questions to ask.
The existence of God
Many of my readers are familiar with this particular problem because some of them have asked me the question. The question about the existence of God is something we do under philosophy of religion. The questions philosophers ask are: who is God? Does He exist? If He does, can we call God a ‘It’, ‘He’ or ‘She’? What created God – considering the law of logic that nothing creates itself? What is His nature?
This particular problem started in the medieval period. The was the time of St Augustine of Hippo, St Thomas Aquinas, St Anselm, etc. These scholars used theology to answer this question and in most cases they ran into inconsistencies.
The question of God’s existence is always new to every philosopher because as a philosopher in the embryo, you must theorize on the topic. This is another problem in philosophy which directly gave birth to the problem of evil.
The problem of Mind and Body:
Many people who are not in the realm of 'philosophy' believe that man is made up of two components: body and soul. According to the layman, man is both body and soul. His soul is eternal while the body is pure material.
This is similar to what we have in philosophy. It is a problem created by Rene Descartes when he argued that man is both material and immaterial. He believes that body extends and is destructive while the mind does not extend.
Philosophers have been trying to differentiate mind actions from bodily actions. They try to see if mind and body can influence one another and how. This is another problem that every new philosopher must try to solve.
The question is can they be solved? I doubt that because if they are ‘solved’, it will be for a while. It will be like the case of ‘justified true belief’ where a scholar maintains that once a belief can be justified then knowledge is involved. This was the case before Edmund Gettier came with just three pages paper to destroy the claim and 'justified true belief' stopped being the yardstick of judging knowledge.
This is the beauty of philosophy and something I love about the enterprise called philosophy.
