The 12 Great Philosophical Questions
Found Within Established Philosophical, Theological, And Cultural Worldviews
David L. Cale
The Three Great Ontological Questions
1. The Introspective Question: What is the self?
In many theological worldviews, one’s true self is a soul comprised of a spirit-like substance, capable of both existing and retaining memories, even without a biological body. In some worldviews, the ancient Egyptian for example, the spiritual self and one’s physical body are forever entwined. Some worldviews, animalism for example, see the self wholly defined by such biological features as race, gender, shape, and size. With the Renaissance, and the rise of philosophers in the tradition of Descartes and Kant, one’s true self is defined as mind. In contemporary philosophy, this perspective is still popular, but modified by the scientific view that thoughts are, essentially, complex patterns of electrochemical impulses created by sensory inputs, a brain’s genetic software, and hardware comprised of neurons, synapse, dendrites, and the like.
2. The Anthropological Question: What is humanity?
Answers to this question can be bifurcated into those that define humanity as one homogenous species and those that categorize humanity as a composite of diverse populations. Most theological worldviews choose the former, believing humanity to be consciously created to serve the wills of a pantheon of gods, or will of a divine power. Perhaps inspired by this tradition, post-medieval philosophers began to interpret humanity as a plurality of essentially identical individuals, each having an equal set of lifetime rights and responsibilities. Alternatively, militarily powerful families have, throughout history, maintained their royal power by dividing humanity into those having aristocratic blood and those having common blood. Against this, democratic ideals, of the kind explored by Plato, reappeared as the political gift of the Renaissance. However, another gift of the Renaissance, science, felt compelled to biologically analyze humanity into race-based categories. In so doing, it created social stresses unimagined in the pre-Columbian world. Contemporary sociologic and economic theories tend to take a non-biological approach to humanity, allowing for the formation of worldviews that identify persons institutionally, using, for example, religions, clubs, schools, professions, communities, citizenships, and cultures as their categories.
3. The Metaphysical Question: What is nature?
In the everyday sense, nature is simply the world of yards, parks, farms, skies, mountains, lakes, oceans, forests, fields, deserts, countryside, and all the living things they contain. Science has expanded this meaning to include everything that can be seen from microbes to distant galaxies. For philosophers, this question takes the form: Of what are the objects of nature made? Most ancient philosophers believed that such substances as flesh, vegetation, and rock ultimately reduced to one, several, or all of the following: earth, air, fire, water, and metal. The Pythagoreans stand out in that they believed that numbers comprise nature’s ultimate substance. For Newtonian physics, all of nature reduces to the variables of distance, time, and mass. In reacting to Newtonian and Lockean views on a material world, Bishop George Berkeley argued that all of nature exists as a collection of ideas in the mind of God. Today, mass-energy is believed to be the substance underlying all of nature.
The Three Great Ethological Questions
4. The Self-discipline Question: How should the self, as mind, relate to the self, as body?
Mind-over-matter suggestions and the counsel: “Be all you can be.” provide answers to this question. Emotional and behavioral self-control, in the face of stress, is both a practical virtue and an ethical virtue; this theme is at the heart of Stoic philosophy. Other themes encompass ideas on self-respect, self-care, and personal growth. Like Socrates’ view that an unexamined life is not worth living, today’s many works on self-improvement are also philosophical perspectives.
5. The Ethical Question: How should the self, as one person, relate to humanity?
This question addresses one’s duties and ethical responsibilities toward others. It explores concepts of empathy, altruism, and charity. Most often, one finds the answers to this question within the expectations imposed on one by one’s family, religion, clubs, schools, professions, communities, and government. Thomas Hobbes’ social contract is not a contract between a king and subjects, as often thought; it is a contract among citizens to maintain social order and person-to-person respect. John S. Mill reduced social contract theories to the simplicity of his familiar no harm principle.
6. The Axiological Question: How should the self, as mind, relate to nature?
From a practical perspective, this question is custodial: How should one best manage one’s immediate environment? Yet, nature enters one’s mind both through one’s sensory experiences and one’s inner wants and emotional feelings. As a philosophical question, it asks: In what order should the many good things that life offers be valued. What is the highest good? Life-goods can be categorized as spectra. Familiar examples are: longevity as opposed to an early death; happiness as opposed to depression; pleasure as opposed to pain; self-confidence as opposed to fear; power as opposed to weakness; wealth as opposed to poverty; popularity as opposed to rejection; and knowledge as opposed to ignorance. Utilitarian worldviews tend to see happiness and pleasure as the highest goods. Economic theories concern themselves with acquiring and distributing wealth. Social and personality theories are interested in social acceptance and self-confidence. Political theorists explore the nature of power, and scholarly worldviews tend to see knowledge as the highest good.
The Three Great Sociological Questions
7. The Justice Question: How should humanity relate to the self?
This question examines how society should treat individuals. Its focus is on justice, rights, and respect for personal autonomy. Every work on social justice, from Plato’s dialogues covering the trial of Socrates to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, presents a philosophical answer to this question. Contemporary debates on criminal laws and immigration policies represent opinions within larger worldviews having a sociological component.
8. The Diplomacy Question: How should humanity relate to humanity?
Any work, offering a viewpoint on how a particular kind of institution, whether defined as a family, club, school, profession, community, or government, should properly interact with other such institutions, is best understood as a philosophical perspective under the umbrella of this question. The primary task, of every state department as well as the United Nations, is to provide answers to this philosophical question.
9. The Environmental Question: How should humanity relate to nature?
Investigating humanity’s collective responsibilities toward the environment and natural resources, this question addresses the ethical implications of human actions on the planet. It is sometimes helpful to divide answers to this question into those that are anthropocentric, suggesting that nature be restructured to serve the needs of humanity, and those that are eco-centric, suggesting that nature be preserved in accord with its own history.
The Three Great Epistemological Questions
10. The Phenomenological Question: How does nature, as the outside world, relate to the self, as mind?
It might be that Western philosophy had its beginning with the ancient Greek discovery that the world we see is not the outside world but a replication of that world created by mind. This discovery was, and still for some, an affront to common sense. This philosophical question is the product of that discovery. Plato’s well-known Parable of the Cave is still, perhaps, the best example of an intuitive explanation for the philosophical problems created by that discovery. With the rise of empiricism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers divided into realists, those that supported the idea that thought honestly represents the outside world, and idealist, those that believed that every mind can only know nature to that degree permitted by one’s sensory ability. In his Critique (analysis) of Pure Reason, Kant expands on this theme to argue that the laws of nature are mental constructs created to make sense of sensory information. G. W. F. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Mind, draws on Berkeley’s idealism (All existence is thought.) to argue that conscious thought is the whole of all existence. From these worldviews emerged philosophy’s twentieth-century rejection of realism as a foundation for subatomic physics, as well as Edmund Husserl’s works on how personal epistemological limits affect human logic and the judgments that follow.
11. The Etiological Question: How does nature relate to humanity?
Etiology is the study of causes. Philosophy goes where eyes and ears cannot. In the ancient world, there was little distinction between the forces of nature and the will of local spirits, gods, or a particular divine power. It can be argued that science was born on May 28, B.C.E. when Thales of Miletus proved that solar eclipses are mathematically predictable, not something randomly done by a whim of Zeus or the Egyptian god Ra. Both medicine and physics are filled with causal assumptions. Few realize that the claim: “We live in an expanding universe.” is underwritten by the assumption that the Hubble redshift is a Doppler shift, as opposed to, for example, randomly-induced misalignments and realignments of a string of alternating positive and negative Planck-scale particles. The entire edifice of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics sits upon the assumption, made in 1909 by G. I. Taylor, that a scintillation event on a targeted screen is caused by a single particle, as opposed to electron instability caused by its absorption of millions of alternating positive and negative Planck-scale grains. A primary task, of that discipline called: Philosophy of Science, is to investigate the limits of what the natural sciences can know with certainty and what they cannot.
12. The Cosmological Question: How does nature relate to nature?
It is likely the question: “Why is there somethingness, rather than nothingness?”, often attributed to Leibniz, preceded Leibniz by millennia. Long before today’s theoretical astrophysicists took-up the task of offering explanations for how the universe came to exist, ancient religious teachings did the same. Those creation narratives that framed this question as: “How does God relate to nature?” are still respected today. Whether religious or secular, these narratives are important because they provide one’s own existence with a context.
Etiological investigations look at particular if-then events. Science groups them into such disciplines as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, agriculture, meteorology, and so forth. For science, this question is concerned with, for example, how the laws of physics relate to the laws of chemistry, which, in turn, relate to the laws of biology. Evolution theories are cosmological as well, in that they concern how natural states, whether living or non-living, are selected-in or selected-out.