What philosophy is: the word, the definitions and the questions it asks

What this chapter is for

The first line of your syllabus is “Definition of Philosophy”. This chapter teaches it. By the end you will know where the word comes from, what the great philosophers of Greece, of the Muslim world and of modern Europe said philosophy is, and how to tell a philosophical question from a question for a scientist, a dictionary or a timetable. You will also have a definition of your own that you can write in the hall and defend.

The chapter has three parts. The first five sections are about the word and the definitions, from Pythagoras to Iqbal. The next four show how philosophy works on a question, with Kant’s four questions, two real cases and two maps of where philosophy stands beside science and religion. The last three give the case against philosophy, where it stands today in the world and in Pakistan, and the mix-ups that cost students marks.

FPSC asked candidates to define philosophy in four papers in a row, CE-2018 to CE-2021, and every time it joined the definition to a second demand. That was its branches, its relation to science or its relation to religion.¹ So this chapter is also the opening paragraph of three other answers. The chapters on the branches of philosophy and on philosophy, science and religion carry those second halves in full.

Before you start

The words

• Philosophy. From the Greek philosophia, made of philos, loving, and sophia, wisdom. So the word means the love of wisdom.
• Falsafa. The Arabic and Urdu word for philosophy, borrowed from the Greek. A philosopher is a failasuf.
• Hikmah. The Quran’s word for wisdom. Muslim writers often used it for philosophy too, and the Urdu hakeem and hikmat come from it.
• Reason. Our power to think things through, to see that one thing follows from another, and to judge an argument.
• Revelation. Knowledge given by God to a prophet. For a Muslim, the Quran.
• Demonstration. A proof that starts from things known to be true and shows, step by step, that the conclusion must be true as well.
• Dogma. A belief held because an authority states it, and not open to question by those who hold it.
• Metaphysics. The part of philosophy that asks what is ultimately real, such as whether God exists, whether the mind is more than the body, and what a cause is.
• Epistemology. The part that asks what knowledge is and how we get it.
• Ethics. The part that asks how we ought to live and what makes an action right or wrong.
• Logic. The study of good and bad reasoning.
• Aesthetics. The part that asks what beauty is and what makes a work of art good.

The places and the people

• Greece, and the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily, in the sixth to fourth centuries before Christ. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle lived and taught there. Athens was the centre of Plato’s and Aristotle’s schools.
• Kufa and Baghdad, in today’s Iraq, in the ninth century. Al-Kindi grew up in Kufa, where his father had been governor, and did his work after he went to Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphs. Greek books were being translated into Arabic there.
• Muslim Spain, in the twelfth century. Ibn Rushd, a judge and a philosopher, wrote there. Europe knew him as Averroes.
• Königsberg, in Prussia, where Immanuel Kant taught for his whole life, and Cambridge, in England, where Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein worked.
• Lahore, where Allama Muhammad Iqbal lived and wrote, and where the Pakistan Philosophical Congress published its proceedings. Karachi, where the University of Karachi opened its Department of Philosophy in 1952.

The story in plain words

1. Everyone asks some big questions. What is real? What can I know for sure? How should I live?
2. Philosophy is the attempt to answer those questions carefully, with reasons, and not just by habit or by what we were told.
3. The Greek thinker Pythagoras gave it its name. He would not call himself wise, only a lover of wisdom.
4. Plato and Aristotle said philosophy begins in wonder and seeks the first causes of everything.
5. The Muslim philosophers took up the Greek books. Al-Kindi said philosophy is knowing the reality of things as far as a human being can. Ibn Rushd said the Quran itself commands it.
6. Later thinkers gave other definitions. Kant said all philosophy comes down to one question, “What is Man?” Russell said philosophy frees us from the tyranny of custom. Iqbal said its spirit is free inquiry.
7. Some people say philosophy is a waste of time, or dangerous to faith. Philosophers have answered both charges.
8. Today philosophy is at work wherever people ask what a word in a law means, whether a machine can think, or what we owe to each other.

1. Three questions you already ask

Suppose your friend is caught cheating in an exam, and the teacher asks you whether you saw anything. You did see it. If you tell the truth, your friend fails. If you lie, you break a rule you were taught as a child. Before you answer, a question goes through your mind. Is it ever right to lie to protect a friend? You are not asking what the rules of the college say, which you could look up. You are asking what is actually right.

Now suppose you are sitting by the window at night, and you wonder how you know the room around you is real. You see the wall, you touch the table. Yet you have dreamt rooms just as clear, and in the dream you were sure they were real too. How do you know you are not dreaming now? Or you stand at a grave in the village and wonder whether the person buried there still exists in some way. Is a human being only a body, or is there something more?

These are three kinds of question, and every thinking person meets them sooner or later. The first is about how we ought to live. The second is about what we can know. The third is about what is real. They feel different from ordinary questions, because no timetable, no measuring tape and no textbook of facts can settle them. Yet they are not idle. How you answer the first decides what you do tomorrow morning in front of the teacher.

Philosophy is the careful study of questions like these. Bertrand Russell opened his short book The Problems of Philosophy (1912) with one of them. “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” He then said what philosophy is. It “is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically”.² Two words in that sentence carry the whole idea. The questions are ultimate, meaning they are the deepest questions behind all the others. The answers are worked out critically, meaning we test every reason before we accept it, and we do not accept an answer only because we have always believed it.

So the definition this chapter builds towards has three parts. Philosophy has its own questions, the most basic ones about reality, knowledge and how to live. It has its own method, reasoned argument, in which every claim must be supported and every objection answered. It has its own aim, which is understanding, of the world as a whole and of our place in it, and through that understanding, wisdom in how we live. Hold those three parts in mind as you read what the great philosophers said. Each of them stressed one part more than the others, and none of them left any of the three out.

2. The word: philosophia, falsafa and hikmah

The word philosophy is Greek, and the story of how it was first used is told by two ancient writers. Diogenes Laertius, who collected the lives of the Greek philosophers, wrote that “Pythagoras was the first person who invented the term Philosophy, and who called himself a philosopher”. Pythagoras, a thinker and mathematician of the sixth century before Christ, was talking with a ruler named Leon. Diogenes gives his reason for the new word. Pythagoras “said that no man ought to be called wise, but only God”. Before him, the men who studied nature were called sophoi, wise men. Pythagoras refused that title. A human being, he thought, can love wisdom and seek it, but only God truly has it.³

The Roman writer Cicero tells the same meeting with more colour, in the fifth book of his Tusculan Disputations. Leon admired Pythagoras’s learning and asked him what art he practised. Pythagoras said he knew no art, but that he was a philosopher. Leon had never heard the word and asked what it meant. Pythagoras answered with a picture. The life of man, he said, is like the great games to which all Greece comes. Some come to win the crown, for glory. Some come to buy and sell, for profit. A third group, “by far the best”, come for neither. They come as spectators, “to observe what was done, and to see in what manner things were carried on there”. So it is in life, he went on. Some are slaves to glory, some to money, and a few “earnestly look into the nature of things”, and these call themselves “studious of wisdom, that is, philosophers”.⁴ Figure 1 draws his picture.

Notice two things in this story, because both will come back in every definition you meet. The first is humility. The philosopher does not claim to own the truth. He claims only to be looking for it, and that is why the word is “lover of wisdom” and not “wise man”. The second is that the philosopher wants to understand for the sake of understanding. The spectator at the games gains no crown and no money. He gains a clear view of what is going on. Aristotle will say the same thing two hundred years later, in plainer words.

When the Greek books reached the Muslim world in the eighth and ninth centuries, the Arabs kept the Greek word. Philosophia became falsafa, and philosophos became failasuf. That is the word Urdu still uses. Muslim writers also had a word of their own, hikmah, wisdom, which the Quran uses many times. One verse says, “He gives wisdom to whom He wills, and whoever has been given wisdom has certainly been given much good. And none will remember except those of understanding.”⁵ For a Muslim reader, then, the love of wisdom is not a foreign idea. The Quran praises wisdom as one of God’s great gifts and praises “those of understanding” who reflect on it. In Urdu the hakeem, the wise man, became the name for the physician of traditional medicine, and hikmat came to mean both wisdom and the art of healing.

A word’s origin is a good opening for an answer, but it is not a definition. “Love of wisdom” tells you how the philosopher feels. It does not tell you what he studies or how. A candidate who writes “philosophy means love of wisdom” and stops has told the examiner the meaning of two Greek words and nothing about the subject. The next three sections fill in what the word left out.

3. What the Greeks meant: wonder and first causes

Plato, the pupil of Socrates, gave the first full answer to the question of what a philosopher is, in the fifth book of his Republic. In a conversation, Socrates asks whether “the philosopher” is “a lover, not of a part of wisdom only, but of the whole”. The answer is yes, of the whole. A little later he is asked who the true philosophers are, and he answers, “Those … who are lovers of the vision of truth.”⁶ Plato is separating the philosopher from two other kinds of people. One is the man who loves only a part of knowledge, as a carpenter loves carpentry. The other is the man who loves shows and sights and opinions, and never asks what lies behind them. The philosopher wants the whole, and he wants the truth behind the appearances. The chapter on Plato’s theory of Forms explains what Plato thought that truth was.

Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, began his Metaphysics with a sentence every student of philosophy should know. “ALL men by nature desire to know.” His evidence is homely. We enjoy our senses, he says, “even apart from their usefulness”, and sight above all. A child looks at things for the pleasure of looking.⁷ Philosophy grows out of that natural desire.

Aristotle then says how philosophy starts. “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” People wondered first at small puzzles close at hand, then at larger ones, such as the moon, the sun, the stars and how the universe came to be. A person who is puzzled feels ignorant, and philosophy is the effort to escape that ignorance. Aristotle draws a conclusion from this. Since people philosophised “to escape from ignorance”, they “were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end”. He even notes that this kind of knowledge was first sought only when “almost all the necessities of life” had been secured.⁷ The spectator at Pythagoras’s games is back. Philosophy is knowing for the sake of knowing.

What does philosophy want to know? Aristotle’s answer is that wisdom is the knowledge of “the first principles and causes”. A child who asks “why?” and then asks “why?” again of every answer is walking towards first causes. Why does the rain fall? Because the clouds are heavy with water. Why are they heavy? Because the sun lifted the water from the sea. Why does the sun shine at all? Why is there a world with suns and seas in it? Each answer pushes the question one step further back, and the last step is the question of the first cause of everything. A science such as medicine or farming stops early, at the causes it needs for its work. Philosophy wants to go all the way.

Aristotle ends with his most famous claim about philosophy. We call a man free, he says, “who exists for his own sake and not for another’s, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake”.⁷ A science of production, such as building or medicine, serves something else, a house or health. Philosophy serves nothing beyond itself. It is the knowledge a free mind seeks because it wants to understand. When you write about the Greek definition in the hall, carry three points. Philosophy begins in wonder, it seeks the first causes of things, and it is pursued for its own sake.

4. What the Muslim philosophers meant: the reality of things, and the signs of their Maker

The Greek books came into Arabic in Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliphs, and the first Muslim to make philosophy his life’s work was Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. He was born around 801 and grew up in Kufa, where his father had been governor, and he died around 873. He belonged to the Arab tribe of Kindah, and his ancestor Hazrat al-Ash’ath ibn Qais (RA) had been a Companion of the Holy Prophet ﷺ. Because he was the first Arab Muslim to study the sciences and philosophy, he was called “the Philosopher of the Arabs”.⁸ He is where the Muslim tradition that runs to Iqbal begins, and his definition of philosophy is the one to quote first in a Pakistani hall.

In his book On First Philosophy, al-Kindi wrote, “Philosophy is the knowledge of the reality of things within man’s possibility, because the philosopher’s end in his theoretical knowledge is to gain truth and in his practical knowledge to behave in accordance with truth.”⁸ Read it slowly, because every phrase matters. The knowledge of the reality of things means knowing what things truly are, behind how they look, as Plato wanted. Within man’s possibility is the humility of Pythagoras again. A human being knows only as far as a human mind can reach, and God’s knowledge is beyond it. The last part of the sentence divides philosophy in two. Its theoretical side aims at truth. Its practical side aims at living by that truth. A philosopher who knows the truth and does not live by it has done only half the work.

Al-Kindi divided philosophy along that same line. The theoretical studies were physics, mathematics and metaphysics. The practical studies were ethics, the management of a household and politics, which he described as the guidance of one’s self, of one’s house and of one’s city.⁸ Table 1 sets his division beside the one most textbooks use today. You can see that little has changed in eleven hundred years except the names.

Table 1. Two ways of dividing philosophy

Al-Kindi also had to defend philosophy, because some religious scholars of his day accused him of unbelief. They said, as he reports, that “the acquisition of the knowledge of the reality of things is atheism (kufr)”. His answer is one of the neatest arguments in the history of philosophy. Philosophy, he said, “is either necessary or it is not necessary”. If his opponents say it is necessary, they should study it. If they say it is not necessary, “they have to give the reason for this, and present a demonstration”. To give a reason and a demonstration is already to do philosophy. So even the man who argues against philosophy must use it to make his case.⁸ Learn the steps of this argument. It is short, it is clever, and it answers a charge candidates often meet.

Three centuries later, in Muslim Spain, the judge and philosopher Ibn Rushd asked the same question as a lawyer would. His Decisive Treatise opens by saying its purpose is to examine, “from the standpoint of the study of the Law”, whether the study of philosophy and logic “is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commanded”. He answers with a definition. If philosophy “is nothing more than study of existing beings and reflection on them as indications of the Artisan”, that is, as signs of the God who made them, and if the Law urges such reflection, then the Law makes philosophy either obligatory or recommended.⁹

Ibn Rushd then shows that the Quran does urge it. He quotes “Reflect, you have vision”, from Surah al-Hashr, which the Sahih International translation renders “So take warning, O people of vision”. He quotes the verse praising those who “give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth”, from Surah Al-Imran, and the verse asking “Do they not observe the camels, how they have been created?”^{9 10} For Ibn Rushd, a Muslim who studies the world carefully and reasons about it is doing what the Quran asks. He adds a sentence that sums up the whole Muslim view of reason and revelation. In his words, “truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.”⁹

Not every Muslim scholar agreed. Imam al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, fifteen years before Ibn Rushd was born, had attacked several of the philosophers’ doctrines in his Incoherence of the Philosophers. Ibn Rushd answered him point by point in The Incoherence of the Incoherence, written in 1180.²¹ That great debate has two chapters of its own in head VI of this subject. For a definition, the point to keep is that both sides argued with reasons. Al-Ghazali did not reject reasoning. He reasoned that some of the philosophers’ conclusions went beyond what reason can prove.

5. What the moderns meant: Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein and Iqbal

Many centuries after al-Kindi, philosophers in Europe were still asking what their subject was, and their answers stressed different parts of it. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher whose ethics you will meet in head V, gave two senses of the word in his lectures on logic, published in 1800. In the “scholastic” sense, the sense of the schools, philosophy is a body of reasoned knowledge whose parts are joined into a single system. Kant thought it was “the only science which in the most proper sense has a systematic connexion, and gives systematic unity to all other sciences”. In the larger, “cosmic” sense, philosophy is “the science of the relation of all knowledge and every use of reason to the ultimate end of human reason”.¹¹ The first sense is about how philosophy holds knowledge together. The second is about what all that knowledge is for. Section 7 shows how Kant turned the second sense into four plain questions.

Bertrand Russell, writing in English in 1912, said that philosophy “aims primarily at knowledge”, and that the knowledge it seeks “gives unity and system to the body of the sciences” and “results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs”.² The first half of that is close to Kant. The second half is new and important. Philosophy looks at the reasons we have for what we already believe. Most of our beliefs were given to us by our family, our teachers and our country. Philosophy does not throw them away. It asks whether each one has good grounds.

Russell also noticed something strange about philosophy’s history. Whenever a part of it found definite answers, it left philosophy and became a science of its own. “The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy,” he wrote. Isaac Newton’s great work on physics was titled the “mathematical principles of natural philosophy”. The study of the mind became psychology. So what remains called philosophy is the set of questions to which “no definite answer can be given” yet.² That is why philosophy can look as if it never makes progress. Its successes are counted under other names.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Russell’s student, went further in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921. “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity,” he wrote. “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts,” and its result is “to make propositions clear”.¹² A proposition here is simply a statement that can be true or false. On this view the philosopher does not add new facts to the world. He makes our thinking clear, so that we see what we are really saying and whether it makes sense. Many philosophers today would not go all the way with Wittgenstein, but most accept that clearing up confused thinking is a large part of the work.

Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher of the East, gave his own account in the first of the lectures later published as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, delivered at Madras, Hyderabad and Aligarh. He asks whether the purely rational method of philosophy can be applied to religion, and answers by saying what philosophy is like. “The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places.”¹³ An assumption is something we take for granted without noticing. Iqbal’s picture is of a searcher going into the corners of our minds to find what we have accepted without thinking.

Iqbal did not stop there, and a candidate who quotes only this sentence misses his point. He admits that such inquiry “may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality”. He then argues that faith “is more than mere feeling. It has something like a cognitive content”, meaning it carries real knowledge.¹³ So religion cannot be closed to reason, and reason cannot claim to be the only road to reality. The chapters on Iqbal in head VI follow this argument through.

Put these definitions side by side, as Figure 2 does, and you will find that the three parts from section 1 run through all of them. The questions are always the most basic ones, whether al-Kindi calls them the reality of things, Aristotle first causes, or Kant the ultimate ends of reason. The method is always reason, which al-Kindi and Ibn Rushd call demonstration, Russell critical examination, Wittgenstein clarification and Iqbal free inquiry. The aim is always to understand the whole and to live by it, which is Plato’s whole of wisdom, al-Kindi’s truth and conduct, and the unity of the sciences that Kant and Russell describe. From this you can build a definition of your own for the hall.

Philosophy is the reasoned study of the most fundamental questions about reality, knowledge and value: what ultimately exists, how we can know anything, and how we ought to live. It proceeds by argument rather than by authority or experiment alone, and it seeks an understanding of the world as a whole that can guide human life.

That is a model sentence, written in the register that earns marks. Each part of it can be traced to a philosopher you can name and quote, which is exactly what turns a definition into an answer.

6. How to tell a philosophical question

A definition is easier to hold when you can use it. The most useful thing this chapter can give you is a way to look at any question and say whether it is philosophical. Figure 3 sets out three tests in order, with an example that stops at each.

Work through the first example with me. “How far is Lahore from Karachi?” Could an observation or a measurement settle it? Yes. Someone can measure the road. So it is a question for a science, here geography, and it stops at the first box. “What does falsafa mean in Urdu?” Could a measurement settle it? No. Could a dictionary? Yes. It is a question about words, and it stops at the second box. “Which bus goes to Saddar?” No measurement of nature and no dictionary answers it, but it is not about what is real, what we can know or how to live. It is a practical question, and the conductor will answer it.

Now the last example. “Is it ever right to lie?” No experiment can settle it. You could survey a thousand people and find what they think, but that tells you what people believe about lying, not whether lying is right. No dictionary settles it either, because we all know what a lie is. The question is about how we ought to live. It passes all three tests and lands in the red box. It is a philosophical question.

Three features explain why the tests work. First, a philosophical question is general. It is not about this lie or that table, but about lying, knowledge or reality as such. Second, it is usually about the concepts that every other subject uses without examining, such as cause, mind, justice, knowledge, truth and time. A physicist uses the idea of cause in every experiment. A philosopher asks what a cause is. Third, it is often normative, which means it asks what ought to be rather than what is. A sociologist can tell you how many people in Pakistan pay their taxes. Whether they ought to, and why, is a question for ethics.

The tests also show you the line between philosophy and its neighbours, which an examiner asking about philosophy and science will want you to draw. Science answers questions that observation can settle. Philosophy works on the questions observation cannot settle, including the questions about science itself, such as what makes a theory scientific, which Karl Popper answered in the chapters on his method. The border moves, as Russell said. When a philosophical question finds a way to be settled by observation, it becomes a science.

Now try three on your own before you open the answer. Sort each question with Figure 3.

1. Does the soul survive the death of the body?
2. At what temperature does water boil at the top of Murree?
3. Is a law that most people want always a just law?

7. Kant’s four questions: philosophy in one sentence

Kant, whose “cosmic” sense of philosophy you met in section 5, turned that sense into a short list. “The field of philosophy,” he wrote, “may be reduced to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is Man?” He then said which subject answers each. “The first question is answered by Metaphysics, the second by Morals, the third by Religion, and the fourth by Anthropology.” By anthropology he meant the study of human nature, not the modern science of tribes and cultures. Then he added the line that turns a list into a map. “In reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last.”¹¹ Figure 4 draws it.

Why do the first three questions point to the fourth? Because each of them is asked by a human being, about the powers and the place of a human being. What I can know depends on what kind of mind I have. What I ought to do depends on what kind of creature I am, free or not, rational or not. What I may hope for depends on what my life is and how it ends. So the question “What is Man?” sits under all the others. Iqbal, who knew Kant’s work well, made the human self, the khudi, the centre of his own philosophy, and the chapter on Iqbal’s idea of the self shows how.

Kant’s list gives you the branches of philosophy in their simplest form, and you will need them for CE-2018’s question, “Define Philosophy and explain its main branches”. The first question, “What can I know?”, is taken up today by two branches. Epistemology asks what knowledge is and how we get it. Metaphysics asks what is real, and its central part, ontology, asks what it means for anything to exist at all. The second question belongs to ethics, with political philosophy as its public side. The third belongs to the philosophy of religion. Two branches stand outside Kant’s list. Logic studies reasoning itself, and every other branch uses it. Aesthetics studies beauty and art. The chapter on the branches of philosophy treats each one fully. In a definition answer, a paragraph that maps the branches onto Kant’s four questions shows the examiner that you see philosophy as one subject, not a list of names.

8. Philosophy at work in the world and in Pakistan

People sometimes imagine philosophy as old men talking in a library. Two cases, one from the world and one from Pakistan, show it doing real work. In both, someone had to answer a question no measurement could settle, and the answer changed what happened next.

The first case comes from the birth of the computer. In 1950 the English mathematician Alan Turing, a pioneer of the first computers, published a paper in the philosophy journal Mind. It began, “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’ This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’.” Turing saw at once that the question was philosophical. If we decide what “think” means by asking how people commonly use the word, he wrote, the answer would have to come from “a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.”¹⁴ A survey tells you what people believe, not what is true, which is exactly the second test of Figure 3.

So Turing did what philosophers do. He replaced the vague question with a clearer one. Instead of asking whether a machine thinks, he asked whether a machine could answer questions in writing so well that a judge could not tell it from a person. He called it the imitation game, and it is now known as the Turing test. He did not run an experiment. He clarified a question, as Wittgenstein said philosophy should, so that it could be argued about sensibly.

Seventy-six years later the question is no longer a thought experiment. Students in Pakistan now use computer programs that write essays and answer questions in fluent English. Does such a program understand what it writes, or does it only arrange words? Is it fair to grade an essay it wrote? Should a government let it decide who gets a loan? None of these questions can be settled by looking inside the machine, because they turn on what understanding, fairness and responsibility are. They are philosophical questions, and the people who answer them, in ministries and courts, are doing philosophy whether they call it that or not.

The second case comes from Pakistan’s own Supreme Court, and it shows the same kind of reasoning done by judges. The case is Shehla Zia v. WAPDA, which the Supreme Court of Pakistan decided in 1994. A group of citizens had come to the Court because WAPDA planned to build a grid station near their homes, and they feared that its high-voltage lines would harm their health. The case turned on Article 9 of the Constitution, which says no person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with law. The residents’ lives were not being taken. So did Article 9 protect them at all?

The Court had to decide what the word “life” means, and no dictionary or measurement could decide it for them. They reasoned their way to an answer. “The word ‘life’ has not been defined in the Constitution but it does not mean nor can it be restricted only to the vegetative or animal life or mere existence from conception to death. Life includes all such amenities and facilities which a person born in a free country is entitled to enjoy with dignity, legally and constitutionally.”¹⁵ In the next paragraph they joined life to “dignity of man” and asked whether a person whose life is “below bare necessity like without proper food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, clean atmosphere and unpolluted environment” can be said to have that dignity.¹⁵

Look at what the Court did. It took a concept, asked what it really contains, rejected the narrow answer with a reason, and drew a conclusion that changed the law. That is philosophical reasoning about the question “What is Man?”, carried out by judges. A civil servant who will one day apply that law is better at the job for understanding the reasoning behind it, and the examiner knows this.

9. Two maps of where philosophy stands

Every definition of philosophy says, openly or not, where philosophy stands beside the two other great ways of knowing, revelation and science. Two maps of this are worth knowing, because the examiner set the relation of philosophy to religion and to science three times between CE-2019 and CE-2021.¹ Figure 5 draws both.

The map that comes first for a Muslim reader is the one the Muslim philosophers drew. For al-Kindi and Ibn Rushd there is one truth, and two roads lead to it. Revelation brings it through the Holy Prophet ﷺ, and a believer accepts it in faith. Reason reaches it by demonstration, step by step from what is known. Because both roads end at the same truth, they cannot contradict each other. “Truth does not oppose truth,” as Ibn Rushd put it.⁹ When a passage of scripture seems to clash with a proof, Ibn Rushd said, the passage must be read more deeply. The clash is in our reading, not in the truth. Al-Kindi went further and counted theology as a part of philosophy, since knowing the reality of things includes knowing the One who made them.⁸

Russell drew a different map, in the opening pages of his History of Western Philosophy (first published 1946). Philosophy, he wrote, “is something intermediate between theology and science”. It is like theology because it speculates on matters “as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable”. It is like science because “it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation”. Definite knowledge belongs to science, Russell said, and dogma about what lies beyond it belongs to theology. “Between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy.”¹⁶ A no man’s land is the strip of ground between two armies’ trenches, which neither side holds.

The two maps differ because Russell did not accept revelation as a source of knowledge, and al-Kindi and Ibn Rushd did. On Russell’s map, religion’s claims are dogma. On theirs, revelation is truth, and reason confirms it. You do not have to pretend the two maps agree. In the hall, set out the Muslim philosophers’ map as the position you hold and argue for, give Russell’s as Russell’s, and explain the reason for the difference. An examiner rewards a candidate who can state a view he does not share fairly and then answer it. The chapter on philosophy, science and religion takes this whole argument further, with Iqbal’s position, which is subtler than either map.

10. The case against philosophy, and the replies

A good answer gives the strongest criticisms of an idea and then replies to them. Philosophy has had four kinds of critic. Each has a point, and each has been answered.

The first critic is the practical man, who says philosophy is a waste of time. Philosophy bakes no bread, cures no fever and builds no dam. Why should a poor country spend a minute on it? Russell took this charge seriously. He described the “practical” man as “one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind”. Even if poverty and disease were ended, he said, “there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society”.²

Russell’s reply is that the value of philosophy lies “largely in its very uncertainty”. A man with no philosophy goes through life “imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation”. Philosophy cannot always tell him the right answer, but it “is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom”.² Add to this the cases in section 8. A judge reading Article 9 and a ministry deciding how to use a computer program are making practical decisions, and those decisions rest on philosophical answers. The choice is not between philosophy and practice. It is between thinking about those answers carefully and taking them on trust.

The second critic is the religious scholar who fears that philosophy leads to unbelief. Al-Kindi met this charge in the ninth century, and his reply, set out in section 4, is that even arguing against philosophy is doing philosophy. Ibn Rushd answered it from the Quran, showing that the Book commands reflection on creation. Iqbal answered it in the twentieth century by showing that faith itself has a content that can be reasoned about.

The charge still has a point that a careful answer admits. A philosopher can follow an argument to a conclusion that contradicts faith, and some have. Al-Ghazali’s case against the philosophers rested on exactly this, that on certain questions they had claimed proofs they did not have. The fair reply is not that philosophy is always safe. It is that bad reasoning is answered with better reasoning, as al-Ghazali himself did, and not by forbidding thought.

The third critic points to two and a half thousand years of argument and asks what has been settled. Physicists agree on the laws of motion. Philosophers still argue about whether we have free will. Russell’s reply, in section 5, is that philosophy’s successes leave home. Astronomy, physics and psychology were all once parts of philosophy, and they took their settled answers with them. What is left is, by definition, the unsettled part.² A second reply is that progress in philosophy is often clarity. We may not know whether we have free will, but we know far more exactly than Pythagoras did what the question is and what each answer would cost.

The fourth critic is Karl Marx. In the last of his Theses on Feuerbach (1845) he wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”¹⁷ Philosophy, on this view, is idle talk while the world suffers. The reply has two parts. First, nobody can change the world well without first understanding it. A reformer who does not know what justice is will build an unjust system with good intentions. Second, Marx’s own sentence is a philosophical claim, about what thought is for, and he spent his life building a philosophy to support it. The chapters on Marx in head IV show how that philosophy itself interpreted the world before it tried to change it.

11. Where philosophy stands today

Philosophy today is both an old academic subject and a living practice. Every year, on the third Thursday of November, UNESCO celebrates World Philosophy Day. In 2026 that falls on 19 November. UNESCO says that by “awakening minds to the exercise of thinking and the reasoned confrontation of opinions, philosophy helps to build a more tolerant, more respectful society”.¹⁸ That sentence is a good modern statement of philosophy’s practical value, from a body that represents almost every country in the world.

Much of the most active philosophy now is applied to new problems. The questions about computer programs that write and decide, raised in section 8, have grown into a field of their own, the ethics of artificial intelligence. Medicine has its own ethics, which asks when life begins and ends and who may decide. The environment has its own, which asks what we owe to people not yet born. In each of these, philosophers work beside doctors, engineers, lawyers and officials, and the old questions about reality, knowledge and right action come back in new clothes.

Pakistan has had its own tradition of philosophy since the country began. The University of Karachi founded its Department of Philosophy in 1952, and its own history records that it was the first department to come into existence in the university’s Faculty of Arts.¹⁹ The Pakistan Philosophical Congress published its proceedings from Lahore in the 1950s, and its president, M. M. Sharif, edited the two-volume A History of Muslim Philosophy, published in 1963 under the Congress’s name.²⁰ That book, written by scholars from across the Muslim world, is still the standard history of the subject, and this course draws on it throughout head VI. Iqbal’s Reconstruction, the best-known work of philosophy by a Muslim of the subcontinent, is on your syllabus in head VI.

Philosophy is also a live choice in the CSS examination itself. In CE-2023, 910 candidates sat the Philosophy paper.²² For a future officer the subject teaches a skill the service needs every day. It trains you to see what a question is really asking, to set out the reasons on each side, and to reach a judgment you can defend.

12. What students mix up

Philosophy and “my philosophy of life”. In everyday speech people say “my philosophy is to work hard”. That is a personal motto, not philosophy in the sense of this paper. A philosophy in the paper’s sense is a reasoned position on a basic question, defended by argument and open to objection.

The meaning of the word and the definition of the subject. “Love of wisdom” is where the word comes from. It is not enough as a definition, because it says nothing about the questions philosophy asks or the method it uses. Use the word’s origin as your first sentence, never as your whole definition.

Philosophy and theology. Theology, or kalam in the Muslim tradition, starts from revelation and reasons to defend and explain it. Philosophy starts from reason and asks what reason can reach. They meet, and on the Muslim philosophers’ map they reach the same truth, but they start from different places. The chapter on philosophy, science and religion draws the line exactly.

Philosophy and science. Philosophy is not “science without experiments”, and science is not “philosophy that worked”. Science answers questions that observation can settle. Philosophy works on the questions it cannot, including questions about science itself. Many sciences began inside philosophy and left it, which is a fact about history, not a sign that philosophy is a failed science.

Philosophy and its history. Knowing what Plato said is the history of philosophy. Doing philosophy is judging whether he was right. The paper asks for both, and the verdict at the end of your answer is where the second shows.

Who coined the word. The ancient sources give the word to Pythagoras, not to Socrates or Plato. Socrates made philosophy famous in Athens. Plato wrote the first full account of what a philosopher is. Pythagoras, who lived before Socrates, gave it its name.

Urdu’s falsafa as an insult. In Urdu, someone who talks at length without saying anything is sometimes told to stop his falsafa. The paper means the subject, not the insult. Never let the casual meaning into an answer.

13. What FPSC has asked on this topic

FPSC set the definition of philosophy four times, in four consecutive papers, and never on its own:¹

• CE-2018, Q2. “Define Philosophy and explain its main branches.” (20 marks)
• CE-2019, Q3. “What is philosophy? Discuss its relation to science.” (20 marks)
• CE-2020, Q2. “Define philosophy. What is its relationship with religion?” (20 marks)
• CE-2021, Q7(b). “Define Philosophy. What is its relationship with religion?” (10 marks, as half of a two-part question)

The pattern is plain. The definition is the first half of the question, and the examiner wants it done well and quickly so that the second half has room. A definition in these answers should take about a quarter of your space. Give the word, two or three definitions from named philosophers including at least one Muslim philosopher, and your own definition built from them. Spend the rest on the branches, science or religion, which the chapters on those topics teach.

14. Facts to take into the examination hall

• The word. Philosophia, from philos (loving) and sophia (wisdom). In Arabic and Urdu, falsafa; a philosopher is a failasuf. The Quran’s word for wisdom is hikmah (2:269).
• Pythagoras (6th century BCE) first called himself a philosopher, according to Diogenes Laertius and Cicero, because “no man ought to be called wise, but only God”. Cicero tells his comparison of life to the games: some come for glory, some for gain, and the best come to watch and understand.
• Plato, Republic V: the philosopher is “a lover, not of a part of wisdom only, but of the whole”; the true philosophers are “lovers of the vision of truth”.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I: “ALL men by nature desire to know”; philosophy begins in wonder; wisdom is knowledge of “the first principles and causes”; “the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake”.
• Al-Kindi (c. 801 to c. 873), “the Philosopher of the Arabs”, On First Philosophy: “Philosophy is the knowledge of the reality of things within man’s possibility”. Theoretical philosophy (physics, mathematics, metaphysics) aims at truth; practical philosophy (ethics, the household, politics) at acting by it. His argument: philosophy is either necessary or not, and to show it is not necessary one must give a demonstration, which is philosophy.
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes), The Decisive Treatise: philosophy is the “study of existing beings and reflection on them as indications of the Artisan”; the Law makes it obligatory or recommended; “truth does not oppose truth”.
• Kant, Logic (1800): four questions, “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is Man?”, answered by metaphysics, morals, religion and anthropology; “the first three questions refer to the last”.
• Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912): philosophy answers “ultimate questions … critically”; its value lies “in its very uncertainty”; it frees our thoughts “from the tyranny of custom”; a subject that finds definite answers “becomes a separate science”.
• Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (first published 1946): philosophy is “intermediate between theology and science”, a “No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides”.
• Wittgenstein, Tractatus (1921), 4.112: “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity”; its object is “the logical clarification of thoughts”.
• Iqbal, Reconstruction, Lecture I: “The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority.”
• Marx, Theses on Feuerbach XI (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
• Turing (1950), Mind: “Can machines think?”; defining “think” by a Gallup poll would be “absurd”.
• Shehla Zia v. WAPDA, PLD 1994 SC 693: “life” in Article 9 is not “only … the vegetative or animal life” but includes living “with dignity”.
• University of Karachi, Department of Philosophy, founded 1952. M. M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy (1963), published for the Pakistan Philosophical Congress. UNESCO World Philosophy Day: the third Thursday of November.

15. What loses marks on this topic

Stopping at the meaning of the word. “Philosophy is derived from two Greek words, philo and sophia, meaning love of wisdom” is a sentence every candidate writes. It earns little on its own. Go on at once to what philosophy studies and how.

A list of definitions with no thread. Ten definitions, one after another, each with a name, read as memorised notes. Choose three or four, say what each adds, and show what they share. The three parts of section 1, the questions, the method and the aim, are the thread.

Only Western definitions. A paper set by a Pakistani commission, for officers of a Muslim state, should hear al-Kindi and Ibn Rushd as well as Aristotle and Russell. Leaving them out is a missed opportunity. Putting them first, with their own words, marks you out.

Invented quotations. Sayings such as “philosophy is the mother of all sciences” are pinned on Socrates or Aristotle in many answers, with no book behind them. An examiner who knows the field marks a false quotation down harder than no quotation. Quote only what you have learnt from the text, and name the book.

Answering only the first half. The definition is never the whole question. An answer that spends three pages on Pythagoras and one paragraph on religion has answered the wrong question. Plan the second half first, then fit the definition into the space left.

Treating religion as philosophy’s enemy, or as beyond reasoning. Two opposite mistakes. One writes as if philosophy proves religion wrong. The other writes as if religion has nothing to do with reason. The Muslim philosophers’ own view, that the two roads lead to one truth, is both the strongest position and the one the examiner expects a candidate to understand.

16. A worked answer plan

Worked: CE-2018, “Define Philosophy and explain its main branches”

First, read what the question asks. It has two commands. “Define” wants an exact statement of what philosophy is, with its leading thinkers. “Explain its main branches” wants each branch set out so that a reader who did not know it now does. The branches are the larger half, so the definition gets about a quarter of the answer and the branches the rest. The thread that joins the halves is Kant’s four questions, because they turn a definition into a map of branches.

Here is the plan, as you would jot it in the margin in five minutes.

1. Opening. Philosophy is the reasoned study of the most fundamental questions about reality, knowledge and value. Its branches are the different questions it asks, which Kant reduced to four.
2. The word and its first use. Philosophia, love of wisdom; Pythagoras would not call himself wise, “only God”. Falsafa and hikmah (Quran 2:269).
3. Three definitions, one thread. Aristotle: wonder, first causes, “the only free science”. Al-Kindi: “the knowledge of the reality of things within man’s possibility”, theoretical and practical. Russell: “ultimate questions … critically”. Then your own definition, showing the questions, the method and the aim.
4. The bridge. Kant’s four questions, answered by metaphysics, morals, religion and anthropology. Draw Figure 4 in six lines.
5. Metaphysics and ontology. What is real? Example: Plato’s Forms against Marx’s matter.
6. Epistemology. What can we know, and how? Example: rationalists (Descartes) against empiricists (Locke).
7. Ethics. What ought we to do? Example: Mill’s greatest happiness against Kant’s duty. Political philosophy as its public side: Hobbes, Rawls.
8. Logic. The study of good reasoning, used by every other branch. Example: deduction and induction.
9. Aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. Beauty and art; what may we hope? Iqbal on faith’s “cognitive content”.
10. Al-Kindi’s division beside the modern one (Table 1), to show the branches are old and the names new.
11. Verdict. The branches are not separate subjects but one inquiry asked from different sides, all pointing, as Kant said, to “What is Man?” That is why a question in one branch so often needs an answer from another.

The model opening, in the register that earns marks:

Philosophy is the reasoned study of the most fundamental questions human beings can ask: what ultimately exists, how anything can be known, and how we ought to live. Its branches are best understood not as separate subjects but as these questions asked from different sides. Kant reduced them to four, “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is Man?”, and held that “the first three questions refer to the last”.

Notice what the plan does. Every branch gets one example from a thinker in your syllabus, so the examiner sees you know the subject as well as its map. The Muslim philosophers appear twice, once in the definition and once in the division of branches. The verdict answers the question, which asked you to explain the branches, by saying what they are together.

With me: CE-2020, “Define philosophy. What is its relationship with religion?”

Now do the next one with the steps beside you. Read the two commands. The second half is the larger one, and it asks for a relationship, which means you must say how the two connect, where they agree and where they differ. Write your own plan of eight to ten points before you open mine. Use section 9 for the second half.

Alone: CE-2019, “What is philosophy? Discuss its relation to science.”

Plan this one by yourself, in five minutes, before you look. “Discuss” asks you to weigh the relation, with the case on each side, and say where you stand. You will need Russell’s point about sciences leaving philosophy, the tests of Figure 3, and one example where philosophy and science work together.

What to remember from this chapter

• The word philosophia means the love of wisdom. Pythagoras first used it, because only God is wise. Arabic and Urdu call it falsafa, and the Quran’s word for wisdom is hikmah.
• Every definition has three parts: the most basic questions (reality, knowledge, how to live), a method (reasoned argument, not authority alone), and an aim (understanding the whole, and living by it).
• Aristotle: philosophy begins in wonder, seeks first causes and is “the only free science”. Al-Kindi: “the knowledge of the reality of things within man’s possibility”, theoretical and practical. Ibn Rushd: the study of beings as signs of their Maker, which the Quran commands.
• Kant reduced philosophy to four questions, “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is Man?”, and said the first three refer to the last. They map onto the branches.
• A question is philosophical when observation cannot settle it, a dictionary cannot settle it, and it is about what is real, what we can know or how we should live.
• For the Muslim philosophers, reason and revelation are two roads to one truth. For Russell, philosophy is a No Man’s Land between science and theology. Lead with the first, state the second as Russell’s, and explain why they differ.
• Philosophy has answered its critics: the practical man (Russell, “the tyranny of custom”), the charge of unbelief (al-Kindi’s demonstration argument), the charge of no progress (sciences leave philosophy), and Marx (understanding comes before change).
• FPSC has asked for the definition four times, always joined to branches, science or religion. Give the definition a quarter of the answer and the second half the rest.

Check yourself

Answer each question in your own words before you open the answer.

1. Why did Pythagoras call himself a lover of wisdom and not a wise man, and what does Cicero’s story of the games add?

2. State al-Kindi’s definition of philosophy and explain what “within man’s possibility” adds to it.

3. Set out al-Kindi’s argument against those who said philosophy was not needed, as numbered steps.

4. Use the three tests of Figure 3 on this question: “Should Pakistan’s government spend more on universities than on roads?”

5. What are Kant’s four questions, which subject answers each, and why did he say the first three refer to the last?

6. In Shehla Zia v. WAPDA, what philosophical question did the Supreme Court answer, and how?

7. How do the Muslim philosophers’ map and Russell’s map of philosophy, science and religion differ, and why?

8. Give Marx’s criticism of philosophy and two replies to it.

9. From the chapter on sitting the paper: what are the five parts of a twenty-mark answer, and which part of a definition question gets most of the space?