This translated article, intended to clarify the term “applied” in the expression “applied philosophy,” discusses both the practical (post-Kantian) and the “applied” (theory-practice dualism in applied ethics) meanings of the term. Paul B. Thompson’s notion of “philosophy in context” is particularly significant in that it encompasses both of these meanings of “applied philosophy” and treats philosophy together with life.
Practical thinking—one of the most widely debated philosophical topics in recent years—has received little systematic attention in professional philosophy journals. It has instead been debated with great intensity in places where participants have a personal stake: curriculum discussions, staff evaluations, and job interviews. The issue is whether courses emphasizing philosophy’s relationship to contemporary issues or specific professions should be taught; whether research aimed at developing a philosophical understanding of socially relevant topics or professions counts as real philosophy; and whether the intellectual value of such research meets the standards of research in traditional areas such as metaphysics and epistemology. In short, the matter concerns applied philosophy, practical philosophy, and its proper place in the world of professional philosophers. Yet practical philosophy can be divided into two distinct types. Some of the objections typically raised against the legitimacy of practical philosophy can be successfully applied to one type while failing to apply to the other.
Objections to Applied Philosophy
Research and courses conducted under the heading of practical philosophy have faced a degree of opposition, partly due to the lack of a consistent and established name. The expression “practical philosophy” has a historical basis, but it gives many people the impression that the subject has been diluted or simplified to appeal to a general audience. The more widely used “applied philosophy” bears too close a resemblance to expressions like “business mathematics” or “technical writing.” It evokes the idea that the subject’s full theoretical and intellectual development has been shortened and that shortcuts are being offered for the impatient. Philosophers working on practical problems have seemed eager to create specializations for themselves—philosophy of medicine, philosophy of technology, environmental ethics, and so on—as if to avoid being labeled a type of “applied philosophy.”
Undergraduate courses, by contrast, appear to have won broad acceptance. Yet ironically, the success of practical philosophy in the classroom is sometimes cited as evidence that it is not professionally legitimate—because the courses are taught at an introductory level and typically appeal to student groups who do not wish to study philosophy in depth. The growth of practical curricula may therefore be seen as a threat to traditional subject areas, not only within philosophy but across the humanities more broadly. A program’s success reinforces traditionalists’ sense that practical or applied courses cater to mass tastes and depart from sound educational principles. Indeed, the fact that first- and second-year students enroll in large numbers in courses on animal rights, abortion, or homosexuality is not, in itself, evidence in favor of those courses’ intellectual content. Traditionalists can also find support for their judgments in recent studies showing that American educational reforms over the past twenty years have in fact lowered student performance and that education at every level needs to refocus on basic skills.
Basic Education and Philosophy
The problem in philosophy of education stems from the view that students must be taught a significant proportion of content that can be defined as foundational according to some standard curriculum. But what that standard should look like is contested. One approach defines the foundation as topics that have stood the test of time—the “timeless.” Plato’s Republic is generally considered foundational. It may be reasonable to propose that every student should become acquainted with the classics. But it is clear that the most exciting and interesting aspects of every academic discipline lie in what is new and current, relative to what is classical and old—and this holds for recent work on practical topics as much as it does for philosophy. It may therefore be conceded that students should not study medical ethics at the expense of Aristotle. But by the same token, studying Kripke at the expense of Aristotle may also be a mistake. This argument is directed not specifically against practical philosophy, but only against broad curricular changes that harm the classics.
A second approach to identifying what is foundational specifies the topics a student must master to be able to continue working at an advanced level in the field. Symbolic logic could be considered foundational on these grounds, and it may seem reasonable to expect philosophy students to take a logic course whether or not they plan to do further work in logic. Logic underpins many upper-level and graduate courses. But for an art history student who will take only two or three courses in philosophy, is logic foundational in the same way? Are the “building blocks” of a discipline really the most appropriate courses for giving a student rapid exposure to the discipline’s central ideas and methods? While the building-blocks standard is a legitimate interpretation of what is prerequisite to working in a discipline, it does not fully capture the meaning of “foundational” implied in the broader claim that education should emphasize a certain amount of basic material.
A third interpretation rests on the vague concept called basic skills—typically defined as reading, writing, and mathematics. While there is some debate about exactly what these skills are and how best to teach them, one possibility is to propose that students at a given educational level can sharpen their critical thinking and comprehension by engaging with more challenging material and the education they receive on those topics. The main alternative to this view is that basic skills must be taught technically—for example, by teaching how to scan a page with minimal eye movement in a speed-reading class. There is no need to debate the relative merits of these approaches here, because if philosophy education is to make any meaningful contribution to basic skills, it will clearly be through the former approach. Yet when it contributes to basic education, philosophy does so in this model through its capacity to offer a constant challenge to students’ reading, writing, and analytical abilities—not through the specific content of the course material.
Philosophy is well positioned to make this contribution because it has an almost inexhaustible supply of arguments, dimensions, and perspectives. Yet these problems can often be introduced to undergraduate students in deceptively simple terms. What is required here is that the material taught be complex enough to discourage students from settling for superficial solutions, and that students not be allowed to take shortcuts in their reasoning when arriving at a position.
If the aim in philosophy of education is to present students with challenging material to sharpen their reading, writing, and reasoning abilities, it is difficult to see why the so-called foundational courses in the philosophy curriculum should have an inherent advantage over the so-called practical courses. If practical courses are less demanding and less philosophical by nature, they cannot serve as well in developing basic skills. Whether this is the case will be addressed below. However, someone who objects to all this reasoning might claim that the purpose of philosophy courses is to teach students philosophy, not basic skills. This objection is acceptable at two levels against the approaches to basic education philosophy discussed earlier. Certainly a well-educated person should not be exempted from learning the great ideas of Western philosophy—but does every student also need to read Davidson and Derrida?
Furthermore, it is clear that a student considering graduate study in philosophy must be systematically trained in the foundational courses of philosophy; but does a pre-medical student need this as well?
The Philosophy of Philosophy
What this objection implies is that the purpose of philosophy courses is to teach philosophy—and therefore that practical philosophy is not really philosophy at all. This view lies at the heart of the “philosophy of philosophy” debate. It is impossible to review all the views on what criteria must be met for a topic to be called philosophy. People feel very strongly about what is and is not philosophy, and this debate is not limited to the status of practical or applied areas. Was Heidegger a philosopher? Some say he was not. What about Skolem? Or Einstein?
The debate over what is and is not philosophy is often more an exercise of power than of reason.
For instance, several years ago, while discussing my dissertation at a job interview—a critique of formal risk analysis applied to public policy and public discourse on nuclear energy—a distinguished and respected interviewer acknowledged that the topic was very important and valuable for a dissertation, but said I should be submitting it to the Physics Department. I do not interpret this as “interview tactics,” but I was not offered the position.
Another example comes from a curriculum discussion in which a new course on the philosophy of literature was being proposed. An opponent claimed that this was another step onto a slippery slope and would compromise the integrity of the course offerings, and sarcastically added, to make the point, “Your next request will be for a course on the philosophy of language.” One person’s philosophy is another’s physics, and even the most extensively studied areas of the twentieth century are not immune to the charge of being “not philosophy.” That said, there must be at least some (perhaps vague) standards worth protecting. Certainly there are some values of x that do not satisfy the open sentence “x’s philosophy is not a legitimate field.” The most striking point about applied philosophy is that it is supposed not to be philosophy because it is applied, because it is practical. If it is part of a practice, part of life itself, how can it be reflective in the same way that all philosophy since Socrates has been reflective?
Two Types of Practical (Applied) Philosophy
Confusion is inevitable from the habit of grouping so many specific areas under the umbrella of practical philosophy. Each type of practical philosophy has its own problems and methods, and some branches—such as philosophy of law, sometimes included and sometimes excluded—have a long history. Yet a useful division of the field can be made by drawing a distinction based on a branch’s relationship to philosophical theory. Some practical philosophies are derived from pure theory. That is, theory is developed and then real data points are used to fill in free variables. The theory then “produces an answer” in the form of a prediction or measurement. In other cases, practical philosophy involves problems of a philosophical nature for which there is no theory—either because the conditions generating the problem are unique, or because they depend on recent historical developments, or perhaps because philosophers have not previously had time to write at length about the subject. For convenience, I call problems of the former type applied philosophy and problems of the latter type philosophy in context.
Applied (Applied) Philosophy
Like the philosophical concepts and theories of any academic discipline, this field is formulated in general terms. Ethicists attempt to define the greatest good or persons’ rights in a language that captures the essence of these concepts and illuminates a variety of particular cases. In informal logic, fallacies are examined to show that bad arguments can be categorized and that logical errors are usually instances of general types. Because philosophy is general, it has specific applications. Philosophical theories are in some respects similar to the formulas of geometry. The formula “length × width = area” expresses a general relationship, but can be usefully applied in a specific situation—such as determining how much carpet to order for your living room. Applications of philosophical theories are rarely this transparent, but similarly, if ethical theory claims that there is a right to education in all human beings and the practice of segregated classrooms deprives some people of this right, then segregated classrooms are wrong according to the given theory. In both cases—philosophy or geometry—there are applications of general principles.
Teachers of any discipline know how important it is to convey to students some applications and uses of the material. It is easier to teach ethical theory to students who see that it has a stake in the resolution of a particular argument. It is far more effective to teach informal fallacies by giving examples of types that occur in sources students may be familiar with, and it helps for those sources to be current. Even intelligent students may fail to appreciate the relevance of a given course, and familiarity with applications of general principles helps students overcome their disengagement. That said, doing the application is not the same as appreciating the logic underlying the general principles. Any discussion of teaching applied philosophy must be aware of this distinction.
A teacher who uses applied philosophy as an example and uses applications to arouse interest in the arguments supporting basic theories is, in a sense, not teaching applied philosophy; rather, the teacher is using applications as a pedagogical method to teach philosophy. Presumably, teaching applied philosophy should consist largely of instruction in how to do the application. This does not mean that a course on applied philosophy cannot be useful and important for student education. Courses on informal reasoning are examples of applied philosophy teaching that clearly serve some undergraduate students. But in a sense, these are not really philosophy courses; they do not engage the student’s mind in the way required for real philosophy. Applied philosophy courses can convey useful information and valuable techniques, but they often do not genuinely require the student to think, read critically, or write clearly.
Moreover, the determining factor in many applications of philosophical theory is not even philosophical. For example, one key issue in determining a social ethic for combating world hunger concerns the demographic transition. The demographic transition theory holds that as individuals in a society improve their standard of living, the society’s birth rate will decline. The demographic transition thesis is not a philosophical theory; it is a theory of cultural demography. Yet it is their theories on demographic transition that distinguish the utilitarian Joseph Fletcher from Peter Singer on the issue of world hunger. [1] This is not a criticism of Fletcher or Singer, but it shows that arriving at an informed conclusion on world hunger by calculating the consequences of utilitarian ethical theory requires studying far more than philosophy. Examining the topics to which philosophy is applied means studying much more than philosophy alone.
Even professional philosophers may not appreciate the extent to which real-world facts intervene in resolving specific problems. For example, one argument for vegetarianism is that the consumption of meat and poultry constitutes a nutritionally inefficient use of agricultural resources. [2] This argument has a certain plausibility for Americans in particular, since most of us eat supermarket and restaurant meat raised on grain that could be used for human consumption. Feedlot cattle convert proteins from grain and fodder into human-digestible meat and dairy products. In other agricultural economies, moreover, the consumption of farm animals provides a nutritionally efficient solution to waste problems caused by underdeveloped storage and transportation systems. The moral point supportable on the basis of the realities of agricultural production is not in favor of vegetarianism, but against the consumption of most commercially available meat in the United States. Philosophers who launch applied courses without awareness of such matters of everyday fact (which are often decisive) do not serve their undergraduate students well.
Applied philosophy differs from philosophy in two senses: it can evolve into the teaching of technique rather than thinking, and the issues can become entirely a matter of facts or theories belonging to another discipline’s jurisdiction. These objections do not mean that no course in applied philosophy is valid, but they indicate reservations that should be borne in mind.
Philosophy in Context
Philosophy in context differs from applied (applied) philosophy in that while applied philosophy attempts to move from theory to practice, philosophy in context identifies philosophical problems that arise in practice and attempts to formulate general philosophical solutions to them. People attempting to carry out tasks of practical importance in real life (i.e., non-academic life) sometimes encounter philosophical difficulties. Professional philosophers who take these philosophical difficulties as their own problems are doing a kind of applied philosophy. Sometimes these difficulties are resolved quickly. Sometimes they become quite hard. Then they become “perennial questions.” A few examples will illustrate the phenomenon of philosophy in context.
Whether we have obligations to future generations is a philosophical topic unlikely to have attracted much attention from classical philosophers. Before the peak of the Industrial Revolution, it seemed quite clear that the lives of one’s descendants would be like one’s own. But the possibility of environmental pollution and resource depletion led many to question whether the quality of human life would be sustainable in the future. This question in turn generates a philosophical question about whether we, as present inhabitants of the earth, have a responsibility to ensure the planet’s habitability for future generations. Another example of philosophy in context is the continually renewed interest in the metaphysical criteria of being human.
The search for a definitive account of human nature certainly has historical precedents. Philosophers have been interested in determining humanity’s place in the chain of being. The problem of modern interest is connected not with general questions of theology and architecture but with the resolution of the abortion debate. In this case, advances in biomedical understanding have made it seem reasonable to some to argue that a fetus is not yet human and therefore not subject to equal protection under the law. The Supreme Court’s ruling that made abortion a matter of conscience made philosophical definitions of human nature a problem with political and practical significance. The fact that the problem has practical consequences does not make it any less philosophical. A final example can be taken from the practical problems of another era. Locke’s attempt to philosophically authorize property rights is also an example of philosophy in context. As the political authority of the aristocracy began to crumble, there arose a need to restructure the political rights and privileges of the English in a way more consistent with the new economic importance of the emerging middle class. Describing Locke’s treatises on government as a brilliant and innovative attempt to resolve this practical challenge is no insult to Locke.
Of course, what I call “philosophy in context” corresponds to what is traditionally called “practical philosophy.” This is philosophy that arises as a result of an encounter with reality. Reality should be interpreted to include both the ordinary reality of everyday experience and the space-time of the physicist. Real people have real problems. Some of these are philosophical, and some are very hard. Why should these “genuinely philosophical questions” not be the subject of a philosophy course?
For a philosophy course, the difference between applied philosophy and philosophy in context may be one of approach rather than subject matter. Teaching the treatment of animals by showing what all the various ethical theories say about it is applied philosophy. It is also possible to teach the treatment of animals by asking what kinds of moral obligations we have toward animals in real life; in this case, philosophical approaches emerge as an answer to a practical question. The difference in approach makes a difference in your philosophy; philosophy becomes a process of thinking about topics rather than a set of doctrines to be learned.
Practical philosophy courses thus fall into two categories: philosophy adapted for practical use (applied philosophy) and philosophy done in response to the philosophical problems of the real world (i.e., non-academic philosophy). Both types of course have legitimate, but different, constituencies. Curriculum discussions should take this into account. For example, while applied philosophy might be expected to be taught at quite low, undergraduate levels, philosophy in context is likely to seek to attract either students with fairly advanced philosophical skills or students who understand well the practical situation giving rise to the problem. I hope I have shown, at least to some degree, the weakness of the idea that applied philosophy is merely pseudo-philosophy. The practical world presents a great many philosophical problems. Professional philosophers who insist on placing an artificial limitation on the discipline fail to see the variety and complexity with which philosophy is intertwined with our lives.
NOTES
[1]. See Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” and Joseph Fletcher, “Give If It Helps But Not If It Hurts.” Both essays are reprinted in William Aiken and Hugh L. LaFollette, World Hunger and Moral Obligation, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977. [2]. See James Rachels, “Vegetarianism and ‘The Other Weight Problem.’” Also in Aiken and LaFollette, op. cit.
Translated by: Ahmet Er
Note This article is translated from Paul B. Thompson’s “Two Types of Practical Philosophy”.