An “Apology” for Philosophy
T HE time was, and that in the not so far distant past, when philosophy was generally known and accepted as "the queen of the sciences." Even that, however, was a real comedown for philosophy from the position she once occupied; namely, that of being the synonym for all ordered and reliable knowledge of any kind. It is, of course, a well-known fact that for the Greeks there existed no science or sciences aside from philosophy, since philosophy, being the love of wisdom, was the all-inclusive term used for the serious study of anything, from mathematics and astronomy to ethics, political science, rhetoric, and poetry. It is necessary, therefore, at the outset of our discussion to make it perfectly clear that philosophy, as at present understood, makes no claims to any such pretentious or all-inclusive program. In fact, there are those who claim that philosophy itself has ceased to have any unusual or even worth-while function to fulfill in the modern world. It has been asserted that, together with religion and mythology, philosophy belongs to the limbo of a bygone day, a day when people who had not yet learned how to "know" the universe in which we live had to depend upon more or less shrewd and more or less adequate speculation. The day of empirical science spelled the doom of philosophy as surely as it spelled the doom of religion and mythology, so we have been told. If this is true, the answer to our discussion becomes easy enough: there is no room for philosophy in the liberal-arts curriculum of an empirically scientific age. One might, of course, proceed simply to pass up all such voices with the Nazarene's first prayer from his cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not." Such procedure, however, becomes questionable when one