Core

Welcome to the excavation.

I won’t bore you with sunshiney reasons as to why you need/should/have to study philosophy. Candidly, many of you won’t see the value in wrestling with philosophical reflection. It’s not that you lack the aptitude. It’s more a matter of expectation management; what you think philosophy is all about versus what it actually does to a person. Done properly, philosophy exposes the limitations of human endeavors. It “teaches” us how little we know. That’s never an easy lesson for anyone to take, and accordingly, the history of philosophy is filled with the stories of men and women who suffered great humiliation, even death, because of their views. Most philosophers value independent thought over the comforts of groupthink, and for their trouble, many have been labeled as agitators, blasphemers, and traitors.

As a rule, the military doesn’t abide those kinds of people serving in our ranks, or at least not for very long. Nor, as individual military members, are we encouraged to allow doubt or skepticism to creep into our consciousness (or consciences) as both tend to hinder the performance of our mission. Therefore you, having been raised and trained here at USAFA to act decisively and confidently, may find your first experience with a formal philosophy course to be somewhat jarring.

So why exactly are you here?

The official reason has to do with the coherence of USAFA’s core curriculum, which is organized developmentally to promote learning and growth in the areas of (1) culture and global awareness, (2) leadership and human behavior, and (3) science and technology. Specifically, PHI 310, the core philosophy course, focuses on ethics, which USAFA cites as contributing to the culture and leadership areas.

Fair enough, but the study of philosophy also contributes to learning and understanding in the sciences as well. General science began to gel as a recognizable form of inquiry only after its questions passed through a period of philosophical reflection. That’s true of most other fields of study as well. As we’ll cover in class, philosophy – literally, the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia) – founded all of the academy. It is our core. Or, as Matthew Goldstein, CUNY Chancellor (and math/stats major) says: “If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

That perspective gets closer to explaining why you’re here. Philosophy is concerned with human cognition, reason, and the faculties and tools we use to understand and engage the world. Our mind tools haven’t changed for quite a while. Despite boggling advancements in technology, science, etc., we still think, at a very basic level, very much the way humans thought thousands of years ago. We still think like humans. So as other disciplines have spun off and marked their own areas of inquiry and specialized study, dramatically changing our perspective on the world, philosophy has, for 2,500+ years, retained its central position as the broader search for knowledge at a basic, human level. It’s done this by embracing, challenging and reconnecting theories from the sciences, arts, math, religion, social studies and society in general.

How does it do this? How does philosophy work? Here are two broad examples: First, philosophy challenges basic assumptions, both those held by individuals as personal beliefs and those that serve as the foundation, the received truths, for a specific institution. Second, philosophy pushes knowledge and understanding to its theoretical limits, setting the groundwork for further development. These two operations define the boundaries of knowledge (and other disciplines) with something like a pull-push: check what you think you know and press that to its limits.

And that’s exactly what we hope to accomplish with you in this course. As officers, you’ll have to make decisions with incomplete and imprecise data. True success in those situations comes from acknowledging and understanding what you don’t know, and avoiding the natural tendency to BS your way through.

And, obviously, if that was the easier path to take, you wouldn’t be here.