Dialogue 1
At War with the Mystics 

JUNE: You will both be fine. I’m glad you were able to pair up for this course, and I’m looking forward to working with you.

TE’A: Likewise.

JUNE: Do either of you object to going outside? I prefer to philosophize in the peripatetic fashion. That way you can’t take notes!

STELLA: Haha—Are you going to be sharing some top-secret info?

JUNE: (laughing) No, nothing secretive. But good philosophizing is rarely accomplished in a classroom setting, where all of the bad habits you’ve accumulated from years of schooling kick in.

They make their way down the hall and June continues.

So, in class today we’re going to start by jumping right in. It’s not very useful to devote any time during the lecture to introducing students to one another. There’s too many of them. You two can save that for your discussion sections on Friday.

You will both have two sections. Unfortunately, they are pretty large. There will be about twenty-five students in each. I think you both ended up with fifty-one in total. That means there will be a lot of grading during midterm and finals, so you’ll need to plan your own coursework accordingly.

As a general rule, I want us to meet like this on Monday mornings to talk about the content that will be covered each week. I typically provide a summary of what I plan to say, and I always want to hear your thoughts and ideas about the topics, before I deliver my lectures. We’ll also meet on Thursday to review and discuss any concerns you have prior to your section meetings. Sound good?

TE’A: Meeting twice a week sounds great.

STELLA: Yes, works for me, too.

They exit the building and June directs them to the walkway that traces the bank of a small stream that meanders through campus.

JUNE: Enough of that business for now. Obviously, our first topic this week is going to be a general introduction to what philosophy is. So, Te’a, tell me, what is philosophy? How would you explain it to students?

TE’A: Well, it literally means the love of wisdom. The one-liner that I learned as an undergraduate is that philosophy is all about asking and attempting to answer the big questions.

JUNE: Okay, good start. But isn’t religion also concerned with asking and answering the big questions? If so, does that mean philosophy and religion are basically the same thing?

TE’A: There is definitely a lot of overlap. I doubt we can draw a clear distinction between religion and philosophy. They are often intertwined.

JUNE: Very true. Stella, pick up the thread here. What is philosophy, and is it different than religion?

STELLA: Okay, well, I think responsible, rational doubt is a key part of philosophy. Philosophizing is mostly about questioning the legitimacy of accepted narratives and beliefs. Socrates is my paradigm philosopher: he was willing to question whether the narratives and claims that his fellow Athenians accepted were true, and he put them to the test. Many highly religious people seem to discourage doubting, though. Religions—at least the various forms of Christianity and Islam that I’m familiar with—seem to be more about accepting certain pre-determined answers to life’s big questions than they are about subjecting those answers to critical scrutiny. Doubting the answers a religion provides is rarely viewed as a sign of faithful discipleship. Philosophical discipleship, though, involves learning to doubt and to ask critical questions.

TE’A: Can I ask a question?

JUNE: Of course! The only question you can’t ask is “can I ask a question”!

Te’a chuckles and continues.

TE’A: I actually have two questions. First, is doubting the be-all and end-all of philosophy, or is it is simply part of the philosophical life? Second, does being religious necessarily involve simply accepting what authorities or traditions teach?

STELLA: I do think intellectual and methodological doubt is a key element of philosophy, but I don’t think it is the be-all and end-all. We doubt because we want to know the truth. We don’t doubt simply for the sake of doubting. Concerning religion, I’m not sure what to say, but I think of religions as involving creeds, or confessions of belief that one is supposed to simply accept or affirm. To that extent, there is always a potential tension between being philosophical and being religious. That doesn’t mean that philosophy and religion are incompatible, but it does mean the relationship is fraught.

JUNE: And philosophy doesn’t involve any creedal commitments?

STELLA: No, I don’t think so.

JUNE: Let’s think about that for a moment. Do philosophers really have no creed? Do philosophically minded people have no guiding commitments?

STELLA: Hmm. I think they are willing to entertain the possibility that pretty much everything might be mistaken or wrong. That’s the way in which they love wisdom: they love it so much, they don’t want to accept any false pretenders to the throne, so to speak, so they are willing to doubt and put to the test any proposed truth. What they ultimately want is to protect genuine wisdom from impostors. They trust that whatever is genuinely true can withstand critical scrutiny, and so, it can be questioned.

JUNE: That is an interesting metaphor—pretenders to the throne. 

TE’A: Couldn’t the same be said of a religious person? Someone who is deeply religious can trust what they have faith in so much that they are willing to let their god and their religion be questioned. They trust that they can come out unscathed. I’d grant that some people who are weaker in faith might find questioning and doubting scary, but people who have a strong religious faith don’t shy away from it.

STELLA: I suppose that’s true. (As they continue walking, she gathers her thoughts.) Maybe what I have in mind is this: when we are being philosophical, we wonder how, why, and whether the things we happen to believe are actually true, and we dig down to try to determine whether they genuinely are or are not.

JUNE: That’s very close to how I often characterize it: philosophy is about doggedly asking why we believe what we do and whether we ought to believe what we do.

STELLA: I might have cribbed that from you! (After a moment.) I think that is a bit different than what is characteristically associated with being religious. Again, I don’t think being philosophical and being religious are necessarily in conflict, but religiosity seems to involve a certain amount of commitment and faithful trust, whereas philosophizing seems to involve suspending commitment and being doubtful.

JUNE: I want to interrogate your suggestion that philosophers don’t have any creedal commitments. Philosophers sometimes say that they are committed to reason—to being rational. And there are certainly some standards of rationality that we hold to be effectively sacrosanct, such as the principle of non-contradiction. If someone isn’t committed to being rationally coherent and abiding by the fundamental principles of logic and reasoning, can they be said to be a philosopher?

STELLA: Ah, I see. No, I don’t think someone who isn’t committed to trying to be logical and rational can be said to be philosophical. And that seems to be a differentiating mark: I think a person can be religious, even if they aren’t committed to thinking logically and rationally.  

TE’A: Another one-liner that I often think about is the classical summary explanation of philosophy—that philosophers attempt to understand what is ultimately true, beautiful, good, and just. If someone isn’t committed to truly understanding what is ultimately real and ultimately good, can they really be said to be a philosopher? Even if they otherwise think rationally, if they don’t strive to understand reality in its totality and ultimacy, they are, at best, clever. Perhaps even theologically clever. To be genuinely philosophical, someone has to care about truth, beauty, goodness, and justice. And they have to want to know those things in themselves, regardless of what people have traditionally said about them, and regardless of whether their investigations put them out of step with other people.

JUNE: At the very least, when we come to suspect that an otherwise philosophically minded person has fallen into dogmatism and apologetics, we think of that as a failure or limitation to their philosophical contributions.

TE’A: Exactly. It’s not like anyone is a perfect philosopher, so obviously philosophers end up defending what they have become convinced is true. There’s always the temptation to become dogmatic. But there’s a difference between defending something because you assume it is infallibly traditional and simply has to be accepted, versus defending something because you think reason and evidence justifies that belief. Philosophers are people who strive for wisdom and do so by trying to be rational, following the evidence and reason wherever it might lead. We might not get together in a group and proclaim this creed, but it is surely what has animated every genuine philosopher throughout history.

STELLA: I agree, though I never thought of it as amounting to a creedal commitment. But I suppose it is effectively the same thing.

TE’A: I think that commitment is what makes it possible for philosophy and religion to converge, even though they sometimes stand in tension. Someone can be both philosophical and religious so long as their religious commitments don’t prevent them from being genuinely committed to pursuing wisdom about what is true, beautiful, good, and just.

STELLA: That makes sense. (After a brief pause.) Whether someone is actually able to achieve convergence is going to be a function of their substantive religious beliefs. For those who think that God has revealed things that aren’t accessible by reason and which stand in conflict with reason, being philosophical is basically impossible.

JUNE: Yes, I suppose so. Unless of course they opt to be an infidel. Do very many religions proclaim such a thing, though?

STELLA: I don’t know how the statistics would stack up, but at least some do. Certain fundamentalists seem to believe that elements of divine revelation are both incapable of being known by reason and require forms of discipleship that are irrational.

JUNE: (Checks her watch.) Today, I am going to structure my lecture around the idea that philosophy is an alternative to magical thinking. That often provokes the students to want to talk about the relationship between philosophy and religion. As you prepare for your section discussions, I recommend thinking about various questions you could pose to them about the nature of religion. And that could include the question of whether there even is a nature of religion.

TE’A: What do you mean?

JUNE: I think you’ll find that many students assume that all religions share a common nature. For example, they often say that religions, or religious people, necessarily believe in God. However, that isn’t true. Most of them take the Abrahamic religions to be paradigmatic, and they neglect other religious traditions that are radically different, such as Buddhism.

TE’A: Ah, right. I think they usually think of Buddhism as a philosophy, not a religion. 

JUNE: Exactly. So develop questions that will help them probe those sorts of assumptions to see whether they are adequate.

TE’A: I don’t know that I have an adequately worked out conception of the difference.

JUNE: That’s okay. Philosophy is about rationally interrogating our beliefs and commitments, and that’s a process that develops over time. Your task as a teacher isn’t to indoctrinate them into some worked-out conception of things, but to guide them in learning how to ask philosophical questions. It’s more important to ask genuine questions that maybe even perplex you than it is to tell them the way things allegedly are.

TE’A: I want to go back to the notion of magical thinking. What do you have in mind when you say that philosophy is an alternative to it?

JUNE: Right, so I think of all magical thinking, as we now define it, as hinging on the idea that thoughts, representations, or manipulation of correspondences can determine what is true, or they can cause change in the world.

TE’A: Ah, that’s interesting. Like people who think that drawing sigils can somehow summon a demon, or the use of talismans and amulets.

JUNE: Exactly. I think it is helpful for students beginning to study philosophy to recognize that there is a difference between hoping or trusting that reality can bend to mind and will through the use of grammatical constructions and representations¹ and hoping or trusting that the mind can be disciplined to correspond to reality. The former is the aspiration of magic, and the latter is the aspiration of philosophy.  

STELLA: And science.

JUNE: Yes, and science. All science is an offshoot of philosophy. (After a pause.) Historically, everything is very complicated and intertwined. For a long time, magic and science—or what we would now call sciences—were not distinct, and they were all considered part of philosophy.

TE’A: Wait, magic was considered part of philosophy?

JUNE: Using the terms in a certain historical sense, yes. Magic was broadly the effort to control reality. That included control by symbolic representations and grammatical constructions—using spells, incantations, sigils, and so on—but also the kind of control of natural phenomena that is more of a piece with modern science. Specifically, being able to predict and control outcomes by understanding the nature and powers of things.

STELLA: That’s interesting. I don’t think of that as having anything to do with magic.

JUNE: Right, explicitly drawing the distinction between them is a relatively recent development. An important development, to be sure, but one which wasn’t really solidified until the Modern period.

TE’A: I’m a bit confused. If it is a recent development, on what grounds can you say that philosophy is an alternative to magical thinking? Philosophy is an ancient discipline, so if it only became distinguished from magical thinking in the past few hundred years or so, it wasn’t really an alternative to it, at least not historically.

JUNE: That’s right, in a sense. Partly, the confusion has to do with the words that we use to refer to things. We inherit words from earlier generations, but over time they come to denote slightly different things. That makes it is difficult to communicate in a completely transparent way about the past using those terms. All talk about “philosophy”, “science”, “magic”, and “religion” suffers from this problem. In the ancient period, science—or rather, scientia—was an intellectual habit. Basically, it was the ability to rehearse and think in terms of valid argument forms.² Later on, it came to refer to any systematically organized body of knowledge. And nowadays, it is mostly used to refer to areas of inquiry where hypotheses and theories can be empirically tested or confirmed. There were corresponding and coincidental shifts in how we conceive of philosophy. What we now call empirical science used to simply be called natural philosophy.  

TE’A: Okay, so what someone in the past called philosophy or science, or whatever, might not be what we would refer to using those terms. That makes things very confusing.

JUNE: No doubt about it. That brings to mind a point I’ll share with you, but I probably won’t address in the lecture. Historically, the sorts of experimentation that we now associate with scientific inquiry were part of magic. If you read grimoires from the Sixteenth Century, for example, they include spells or experiments that are effectively just forms of household chemistry. One that comes immediately to my mind is for changing the color of one’s skin. The process involves making dye from various plants and then rubbing it in. Obviously, that’s not the sort of thing we now think of as magic.

TE’A: Haha, right, it’s just makeup!

JUNE: Exactly. But since magic was all about making reality comport with one’s mind, and since applying makeup is a way of changing reality in accordance with one’s desires, it was considered magic. There’s an entire book in John Baptista Porta grimoire, Natural Magic, titled, “How to Make Women Beautiful,” and most of the experiments are effectively versions of primitive chemistry.³ (She laughs.) Another one involves taking the head and tail from a green lizard and boiling them in oil. You’re then supposed to anoint your head with it to get long, black hair.⁴

STELLA: Haha, okay, so it was weird chemistry.

JUNE: Yeah, chemistry-ish practices. Basically, trial and error, without carefully developed and worked-out theoretical underpinnings.

STELLA: This is a bit cynical of me, but all of this makes me think that there’s not much of a difference between my dad tinkering around in the garage and a warlock doing magic. It’s mostly a different aesthetic. He listens to prog rock and writes his notes in ballpoint pen on a legal pad, but if he switched it up and wrote with a quill and ink in a leather-bound journal, he’d be a warlock.  

JUNE: That’s not terribly far off! Sub the florescent lights for candles, and he’d be good to go.

TE’A: That’s both funny and interesting. I’ve often thought that a lot of religious practices are sustained for aesthetic reasons. Like, it seems performative in a way that is similar to magic.

STELLA: Haha, yes! My abuela used to make fun of one of the young priests because he opted to use antique artifacts rather than the newer chalices and whatnot that the church had available. We practically had to gag her one day when she overheard him throwing shade about some girl’s distressed jeans.

June winks and smiles.

TE’A: Can you say more about philosophy being an alternative to magical thinking?

JUNE: Oh, yes, of course. Sorry, I lost the thread. What I mean is that philosophy—

TE’A: Philosophy as we now understand it, or philosophy as they originally understood it?

JUNE: Well, both. The through-line from the ancient period all the way up to today was that philosophers were trying to understand the world as it is, not merely as people imagined it to be. They recognized that there’s a potential discrepancy between how people imagine things and how things actually are.

STELLA: A version of the appearance-reality distinction.

JUNE: Right, a rudimentary appearance-reality supposition. A fair characterization is that they deliberately attempted to use reason to make their conception of reality comport to reality itself. In this sense, they were introducing an alternative to what we now call magical thinking.

TE’A: Ah, gotcha. Because magical thinking, in the contemporary sense, has things the other way around: mental action or representations are believed to dictate reality.

JUNE: Yes!

TE’A: Okay, that makes sense.

June checks her watch again.

JUNE: I need to get some stuff in order before class. I’ll see you there shortly.

TE’A: Sounds good. I’m looking forward to it.

STELLA: Yep! Thanks, June.  

June returns down the path and Stella and Te’a continue walking and chatting.

About an hour later.

June stands at the front of a lecture hall. Class is under way, and she has already introduced Stella and Te’a to the students. After briefly reviewing her syllabus, she launches into her lecture. 

JUNE: We are going to be philosophizing about ethics, morality, and what constitutes a life well-lived. My aim today is to begin our exploration by discussing the nature of philosophy. That way, we will have a sense of what it means to think about these important human questions in a uniquely philosophical way.

Let’s begin with a simple definition. The word ‘philosophy’ etymologically means “the love of wisdom”; however, it is best conceived of as a practice. When someone philosophizes, whether one has been formally trained in the matter or not, one rationally interrogates the grounds for one’s beliefs and values—though I should add that I don’t merely mean one’s private beliefs and values, but also those that prevail within and inform one’s society.

She turns to the whiteboard on the wall behind the lectern and picks up a marker. 

Put simply, philosophy is the practice of genuinely asking and rationally attempting to answer two related questions:

A great deal rides on the word ‘should’ in that second question. Philosophers have never endorsed an appeal to tradition, emotion, ease of life, or psychological contentment as what we call normative criteria. What I mean is these factors don’t reliably or ultimately tell us what we “ought” to do. Normative criteria tell us what should be the case, not necessarily what is the case. I said we do not accept appeals to tradition, contentment, or so forth as normative criteria because the mere fact that believing something makes life easier to deal with or more enjoyable doesn’t entail that the content of that belief is true. 

I think we all know this, to some extent. Can anyone give me an example of something that you used to believe but no longer do, but when you believed it, life was a bit more enchanted or pleasurable? 

A student a few rows back raises his hand, and June gestures for him to speak.

BYRON: The thing that immediately came to my mind was believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

JUNE: Yes, those are excellent examples. Imagine you were on the schoolyard explaining to your friends that these imaginary creatures are really just fictions that your parents manipulated you into believing existed. If a friend, who is still a believer, said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter, because believing in them makes life sweeter,” you might acknowledge that point. But nevertheless, the fact that believing such things contributes to happiness doesn’t make them true.

Another student raises her hand.

MARY: But how do we know whether something is true or not? It seems like what you just said could apply to a lot of things that we take to be true.

JUNE: That’s right! That’s the challenge that philosophy—and all science, for that matter—attempts to answer: what should we believe and how do we know whether what we believe is true?

There is no easy answer. Much as we might wish there to be, things are very complicated, and what we are going to do in this course is begin to grapple with this complexity.

I’d like you to think of what I’m doing in this class in terms of an invitation. Specifically, it is the invitation to dare to ask the questions that disturb our ordinary conceptions. (Once again writing on the board.) As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates put it—at least according to his student, Plato—philosophy is about enacting our intellectual dignity and interrogating ourselves. He said:⁵

This invitation and task, which has animated philosophers for thousands of years, sounds great, but it is very difficult. It is far easier to simply believe stories that make life enjoyable than it is to rationally examine whether they are actually true.

I am tempted to say that it would be “childish” to believe things simply because it’s easier, but I have found that such intellectual laziness is more common among adults than it is children. Kids are often much more philosophical than adults. They love to ask “why” questions, and they are keen to point out lies, inconsistencies, and injustices. When they are still young, they haven’t learned to parrot accepted narratives or invest their identity and self-worth in some supposedly important capital “C” Concept or capital “I” Idea. Adults, by contrast, often do so. In fact, they are known to kill each other—and children—over such matters. 

Children typically don’t just accept prevailing viewpoints, but are rather suspicious—something that I think is an intellectual virtue. In fact, they will sometimes ask questions that embarrass those who “know better”: their parents, priests, and teachers. After repeatedly being told by adults to stop asking “stupid” or annoying questions, many children will. This is quite tragic.

Philosophical thinking is a bit like childish thinking: it is playful, inquisitive, suspicious of authority and tradition, and it often reveals how very little “serious” adults really know. By the way, this is something that you will see exemplified by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, which you will need to read this week. Plato portrays Socrates as asking authority figures—in that case, a religious authority named Euthyphro—to explain key concepts associated with the matters they claim to be experts in. In almost every case, the experts come up short; they can’t satisfy Socrates’s inquisitive demand for answers.

Anyhow, back to children! We want to be a bit like them, but we need to recognize that children are immature and inexperienced. They have the right approach, but not the right tools. Training in philosophical thinking—and really any scholarly training worth its salt—is about rediscovering the passion to wonder, to suspend belief and to investigate. But it is also about learning how to do that well and with the right intellectual tools.

Philosophically minded people aspire to make reason their normative standard, and logical reasoning is one of the main tools of philosophy. When we philosophically ask whether a belief or value is justified, or whether it ought to be retained, adopted, or jettisoned, we are asking whether such beliefs and values are rationally warranted and coherent. By “coherent” I mean that the belief in question is not internally contradictory, but I also mean that it fits into relation with other “external” beliefs and values, including what we understand to be observably true about the world and the human person.

In light of this, philosophy is often characterized as the attempt to make rational sense of all things, or to develop a rational view of our lives and our place in the world. The British philosopher, Nigel Warburton, has summarized his conception of philosophy in similar terms. He says, “I see philosophy as an activity of thinking critically about what we are and where we stand in relation to the world.” He goes on to explain, “Philosophy is concerned with how things are, the limits of what we can know, and how we should live. It is anti-dogmatic and it thrives on questioning assumptions.”⁶ What Warburton chiefly means when he says that philosophy is anti-dogmatic is that, to the philosopher, everything is open to rational interrogation, even—or perhaps especially—those things which are often taken for granted, assumed to be beyond question, or said to be sacrosanct.

Philosophers aspire to make rational sense of reality, where that includes identifying the limits of reason and correcting beliefs that are either irrational or non-rational. This has been evident ever since the beginning of philosophy in the Western world, about 2600 years ago.

The Western philosophical traditions we will be studying originated in ancient Greece.⁷ I think of them as constituting an alternative to magical ways of thinking, both then and now, so I want to spend a few minutes talking about magic and what it means to be magically minded. So, buckle up and take notes, if you’re not already doing so. I’m sure some of what I have to say might provide good fodder for your discussion sections.

She quickly flips through the lecture notes before continuing.

We can understand magic as the attempt to control the world via representations—either actual representations, as in the case of effigies, or mental representations, like when people “picture” or “conceive” of the world as being a certain way in order to get the world to be that way. Magically minded people rely on wishes, dreams, and visions to provide guidance about how to get on with their lives and to make sense of things. For example, a magically minded person might take a dream about something bad happening to be a kind of sign that they should avoid a course of action that they were planning to take. Such people often seem to view the world as enchanted; it is thought that parts of the world, or some of the things in the world, are animated or imbued with powers, spirits, and perhaps even personality. Think of tree nymphs, water sprites, and so on.

Magically minded people can be found in every society, including our own. As evidence of how widespread such thinking is, we can take note of the popularity of New Age self-help products such as, The Secret, a popular film which was followed up by a best-selling book of the same name, as well as numerous additional books.⁸ It’s become a real cottage industry. Anyway, The Secret claimed that individuals can get what they want or need by thinking positively. The central idea that it promoted is the so-called “Law of Attraction,” according to which positive thinking is said to bring about positive results while negative thinking is said to bring about negative results. The film makes it seem as if there is a mysterious causal connection between thinking that the world is a certain way and it then turning out that way. I suppose it might be nice if that were the case, but as far as I can tell, there is no rational reason to suppose we have such awesome power. The core claims of The Secret and many other New Age self-help books, blogs, and social media influencers, seem to spring from the imagination, not the intellect; they are a form of wishful and non-rational thinking.

She pauses and shifts her tone, looking up.

The Secret, and all of the ridiculous “manifestation” materials that stemmed from it, constitutes a noteworthy example not only because of the magical thinking it expresses but also because it couples this with a conspiratorial narrative. According to the film, the “secret” has been known since time immemorial, but for centuries it has been suppressed by powerful people and institutions. When these two things are combined—magical thinking and conspiratorial thinking—the result is a potent mind-poison.⁹

She returns to her lecture notes.

Now, in the ancient Greek world, magical thinking was widespread. Moreover, people’s practices were colored and influenced by the myths concerning the gods. 

The first philosophers to appear in the ancient Greek world are now known as “natural philosophers,” since they were interested in developing a naturalistic view of the cosmos. Naturalist accounts effectively supplanted or, at the very least, radically revised what I’ll refer to as “mythopoetic explanations.” These are explanations about matters of existential concern—like death, pain, suffering, and so forth—that are couched in poetic terms and utilize mythical tropes. Myths are traditional stories that served as sources of wisdom about life, the universe, and our place within it. The natural philosophers were a bit like early scientists, especially physicists, insofar as they were concerned with pushing beyond myths and speculating about the origins and underlying material principles of the universe.

For all intents and purposes, earlier explanations concerning the way the world worked—for example, the causes of earthquakes and thunderstorms—tended to be supernatural explanations that were expressed through myths. Any of the famous creation stories that are embedded within the world’s various religious traditions may be taken as examples here. For example, the book of Genesis in the Bible contains at least two different creation stories—the first account is presented in Genesis 1:1-2:3, the second account is presented in Genesis 2:4-25. You’re probably familiar with the basic details of one or both of these creation stories: the first says that Elohim separated the Chaos Waters and then went about speaking into being everything that exists, including human beings. The second depicts Yahweh as crafting Adam from the mud and then creating Eve because Adam wasn’t complete in himself. The Greeks had stories of their own that explained the alleged origins of the world, some of which were very similar to the Genesis stories.

She once again pauses and shifts her tone, sounding more extemporaneous.

I should add two qualifiers. While I think it is safe to say that ancient peoples did utilize supernatural explanations, I don’t want this point to be taken in an over-exaggerated manner. They didn’t develop supernatural explanations for everything. As a rather obvious example, they presumably knew that the explanation for why their hand hurt upon touching fire was because the fire burned their skin. Nevertheless, it seems that when they encountered mysterious but existentially significant phenomena, they would often seek to explain these by appealing to divine action or intervention.

The second qualification is that we shouldn’t suppose that appealing to supernatural causes is merely a tendency on the part of people in the past. Many people do so to this day, in regards to both mundane and super-mundane matters. To take an example of the latter, consider the Big Bang. Lots of people assume that since we don’t have a scientific explanation for why the Big Bang happened, we are thereby justified in believing it was the work of god—that it was how god created the universe. The most charitable account of why people make this inference is they think there must be an explanation for everything,¹⁰ and since we lack adequate scientific or naturalistic explanations for things such as this, these kinds of things need to be explained by appeal to supernatural causes. It isn’t clear why we should accept the premise, “there must be an explanation for everything.” And even if that premise were true, it wouldn’t follow that an event unexplainable by contemporary science is ipso facto unexplainable by science per se. It might be that a naturalistic or scientific explanation could be developed in the future.

She quickly glances at the clock and then consults her lecture notes.

Back to the mythical stories!

The authors of mythical accounts were artists or poets who crafted narratives that highlighted what they took to be meaningful or significant in life. (Looking up, over the rim of her glasses.) Actually, in many cases we can’t really speak meaningfully of an author; instead, the people we think of as the authors of mythical stories are better thought of as editors and redactors. They were collecting and collating stories from earlier oral and written traditions, often changing and retelling them for various purposes. And each myth was “touched,” so to speak, by many hands. (Returning to her notes.) In any case, they weren’t scientists seeking to get the facts straight. They were storytellers. The myths they preserved and passed down are often beautiful and deeply moving, and they captivate us and disclose important perspectives about what is important in life and what is trivial. And that is probably a sufficient explanation of their purpose.

My wager is that factual accuracy wasn’t the main concern of the ancient poets, any more than it is the main concern of contemporary poets. The standards of success against which mythopoetic accounts are judged to be good—the grounds on which they are accepted or rejected—have little to do with factual accuracy or rational coherence. That’s why we can find contradictory stories contained within a single tradition and within its revered texts. The Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels are cases in point. The Jewish and Christian traditions preserved a variety of stories that converged on some points yet diverged on other points. This is a feature not a defect of myth; the combination of intertextual divergence and convergence results in a work that has a surplus of meaning—a work that we can probe, explore, decode, retell, and rework in light of our own concerns. The richness of myth is partially a function of this excessiveness, this surplus.

Unless we’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, we should assume people back then were basically like us: they valued good stories and they respected the poets who could craft stories that were deeply compelling. I think they knew just as well as we do—if not better than us—that their myths weren’t tightly coherent. Coherency, in the sense of resolving all contradiction, wasn’t their concern. It is sort of analogous to how movie studios keep recycling the basic storylines from superhero comics. We know that the various installments of Batman or Spiderman aren’t always consistent with one another. Sometimes we prefer a particular retelling precisely because of how it relates to, builds off of, or rejects elements from its predecessors. Something analogous was probably going on with ancient poets. They knew they were spinning or gathering together tales, just as our modern-day storytellers do.

I want to be very clear about this: there is nothing wrong with any of this! But I also want to be very clear about a further point: there is more that can be done. Human beings, as I said, love a good story, but we also desire to know things as they are. Some poets might claim to offer us the “God’s honest truth,” and many people certainly assume that ancient poets provide us with accurate accounts of primordial history. But a story that chiefly springs from the sympathetic imagination is not the same thing as a coherent, rational account of how the universe works.

That’s where the philosophers come in.

Although the Greeks had a rich mythical tradition, which provided narratives about their place in the universe and the order of nature, they did not yet have a scientific tradition which aimed at getting the facts right. This, I propose, is the void that the early philosophers attempted to fill. They wanted to advance rational understanding as far as possible, and they were willing to question whether the mythopoetic stories were correct.

Okay! I think that just about does it for today. I will leave you with this teaser: sometimes philosophers piss people off when they poke at the stories and traditions in which people have invested their lives and identities. Such was the case with Socrates!

Your reading assignments are two short articles about the nature of philosophy, as well as Plato’s Euthyphro. 

Have a good day!

She quickly gathers her notes and then walks over to the exit to greet students as they pour out into the hall. A number of them pause to ask questions or wish her a good day, others skirt on by, avoiding eye contact. 

Te’a and Stella wait until the undergraduates leave and then begin making their way across the quad, heading back to their apartment. 

STELLA: So, what did you think?

TE’A: Where to begin! If the students were paying attention, they should’ve gathered that she basically said all religious and spiritual practices are forms of magical thinking.

STELLA: Yeah, it is quite an opening bit. A very provocative story.

TE’A: The whole time she was lecturing I was thinking of people like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes—almost every philosopher from the ancient, medieval, and modern periods—who clearly believed in God. 

STELLA: Don’t worry, she gets to those other guys. 

TE’A: I sure hope so. (She rubs her neck.) I don’t feel prepared to field really challenging questions, and I think almost any question a student might have about the lecture will be extraordinarily challenging. 

STELLA: I hope so! The challenging questions are the best!

Te’a laughs, but looks skeptical. Stella continues.

She never leaves us hanging. Last year, the prep meetings were super helpful. 

TE’A: I hope so. At this point, I have no idea how I will handle things. 

Stella unlocks their door and they drop their backpacks by the sofa in their small apartment. 

STELLA: Just to put your mind at ease, pull out your notes and let’s talk through what you’re worried about.

Te’a pulls her backpack over, unzipping it. She pulls out her notebook.

TE’A: I’m simply worried about how to handle all of the questions that her characterization will give rise to. I worry they might be offended by the idea that prayer and whatnot are forms of magical thinking. (Reading from her notes.) She defined magic as the attempt to control the world using physical or mental images. She said, “Magically minded people rely on wishes, dreams, and visions to provide guidance about how to get on with their lives and to make sense of things.” I guess she didn’t explicitly reference prayer, but that would count, right?

STELLA: Oh yeah, for sure. (Laughing.) Tostig definitely thinks that prayer is a form of magical thinking.

TE’A: I figured. So, the religious students are probably going to be triggered. (She slaps herself on the forehead.) But it’s even worse! Given what she said about New Age spirituality, pretty much everyone will be offended.

STELLA: Oh, give them some credit. They will be challenged, but I doubt very many of them will be truly offended. And even if they are, we can work with that. You can work with it.

TE’A: How? You’re way more confident in my abilities than I am!

STELLA: Let’s think through how it might go. Suppose a student is offended by her claim that those sorts of things are forms of magical thinking. Why would they be offended?

TE’A: Well, obviously because they don’t think of it as magical!

STELLA: Okay, maybe so. But why do they think that?

TE’A: This is what I’m worried about! I don’t know!

STELLA: Let’s back up a bit. There are two routes a student might take if they want to object to June’s characterization. As you said, they could deny that prayer or mental manifestations are forms of magical thinking. But they could also admit they are forms of magical thinking but deny that there is anything wrong with that.

Te’a grabs her pencil and starts jotting down notes.

TE’A: That didn’t occur to me. I need to draw a mind map or a decision-tree or something.

STELLA: That’s not a bad idea! (She pauses until Te’a is done writing.) Let’s imagine a student takes the first route and wants to argue that prayer is not a form of magical thinking. Two things: first, you need to make sure they are using the term ‘magical thinking’ in the same way Tostig was. If they aren’t, there isn’t really a contradiction. 

TE’A: Ah, right. The ABCDs of philosophy.

Stella tilts her head inquisitively.

TE’A: Always Be Clarifying Definitions.

STELLA: Haha, I might have to use that! The second thing is that once you make sure they’re on the same page in terms of the definition, you need to ask them to give an argument to defend their claim. And that is what you should really talk about: their reasoning. If they can give a good argument, that’s great. If they can’t, try to help them think through how to do so.

TE’A: (glancing at her notes) I can handle the discussion if it goes the way you just described. That was helpful. But what do I do if a student just doesn’t think that magical thinking is problematic?

STELLA: Well, you just talk it through. For my part, I think we are prone to magical thinking, but it’s like a mindbug or something that we need to constantly be on the lookout for.

TE’A: Yeah, that’s what I think, too. It’s not intellectually sound.

STELLA: I can think of two reasons someone might think it is okay to believe in magical processes. Either they think it is innocuous and psychologically helpful, or they think the universe operates in ways that you and I do not.

TE’A: Right. (She draws a new branch on her diagram.) Like the whole Law of Attraction thing from The Secret.

STELLA: Exactly. I think it is sometimes expressed as “thoughts make reality.”

TE’A: I’m with June on that: I don’t see any evidence to suggest that the world works in that way.

STELLA: Hmm. I have a slightly different worry. I think that so-called “law” is impossible to disconfirm using empirical evidence. We couldn’t, even in principle, muster evidence that it is false.

TE’A: What do you mean?

STELLA: Well, try to give me an example of evidence that you think suggests it is a false principle.

TE’A: Oh, I don’t know. (She thinks for a moment.) Well, the fact that lots of people suffer and experience things they don’t want to experience seems to indicate that wishing things were one way rather than another isn’t sufficient to make them turn out that way.

STELLA: Okay, that’s the sort of thing I thought you would say. Here’s the problem: people who defend the Law of Attraction can respond by saying, “The problem is that those people think of themselves as suffering or experiencing bad things. If they thought of themselves as thriving, instead of suffering, then they would thrive.”

TE’A: That’s bullshit!

STELLA: Sure. I agree. My point is that no matter what scenario we bring up, someone who has bought into The Secret is simply going to say that it doesn’t disconfirm the hypothesis.

TE’A: How are we supposed to make any headway, then?

STELLA: That is the problem! Someone who subscribes to a thesis that is immune to empirical disconfirmation isn’t playing the same game that we are. We’re playing the “evidential warrant” language game, or whatever you want to call it. They are playing the apologetics language game.

Te’a runs her hand over her neck in frustration.

TE’A: Right. They want to simply defend their belief against all comers, whereas we’re trying to figure out whether there is evidence to back up the belief. (She throws her hands up.) That’s what I’m really worried about: what happens when a student doesn’t want to play the game of philosophy, and instead wants to engage in apologetics?

Stella sighs and shrugs.

STELLA: I dunno. We just keep on playing, I guess.

TE’A: Ugh. (After a pause.) How did this go for you last year when you were her TA?

STELLA: Hmm. Honestly, I don’t remember the specifics of our discussion relating to these topics. And that means it couldn’t have been too bad. In general, though, I really liked the discussion sections. (After a pause.) You know, I think you’re assuming that your job is to answer questions, but that’s not really it. I mean, there’s some amount of clarification required, but really you should think of your role like Socrates’s.

TE’A: Right. Ask lots of questions.

STELLA: Exactly. That’s very different than providing answers. Remember what he said: being a philosopher is like being a midwife. We use questions to help people “give birth” to their ideas.

TE’A: Haha, you’re forgetting the best part: he said that the task of a philosopher is to quickly kill an idea that isn’t viable!

STELLA: Hehe, yes. Exactly. (Winking.) That’s the morbid part of ancient midwifery and the potentially offensive aspect of philosophy.

TE’A: Well, here’s to hoping that I don’t end up in anything like Socrates’s position!

She stretches her neck and arms.

Hey, thanks. I’m still nervous, but it helps to talk it through.

STELLA: Anytime. Are you hungry? 

TE’A: I’m going to tighten up these notes and then tackle the readings she assigned.

STELLA: How about I make some spaghetti while you do that?

TE’A: That would be great! 

STELLA: Remember: jot down questions!

Te’a settles in and gets to work. By the time Stella brings out a plate from the kitchen, she has reorganized her notes into an argument map. Feeling a bit more better, she is lets out a sigh of relief before enjoying her spaghetti. 

Meanwhile, back in the Philosophy Building, June receives an unwelcomed email.

Notes

1. The term grimoire, which refers to a book of spells, is derived from the Latin term for grammar (grammatica) via the Old French gramaire.

2. Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 7ff.

3. Alternatively translated, “Of Beautifying Women.” John Baptista Porta (1658), Natural Magick (London, Thomas Young and Samuel Speed), Book 9.

4. Ibid., Book 9, ch. III.

5. Plato, Apology (38a5–6).

6. Nigel Warburton and Jules Evans, “Is philosophy therapy, or is it simply a search for truth?” Aeon (2016), aeon.co/ideas/should-philosophy-be-therapy-or-a-simple-search-for-truth.

7. European and Anglo-American historians and philosophers often distinguished their own “Western philosophical tradition(s)” from what they called the “Eastern philosophical tradition(s).” In the most charitable sense, this distinction was intended to acknowledge that these traditions largely developed independent of each other and thus stand on their own. However, the distinction is, itself, one which Anglo-American and European scholars chiefly promoted, and it is a culturally and politically ladened distinction. It is not accurate to say that all philosophy belongs in one or the other category, for the distinction is not exhaustive; it leaves out those traditions which colonial Europeans ignored or did not look favorably upon. These include the wisdom traditions of the original Americans (inclusive of North, South, and Central America) as well as the various African philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, the “Western” traditions are important to consider since they informed and include Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, and these religious traditions profoundly influenced the concerns of many philosophers throughout the Common Era.

8. Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Atria Books, 2006); The Power (Atria Books, 2010); The Magic (Atria Books, 2012); and The Secret to Love, Health, and Money: A Masterclass (Atria Books, 2022). The trailer for The Secret is available at youtube.com/watch?v=san61qTwWsU. 

9. Oliver and Wood have examined the appeal of conspiracy theories among Americans and find that it is strongly correlated with magical thinking, as well as subscribing to dualist narratives according to which there is a cosmic battle between good and evil. Eric J. Oliver and Thomas J. Wood (2014), “Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion.” American Journal of Political Science 58(4): 952–66.

10. This is known as the principle of sufficient reason. For an example of how it figures into unifying scientific and religious thought, see Joshua M. Moritz, Science and Religion: Beyond Warfare and Toward Understanding (Anselm Academic, 2016), esp., 231.