An Introduction to Philosophy
Philosophy is the discussion of the bases of reality, and of the thinking about them, concerning things observed or fabrications, actions, intentions and knowledge. For this, a background of intimation and learning acquired through personal meditation or studies is necessary. To give an example, a mathematician constructs a triangle with three vertices which are points, but the philosopher will ask whether points exists in nature, or whether they are something invented by the human mind in an attempt to understand nature. Physicists, chemists and biologists carry out experiments to discover the causal relationship between phenomena, and philosophers investigate whether there can by an occurrence without a cause. Applied science has achieved near infallibility in its productions and philosophy would like to know if truth is that which succeeds. Linguists study languages and philosophers ask why there are two words in French for a large stream of water ("fleuve" and "rivière") while in English there is only the one, river. In short, in all these fields, philosophy makes people think again about what they have acquired through learning, to consolidate their thoughts. Among the great philosophical questions we can draw particular attention to two which are closely linked, concerning all there is in the way of fabrications, actions, intentions and knowledge: "what is the role of human thought?" And "what is the part played by objects?" When rails leave the factory, the iron has been taken from the ground, but there has been human intervention. When we look at the sun nowadays we no longer see it as a star circling the earth. Collective thought has changed and so we see the object in a different way from most of our distant ancestors. Furthermore in French the sun is seen as masculine: "«le» soleil". In German it is feminine: "«die» Sonne". A question that may be asked is: "what is the difference between the sun as it is in itself and the sun as we talk about it?" Let us now consider more particularly the question of writing. When we interpret a text, the problem is to know whether the text really says what we understand from it. Thus we are confronted by the difficulty of the plausibility of our interpretations: "what does the text mean, as the author delivered it on the day of its publication?" We run the risk of mistaking the meaning understood by one interpreter of the text for the real original meaning. It can be pointed out that this question is unusual, in view of the considerations mentioned previously, since there are two thinkers here, the author and the interpreter, while for the sun we had just the object and a single person doing the thinking: the interpreter. However, the author and the text may be assimilated into a single object so we can find ourselves in a position to re-examine the object as seen by the interpreter. We have therefore to consider the following philosophical question: "how plausible is it that the author really wanted to say what we have understood from his text?" This is the subject of our essay.
Michel Magnen