Question However hard I try, I cannot shrug off the impression that philosophy asks all the truly important questions, but has always been somewhat vague when it comes to giving staightforward answers to those very questions. Do people have to turn to religion to get final answers? Because one thing is for sure: they are looking for those final answers.

Accepted:
May 17, 2010

Comments

Beware a certain inference that you seem very close to making (and which I do think people make all the time): Because I want such-and-such to be true (e.g. I want there to be a "final answer" to some question, Q), it must be true (e.g. there must be a "final answer" to Q)

You are right, people want "final answers," and some people want them so badly that they are willing to accept as "final answers" all kinds of nonsense. I rather suspect that it is part of the human condition that the actual "final answers" we discover that are actually comprehensive and fully correct will be few to none. Success, for a human inquirer, is, rather, to continue to make progress--even if the "final answers" continue to recede before our inquiries.

Beware of straightforward answers to questions -- otherwise, you may end up like the folks who built the computer Deep Thought to answer the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When Deep Thought delivered the answer ("42") after 7.5 million years, it was a very straightforward one. But in this case it turned out that to understand the answer, you have to understand the question -- and no one really did.

Getting clear on what the truly important questions are -- and how they should be understood -- is thus critical if we are to have any hope at answers that we can make sense of. So the question-asking role of philosophy is not one to be lightly dismissed. That said, I don't think it's true that philosophy fails to provide answers. You might be interested in Gary Gutting's recent book, What Philosophers Know, which attempts to show some answers that philosophy has provided in recent years.

I might add a modest point that could be helpful: It may not be helpful to see philosophy on the one side and religion on the other side of a great divide in terms of "final answers" and the offering of clear answers. Many philosophers today and in the past have adopted religious convictions, and many religious traditions (east and west) have either shaped or been shaped by philosohical inquiry. Within each of the great world religions there are multiple philosophically significant traditions that are experimental and speculative (non-dogmatic). So, for example, in Christianity there are materialists (Christian materialism is a new movement with philosophers like Peter van Inwagen and Lynne Baker) and dualists, nominalists and realists, utilitarians and virtue theorists, those who accept the static or dynamic theory of time (the so-called A series and B series), those who are libertarians versus compatabilists, and so on. And there is a similar diversity of views among philosophers in Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. My point is that even if one decides upon "the final answer" of a given religion, this does not at all bring the philosophical enterprise to an end. There is, rather, a vibrant great philosophical conversation over the centuries that you would be joining in which there is profound (and fruitful) diversity.