The Nature of Philosophical Problems: Their Causes and Implications

John Kekes



Philosophical problems concerned with the most basic questions of how we should live are perennial because modes of understanding conflict and provide incompatible interpretations of the significance of agreed upon facts. Such conflicts are unavoidable so long as historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of understanding persist. Their conflicts are part of the complexities that enrich our world-view, not defects that could be corrected. The constructive aim of the book is to defend a pluralist approach to reasonable, practical, context-dependent, and particular ways of coping with philosophical problems. Its critical aim is to give reasons against regarding any of the modes of understanding as always overriding. Philosophical problems are perennial because modes of understanding continually change in response to the growth of knowledge, the emergence of new problems, and the forever changing conditions of human lives.