What is Philosophy About?

What is philosophy actually about? In this video, Anthony Alberino explores the classical answer to that question: philosophy studies the intelligible order of reality—the principles, natures, and causes that make science, and indeed all rational inquiry, possible. Drawing on Lloyd Gerson’s Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, we examine why the classical philosophical tradition—from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas—stands fundamentally opposed to naturalism, and why Gerson argues that the choice is ultimately philosophy or naturalism, not both. Along the way, Anthony examines the five doctrines Gerson associates with consistent naturalism—materialism, mechanism, nominalism, skepticism, and relativism—and consider what the rise of naturalism means for the nature of philosophy today. Gerson’s framework presents the history of philosophy as a conflict between Ur-Platonism and Naturalism, including various attempts to find compromises between them.