What is the point of philosophy? The ‘equilibrist’ answer

09/03/2026

‘Philosophy: what’s the point of that then, eh?’ It’s a question that’s sometimes asked by people you fall into casual conversation with. Unfortunately, like all good philosophical (or in this case, metaphilosophical) questions, it’s deceptively hard to answer. Here, Professor Helen Beebee attempts to answer.

Some scientists have the annoying habit of saying publicly that the answer to the question is “er, nothing”. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, for example, say on the very first page of their irritatingly popular book, The Grand Design, “philosophy is dead”. (Thanks very much.) They continue: “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge”. So they’re rather taking it for granted that the name of the game when it comes to philosophy is the quest for knowledge. And you might think that, if that’s so, then they have a point. If philosophers are looking for knowledge – especially if that knowledge is supposed to be knowledge of answers to the perennial ‘big questions’ of philosophy – does God exist? Is the mind distinct from the body? Does determinism rule out free will? What makes something the right thing to do? – then it’s not clear that they’ve got very far in the last two and a half thousand years.

Granted, many ingenious views have been devised; arguments for and against those views have been formulated, rebutted, refined, rebutted again; many sensible conceptual clarifications and distinctions have been made; and so on. But we don’t seem to be any closer to agreeing amongst ourselves what the answers to any of those questions actually are. And in a situation where experts disagree with each other about the right answer to a question – and continue to disagree even after serious and prolonged attempts by one party to convince the other  –  I don’t think anyone knows what the answer is. And even if some lucky individuals do know, namely the ones who happen to have arrived at the correct answer, the experts taken as a collective certainly do not know what the correct answer is.

So maybe we shouldn’t think that philosophy aims at knowledge in the first place. I suggest that the right way to approach the ‘what’s the point of philosophy?’ question, we should proceed in two stages. First, look at the actual practice of philosophy – with its distinctive concerns and methods – and ask what results that practice is apt for producing: what its telos is, if you like. And I think what the practice is apt for producing, by and large, is a menu of well worked-out theories of a given phenomenon – free will, justice, the mind, knowledge, the nature of art, and so on – each of which is viable on its own terms, but there is no hope of figuring out which is the true theory. And, second, ask whether or why that product – the thing the practice of philosophy is apt for producing – is worth having.

In a paper I wrote on this topic a while back – ‘Philosophical scepticism and the aims of philosophy’ – I was, frankly, pretty hand-wavy when it comes to that second question. In a book I’m co-authoring with Ylwa Sjölin-Wirling, we aim to do better. We call it the ‘Value Question’, and our answer to it is that having a grasp of the various different theories of a given phenomenon, what kinds of intuitions and methods motivate each of them, what their various strengths and weaknesses are, and so on, delivers a kind of ‘non-factive’ understanding of the phenomenon: ‘non-factive’ because most of the theories one grasps are in fact false.

The intuitive idea here is just this: I don’t know much about (say) free will. I really don’t: I don’t know what the true theory is; I don’t even know whether or not it’s compatible with determinism. (I’ve defended the claim that it is compatible with determinism. But plenty of extremely well-informed and reasonable philosophers disagree with me about that.) On the other hand, I have a decent grip on a lot of different theories of free will, I know what kinds of intuitions and background beliefs and methodological preferences push people towards defending one of them over another, and so on. We think I thereby understand free will much better than, say, your average first-year undergraduate. And such understanding is very much worth having. Providing the resources for such understanding – resources that any curious human being who is in a position to access them, not just professional philosophers, can in principle avail themselves of – is what philosophy aims to do.

Ylwa and I call the view just sketched ‘equilibrism’ (which is admittedly annoyingly hard to get your tongue around) in deference to David Lewis, who said a ‘reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring [her opinions on some philosophical topic] into equilibrium. Our common task is to find out what equilibria there are that can withstand examination’ (Philosophical Papers, vol. I, p.x). Other views of philosophy’s aims, and the value of pursuing them, are of course available. That’s fine; we’re equilibrists about meta-philosophy too. Whether some version of equilibrism will itself turn out to be a view ‘that can withstand examination’ – and which competitor views, once suitably well worked-out and debated, will end up on the menu of options –  remains, of course, to be seen.

Helen Beebee is Professor of Philosophy of Science in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. She works mainly on metaphysics, but also sometimes on the history of philosophy (Hume in particular), epistemology and metaphilosophy. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and, currently, President of the Mind Association.