Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you're intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

The way we talk about it nowadays, it's the exemplar of a rarefied field of study, the province of intellectuals who hardly engage at all with the world around them. As a result, you're unlikely to center philosophy in your worldbuilding unless you know quite a bit about it to begin with (as I, freely confessed, do not). But I do know this much: philosophy is far from disengaged with the world. Indeed, its purpose is to consider why the world works the way it does, how we should engage with it, and other such fundamental and vital questions. So even though my own knowledge is limited, it's worth taking a bit of time to unpack just what philosophy is.

We've touched on parts of it already, because philosophy is not fully separable from other topics. The Year Six essays on sin and salvation? Those got grouped under my broad "religion" header for obvious reasons, but they're also philosophical topics -- specifically the branch known as moral philosophy, which concerns itself with ethical questions like what is good and whether one should weigh intentions or consequences more heavily in evaluating an action. For many people, religion has long been the foundation of moral philosophy . . . though the notion some hold, that a person can't really be moral without faith to enforce it, is utterly without foundation.

Last week's science essay also touched on philosophical matters, because philosophy asks questions like "what do we know and how do we know we know it?" This branch is known as epistemology, or the study of knowledge itself. That revolution in thinking I mentioned before, where the Royal Society said nullius in verba and started testing long-held dogma to see if it was right? That was an epistemological shift, one that declared sense experience and experimental procedure to be the proper basis of knowledge, rather than deference to authority.

Science also ties in with the logic branch of philosophy. How do you know if someone's reasoning is sound? Among specialists, different logical methods often get discussed in very abstract, dry-sounding ways, but we use them all the time in daily life: if you come home to find toilet paper shredded throughout the house and the only living creature who was there is the dog, ergo you conclude the dog is to blame, you're applying logic. Science, medicine, and the law all share the task of looking at the evidence and attempting to formulate an explanation that adequately explains what you see -- or, alternatively, to show that an explanation fails that test. Because, of course, the flip side of logical reasoning is the fallacy: incorrect reasoning, which fails at one or more steps in the chain.

The fourth major branch is metaphysics, and it's the hardest to pin down (thanks in part to the definition changing over time; that's what happens when your field of study has been around for thousands of years). This, I suspect, is what most people think of when they hear the word "philosophy," because metaphysics is the branch asking questions like "why does reality exist?" But here, too, it loops around to touch on other areas of culture, as the beginning and end of the universe fall under this header: religion-themed topics you'll again find in Year Six.

Enough of the abstractions, though. What does this mean for fiction?

Whether you mean it to or not, philosophy is going to soak your fiction, because it soaks your thinking. If your student at magic school decides to experiment with different ways of casting spells to see if what the teacher said is true or not, that's demonstrating a certain epistemological stance, one that says experimental results are the most valid way to answer a question. If your protagonist investigates a mystery and comes up with a theory about what's happening, they're using a specific logical approach. If your villain is pursuing a potentially admirable outcome by really terrible means, they're subscribing to a consequentialist view of ethics, the one commonly shorthanded as "the end justifies the means."

If you don't make a conscious effort to worldbuild the philosophy of your setting, its philosophy is likely to default to yours. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But it can feel anachronistic or otherwise out of place. If the protagonist in your medieval-esque story approaches questions of knowledge and logic like a modern scientist, they're going to feel a bit like a modern person dressed up in fancy clothes. If the good guys all do that while the bad guys adhere to different philosophical stances, now you're adding an implied moral dimension to the result.

And I suspect that for most stories, it's that ethical dimension of philosophy where this influence becomes most obvious and, at times, problematic. Protagonist does a bad thing, but it gets brushed off because they've got a good heart and that makes it okay? The story is presenting a philosophical argument, whether the author thinks of it that way or not. When the chips are down and a character has to make a hard decision, which way do they jump? Will they bend or break a principle to help someone in need? Will they sacrifice their own desires for the sake of upholding that principle? This is the stuff of deep personal drama, and simply recognizing it as such -- and thinking about what stances the various answers would express -- can result in more powerful stories, rather than simple ones where the supposed hard choice is really a no-brainer.

But especially on that ethical front, it's going to be difficult to write a story that endorses a philosophy you, the author, do not support. Deontology, for example, is the field that looks at ethics from the perspective of obedience to rules . . . and for many of us, that rapidly leads to "lawful evil" territory. We'd have a hard time writing a sincere story in which the protagonist virtuously obeys a terrible order because their duty requires it -- not as anything other than a tragic ending, anyway. It could be the basis of a villain or an antagonistic society, though, and in fact we often deploy these elements in exactly that fashion.

So even if you don't have a degree in philosophy, just dabbling your toes in the shallow end of that ocean-sized pool can help you become more aware of what message your worldbuilding and plot are sending. And that, I think, is worth it!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/fDGUFl)

In the beginning, there was the list.

Some of our oldest written texts are, in fact, just lists of things: types of trees, types of bird, that sort of thing. They may have been used for teaching vocabulary in writing, but they also serve as a foundational element for knowledge, one so basic that the average person today barely even thinks about it. But how can you learn about Stuff if you haven't first thought about what Stuff is out there?

The Onomasticon of Amenope goes a step further. Not only does this Egyptian text from three thousand years ago set out to help the student learn "all things that exist," but it organizes them into loose categories, summarized by Alan Gardiner as things like "persons, courts, offices, occupations," "classes, tribes, and types of human being," and "the towns of Egypt." This is a vital step in scholarship, not only in the past but the present: even today, we wrestle with questions of categorization and how best to group things, because there's no single "right" answer. What system is best depends on what you want to use it for, and how you approach this issue reveals a lot about where your priorities are. (Think of a grocery store: what's revealed by having dedicated shelving for things like "Hispanic foods" and "Asian foods," and what items could arguably be placed among them but aren't.)

Another very early category of scholarship is travel writing or travelers' reports -- basically, accounts of ethnography and natural history covering foreign lands. These have often been highly fanciful, reporting things like people with no heads and their faces in their stomachs, but why? It's hard to say for sure. In some cases the information probably got garbled in the transmission (think of the game "telephone"); in others, the observer may have misunderstood what they were seeing; sometimes the teller deliberately jazzed up their material, and sometimes they made it up out of whole cloth, perhaps to support whatever larger point they wanted to make. From our modern perspective, it often looks highly unreliable . . . but it's still a key element in laying the foundations of knowledge.

Once you have foundations, you can start building upon them. Much ancient scholarship takes the form of commentaries, works that aim to explain, expand upon, or contradict existing texts, often by pointing at another text that says something different. You also get textual criticism, which is our modern term for a practice going back at least two thousand years: when works are copied by hand, there is significant need for scholars comparing the resulting variants and attempting to identify which ones are the oldest or most accurate. Basically, undoing that game of telephone, lest things get garbled beyond comprehension.

What you don't tend to get -- not until more recently -- is research as we think of it now. There absolutely were people who attempted to explain how the world worked, but they largely did so by sitting and thinking, rather than by actively observing phenomena and testing their theories. That doesn't mean they weren't curious about things, though! How the heck does vision work, or smell? Why do objects fall down? What makes the planets seem to "move backward" through the sky, rather than following a straight path? What engenders disease in the body? People have been trying to answer these questions for thousands of years. The pop culture image of pre-Enlightenment science is that people just said "it's all because of the gods" and stopped there, but in truth, pre-modern people were very interested in finding more specific answers. Yes, it was all due to the gods, but that didn't mean there weren't patterns and rules to the divine design. Even medieval Christians, often assumed to be uninterested in or afraid of asking questions (lest the Church come down on their heads), argued that better understanding the mechanics of God's creation was an expression of piety, rather than incompatible with it.

But it's true that they largely didn't conduct experimentation in the modern, scientific method sense. Science and philosophy were strongly linked; rather than aiming to dispassionately observe facts, much less formulate a hypothesis and then see whether the data bore it out, people sought explanations that would be in harmony with their beliefs about the nature of existence. Pre-Copernican astronomy was shaped by philosophical convictions like "the earth we humans live on is supremely important" and "circles are the most perfect shape, therefore the one ordained for the movement of heavenly bodies" -- because why would divine entities arrange things any other way?

Scholarship and science were also strongly shaped by respect for past authority, to the point where luminaries like Aristotle were practically deified. (Or literally deified, in the case of the Egyptian chancellor Imhotep.) It marked a tremendous sea change when the English Royal Society in the seventeenth century adopted as its motto Nullius in verba, loosely translated as "take nobody's word for it." They resolved not to accept the wisdom of yore, not until it had been actively tested for veracity . . . and if it failed to hold water? Then out it went, regardless of who said it and how long it had been accepted as dogma.

This is, of course, a highly simplified view of the history of science. Not everything proceeded at the same pace; astronomy, for example, has an incredibly long history of precise observation and refinement of instrumentation, because correctly understanding the sky was vital to things like the creation of calendars, which in turn affected everything from agriculture to taxation. Biology, meanwhile, spent a lot longer relying on anecdata. But it's vital to remember that things which seem completely obvious to us are only so because somebody has already done the hard work of parsing the mysteries of things like the circulation of blood or the chemistry of combustion, which in fact were not obvious at all.

And this opens an interesting side door for science fiction and fantasy writers. The history of science is littered with theories eventually proved incorrect -- but what if they weren't wrong? Richard Garfinkle's novel Celestial Matters operates in a cosmos where Aristotelian biology and Ptolemaic astronomy are the reality of things, and develops its story accordingly. There's a whole Wikipedia list of superseded scientific theories, which could be fodder for story ideas! (But tread carefully, as some of those theories have pretty horrific implications, especially when they have to do with people's behavior.)

It's also worth thinking about what theories we hold today will look hilariously obsolete in the future. We like to think of ourselves as having attained the pinnacle of science and everything from here on out is just polishing the details, but you never know when an Einstein is going to come along and overturn the status quo with a new, deeper explanation of the facts. Of course none of us know what those future theories will be -- if we did, we'd be the Einsteins of our generation! But if you can spin a convincing-sounding foundation for your theory, you can present the reader with a world that contradicts what we think we know today.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/jG7X6K)