28/06/2026
The claim that philosophy is just opinions is itself a philosophical position. And a poorly justified one.
Hi, this is Markus and I will explain this meme to you.
The ancient Greek word doxa means common opinion or belief: a view held without systematic examination or justification. The word episteme means genuine knowledge: claims that can be rationally grounded, tested against objection and defended through argument. The explicit project of philosophy from its earliest practitioners onward was to develop the methods necessary to move human beings from the first toward the second.
Socrates made this his life's work in fifth-century Athens, and it is worth understanding the historical context. Athens was flooded with Sophists, professional intellectuals who charged considerable fees to teach the art of persuasion. Their service was to make any position sound convincing, regardless of its truth.
Plato's dialogues are, in significant part, a sustained argument that this is not merely intellectually dishonest but politically catastrophic. A democracy run on rhetoric without rigorous justification will be manipulated by whoever argues most persuasively.
The Socratic method was constructed precisely as a counter to this. By asking carefully sequenced questions rather than delivering assertions,
Socrates forced interlocutors to examine not just what they believed but on what basis they believed it. The Apology records that most people, across every profession and social class, discovered under questioning that their firmest convictions had no articulable foundation. This was not humiliation for its own sake. It was the first step toward the kind of self-knowledge that actual reasoning requires.
What is underappreciated is that philosophy did not remain in the domain of opinion. It became the discipline that gave birth to every modern academic field. Aristotle produced foundational texts in biology, physics, political science, meteorology, psychology, literary criticism and formal logic, all of which were understood at the time as branches of philosophy. The word scientist did not exist until William Whewell coined it in 1833. Before that, investigators of the natural world were called natural philosophers. The separation of science from philosophy is a recent institutional development, not a historical fact about their relationship.
Psychology itself is a direct descendant of philosophy. Wilhelm Wundt, who established the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, was trained as a philosopher. William James, who established American psychology as a discipline, wrote the Principles of Psychology and The Will to Believe, a major work in philosophy of mind, in the same decade. The questions that drive psychology, about consciousness, identity, motivation and moral judgment, remain philosophical questions with empirical methods added.
What this teaches: philosophy is not the alternative to rigorous knowledge. It is where rigorous knowledge came from.
Follow this page for the history of how we actually know what we know.
