From Reading to Reasoning

Have you ever heard of Socrates? Before being introduced to his ideas in class, I too had no idea who he was or what he might have contributed to our society. I had vaguely come across the painting The Death of Socrates in an art magazine, but beyond that brief encounter, we had never truly been acquainted. Yet, I was always struck by how often certain academics around me would quote him — along with other illustrious but obscure names to any untrained ear. Like many of us do in everyday life, I would pretend to understand their references, the fear of appearing ignorant outweighing any genuine desire to comprehend. 

And yet, this feeling of shame is something we have all experienced at least once — and it has existed for centuries. In fact, the man known as the founder of philosophy, Socrates himself, gave his most precious lesson when he declared: "I know that I know nothing." What Socrates teaches us here is not something new, but a crucial reminder: most of our certainties are based on an illusion of understanding. More often than not, we simply pretend to understand!

What a relief, you might say — and I understand that. Yet the desire to no longer remain ignorant about this has lived within me long enough to spark the wish to share, even if only superficially, a little story of philosophy. So, without further delay, let us set out in the footsteps of thinkers who have shaped our way of perceiving the world…

About the author: Armelle Martinez participated in the final of the Philosophy Olympiad in 2024 and has been active as a volunteer since. She went to school in Nyon and now studies medicine in Zurich.

Our first step is to define our approach to the history of philosophy. Since we are in a quest of understanding, I propose to focus on what philosophers said about knowledge and how to acquire it.

For many, “western” philosophy roughly begins with the death of Socrates in 399 BC. Plato, his disciple, was a prolific writer who used his mentor as a central figure to convey his own philosophical ideas. Socrates himself never wrote anything, but Plato gave us a clear enough picture of his method of teaching. At the start of a discussion, Socrates would take on the role of a student and ask his interlocutors to explain something they believed they understood. Then, through logical questioning, he would guide the conversation toward the essence — the true definition — of the chosen topic. But his interlocutors were often caught off guard by their own inability to explain their reasoning clearly. This phenomenon is quite familiar: while we believe we know, in truth we merely accept reality as it is, without questioning it. In other words, Socratic dialogue would invariably lead to a deeper search for meaning, for example: What is justice? What do we truly mean by knowledge? Socrates and Plato believed that we cannot speak meaningfully about a concept without first understanding the Idea behind it. To acquire genuine knowledge and avoid falling into the illusion of understanding, we must first define the concept — only then can we meaningfully explore its implications. This method of progressing from definitions to examples is called deductive reasoning. Many opponents of Socrates and Plato argued that finding the true Idea of something was impossible, making the entire quest pointless. Socrates, however, insisted on quite the opposite: the journey toward knowledge is the only one that can lead us out of the shadows of illusion and into the light of true happiness.     

Aristotle utterly disagrees with this approach and takes the opposite path: starting from observations of nature and society to discover the larger picture behind them. This inductive reasoning can be seen as the root of scientific thinking, and by extension, one might consider Aristotle one of the first scientists. Instead of viewing our senses as a burden or a distraction from true knowledge — as Plato did — Aristotle considered them the starting point and an essential part of the journey toward understanding.

Now, let’s take a big leap forward in time to 17th-century France. Descartes, a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, famously stated a simple sentence — just three words, in fact — that have been as widely discussed and analyzed as carpe diem in “Dead Poets Society”: Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. This statement might sound natural to us now, almost self-evident, but the path to reach it was far from easy. Descartes underwent a process of radical doubt, deliberately questioning everything he believed to be true, stripping away every assumption in search of something absolutely certain. Could he trust his senses? No — they had deceived him before (and here again, we see how Aristotle would disagree — the debate remains open…). Could he trust the existence of the world around him? Even that could be an illusion. But there was one thing he could not doubt: the very act of thinking itself. Even if he doubted everything else, the fact that he was thinking was proof that he existed. This self-awareness became, for Descartes, the unshakable foundation upon which all knowledge must be built.

Armelle (on the left) discussing with participants at the Philosophy Olympiad.

David Hume, a highly influential empiricist, unlike Descartes, searched the foundation of knowledge by asking himself: how do we acquire it? In contrast to rationalists like Descartes, Hume firmly believed that all knowledge originates from experience — specifically, from what we perceive through our senses. For him, the mind at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, a tabula rasa, gradually inscribed with impressions, memories, and associations as we interact with the world around us. According to Hume, even the most complex ideas are, at their core, composed of simpler sensory impressions that we have experienced firsthand. Through our lives, we are repeatedly exposed to the world and we begin seeing patterns which then build expectations and ultimately what we call knowledge. But Hume also issued a warning: just because we associate two things together repeatedly does not mean they are logically or necessarily connected. This skepticism led him to question concepts like causality, which we often take for granted. Do we truly know that one event causes another — or do we merely expect it, because it has always appeared that way in our past experience? In this way, Hume not only grounded knowledge in perception, but like its predecessor Socrates, challenged the certainty of what we believe we know.

Hume’s radical empiricism shook the foundations of philosophy — and few were more affected than Immanuel Kant, who famously admitted that Hume’s skepticism “awoke [him] from [his] dogmatic slumber.” While Kant agreed that knowledge begins with experience, he argued it doesn’t end there. In his “Critique of Pure Reason”, he sought to bridge rationalism and empiricism by showing that knowledge arises from the interaction between sensory data (a posteriori - on that he agreed with Hume) and the mind’s innate structures (a priori - Plato and Socrates’ side of the story ) — such as space, time, and causality. We don’t just absorb reality; we actively shape it. For Kant, this means that while we can never access things as they are in themselves (das Ding an sich), we can understand the world as it appears to us, filtered through the structures of human perception.

Philosophy, as all the examples above show, is beautiful. It is beautiful precisely because it offers no consensus on a single story. It is a discipline of contradictions, of dialogue, and ultimately a return to the foundations of all sciences: logic and intuition. At its core, philosophy forces you to think for yourself. This article might have given you a glimpse of the history of philosophy, but to truly understand it, you have to engage with it yourself. You have to become a philosopher. Fortunately, the title isn’t hard to earn — you simply need to think for yourself. This is exactly what is expected of you at the Philosophy Olympiad. Now, that may sound easier said than done. So, let me challenge you to read second part where we tackle a classic activity of the Philosophy Olympiad: a so-called thought experiment.