Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early
or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and
gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to
seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has
been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which
are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and,
if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.
In Chapter 7, I will challenge the assumption of Epicurus that happiness is the meaning of life, and I
prefer to write of the health of the mind or brain rather than the soul. But I agree wholeheartedly that
old and young alike ought to seek wisdom.
Wisdom operates at different levels. Most generally, it concerns recognizing major goals such as
love, work, and play. In addition, much wisdom consists in knowledge about how to accomplish these
goals. For example, learning from experience how to have a good romantic relationship contributes to
satisfaction of the goal of having love in one's life. Moreover, wisdom includes many kinds of
knowledge that complement more specific information about primary goals and how to accomplish
them. In particular, knowing how to keep yourself healthy by eating well is valuable for ensuring that
illness won't prevent the pursuit of major goals. Wisdom of a particularly deep sort concerns knowing
why some goals such as love, work, and play are so important to people. Chapter 8 will argue that
love, work, and play are the meaning of life because they help to satisfy vital human needs.
Where can we look for all these kinds of wisdom? Philosophers have sought wisdom for thousands
of years, but there is little consensus about what they have learned. The philosopher Jerry Fodor
joked that anybody who thinks that philosophers have access to large resources of practical wisdom
hasn't been going to faculty meetings. My own approach to wisdom is unusual in that I use
experimental psychology and recent research in neuroscience to develop a systematic account of what
matters to people and why it matters.
Philosophical Approaches
The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them
to scientific findings, is called naturalism. Many philosophers since Plato have scorned naturalism,
arguing that science cannot provide answers to the deepest philosophical questions, especially ones
that concern not just how the world is but how it ought to be. They think that philosophy should reach
conclusions that are true a priori, which means that they are prior to sensory experiences and can be
gained by reason alone. Unfortunately, despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to
find any undisputed a priori truths. The absence of generally accepted a priori principles shows that
the distinguished Platonic philosophical tradition of looking for them has failed. Wisdom must be
sought more modestly.
Sometimes, however, philosophy gets too modest. The highly influential Austrian/British
philosopher Wittgenstein asserted that philosophy is unlike science in that all it should aim for is
conceptual clarification. In his early writings, he looked to formal logic to provide the appropriate
tools, and in his later work he emphasized attention to ordinary language. He claimed that philosophy
“leaves everything as it is.” Much of twentiethcentury philosophy in English devoted itself to the
modest goal of merely clarifying existing concepts. But no one has learned much from analyzing the
logic or the ordinary use of the words “wise” and “wisdom.” We need a theory of wisdom that can
tell us what is important and why it is important. Such theorizing requires introducing new concepts
and rejecting or modifying old ones.
My approach in this book is to seek wisdom that is natural, not in the health food sense of being
free of chemical additives, but in the scientific sense of being guided by experiments and theories.
Philosophical naturalism is more intellectually ambitious than conceptual clarification, but rejects
Platonic and religious ambitions to seek truth in supernatural realms. In Chapter 2, I will give a
sustained argument why we should base our beliefs on scientific evidence rather than on faith.
Psychology and neuroscience are particularly rich sources of evidence relevant to the four central
philosophical questions about reality, knowledge, meaning, and morality, so I call my approach
neural naturalism.