I am not here preparing to offer some sort of be all to end all. Rather, I am commenting on a particular work.

I recently took advantage of a Barnes & Noble gift card to download Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money to my Nook. The author’s preface gives a very persuasive (at least to this reader) argument for the intellectual function of philosophy in understanding the world. It is all the more interesting in that this does not come in the context of a book about spiritualism or the meaning of life or finding one’s “purpose.” Rather, it opens up a lengthy discussion of money.

Simmel writes that any topic of study has “two boundaries making the point at which the process of reflection ceases to be exact and takes on a philosophical character.” He points to the first boundary as being the “lower boundary of the exact domain.” Now, I admit to not being too clear what he is saying here. Perhaps a reference to the philosophy that pre-dated modern science (the ancient Greeks, for example).  But the real meat is what he considers to be the philosophical domain that comes after the upper limit of the “exact domain.”

Philosophy, he says, is what can turn the disparate fragments of scientific and empirical knowledge in a world view. Essentially, philosophy as the science of hermeneutics. These things cannot be fully determined, he writes, by science. To get past this upper limit of scientific knowledge requires philosophy.

As to whether philosophical interpretations can ever be replaced by ever growing empirical knowledge… he compares that to the idea to the idea that photography could replace painting and sculpture. Purely mechanistic depictions are beside the point.

Simmel tries to explain the “essence [of money] and the meaning of its existence.” This is, to him, a purely philosophical exploration. Thus, no matter who often it might have recourse to the science of economics, it remains a philosophical study.

On another note, it appears that Routledge Classics is publishing a new edition of The Philosophy of Money for just $29.95 retail – a far more affordable from the $67.95 (plus tax) that I paid. The high price of the book was one reason that I took so long to purchase it (having desired the tome since 1997).