Philosophy Read online

  For Tris, Audrey and Xavier – with all my love

  With special thanks to Terry Bradley

  Sharon Kaye is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After receiving her PhD in 1997 from the University of Toronto, she was a Killam postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then, she has published numerous articles as well as books, including Philosophy for Teens Volumes I and II with Paul Thomson (2006, 2007), Medieval Philosophy (2008), Black Market Truth, Book One of The Aristotle Quest: A Dana McCarter Trilogy (2008), Critical Thinking (2009), The Onion and Philosophy (2010), The Ultimate Lost and Philosophy (2011), and What Philosophy Can Tell You about Your Lover (2012). Her works have been published in Japanese, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese and Slovak.

  PHILOSOPHY

  A complete introduction

  Sharon Kaye

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Plato and justice

  Do the right thing

  The Forms

  Idealism

  The Allegory of the Cave

  The good life

  Love

  Justice?

  2 Aristotle and friendship

  Seize the day

  The four causes

  Teleology

  The golden mean

  Three types of friendship

  Logic

  Realism

  3 Anselm and God as supreme being

  The Age of Faith

  The ontological proof

  Defining God

  Gaunilo’s response

  Two kinds of existence?

  The problem of evil

  Defence of God

  4 Aquinas and God as cosmic creator

  The consolation of philosophy

  Cosmological proof

  The Big Bang

  The everlasting universe

  The teleological proof

  Evolution

  Anthropic considerations

  5 Descartes and the soul

  Think again

  The method of doubt

  The malignant demon

  The cogito

  God and the world

  The Cartesian circle

  Dualism

  Qualia

  6 Hobbes and freedom

  You’ve got to want it

  Determinism

  Human animals

  Compatibilism

  The state of nature

  Absolute sovereign

  The social contract

  7 Locke and knowledge

  Shipshape

  The problem of personal identity

  The memory criterion

  Personal responsibility

  Empiricism

  Primary and secondary qualities

  Berkeley’s slippery slope

  8 Hume and causality

  That wasn’t supposed to happen

  The problem of induction

  What is a cause?

  Relations of ideas vs. matters of fact

  Miracles

  The bundle theory of personal identity

  9 Kant and duty

  Liar, liar, pants on fire!

  An epistemological compromise

  Transcendental idealism

  Deontology

  The categorical imperative (first formulation)

  Applying the categorical imperative

  The categorical imperative (second formulation)

  Good will

  10 Mill and happiness

  Do the right thing!

  Utilitarianism

  Hedonism

  Lazy Town

  The concern for quality

  Acts vs. rules

  Liberty and equality

  11 Nietzsche and meaning

  You better love your life

  The will to power

  Master–slave morality

  Zarathustra

  Übermensch

  Nihilism/perspectivalism

  Continental philosophy

  12 Wittgenstein and language

  Organic machines

  The mystery of language

  Logic

  Analytic philosophy

  The builder’s game

  Meaning as use

  Family resemblance

  Behaviourism

  13 Sartre and existence

  The choice and the given

  The problem of human existence

  Nothingness

  Free will

  Bad faith

  Existentialism

  The fundamental project

  First candidate: relationships

  Second candidate: political activism

  Third candidate: art

  14 Dewey and truth

  The secret of learning

  Art

  Technology

  Nature

  Truth

  Pragmatism

  Education

  Afterword

  Answers

  How to use this book

  This book is arranged chronologically, with each chapter focused on a key philosopher whose ideas have challenged and enlarged philosophical thought in a significant way. Each begins with a thought experiment to introduce the reader to the crux of the philosopher’s thought before moving on to an in-depth discussion of his ideas.

  This Complete Introduction from Teach Yourself ® includes a number of special boxed features, which have been developed to help you understand the subject more quickly and remember it more effectively. Throughout the book you will find these indicated by the following icons:

  The book includes concise quotes from the philosopher under discussion in each chapter. They are referenced so that you can include them in essays if you are unable to get your hands on the source.

  The case study is a more in-depth introduction to a related topic. There is one in each chapter, and they should provide good material for essays and class discussions.

  The key ideas are highlighted towards the end of each chapter. If you have only half an hour to go before an exam, scanning through these would be a very good way of spending your time.

  The fact-check questions at the end of each chapter are designed to help you ensure that you have taken in the most important concepts from the chapter. If you find that you are consistently getting several answers wrong, it may be worth trying to read more slowly or taking notes as you go.

  The spotlight boxes offer interesting or amusing anecdotes to help bring the philosophers and their ideas to life.

  The dig deeper boxes give you ways to explore topics in greater depth than is possible in this introductory-level book.

  Introduction

  Philosophy is the most important subject you will ever study.

  This may come as a surprise to you, since philosophers aren’t very visible in our society. They don’t have offices like lawyers or counsellors, where you go and pay a fee to receive a service. Nevertheless, they’re everywhere. And it’s a good thing, too, because society would collapse without them.

  Philosophers are people who think about things. They stop and wonder why things are the way they are. They ask questions no one else has ever considered. They dream about how things might be different.

  If you’ve ever done any of these things, then you’re probably a philosopher. Perhaps just about everyone has had ‘philosophical moments’ from time to time. You can be a philosopher without any formal training. But – obviously – the more you know about philosophy the more philosophical you can be.

  The best way to learn about philosophy is to study what great philosophers have said. That’s exactly what philosphers did – they built upon their predecessors’ ideas. The history of ph
ilosophy is the unfolding of an extraordinarily rich legacy of thought that has underpinned the development of Western civilization.

  This book is designed to help you teach yourself philosophy. The goal is not just to teach yourself about philosophy, but to teach yourself to be a (better) philosopher. Why not? We need you. And, besides, it’s fun.

  This book will take a close look at 14 of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. We will examine their views, how they argued for them, and what their critics said about them.

  Each philosopher is different. They ask different questions and have different concerns. They have very different ways of seeing the world. Yet they are all philosophers and they are united by three main themes, which you will see running throughout this book.

  Theme 1: challenging authority

  All the thinking that philosophers do results in some pretty radical ideas. It’s not surprising, therefore, that philosophers often find themselves in deep trouble. Each of the philosophers we will meet in this book has his own tale of woe, which we can summarize as follows:

  • Plato was sold into slavery for offending a tyrant.

  • Aristotle was forced to abandon his school to avoid execution.

  • Anselm was twice exiled for standing up to the king.

  • Aquinas’s use of Arabic philosophy was condemned by the pope.

  • Descartes lived abroad without a permanent address for many years to escape the Inquisition.

  • Hobbes was nearly murdered by royalists and pressured to burn his own works.

  • Locke fled his homeland under suspicion of conspiracy.

  • Hume was charged with heresy and blackballed from university teaching.

  • Kant was reprimanded by the king and censored.

  • Mill was arrested in 1823 at the age of 17 for distributing information about birth control and was denied admittance to Oxford and Cambridge for refusing to take Anglican orders.

  • Nietzsche went insane.

  • Wittgenstein wrote his most important work while serving in the trenches during World War I.

  • Sartre was arrested for civil disobedience.

  • Dewey forfeited his laboratory school over a conflict with the university administration.

  There are many other great philosophers as well, and they often had even more tragic stories. Consider the case of the fifth-century-CE Roman woman Hypatia, who was stoned by an angry mob just for teaching philosophy.

  It takes guts to be a philosopher. Although society needs philosophers, it also hates them. This is because philosophers provoke change. It’s human nature to resist change.

  If you were living in the fifth century CE, especially if you were a woman living in the fifth century CE, you might just decide to pass on philosophy. We couldn’t blame you. But many brave men and women didn’t pass. They refused to pass. And, thanks to them, you no longer have to worry about getting stoned … at least in most places around the world. You can pretty safely read this book and then go on to develop your own outrageously radical philosophy.

  Theme 2: thought experiment

  Philosophy is the mother of all the sciences. It existed before psychology, biology or chemistry. It gave birth to these fields of study by raising questions about the human mind, the human body and the nature of physical objects. When philosophers began investigating the world, they provided a foundation for all the knowledge we treasure today.

  Although philosophy continues to push science in new directions, its methodology is not scientific. At the heart of science is experimental research: scientists conduct experiments in laboratories to gather data. Philosophers conduct experiments, too, but their experiments take place in the mind rather than in laboratories, and their goal is to explore possibilities rather than to collect data.

  Philosophers call their research methodology thought experiment. A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario designed to test an idea. Here are a few examples:

  1 Suppose you learn that invisible aliens are watching you. While not causing any harm, they follow you everywhere, hovering nearby while you sleep, listening to all your conversations, and seeing you naked. Do you mind? Why or why not? Are they doing anything wrong?

  2 Suppose you learn that one of the people you interact with on a daily basis is actually a very sophisticated robot – but you are not told who it is. How would you figure it out? Are there some things humans can do that machines can’t? Or are human beings actually a type of machine?

  3 Suppose you thought you saw your friend Joe smoking cannabis at a concert. In fact, you did not see Joe, but someone else who happens to look like him. Nevertheless, Joe was at the concert smoking cannabis. Would it be correct to say that you knew the truth? Why or why not? What is required for a belief to be considered knowledge?

  Various versions of these three thought experiments have been used to explore different areas of philosophy:

  • The first concerns ethics – the study of right and wrong. Philosophers are interested in finding out whether morality can be rationally justified and whether there are any values that should apply to everyone regardless of how they feel about it.

  • The second concerns metaphysics – the study of reality – which encompasses human nature as well as the nature of time, space and the universe itself. Philosophers are not convinced that things are always as they appear to be.

  • The third concerns epistemology – the study of knowledge. We take it for granted that there is a difference between facts and opinions, but it is far more difficult than one might think to pinpoint that difference.

  It is the business of philosophers to investigate ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. These areas are deeply connected and a complete philosophy would involve all three. The purpose of a thought experiment is to develop views in these areas and then to defend them against criticisms and alternative views.

  Theme 3: no right answer

  In addition to developing original ideas, philosophers spend a great deal of energy defending them. In fact, when it comes right down to it, philosophers love to argue. This might lead you to the impression that their goal is to convince the world that they are right.

  This would be a mistaken impression, however. The purpose of philosophical argumentation is to find out whether or not a view is really true. A good philosopher would never want to win an argument for the sake of winning.

  This makes philosophers different from lawyers. Lawyers aren’t supposed to care whether their clients are guilty or innocent – because everyone deserves a fair trial regardless of the truth.

  It also makes philosophers different from advertisers. Advertisers want everyone to believe that their product is the best, whether or not it really is. They try to convince you to buy their product whether or not you really want it or need it.

  The whole goal of philosophy is to find the truth. Philosophers defend with all their hearts the views that they believe are true, and they want others to challenge them so that they can see whether they are right. Good philosophers are happy to modify or even abandon their views if their arguments don’t hold up against criticism.

  If you asked a group of people to answer the questions raised above in our three thought experiments, you would get a wide variety of answers. Part of the fun of philosophy is learning what other people think and sparring with them. As a philosopher, you will, of course, believe that your own views are true. But philosophy deals with questions that have not yet been answered, and so you have to recognize that others are perfectly entitled to disagree with you.

  To say that philosophy deals with questions that have not yet been answered is not to say that its questions cannot be answered. People who are new to philosophy often find themselves wanting to say: ‘There’s no point in discussing philosophical questions because no one can ever know the answers!’

  But this is an attitude that you have to move beyond. There is a lot of point to discussing philosophical questions:

  • First, som
etimes we actually do find the answers. Consider the fact that philosophers once wondered whether the world was round or flat. This question has now been answered! Today philosophers wonder whether time travel is possible. This question, like all philosophy questions, could one day be answered – even though it’s hard for us in the present moment to see how.

  • Second, sometimes the search for the answer is more important than the answer itself. Suppose you discovered that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything is 42. This answer isn’t going to make any sense until you better understand the question! Understanding the enduring questions human beings have been asking since the dawn of civilization is a big part of the search.

  Philosophers are searching for the truth. It takes a community of inquirers, just like you, to make this a meaningful – and an ennobling – enterprise.

  Enjoy the chapters to come!

  There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

  There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

  Douglas Adams

  Dig deeper

  Kwame Anthony Appiah, Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1999).

  Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar … Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Penguin, 2008).

  ______, Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington (Abrams Image, 2008).

  ______, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between (Viking, 2009).

  1

  Plato and justice

  ‘Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.’

  Plato

  In this chapter you will learn: