What is Philosophy: Introduction

Introduction

• A caricature exists of philosophers as detached, eccentric academics disconnected from real-world concerns.
• Thinking is evolving beyond a detached mental process to include perception and feeling ("perfink").
• It is more beneficial to read a variety of philosophy books instead of focusing only on the study guide.
• Philosophers are influenced by the world views of their historical period.
• Understanding these world views reveals philosophical questions about human consciousness.
• Early philosophers broke from mythological explanations, marking the start of Western philosophy.
• Exploring the contrasting views of Parmenides and Heraclitus is crucial, as Socrates and Plato aimed to reconcile their differences.
• Epistemology explores the relationship between knowledge, truth, belief, and justification.
• Metaphysics studies fundamental questions of substance and causal connections.

What is Philosophy?

• Philosophy involves rigorous analysis of familiar concepts and ideas.
• Defining philosophy requires engaging with it through ongoing debate and self-criticism.
• Philosophy is the rational justification of our perceptions about existence.
• Philosophical knowledge is useful based on biology and evolution.
• Knowledge advances through discussion; debate is the growing point of knowledge.
• Philosophizing defines concepts provisionally through examination, implication development, and correction.
• Philosophy leads to new theories and continuous advancement through ongoing critique.
• The history of philosophy is an ongoing dialogue relevant to every thinking person.

Philosophy and the History of Philosophy

• Understanding contemporary philosophy requires historical context.
• Modern philosophers' work reflects on the ideas of their predecessors.
• Philosophy originates from everyday ideas and experiences.
• Theories require observation and testing, a concept that wasn't always accepted.
• Philosophers must understand the origin of ideas, rethink them, and go beyond them.
• "Philosophy" comes from the Greek words "philein" (to love) and "sophia" (wisdom), meaning "love of wisdom".

The Beginnings of Philosophical Thinking in Greece

• Plato's philosophy is the result of reflecting on two centuries of intellectual thought.
• Greek thought needs to be considered in context, starting with Greek mythology.
• Mythological thought accepts sense impressions uncritically.
• Exposure to the world led to anthropomorphic images of natural phenomena.
• Homeric mythology became the object of public worship in Greek city-states.
• Mythological thought attempts to establish order.
• Philosophical thought evolved from mythology due to changing experiences and needs.
• This evolution caused conflict with traditional values rooted in Homeric mythology.
• Greek philosophy is commonly traced back to the 6th century BCE with the Milesians, including Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.
• Greek philosophy came about as a result of material and economic needs and interests.

Pre-Socratic Philosophy: The Quest for The First Cause (Arche)

• The Milesians sought the first governing principle by which chaos becomes cosmos.
• Greek mythology held that the core elements were air, earth, fire, and water.
• The Milesians believed a single element was more basic, which is called monism.

Thales

• Thales proposed water as the underlying first principle.
• He thought Earth arose out of water, and water needs no support.
• Observations that support this consider spring water, the change of water to air, and volcanoes.

Anaximander

• Anaximander criticized Thales' view.
• He sought to describe the Earth geologically, biologically, and culturally.
• He hypothesized multiple cosmos of Earth, sun, moon, and stars, arising from "the unlimited" (apeiron).
• Apeiron gives rise to all worlds and absorbs them again.
• Anaximander argued that water couldn't be the arche because it's exhaustible.
• The arche had to contain elements in an unmixed state, hence the apeiron.

Anaximenes

• Anaximenes succeeded Anaximander.
• He proposed condensation-rarefaction as a natural operating mechanism.
• All change results from this mechanism.
• Compressed air is cold, relaxed exhalation is rarefied and hot.
• Further compression leads to water, then earth and stones; rarefaction leads to fire.
• Changes indicate density changes in the underlying element: air.
• Anaximenes' analysis defines all objects and events as functions of a single quantitative process.

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• The inhabitants of Miletus shifted from agriculture to maritime activities.
• Their increasing reliance on regular natural occurrences encouraged them to study nature's patterns.

Points to ponder

• Air that has been re-arranged by compression is water.
• Water that has been re-arranged by rarefaction is air.
• Only the process remains fixed, and nothing is anything but a different degree of anything else.
• If all is one and unchanging, how can it appear many and variable?

Other Significant Pre-Socratics

• Heraclitus and Parmenides opposed the Milesians' materialistic approach to the Arche.
• They thought the arche could only be grasped by rational insight and intuition.

Heraclitus

• Heraclitus claimed nothing in the universe is permanent, everything is changing.

• All things are constantly in flux.

• Fire is the ultimate reality as it's forever passing away and renewing itself.

• The universe is a perpetual conflagration with a cycle of transformation.

• Logos is the principle of nature and principle that everything changes; it is universal and unchanging.

• Logos states all things pass into or are constituted by their opposites, and it is a tension driving them.

• Heraclitus's disciple, Cratylus, took the theory further.

• Cratylus thought that word-meanings were constantly changing.

• Cratylus refused to make statements, and would just wiggle his little finger to indicate that he had heard what was said.

Implications of Cratylus's Thought

• Knowledge has presuppositions.
• Only what is true can rank as knowledge, and truth is absolute.
• What is true is always true, and the object of knowledge must be unchanging.
• What constantly changes cannot be an object of knowledge.
• Constantly changing things are neither is nor is not precisely anything.

Parmenides

• Parmenides believed that what we call change is an illusion.
• True change would mean something comes into being that wasn't before.
• If it comes from something else, it already existed.
• if it came out of nothing, then “nothing'' must be treated as though it had some being.
• “Comes into being'' refers to what already exists, so there is no real change.
• What is could never have come into being, because that would imply a time when it was not.
• What is cannot cease to be for then it would pass into what is not being.
• Being is one, uncreated, and indestructible.
• There is no “other'' so there cannot be a “many'' or more than one.
• There can be no movement, for movement is a form of change.
• All variety, movement, multiplicity, difference, is illusory and mere appearance.
• Theories describing the world in these terms are “The Way of Belief '' as opposed to “The Way of Truth''.
• Parmenides denies that introspection is reliable.
• The logos to follow is pure reason, the source of Being itself.
• Being is one, indivisible, and cannot change.

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• Groundwork for Milesian cosmologists was that the world consists of air, earth, fire, and water.
• Pre-Socratic philosophers considered ONE element more basic (they were monists).
• Thales decided water is basic; Anaximander an unspecified element undergoing transformation.
• Anaximenes detailed the process; Heraclitus identified fire as the symbol of eternal change.
• Parmenides showed the contradiction involved in speaking about change when the language of change is subjected to strict logical analysis.

The Sophists

• The Sophists were 5th-century professional educators.
• They advised how to win cases in law courts rather than pursuing truth.
• Bertrand Russell compared the Sophists to American corporate lawyers.
• They emphasized persuasion rather than knowledge.
• They shifted away from explaining nature to explaining human conduct and relationships.

The following principal ideas were characteristic of the Sophists' approach to knowledge:

• Philosophy has proved that no two philosophers think alike.

• If there is no change, there can be no knowledge because, in that case, we cannot describe anything.

• If things change, the same is true because, where nothing persists, we cannot attribute anything to anything.

• If we can know things only in so far as they influence our senses, we also cannot know, because then the nature of things eludes our grasp.

• It is impossible to solve the riddle of the universe.

• The Sophistic position on knowledge is that there is no objective truth - only subjective opinion.

• The individual is a law unto himself in the matter of knowledge.

Points to ponder

• There are two sets of laws that operate in the world: Natural, which is universal, and those that belong to particular societies.

• Many postmodern philosophers adopt the Sophist standpoint.

Socrates

• There are no written records of the ideas of the historical Socrates.

• Ideas are sourced from the writings of his pupil, Plato.

• Plato used Socrates' name as a character in his dialogues.

• Socrates used the Socratic method of systematic questioning and search for defensible definition of a word.

• The objective was to give an exact account of the essential nature of the object to which it referred.

• Essential is defined as that which is peculiarly central to the object.

• Socrates suggested no formal rules, instead using the argument of negativity.

• Enumerating instances of "true'' statements could not define justice.

• A word or phrase that contained the word to be defined was rejected as circular reasoning.

• Deductions were then made from the set of premises.

• An unsatisfactory result would suggest something was wrong with the premises.

• Epistemology is the science of the methods or grounds of knowledge.

• Epistemology wrestles with the question What can I know?

• Metaphysics asks What is the fundamental nature of reality?

• When we turn to Socrates, though, we are introduced to the entire range of philosophical problems from problems concerned with knowledge (epistemology); with underlying reality (metaphysics); with grounds for distinguishing good from evil (ethics); and with grounds and principles upon which laws and states are constituted (political philosophy).

Plato

• We are incarnated into the physical world of the senses and lose our memory of our prior existence in the world of the Forms.

• We perceive the physical world through our senses but intuitively know that because it is always changing, it only appears real.

• We need access to unchanging, eternal knowledge in the world of the Forms.

• This can only happen if we spend time being educated by philosophers, spend time in intellectual contemplation and abstain from over indulging our physical appetites .

• Plato believed the ordinary world is known through the senses and cannot be fully real.

• The world is filled with change and decay.

• Knowledge must be true and always remain true.

• There must be a world of stable, perfect objects behind changing sense perceptions.

• The philosopher's task was to explore this world.

• Plato thought knowledge is inseparable from ethics - knowledge is virtue (arête).

• For the Greeks, to be virtuous or good was to be virtuous in respect of something or good at something.

• Plato reasoned that there must also be a human arete to conduct his or her life as a human being.

• Plato would only accept as knowledge what was completely beyond doubt and necessarily true.

• What was true but might have been otherwise could only be an object of opinion.

• One “sees'' this in one's “mind's eye''.

• Bodily senses interfere with knowledge because they lead to feelings and desires that distort judgement.

• Sense perception often misleads and subjects us to illusion.

• We can only discover the truth by ceasing to rely upon our senses.

• The Platonic upliftment of thought even in fact becomes mystical.

• In the pursuit of knowledge, the soul withdraws from the body and confines itself to thinking.

• Wisdom is the ultimate good.

• Since the philosopher pursues wisdom and truth, the philosopher must keep his soul pure.

• Plato said a philosopher can never hope to do this completely until he dies.

• It was suggested that one does not know that circles are round merely by looking.

• Measurement is done instead.

• Measurement requires units and numbers.

• The notion of unity is purely ideal.

• Diagrams are approximate illustrations.

• Ideas of line, circle, angle, are abstract ideas.

Knowledge and the reality of Forms (Universals)

• Plato distinguishes between knowledge and opinion.

• Knowledge is of the real, opinion is of what seems to be the case.

• Knowledge must imply truth.

• The proper object of knowledge is actual reality (Being).

• Nonbeing is the proper object of ignorance.

• The object of opinion is a combination of being and nonbeing, called Becoming.

• For example, we could say that a boy is a man, yet he is not a man but only a child.

• Or, no human being adequately represents what we mean by humanity, yet everyone does in some way.

• What is real must be unchanging, absolute, and universal.

• These universals are usually translated by Plato's translators as Forms.

• The Forms are similar to mathematical entities in that they are not accessible to sense perception.

• In addition to beauty, justice, and goodness, Plato recognised Forms for the horse, the mountain, and so on.

• There is a Form corresponding to every kind of thing.

• The Forms exist independently of us and our thoughts.

• They were the permanent objective reality to which, if we apply our mental powers, our concepts might correspond.

• Plato took a realist view of Forms (universals).

• Reality of the objects relies on the fact is these objects share limited and imperfect extent, in the nature of the Forms.

• We can apprehend the Form, and so acquire knowledge of piety.

• Plato recognized that he could not demonstrate the existence of Forms with rational deductive argument.

• His account had to be accepted on the basis of an intuitive belief that ultimate reality is immaterial and not accessible to sense perception.

• A theory about the nature of the world must ultimately rest on intuitive beliefs which cannot be rationally justified.

• Plato's “Theory of Forms'' depends on acknowledging that the soul is immortal, or, at the very least, that it existed before it came to the material world.

The doctrine that knowledge is anamnesis (recollection)

• Plato thought that the immaterial soul is independent of the material body.
• The view of the body and soul as two different substances is a form of dualism.
• Plato thought that the soul belonged to the changeless world of Forms, rather than the sense perception world.
• After death, the soul might go back to the Forms, or return once more to the material world.
• While in a material body the soul becomes polluted and forgets the world of Forms.
• Sense perception might remind the soul of the world.
• It could only begin to apprehend Forms because it had once known them fully.
• This explains the sense of familiarity people have when grasping a new point.

Summary

• Knowledge is permanent and certain, and is not subject to correction.
• It is not possible to claim knowledge on the basis of sense perception of any object or event in the material world. The best is true belief.
• True belief can guide us and prompt the mind to remember the world of Forms.
• Forms are eternal and changeless and therefore they can be the objects of knowledge.
• Forms cannot be perceived by the senses; it is only the mind which makes us aware of them.
• We can know only by virtue of our mind, and by its capacity for recollection.

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• Mathematics is independent of experience, but we do not need to suppose pre-existent minds to explain this.
• Knowledge requires ability to understand axioms and definitions plus ability to draw deductive conclusions.
• Plato's argument proves that people naturally have reasoning ability.

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• The Sophists adopted a skeptical Parmenidean approach to knowledge and defended any thesis to demonstrate expertise.
• Socrates sought philosophical clarity as an end in itself, challenging common sense opinion.
• Socratic dialogue underlies intellectual truth, whereas the sole aim of Sophists was technical expertise.

The relationship between knowledge, truth, belief, and justification in Plato

• Plato argues in his writings that knowledge must be true: if something is not true, he says, we cannot know it.
• The mental state has to participate in the truth to call it "knowing".
• Truth, for Plato, consists of how much a thing conforms to the archetype of that thing in the realm of Forms.
• Knowledge consists in perceiving the degree of conformity.
• Knowing implies acceptance/assertion of a fact.
• Knowledge is an individual intellectual state of recognition of the truth.
• Knowledge is all inside the head - what lies outside in the material world are only the appearances.

Criticism of Plato's theory of knowledge

• Plato was critical of his own philosophy.
• The main difficulties are explaining how the Forms are related to each other and to things that exemplify them.
• Another difficulty is understanding how things “participate'' in the Forms.
• Aristotle called “the third man argument”: if the Form of Man is the thing that all men resemble, is it not just another man?

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• General terms are relational.
• Terms such as “tall”, “short”, “heavy”, “light” seem to have no absolute meaning.
• There can be no Form of tallness, since the same individual would be “tall” compared to one individual, and “short” to another.

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• A realist approach to universals implies that classes themselves, are independent objects of knowledge.

Aristotle

• We perceive the world through our senses but realize that our perceptions are only partial representations of reality because the world is constantly changing from potentiality into actuality.
• We have to use reason to arrive at the unchanging qualities of a thing.
• Firstly by categorising all knowledge at its lowest level as contingent, then universal or genus, and finally essential or species.
• Essential properties can also be inductively arrived at by understanding the four causes (reasons) that give rise to existence.
• Aristotle agrees with Plato that particulars cannot be objects of knowledge, but thinks sense perception has to play a part in the acquisition of knowledge.
• Aristotle doesn't think Forms can exist independently of particulars. They are interdependent.
• Aristotle does not believe our knowledge of Forms is innate, depending on recollection.
• According to Aristotle, “the act of sense perception is of the particular but its content is Universal''.
• The lowest Form is a species, contained within a higher Form (its genus).
• To appreciate this we must understand the difference between a definition and a description.

Aristotelian epistemology

• Attributes are essential to a geometrical figure being that figure, and more properties can be logically deduced.
• Aristotle appreciates that we cannot start by defining an existent species in the way that we can define a mythical creature like a winged horse, but he thinks that there is a defining attribute, and by observing the individuals, this can be discovered.
• This process of making general assertions about properties by appealing to evidence from observation of particulars, is known as induction.
• It is only if causal connection can be established that it becomes justifiable .
• Aristotle emphasized that we must observe the plain fact in order to show it is a reasoned fact, although the fact and its reason may be apprehended simultaneously.
• Aristotle's answer to how we know that we have obtained knowledge is that we know this by intuition or nous.
• Nous is a superior kind of apprehension.
• It is more reliable than deduced, scientific knowledge, since truth is known directly.

Summary

• Forms have an objective existence.
• Forms cannot exist without particulars.
• Knowledge is gained with the help of the sense perception of particulars.
• Deduction and Observation helps to discover essential properties by showing the plain facts.
• Nous (intuition) reveals causes of associations.
• Empirical inquiry can give us knowledge which is certain.
• Aristotle accepted knowledge was connected to truth, to belief, and to justification.
• Aristotle writes that “to speak the truth is simply to say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not; and to speak falsely is to say of what is, that it is not, or of what is not, that it is''.
• Aristotle emphasizes the need for extensive observation.

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• Knowledge comes when we know the cause of something.
• We must study hard to find the connection between what we find and its cause.

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• It is possible to believe that neither is correct and that talk about “the ultimate real features of the universe'' is idle.

The doctrine of the four causes

• There are four general kinds of cause: material, formal, efficient or motive, and final.
• The material cause is the stuff of which something is composed.
• The formal cause is the shape, pattern, composition, or structure of something.
• The efficient or motive cause is the initiator of the process.
• The final cause is the goal or end of something.

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• Material cause of motor tire: rubber with chemical additives, with steel wire reinforcing, and a steel rim.
• Formal cause of motor tire: patterned on a circle, about 20 centimeters deep, with a textured surface.
• Efficient cause of motor tire: melting and molding rubber produces it.
• Final cause of motor tire: producing a safe, smooth car/road interface.

Metaphysical implications of the doctrine of the four causes

• It is not, as Plato believed, a mystical communion with Forms can achieve in full.
• We can't understand the objects that happen by accident since they do not happen in accordance with causal laws.
• Knowledge objects are things that are fixed by relations, and these things are ordinary physical objects.
• There is no hierarchy of being, but the physical objects of knowledge are all there is.
• “All things that come to be come to be by some agency and from something, and come to be something''.
• Change does not involve bringing together formless matter with matter-less form.
• Change occurs always on something that is already a combination of form and matter.
• Matter is potentiality, and form is actualized matter.
• All things, says Aristotle, are involved in processes of change, with a power to become what its form has set as its end.
• This self-contained end of anything Aristotle called its entelechy.
• There is a striving to achieve ends that reveal one's internal nature.
• If everything were involved in change, everything would partake of potentiality.
• To explain motion, Aristotle spoke of the Unmoved Mover.

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• Substances are beings which have fulfilled their entelechies.
• According to Aristotle, the foundations of experience are the first substances through their form (the universal) in which the universal is expressed.

The Unmoved Mover

• The Unmoved Mover does not mean the same thing as a first mover.
• Nor is the Unmoved Mover a creator.
• Aristotle introduces the Unmoved Mover as the “reason for'' or the “principle of '' motion.
• It is the actual and the eternal principle of motion.
• The Unmoved Mover is found within the world, and makes the world an intelligible order.

Critical observations

• We can object to the assumption that reason is an infallible guide to the causes of in the world.
• Both Descartes and Locke regarded mathematical knowledge as the paradigm of knowledge.
• Classifications may help scientists to discover unknown species.
• Classifications of plant and animal life are based on empirical facts, not on reasoned facts.
• Neither Plato nor Aristotle considered the possibility that knowledge might be justified in different ways.
• All knowledge had to be logically necessary and beyond any doubt.
• Knowledge of a thing would be to link various evident facts.

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• Aristotle did not consider the possibility that knowledge might be justified in different ways.