Introducing Philosophy E-Book

Dave Robinson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Introducing...
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 124

Beschreibung

Philosophers have always enjoyed asking awkward and provocative questions, such as: What is the nature of reality? What are human beings really like? What is special about the human mind and consciousness? Are we free to choose who we are and what we do? Can we prove that God exists? Can we be certain about anything at all? What is truth? Does language provide us with a true picture of the world? How should we behave towards each other? Do computers think? Introducing Philosophy is a comprehensive graphic guide to the thinking of all the significant philosophers of the Western world from Heraclitus to Derrida. It examines and explains their key arguments and ideas without being obscure or solemn. Lively and accessible, it is the perfect introduction to philosophers and philosophical ideas for anyone coming to the subject for the first time.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184046-853-3

Text copyright and illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and artist have asserted their moral rights.

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Questions

What is Philosophy?

Theocracies

The Greeks

The Milesians’ Big Question

Pythagoras and Mathematics

Heraclitus and the World in Flux

Parmenides

Zeno’s Paradox of Motion

Empedocles and the Four Elements

The Atomists

Introducing Socrates

Cultural Relativism

Protagoras the Sophist

Socratic Dialogue

Condemned to Death

Plato and the Philosopher Kings

The Doctrine of Innatism

The Ideal Forms

The Parable of the Cave

Philosophical Experts

Aristotle the Teacher

Deductive or Syllogistic Logic

Induction and Science

Final Causes

Souls and Substances

The Ethics of Moderation

Taking the Blame

Platonist Dreamers and Aristotelian Realists

Interlude: A Brief History

The Epicureans – “Cultivate Your Garden”

The Stoics

Sceptics and Cynics

More Short History

Christianity Arrives

The Church Fathers

The Problem of Evil

St Anselm’s Proof

Abelard’s Nominalism

Aquinas and Natural Theology

Ockham’s Razor

Renaissance Humanism

Erasmus the Sceptic

Political Theorists

The Social Contract Theory

Bacon’s Philosophy of Science

Origins of Modern Philosophy

Scientific Doubt

Cogito Ergo Sum

Clear and Distinct Ideas

Descartes’ Legacy

Spinoza’s Questions

Spinoza’s Monism

Leibniz and the Monadology

Voltaire and the Enlightenment

Locke and British Empiricism

Berkeley’s Idealism

Hume and Empirical Scepticism

The Problem of Causation

Moral Scepticism

Rousseau’s Primitive State of Innocence

The General Will

Kant’s Response to hume

Mental Structures Precede Experience

Phenomenal and Noumenal Worlds

Categorical Imperatives

Hegel’s Dialectic

Dialectical Logic

Human Consciousness and Knowledge

Relative and Absolute knowledge

The State and the End of History

Schopenhauer’s Concept of Will

Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ

Beyond Good and Evil

Postmodern Forecast

Eternal Recurrence

Kierkegaard’s Christian Existentialism

The Leap of Faith

From Idealism to Materialism

Marx’s Dialectical Materialism

A Philosophy of Economics

Surplus Value

The End of Capitalism

The Prophet Marx

Utilitarianism: The Moral Science

Public Happiness

The Tyranny of the Majority and Pluralism

Origins of American Philosophy

No Government is the Best Government

Emerson: The Knowledge that Lies Beyond

Pragmatism

C.S. Peirce

Semiotics

William James

John Dewey

Democracy

Neo-Pragmatists

The Philosophical Avalanche

Introduction to 20th Century Philosophy

Origins of Phenomenology

Links to Psychology and Mathematics

The Method of Reductions

Heidegger: The Quest for Being

Nothingness and Inauthenticity

Sartre’s Existentialism

Freedom and Bad Faith

Authentic Political Life

Camus and the Absurd

Analytical Philosophy: The Problem of Mathematics

Frege and Demystified Maths

The Mystery Remains

Meaning and Reference

Russell’s Logical Atomism

Logical Analysis

The Logical Positivists

A.J. Ayer’s Logical Positivism

Testing for Meaning

Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism

The Meaning of Meaning

Language Games

Private Thoughts

Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious

Ordinary Language Philosophy

The Ghost in the Machine

The Philosophy of Science

The Induction Method

Falsification Theory

Thomas Kuhn: The Paradigm Shift

Epistemological Anarchism

From Modern to Postmodern

The Three Big “IFS” of Postmodernism

Nietzsche: The Delusion of Truth

Language and Reality

A System of Signs

Structuralists

Derrida and Deconstruction

Logocentrism

The Inexistent Self

The End of Grand Narratives

Foucault: Power Plays

A World of Hyperreality

What About Science?

The Realist Viewpoint

Western Philosophy at a Glance

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

QUESTIONS

Most people are usually too busy to go in for the sort of thinking usually called “philosophical”. This is because they have to spend their time struggling for existence or because they rather enjoy living lives of undisturbed routine. But, on rare occasions, a few awkward and irritating individuals with time on their hands ask deceptively simple questions which never seem to have simple answers.

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF REALITY? WHAT ARE HUMAN BEINGS REALLY LIKE?

WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT HUMAN MINDS AND CONSCIOUSNESS?

CAN WE BE CERTAIN ABOUT ANYTHING AT ALL?

ARE THERE OBVIOUS DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VALID AND IMPROPER ARGUMENTS? WHAT IS TRUTH? WHAT IS MEANING?

HOW SHOULD WE BEHAVE TOWARDS EACH OTHER AND HOW SHOULD WE ORGANIZE SOCIETY? ARE GOVERNMENTS A GOOD IDEA?

ARE WE REALLY FREE TO CHOOSE WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO? IS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLWDGE BETTER THAN OTHER KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE?

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Questions of philosophy might not appear to have much to do with everyday survival. But philosophers still look for convincing answers. Sometimes they get them, often they don’t.

BUT THE QUESTIONS, ONCE ASKED, SEEM NEVER TO GO AWAY. ORIGINALLY, “PHILOSOPHERS” WERE JUST INDIVIDUALS WHO ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT EVERYTHING. NOWADAYS, PHILOSOPHY TENDS TO GET CLASSIFIED MORE RIGOROUSLY.

Some philosophers believe that philosophy must evolve out of argument and debate, others that it can only ever be produced from deductive reasoning.

SOME PHILOSOPHERS BELIEVE THAT PHILOSOPHY CAN MAKE REAL PROGRESS IN THE HUNT FOR KNOWLEDGE.

OTHERS SAY THAT IT IS “THINKING ABOUT THINKING” AND DOES NO MORE THAN HELP TO CLARIFY IDEAS AND REMOVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS.

But all of them believe that philosophers are obliged to provide some kind of explanation, proof or evidence for their ideas. And this obligation marks the one obvious difference between philosophy and religion.

THEOCRACIES

The Ancient Egyptians were very good at maths and at building geometric tombs, but they’re not famous for philosophy. Their religious explanations of things are elaborate and colourful but unconvincing in philosophical terms. The Babylonians were likewise wonderful mathematicians and astronomers.

BUT THEY TOO APPEAR SATISFIED WITH MYTHICAL ANSWERS TO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS.

Theocratic societies governed by priestly castes are usually static and monopolize thought. They insist on orthodox explanations and actively discourage independent and unconventional ideas. Today’s beliefs must always be like yesterday’s.

THE GREEKS

The Ancient Greeks invented philosophy, but no-one really knows why. The Greeks were a great trading nation who dominated much of the eastern Mediterranean and borrowed myths and mysticism as well as architecture and mathematics from their neighbours. But some worrisome Greek philosopher-scientists thought there just had to be some kind of underlying order or logic for the way things are. They were not willing to accept religious explanations – for Instance, thinkers like Xenophanes (c. 560–478 B.C.).

IT IS NAIVE TO WORSHIP THE GODS BECAUSE THEY ALL BEHAVE IRRATIONALLY AND IMMORALLY. IF HORSES HAD HANDS AND COULD DRAW, THEY WOULD DRAW PICTURES OF GODS LIKE HORSES.

So the first Greek philosophers looked for answers which we would now call “scientific” rather than “religious”.

THE MILESIANS’ BIG QUESTION

The first real philosophers were some eccentric Greeks who lived in Miletus, a colony on what is now the Turkish coast, in the 6th century B.C. They asked The One Big Question – what is reality made of? Actually, it’s a very strange question to ask. Most people would say that the world is made up of lots of different things, because it looks that way. But these Milesians didn’t accept that what you see is necessarily the same as what is true.

EVERYTHING IS MADE OF WATER. IT IS MADE OF AIR. THERE IS A SORT OF FUNDAMENTAL “STUFF” FROM WHICH EVERYTHING IS CREATED AND TO WHICH IT MUST EVENTUALLY RETURN.

Anaximander also thought that the earth was like a large stone column. Not much is known about any of these strange early philosopher-scientists, except that their science was almost wholly cerebral and not experimental. But they would never accept answers which relied merely on supernatural explanations.

PYTHAGORAS AND MATHEMATICS

Pythagoras (571–496 B.C.) asked the same One Big Question, but emerged with a very different answer. He thought that the answer was mathematics. He lived on the island of Samos, before he emigrated with his disciples to Croton in southern Italy. He was a vegetarian who believed in reincarnation and declared that eating beans was sinful. He and his disciples worshipped numbers and thought that the world was made of them, a truth most obviously revealed by ratios, squares and right-angled triangles. Pythagoras’ big breakthrough was to recognize that mathematical truths had to be proved rather than just accepted. His number mysticism looks to us very odd. He declared that “Justice” was the number 4, because it was a square number. He was finally shocked by his discovery of “irrational” numbers like Pi and √2.

THE RATIO OF THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF A CIRCLE TO ITS DIAMETER IS – APPROXIMATELY 3,141 … APPROXIMATELY? THIS SUGGESTS THAT THE WORLD ISN’T AT ALL MATHMEMATICALLY NEAT AND PERFECT.

HERACLITUS AND THE WORLD IN FLUX

Heraclitus, who lived circa 500 B.C., would have been more tolerant of an irrational universe. His nickname was “The Rudder” because he maintained that everything in the world is always changing and in a constant state of conflict. He illustrated this by a famous saying.

YOU CAN NEVER STEP INTO THE SAME RIVER TWICE.

Cratylus (c. 400 B.C.), his student, went further.

YOU CAN’T STEP INTO THE SAME RIVER EVEN ONCE.

But Heraclitus is often misunderstood: his view of the universe is really one of underlying unity and consistency. The knowledge that we get from our senses, and foolishly believe in, is inevitably “observer-relative”.

A mountain goes both up or down depending on where you are standing at the time. But that’s what mountains do.

THE PATH UP AND THE PATH DOWN IS ONE AND THE SAME.

If a river didn’t change all the time, it wouldn’t be a river. But nevertheless, we still know that’s what it is. So Heraclitus may have been suggesting that true knowledge comes from thinking with the mind, not from looking at things. His emphasis on accelerated change may also be why his contribution to the One Big Question was that the world was ultimately made of fire – something that is always changing and yet still uniquely itself.

PARMENIDES

Parmenides of Elea (515–450 B.C.) in southern Italy wrote a long poem about the power of logic and knowledge. He agreed with Heraclitus that empirical knowledge was unreliably subjective. This meant that human beings had only reason to rely on if they wanted to discover any permanent truths about the world.

FOR IT IS THE SAME THING TO THINK AND TO BE.

By employing strict logical argument he produced an interesting idea about Time: all that actually exists is the immediate present. Talk about the past and the future is just talk – neither has any real existence. Parmenides is still rather admired by philosophers because he was always prepared to accept any conclusions produced by rigorous deductive argument, however odd they might seem.

ZENO’S PARADOX OF MOTION

His student Zeno (490–430 B.C.) is famous for inventing paradoxes which explore the often puzzling relationships that exist between space and time. The most famous concerns a race between Achilles and a tortoise. Achilles sportingly gives the tortoise a head start which is proportionate to his slowness. But Achilles finds that he can never reach his reptilian opponent.

IF ACHILLES IS TO GET FROM A TO THE FINISHING POST B, HE MUST FIRST REACH POINT C, THE STARTING-POINT OF THE TORTOISE. BUT BY THIS TIME THE TORTOISE WILL HAVE MOVED TO POINT D, AND WHEN ACHILLES GETS THERE, FRUSTRATINGLY, THE TORTOISE WILL HAVE MOVED TO POINT E, AND SO ON …

The tortoise will always be a little bit ahead of Achilles, and is uncatchable. It’s an argument that still worries some philosophers, mathematicians and physicists. There is also a point to these puzzles. Zeno is suggesting that real motion and change are impossible – the view held by his master Parmenides.

EMPEDOCLES AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS

Empedocles (490–430 B.C.) lived in the Greek colony of Sicily. He was a doctor who produced his own answer to the One Big Question.

THE WORLD IS MADE OF EARTH, AIR, FIRE AND WATER. IT IS RULED BY THE TWO FORCES OF LOVE AND STRIFE, OR ATTRACTION AND REPULSION. THE FOUR ELEMENTS WERE HELD TO BE THE BASIC SUBSTANCES UNTIL MEDIEVAL TIMES.

Introducing these new forces was a new attempt to explain how compounds are made and destroyed. His physics may have led him to believe in a constant cycle of destructive and constructive reincarnation. He claimed to have already been “a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a sea-fish” before he became Empedocles. He ended his life by jumping into the Mount Etna volcano, perhaps as a demonstration of his philosophy.

THE ATOMISTS

Anaxagoras (500–428 B.C.) explained how it is that you are what you eat. Everything is a mixture. So there are portions of blood, flesh, bone, hair and nails in wheat, which explains how food makes human bodies.

ULTIMATELY, THERE IS A PIECE OF EVERYTHING IN EVERYTHING ELSE, AND EVERYTHING THEREFORE CONSISTS OF AN INFINITE NUMBER OF SMALL THINGS.

Democritus the Atomist (460–370 B.C.) was a contemporary of Socrates and is famous for his conjectural views about matter which startlingly anticipate the theories of 20th century atomic physicists.

THERE MUST BE TINY THINGS THAT FINALLY CANNOT BE “CUT” ANY FURTHER, OTHERWISE MATTER COULD NOT EXIST. THESE “UNCUTTABLES” OR “ATOMS” MOVE, COLLIDE, FORM NEW COMPOUNDS AND ARE INDIVISIBLE, ALL OF WHICH EXPLAINS THE OBJECTIVE QUALITIES OF THE WORLD LIKE WEIGHT, SHAPE AND SIZE. OTHER QUALITIES LIKE SMELL ONLY COME INTO BEING WHEN THE ATOMS OF AN OBJECT INTERACT WITH THE ATOMS OF THE HUMAN NOSE.

INTRODUCING SOCRATES

All these theories of mind and the ultimate nature of the world are known as “pre-Socratic”. What is remarkable about these conjectures is how close some of them got to 20th century scientific theory. They got to this stage, not by using particle accelerators, but just by thinking very hard.

Socrates (470–399 B.C.) lived in 5th century B.C. Athens, a small “city-state” with a powerful Mediterranean empire. Many Athenians were slave-owners, which gave them plenty of leisure time in which to invent things like drama, history, astronomy and philosophy. They thought they were the most civilized nation on earth, and they probably were.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Herodotus (484–424 B.C.) the historian had travelled extensively beyond Greece and made some startling discoveries about the beliefs and behaviour of other societies. Sophist philosophers like Protagoras (490–420 B.C.) saw the full implications of this. It led him to ask some worrying questions.

IF OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IN DIFFERENT THINGS TO YOU, HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT YOUR BELIEFS ARE RIGHT? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT ANYONE’S BELIEFS ARE RIGHT?

It’s always easy to believe that your beliefs are “natural” when they are only “cultural”. So, the Sophists changed the subject of philosophical investigation from the One Big Question to different ones about human beings and their societies.

PROTAGORAS THE SOPHIST

Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things” – which means that there are no objective truths, only limited human beliefs. This makes him sound very relativist and even postmodern. He also claimed that philosophy was really no more than rhetoric or the art of verbal persuasion (a useful skill to have in debates) and that learning this skill made his students “good men”.

WE ARE CALLED “SOPHISTS” BECAUSE WEARE PAID TO TEACH THIS SKILL OF WISDOM. AND THAT’S WHY WE HAVE SOPHISTRY! YOU ANNOY ME NO END. THERE’S A LOT MORE TO PHILOSOPHY THAN VERBAL TRICKS. KNOW THYSELF.