Beginner's Guide to Philosophy

Logic

• Logic is divided into two categories:
  • The art of thinking and becoming a better thinker.
    • "Logic, or the Art of Thinking" by Arnauld and Nicole (17th century) is a manual for rational thinking.
    • Aims to help readers cultivate true beliefs and avoid false ones.
    • Modern update: critical thinking textbooks.
    • Fallacies are bad patterns of reasoning.
      • Not every fallacious argument has a false conclusion.
      • Fallacious reasoning doesn't reliably lead from truth to truth.
      • Example: Guilt by association.
        • Associating a belief with a bad person doesn't make it false.
        • Focus on relevant evidence to determine if a belief is true or false.
        • Understanding logic helps in becoming a better thinker.
    • Cognitive biases.
      • Bad heuristics that we use to determine if something is true or false.
      • Recognizing cognitive biases improves thinking.
      • Relevant to philosophy and other fields.
  • Formal or mathematical system.
    • Becomes its own subject in the 19th century.
    • Medieval logicians focused on the structure of arguments.
    • Aristotle: the form of the argument rather than the content of argument.
    • Most philosophers today use the term logic, they are talking about formal logic.
    • Flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries.
    • Gottlob Frege: Inventor of Begriffsschrift (concept script).
      • Formal notation to represent arguments, especially in mathematics.
      • Arguments translated into formal representation to assess validity.
    • Originally aimed to provide grounding for mathematics.
      • Difficulties arose due to Russell's Paradox and Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
      • Russell's Paradox showed contradictions in Frege's system.
      • Gödel's incompleteness theorem states that some mathematical truths cannot be proven.
  • Formal logic is useful for modeling philosophically interesting concepts
    • Modal, temporal, epistemic, fuzzy logics, etc.
  • Paradoxes: absurd conclusion from plausibly true premises and reliable inference rules.
    • Reveal problems in our reasoning.
    • Example: The Liar's Paradox.
      • "This sentence is false."
      • Leads to circular reasoning.
    • Accepting common inference rules like modus ponens leads to the principle of explosion
      • Principle of explosion: arriving at a contradiction means you can prove any sentence.
    • Paradoxes tell us something important about our language or logic, but what they tell us is debated.

Metaphysics

• Metaphysics studies the nature of reality.
• Topics include: truth, identity, endurance, necessity, contingency, existence of God, and the relationship between the mental and the physical.
• Focus: nature of truth and the problem of universals.
  • Nature of Truth
    • Philosophers have felt they had to address truth.
    • Early philosophers didn't go into much detail on truth, it was taken for granted that it was obvious.
    • Aristotle's definition: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what it is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true."
      • Conditions under which something is true or false but doesn't say much about the nature of truth.
    • Eventually, philosophers developed theories of truth.
      • Correspondence theory of truth.
        • A sentence is true when it corresponds to reality.
        • Similar to what Plato and Aristotle said.
        • Associated with realism (mind-independent truths).
      • Verification theory of truth.
        • A sentence is true when it has been verified.
        • Associated with anti-realism (before verification, neither true nor false).
      • Pragmatist theory of truth.
        • Truth means that a belief is useful for achieving practical ends.
        • Associated with American pragmatists like C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
      • Coherence theory of truth
        • A sentence is true just when it coheres with some privileged set of beliefs.
        • Associated with idealism (all of reality fundamentally is mental).
        • Associated with German philosophers Kant and Hegel.
      • Deflationary theory of truth
        • Truth isn't a property that has a nature.
        • It plays a logical or functional role in our language but doesn't pick out anything significant in the world.
  • Universals
    • Dividing the world into Individuals and universals
    • Carl and Bark (cats) are individuals.
      • Discrete and distinct things.
      • Can interact with physically and directly.
    • They have things in common. Namely, they are both black and they're both cats.
      • Classifying Carl and Bark means they belong to a class called cats.
      • Carl and Bark both instantiate a common property that we will call the universal.
      • They instantiate or participate in the universal of cat.
    • The idea of universals associated with Plato's theory of forms. Forms called universals.
      • Forms are timeless, eternal, and unchanging.
      • Live in Platonic Realm. These are abstract objects.
    • Aristotle agreed there were universals, but they existed in objects that instantiated them.
    • Nominalists don't believe in universals or properties. No such thing as abstract objects.
      • Based on principle of simplicity.
      • William of Ockham: universals are incoherent.
    • Universals according to Ockham, exist, when there is an act of the mind, which thinks of two or more objects.
    • Nominalists tend to say properties don't exist in objects or another realm; they only exist when we make them up.
    • Buddhist philosophers believe everything is temporary, and nothing is eternal, so there cannot be universals.

Epistemology

• Epistemology: the study of knowledge (from Greek word "episteme").
• Fundamental question: What is knowledge?
• JTB (justified true belief) theory of knowledge (traced back to Plato).
• Many have accepted some version arguing over the nature of justification.
• 20th century arguments against JTB theory (ie: Edmund Gettier's paper).
  • Gettier cases had a satisfaction of JTB, but philosophers didn't consider it real knowledge.
  • Cases centered on epistemic luck, an alignment of justification and truth that was just lucky.
  • JTB theory is insufficient. Especially in English-speaking world, cases are called the Gettier problem.
• Dharmakirti raises similar problems for knowledge theory in India in the 8th century.
• Peter of John of Salisbury, Italian philosopher, raises similar points in 14th century.
• More fundamental epistemological problem: is it possible to know anything at all?
  • Skeptics argue no.
  • Philosophical skeptics deny the possibility of knowledge.
  • If you say knowledge is impossible, someone can ask, "Do you know that?"
    • If you answer yes, it contracts the position.
    • If you answer no, it undermines the position.
  • Skeptics try to hedge their position.
  • Pyrrhonist school of Greek philosophy taught followers to suspend judgment (not believe anything).
  • Academic skepticism also exists.
• Modern era has a turn in skepticism.
  • Instead of viewing skepticism as a position, philosophers used doubt as a tool for inquiry.
  • René Descartes: Uses method of radical doubt to find certainty. If he can doubt a belief, he discards it.
    • Descartes' epistemological project: foundationalism.
    • "I think, therefore I am": Inference Descartes cannot doubt.
    • The existence of his own mind proves a foundation for Descartes.
  • David Hume used skepticism differently; He believed all knowledge was based on experience.
    • Uses skeptical methodology to examine ideas and see if they can be constructed out of base experiences.
    • If said construction is not possible, the belief is discarded and meaningless.
    • Hume doesn't believe in induction for the belief that the future will be like the past.
    • Hume doesn't believe in causation.
    • Hume doesn't believe in the existence of a stable self.

Ethics

• Ethics is the study of right and wrong.
• Three major schools of ethics:
  • Consequentialists: assess rightness or wrongness based on consequences.
    • Have theory of value to determine good or bad consequences.
    • Utilitarians (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer) follow Hedonism: all good is pleasure and all bad is pain.
    • Utilitarianism: moral theory to maximize pleasure.
  • Deontologists: use a law concession of ethics.
    • Come up with rules for classes of actions.
    • Immanuel Kant: moral law deduced from principles of rationality.
    • Moral law knowable because of rationality.
  • Virtue ethics: focuses on character and development of virtue.
    • How to be a good human being.
    • Rightness or wrongness of actions is secondary.
    • Emphasizes focusing on self-development in an ethical manner.
    • Popular in ancient Greece and Rome and Confucian tradition.
    • Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: Outlines theory of virtue and discusses virtues such as justice, courage, prudence, temperance, and what it means to be a good friend.
    • Aristotle believed vicious people cannot be friends.
    • Theory fell out of favor and then came back in 1950, with more ethicists working today.
• People may think ethics are all subjective, but they are probably moral nihilists
  • People can become subjectivists or moral nihilists when doubting ethics.
    • Subjectivists claim right for different people.
    • Moral nihilists claim there is no such thing as right or wrong.
• Nietzsche is associated with nihilism.
  • Whether or not Nietzsche is a proper nihilist is contested, but highly critical of conventional morality.
• Mackie writes Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
  • Mackie argues from strangeness/queerness.
    • Moral properties are strange because lead to objective prescriptions of action.
    • Better to abandon them in our ontology.
• We leave the realm of ethics and are asking foundational questions about ethics.
• The field for asking questions about the language of ethics, epistemology of ethics, and the metaphysics of ethics is meta-ethics.

Political Philosophy

• Political philosophy is closely related to ethics.
• Ethics focuses on individuals; political philosophy tries to deal with human beings at a larger scale.
• Problem of justice, related to the distribution of wealth, is a major issue.
• Some philosophers say the state should redistribute wealth to make equal, and others disagree because of the infringement on certain rights.
  • John Rawls vs Robert Nozick.
    • Both 20th-century philosophers present at Harvard at same time.
    • Nozick develops libertarian view of justice in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia."
      • Sometimes called entitlement theory and emphasizes historical theory.
      • To figure out if current affairs is just, we have to go back and track steps of history where property was acquired acquired and transferred.
      • If something unjust happened, has it been rectified?
    • Rawls, in "A Theory of Justice," bases theory on the veil of ignorance.
      • A group of people are deliberating about what a just society would look like.
      • They don't know who they're going to be in that society. So, they don't know if they'll be men or women, what religion they'll be, if they'll be rich or poor, how smart they'll be, or anything like that.
      • Society that is very different than Nozick's is constructed as a result.
  • Nozick is okay with vast inequality if things come about justly.
  • Rawls thinks all inequality should be justifiable to those who are least well off.
  • Nozick bases a lot of his stuff on property rights, and Rawls thinks that even though you're going to have a lot of rights in his society, perhaps even more rights than we currently enjoy, property rights are something that could be overridden in the name of justice.
• Another foundational issue is democracy.
• Most people take for granted that democracy is good; however, in philosophy, this is a minority position.
• Ancient Greece birth democracy, but Plato and Aristotle were anti-democratic thinkers.
  * Plato thinks that elite should rule and they should be philosopher kings
  * Elite are gifted and they look after the city
  * Aristotle has a classification of different kinds of governments, that includes deviant governments, such as democracy.
• The concern by Plato and Aristotle is if you believe in majority rule, you actually allow tyranny of the majority.
• There is also elitism and people believe the citizens are not capable to rule themselves.
• There exists critique of democracy from the anarchist tradition.
  * Historically anarchy has been identified as tyranny and is just another form of tyranny.
  * However, modern anarchy advocates that there are democratic facets to anarchy that outweigh certain qualms of democratic methodology.