© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This book contains transcripts, somewhat enhanced afterwards, of a series of 15 TV programmes that ran on the BBC in 1987 (although they were recorded over the preceding two years). In each programme, the attention was on one (sometimes two or three) philosophers, with host Bryan Magee (sometime broadcaster and academic at Oxford, Yale and London) running a dialogue with a specialist on that philosopher (or group) being covered. In the case of Schopenhauer (his own special topic) he was partly an interviewee himself.
The programmes themselves were treated as 'first draft's; improvements - in some cases significant ones - were made between recording and publication of this book.
The series only covered a selected subset of the philosophers that could have been included. However the biggest names in Western philosophy are all there. The series did not cover any Eastern philosophy.
I received this book as a present from my parents soon after it came out (I had missed the TV series), but am ashamed to say I did not give it a lot of attention at that time, when I was always very busy with my IT consulting and other work. However in more recent years I have read and re-read it several times. I would have to admit that it has strongly coloured my approach to philosophy as a whole. I do like the rather irreverent line that Magee and some of his cronies take with the weaker points in some of the philosophers' systems (or non-systems).
Recently, there have been several uploads of the original TV discussions on YouTube. I've put in links to the first section of each programme. You will find many other relevant pages if you Google 'Magee <guest name> <philosopher name>'.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | 10 | Magee says that philosophy is a closed book to most people in the English-speaking world; it's "not part of the mental furniture". It has become hard for ordinary folks to access, having become specialized and academic. He says 'Anglo-Saxons' perhaps pride themselves on not being too concerned with abstract ideas. British education, in particular, is often accused of not carrying general education on for long enough. But with the many difficult issues of modern times, moral and political philosophy has become more relevant to many people. |
| 1 - | Plato (427-347 BC), with Myles Burnyeat | |
| YouTube | 14 | The pre-Socratics looked for "universal principles which would explain the whole of nature. Socrates, on the other hand, thought that what we most need is 'how we ought to live'. |
| 16 | "Socrates is a man who thought for himself and taught others to ..." | |
| 17 | Socrates (469-399 BC) said: Injustice harms the doer and justice benefits him. The only harm that matters to the good man is to his soul, or to his value. [RT: sounds like Chinese or Japanese 'face'.] | |
| But he gave no real answers about the meanings of 'beauty', 'courage', 'friendship' - or of 'justice' or 'knowledge'. | ||
| 18 | Socrates said "no-one does wrong willingly", because to be in full knowledge of the situation one needs 3 things: wisdom, courage and temperance. But no-one accepted this then (and certainly not now), as we do most things unconsciously and certainly without thinking them all through. [RT: and there are always 'ratbags'.] | |
| 20 | Plato: in a dialogue, 'conclusions' don't have any special status. They are merely staging posts on the road to further inquiries. | |
| 21 | Plato believed that knowledge was part of the essential nature of the soul, which exists before we are born. So knowledge is remembering some of this. [RT: Sure, our brains may not start with a blank sheet, like all animals. But what about 'constructed' knowledge?] | |
| 22 | We are very attached to the idea that by discussion we can get at the truth. | |
| 22-3 | Beauty, justice etc exist on their own and apart, "prior to all the just actions and just persons". So they are in some ideal world, the same as where Plato's Forms are (see below). | |
| 23 | The 'Theory of Forms' was by far Plato's most influential doctrine. They are the 'templates' for the ideal form of anything, e.g. types of thing, the essence of attributes. | |
| "The influence of Platonism on Christianity has been prodigious." [RT: well, Jonathan Sacks thinks Christianity is just "footnotes to Plato".] | ||
| The purpose of philosophy is to rehearse for death, because that's when the soul separates again from the body. | ||
| 24 | In his biggest work, namely the 'Republic'- which is on political theory - Plato divides the soul into 3 parts. [RT: Burnyeat doesn't say what these are, but other sources (e.g. Wikipedia) say they are the 'appetitive' (i.e. basic desires), the 'rational' (which seeks truth, and which controls the other 2), and the 'spirited' (which seeks victory and honour, and enforces the 'reason' proposed by the rulers, who Plato describes as 'Philosopher kings']. | |
| 27 | Plato's 'Parmenides' does has some old man criticizing Socrates who is advocating Plato's theory of Forms. [RT: So Plato is prepared to face some arguments against his own ideas.] | |
| In his 'Timaeus', Plato put forward a creation myth, with a 'Divine Craftsman' 'imposing order on disorder', which was more mathematical than the Genesis version in the Bible. He didn't believe it literally, but it could be justified as "a poetic way of explaining the intelligibilty of the world" (Magee). [RT: maybe the same words could apply to Genesis.] | ||
| 29 | In the 'Theaetetus' the question is "What is knowledge?". Three possible answers are given (and criticized), 'perception', 'true judgment' and 'true judgment with an account'. | |
| 30 | In Plato's days, many philosophers were 'materialists' in the sense that they thought that "everything - life, order, mind, civilization, art, nature - can be explained as the outcome of the movements of particles". Plato was opposed to this view. | |
| Aristotle (see next chapter) also opposed it, but he probably went too far to accord with what we now know in modern science. Platonism is much easier to reconcile; it has better sympathy between the 'material' and the 'ideal'. So Plato has had revivals whereas Aristotle got largely dropped after the reformation. [RT: with people like Galileo and Newton.] | ||
| 2 - | Aristotle (Ari, 384-322 BC), with Martha Nussbaum | |
| YouTube | 35 | Aristotle's general method of inquiry: 1) start by setting down the 'appearances' - not just perception; 2) see if it presents contradictions; 3) if so, decide which of our beliefs are more basic and central; preserve these and chuck the rest. |
| 36 | We mix experiences of our senses with "ordinary beliefs and sayings" - because perception, like belief, is interpretive. | |
| "A fundamental principle in Aristotle's thought (is) ... the Principle of Non-Contradiction." [RT: if some idea leads to 2 conclusions that can't both be true, then it's a bum idea.] | ||
| 37 | By making any definite statement, one is necessarily ruling something else out (e.g. the 'opposite' if one exists). | |
| 38 | No principle or foundation can stand "outside our discourse and our conceptual scheme". So Ari didn't approve of Plato's Forms. | |
| Ari claimed that ethics and politics don't have the same structure as the rest of science and philosophy. | ||
| Ari believed that we have a faculty by which we are equipped to have insight into the fundamental first principles - he called this 'nous', which was different from discursive reasoning. | ||
| 39 | Nussbaum: In recent thinking, 'nous' "is a kind of insight we get into the explanatory role, the fundamental status, of a principle by our experience of using it to give scientific explanations". | |
| 39 | Ari mapped out the separate sciences and named them; but his specialty was biology. 'Metaphysics' just means that he wrote it 'after' Physics. | |
| 40 | Nussbaum: What 'metaphysics' came to mean was "to pursue some perfectly general questions that might be asked about anything whatsoever. Questions about identity, continuity, logical form and so forth". (and, Magee added, space, time, matter, causality). | |
| What can be said about 'substance', when some things change their composition so much? A had two related questions: 1) "What are the more continuous, more persisting things on which we anchor our discourse about change, things which themselves persist while properties or attributes are changing?" and 2) "Which among the many properties that impress themselves on our senses are the most fundamental ones?" | ||
| Ari's search for identity involved concentrating on the fundamental attributes without which 'thing A' would be indistinguishable from 'thing B', or wouldn't exist. | ||
| 44 | "What a substance fundamentally is, is not some material stuffs or constituents, but rather a certain sort of order or structure." This is Ari's definition of Form. Some of this form is functional, i.e. what it 'does'. | |
| 45 | Identity persists despite changes in constituent material. Something that has been gradually but possibly totally cannibalized thing might still be 'the same' thing, because of its structure. [RT: e.g. the Frauenkirche in Dresden, or the Kinkakuji in Kyoto].] | |
| 46 | Unlike Plato, Ari makes the 'form' something immanent to the particular individual. [RT: but we are still aware, e.g., of 'doggyness'.] | |
| 47 | There isn't just one explanation possible for things; not all questioners want the same sort of explanation. Which of a potentially 'endless list' is best depends on what kind of explanation is needed for the current purpose. | |
| Ari's "4 becauses" ; Material (what makes it up), Formal (what's its structure), Efficient (how it reacts to various external influences) and Final (what's its use, or destiny - it's "for the sake of"). This last is what's called 'Teleological' - but Ari didn't mean it to imply some supernatural purpose. | ||
| 48 | 'Final Cause' was not meant to be mystical or magical - it comes just from observing how a thing acts and changes, and so allows the possibility of some prediction. This 'Final Cause' has later become a topic in itself - 'Teleology' - the study of ends, goals and purposes. | |
| Scholars who invoke Aristotle to claim that there are souls in everything "misunderstood the nature of teleological explanations". A only applies it to living beings. | ||
| 49 | What is the "animating principle", the "entelechy" of some thing? It's organization of its body. | |
| He used the word 'psuche' (from which we get psycho-) to mean 'principle of life', not 'soul' or 'spirit'. It's OK for non-living things to have a function, though - and says "if they had a soul, that's what it would be". | ||
| 50 | 'Perception' (i.e. our sensing of things) "is a function that's always constituted in matter, realized in some matter or other". | |
| 51 | Ari isn't concerned with "What's my duty?" or "What's moral?" - but "What is it to lead a good human life?" And that isn't a single measure like 'greatest good of the greatest number' - it has many dimensions. | |
| 52 | "The discrimination rests with the 'perception' of the situation, by which he means a responsive attunement to it in both thought and emotion." | |
| We can't be (as the Stoics were) self-contained moral entities. We live in an environment which buffets us about. The good life "has got to be vulnerable to many factors that we don't altogether control". | ||
| Nussbaum's criticism of Ari: He doesn't go far enough in talking about factors that are not under our control, or constituents of life that challenge all the others. For example, 'deep love' can threaten and oppose virtue. And he said nothing about erotic love. | ||
| 53 | Ari's politics were still based on very restricted citizenship; he didn't even want to include farmers, traders or sailors - or women, who he thought contributed no characteristics to their offspring. | |
| Aristotle's ethics are really only intended for a small number of elite leisured males, and might not apply if you are doing some debasing type of labour. | ||
| 54 | But he did strike a balance between over-simplifying and saying 'it's all too hard or confused'. | |
| 3 - | Mediaeval Philosophy, with Anthony Kenny | |
| YouTube | 59 | This chapter is different from the others. There's not so much of "what anyone said", more of history and "how they did their thinking". It covers a nearly 2000-year period between Aristotle and Descartes. Singled out are Augustine (354-430 AD) and Aquinas (1225-74). |
| 59-60 | Philosophers, then as now, fall into two classes; solitary introspective thinkers (e.g. Augustine) and university/monastery types (Aquinas). | |
| 60 | "Scholars to this day can find depths of meaning in (Aquinas' works)." [RT: But is that meaning good, helpful, valuable, useful - or just interesting, challenging, or maybe even dangerous?] | |
| [RT: Kenny seems to be almost rating philosophers on the comprehensiveness and word count of their works, rather than the quality of their insight.] | ||
| A characteristic is the technique of Disputation, a bit like a formal debate. The significance comes in seeing which arguments (for and against a proposition) are good and which not. | ||
| 61-3 | The re-discovery by the West and translation into Latin of the works of Aristotle kick-started the later philosophical activity; all European universities spoke church Latin. | |
| 63 | Earlier on, Plato was of more interest [RT: presumably because of the neo-Platonists in Alexandria]. Augustine was concerned to move to the Christian bible as the primary source of truth about the world. | |
| 64 | Mediaeval philosophers believed that the bible was all you needed for salvation. They started from the view that the teachings of the church were the ultimate authority. But many, including Aquinas, were also intellectually curious. | |
| 65 | They were also concerned with Logic. After this period (i.e. Christianity of the Middle Ages) we lost interest in logic until Frege, Russell and Whitehead. It was rather eclipsed by 'epistemology'. | |
| "The great question in recent years has been not 'What do you know?' but 'What do you mean?'." | ||
| 66 | And, "Why are we asking the question?" | |
| Were mediaeval philosophers primarily looking for ways to justify what they already believed in? | ||
| "What constitutes intellectual advance is the abandonment of untenable beliefs." | ||
| 67 | Aquinas held some theological beliefs and some scientific ones based on Aristotle, but he said that you couldn't prove anything for certain. | |
| 68-70 | Can the existence of God be proved by rational argument? Anselm (1033-1109) tried, his most famous attempt being the 'ontological' argument. This goes "If we define God as something that nothing else is greater than, then God can't exist just in the mind and not reality, because existing in both would be greater". Aquinas was not convinced by this argument. [RT: I'd ask "What do you mean by 'greater'?] | |
| 'Ontological' arguments stand in contrast to 'cosmological' ones, the latter being derived from observation of the universe. | ||
| 72 | The theory of a just war was an issue then as now. [RT: but they went ahead with the crusades.] | |
| 72-3 | For a time (late 1800s to mid 1900s) Aquinas was regarded as the RC church's official philosopher. Since then his influence has been diluted in the RC church, but other denominations have picked him up. | |
| 73 | Augustine saddled Christianity with the doctrine that no-one could achieve salvation without God's grace, which throws free will - and hence personal responsibility - into some doubt. | |
| Augustine saddled Christianity with the doctrine that no-one could achieve salvation without God's grace, which throws free will - and hence personal responsibility - into some doubt. | ||
| There are also problems with doctrines about an 'omniscient God'. | ||
| 4 - | Descartes (D, 1596-1650), with Bernard Williams | |
| YouTube |
79 | Descartes's (D's) aim was to find some method or basis on which knowledge could be advanced. After the Reformation (of the Christian church in the late 15th century), there was an outbreak of scepticism. Sceptics accused religion of being built on shaky grounds (although the church could always retort "so is any knowledge"); and they felt there were too many conflicting 'certainties'. |
| 79 | Meanwhile, teaching and intellectual life (e.g. universities) were under the thumb of an authoritarian church (in France, anyhow). | |
| 80 | D was concerned with finding a reliable method for establishing truth; (p 81) 'certainty' is just a state of mind. He "knew for certain that historical authority was not the same as first-order research and inquiry". | |
| 81 | D wanted to pre-empt the sceptics. His approach was the 'method of doubt'. This involved starting by emptying his mind of anything about which he had the slightest doubt. | |
| 82 | The Method of Doubt includes asking 'What could a malicious demon be fooling me about?' | |
| 84-5 | D says he's also sure he has got the idea of God, and since a lesser can't give rise to a greater, God must have given him that idea. | |
| 85 | D felt that God would be the Validator of his honest researches, and would not let him be deceived. | |
| D's arguments depended on any 'sensible' person, whatever their upbringing, believing in an omnipotent God. | ||
| 86 | The price for all this was the view that the material which is my body is not part of the quintessential me, i.e. that I have a separate soul, and 'mind' is fundamentally separate from 'matter' (this is 'Cartesian dualism'). [RT: and this in turn gives rise to the 'other minds' problem - how can we be sure that they exist?] | |
| 87 | In practice, we quite happily mix statements like "I am embarrassed", "I am thinking about Paris" and "I weigh 150 pounds". Some wag said the last one is like saying "On the way here I had a puncture", 'my body' being no more me than 'my car'. | |
| D concluded that the external world "takes up space and is susceptible to being treated by geometry". Other attributes, like colour, are more subjective. | ||
| 88 | D thought of identity as "history of space occupancy". | |
| 88 | 'Identity' can be maintained by "the same continuous history of space occupancy", e.g. if a candle melts. This sounds somewhat questionable, but it helps "establish the notion of a physical world which is fundamentally of a mathematical character". | |
| In this respect, D received better respect than Galileo, maybe because he didn't get pinged by the Inquisition. Francis Bacon also helped (in England at least). | ||
| 90-1 | Although D is a 'rational' philosopher (i.e. he got where he did by following arguments), he did realize that experiment would be needed in Physics. But one had to ask the right questions, not just blunder about. | |
| 91 | D wanted to free the process of science from theological constraints and interference. | |
| D himself seems to have genuinely believed in God. But despite invoking God to pre-empt sceptics and pacify priests, D made it easier for God to disappear from the world and people's understanding of it. | ||
| 92 | D failed to explain how mind could "push material objects around in space". | |
| Although Cartesian Dualism is now generally out of favour, 'subject v object' and 'knower v known' "are distinctions that it is simply impossible for us to do without". But the 'knower' is embodied, not pure spirit. So to distinguish 'mind' and 'body' can be accepted as a 'commonsense' model, but it doesn't make sense to make it such an absolute separation. | ||
| 93 | D has been criticized for his Cartesian Circle in regard to his belief in God as validator. | |
| 94 | Magee: "Any theory has to make room for itself." This disqualifies statements like "Philosophy is a class conspiracy" or "All statements are either tautologically true or empirically verifiable" (the latter statement isn't either of these 2 things!). | |
| D made "what can I know?" the central philosophical question for more than 200 years. | ||
| 95 | He also addressed the important question "what, after all, am I?" | |
| 5 - | Spinoza (1632-77) and Leibniz (1646-1716), with Anthony Quinton | |
| YouTube | 99 | Descartes' God is hardly a 'personal' God. |
| 100 | Descartes was 'saving the appearances' of the external world as we think of it, whereas Spinoza and Leibniz were in the business of seriously re-envisaging it in philosophical terms, beyond our everyday thinking. | |
| 101 | For Spinoza (Sp), there isn't "a Creator God, distinct from everything he creates", but just "everything that is, including mind, body, things". [RT: I think that's a Pantheist view?] | |
| 102 | Hence, there's no "supernatural realm". | |
| 102 | "There isn't anything that God isn't." If God is separate, he has boundaries, limits and hence is finite, not infinite. | |
| "Nature cannot be understood as a passive by-product of God's activity." This is unlike the orthodox Christian position. | ||
| 104 | This gets over Descartes' 'mind having effects on matter' problem. Since mind and matter are part of the same Universal Being, "that is why we perceive the regularities which give us the illusion of causal connection". | |
| What are 'things', then? Spinoza says that "temporary formations crop up like wrinkles in a cloth". In everyday life we take them as clear, identifiable items, but that's just our perception. These 'wrinkles' may have both a mental and a physical aspect, but these are not separate. | ||
| 105 | There's no place for 'immortality of the soul'; mind and body are inseparable. Same goes for free will in the sense of 'pure spontaneity', which is "an illusion engendered by not knowing what the causes of our actions are". | |
| Instead there is 'human bondage', which following 'active emotions' can help us escape. Discovering what are the hidden sources of our feelings and actions can be 'liberating', in the sense of freeing us from the frustration, rage and unhappiness "of being constrained by being at the mercy of forces we do not understand". | ||
| 106 | It's rather Stoic - "the world outside is not particularly interested in us, so we must diminish its power to make us suffer by controlling the emotions it excites in us". | |
| Spinoza is a 'pantheist', i.e. religious (unlike Hobbes), but without a personal God. That's not so different from Wordsworth (see p 107). | ||
| "We fail to recognize the genuineness of Sp's religious attitude because of Christian parochialism." | ||
| 106-7 | We (Christians) prefer a personal, wrathful, intrusive God - Spinoza's is more like Wordsworth's. | |
| 107 | In Spinoza's view, we don't expect nature to "love us back". | |
| Such pantheism is no less religious than Buddhism. But although Spinoza was brought up as a Jew, he doesn't have an 'Old Testament' God. But like in Judaism, you don't pray to God to do things for you (that's petitionary prayer). The key is 'grateful acceptance' rather than 'cringing mendicancy' [I love this!] | ||
| 108 | With Leibniz (Lz) the model is of lots of 'Monads' - these are proposed as indivisible units of which everything is composed. They are not like atoms - they are not material but are 'metaphysical points'. | |
| 109 | Leibniz thought that they have a limited mind-like nature, being 'aware' of other monads. Quinton was dubious about this, but Magee suggested it was not so different to the modern view that everything is energy. Quinton agreed that nature is a dynamic state of affairs, not a stiff "contraption requiring a push from outside". | |
| This sounds a bit like 'energy' in modern scientific theories. | ||
| "Nature ... is a dynamic state of affairs ... not a huge, stiff dead contraption requiring a push from outside." | ||
| 111 | It was Lz who proposed the division of statements into 'true by necessity', or 'analytic' statements (true by definition); and 'factually true', 'synthetic' statements (true only after the facts have been established by observation). | |
| 112 | But Lz held that only God necessarily exists, and He chooses "the best of all possible worlds". This also avoids Descartes' problem, as matter is just mind. | |
| 115 | Leibniz claimed to believe in free will, but again it seems more apparent than real. More generally, rationalism (which insists that everything can be explained) makes free will very difficult to include. | |
| 116 | After Kant, no philosopher (unless one counts Kirkegaard) put God as the central feature of their philosophy. | |
| 117 | Both Sp and Lz needed to find a place for religion in the world, but objected to a "Solomonic carve-up of the cosmic baby" (as proposed by Descartes) as the answer to reconciling new science and traditional religion. | |
| 6 - | Locke (1632-1704) and Berkeley (1685 - 1753), with Michael Ayers | |
|
YouTube | 120-3 | Magee: Locke's message always was: There's no such thing as 'immediate' knowledge of things, it's always mediated through our senses. [RT: but we rely on consensus and say that things really exist, to all intents and purposes.] So philosophical nit-picking is no ground for everyday living. [RT: because, the philosophical view is too individual-oriented.] |
| 122 | Locke (Lk): "The senses supply us with knowledge. They have their own independent authority." | |
| For Lk, 'thinking' is "fundamentally sensing. Whatever we are thinking about, if we are not actually perceiving it with our senses, we are having something like a sensation of it". | ||
| 123 | But the senses "give us limited knowledge". | |
| 124 | Lk distinguished 'immediate' and '(inter)mediate' effects; the latter are those where we only get an 'image'. | |
| 125 | This 'sensitive' knowledge brackets out theories about what really is there that is causing us to have these images. | |
| 127 | We can only recognize a 'substance' through 'multiple' effects. [RT: if we sense it repeatedly, or if lots of people get the same sense effect?] | |
| 128 | Boyle's corpuscular theory was one theory (as on p125) in Lk's time; Lk thought it was OK 'provisionally'. | |
| 129 | Regarding Newton's laws, Lk felt continuing speed and direction was 'intelligible' (to ordinary people), but the inverse square law was not. | |
| But Newton's laws describe 'how things behave', and don't claim to be 'explanations'. | ||
| 130 | Primary qualities (that don't depend on the observer) versus secondary qualities (like colour). | |
| Mathematical sciences are about our idea of things. | ||
| 131 | All we know is that there are things out there that affect us. | |
| 132 | We're either all 'material' which includes a mechanism for thinking [RT: like brain circuitry and neurons], or we are like Descartes says, a [RT: schizophrenic] thinking soul and non-thinking body. | |
| 132-3 | Lk said we must either be 'all material' or have a separate immaterial component that interacts with the material part (not like Descartes). | |
| 133 | Lk rejected Aristotle's 'natural kinds' (a pre-defined view of things, with clearly separate forms and sharp distinctions. It's we who apply the categorization to things in nature. | |
| 134 | Descartes-style dualism is inconsistent with a doctrine of immortality with reward and punishment in an afterlife, if it's only the soul that survives. It must be applied on a person-by-person basis. | |
| 136 | "Memory is the key to personal identity ... it's 'continuousness', an (interrupted) stream of consciousness)." | |
| Political institutions and ethical ideas are a bit like triangles - they can't be proved wrong. Lk thought they were natural, like the laws of property. | ||
| 137 | Lk's best asset was tolerance. We can't always rely on "borrowed opinion". No-one "knows it all". We all ought to have (or be given) time to think things out for ourselves | |
| Locke: "For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or the falsehood of all he condemns, or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness that we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others." | ||
| 138 | Lk was "the last great realist". Ayers thinks there is something "deeply wrong" with idealist philosophies [RT: I presume he means those which say matter isn't real - I agree!] | |
| 139 | Berkeley's (Bk's) main logical point was that "nothing in experience can ever give us a warrant for inferring the existence of something which is not experience". [RT: but it could be 'widely consensual experience.] | |
| Bk: "The only real agents or causes are spirits". | ||
| Earlier, the 'Cambridge Platonists' had proposed "a chain or ladder of Being, with Spirit on a higher 'ontological rung' than Matter". Bk was presumably fearing materialism as a challenge to a Theistic concept of God. | ||
| 140 | Bk: "The world as it appears to us (is) caused directly in our minds by God". | |
| 141 | Magee: Berkeley's view is "There is an infinite spirit, which is God. There are a number of finite spirits, and that's us. God made us, and is in communication with his world. It is God who gives us all the experiences we have. So what we call the world is God's language to us." Ayers: "And there's no need to postulate matter at all". [RT: it all sounds like the 'brain in a vat', or something out of the film 'The Matrix'. It may be perfectly internally consistent, and yet to deny matter seems against common sense.] | |
| 142 | When we're not looking at a table, "there is an idea of a table in God's mind". | |
| Bk's model may be daft, but it has triggered some modern scientific ideas, as claimed by Karl Popper in 'A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein'. | ||
| "Berkeley just wanted to 'chalk off' that mysterious independent 'reality'." | ||
| 7 - | Hume (1711-76), with John Passmore | |
|
YouTube | 146-50 | Hume demolished inference of 'cause' from repeated experiences of A being followed by B. There's no justification for deducing that "A causes B" - that's the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. Somewhat related to this is the problem of 'proof by induction'. |
| There should be an 'intermediary' that actually does the causing. [RT: might we not be able to find the 'mechanism' that does the causing?] | ||
| Observed patterns may only represent 'correlation'; and may cease to be valid either as time passes or limits are extended, e.g. 'black swans'. Our assumed 'uniformities' may change in the future (e.g. new treatment for a previously fatal disease) | ||
| "Something in our minds compels us to believe that some things are necessarily connected with other things." [RT: like Pavlov's dogs.] | ||
| "Judgments of probabilities ... are always founded on our belief in uniformities." | ||
| 149 | " 'Invariant conjunction' is not the same as 'causal conjunction'." | |
| 152 | Similar remarks apply to 'identity' and 'self'. If there is a gap in our experience of a thing (including of ourselves when we wake up after sleeping), are we the same person? [RT: like a computer I saw in Litvinov (Czech Rep) which had more replacement than original parts.] | |
| 153 | A word has no sense if it doesn't relate to some experience we have. | |
| 'Hume's Fork': Q1: "Do these ideas concern 'matters of fact' ... do they rest on observation and experience?" Q2: "Do they concern 'relations between ideas', as for example in mathematics or logic?" If the answer to both is 'no', the ideas are "sophistry and illusion", and we should " commit them to the flames". | ||
| Scepticism, the idea that one can't absolutely demonstrate the truth of anything, is self-defeating. But 'mitigated scepticism' should free us from dogmatism or fanaticism. | ||
| Hume's role in philosophy is as "a sweeper away of illusions". On the one hand, we can't "demonstrate the truth of most of the things we dearly believe"; on the other hand, it is impossible "to maintain a totally sceptical position". | ||
| 154 | "Superstitions are dangerous, but the beliefs of philosophers are at worst ridiculous." Magee commented that: Hume was showing how reason is, and was blowing many of its pretensions sky-high. (Both superstitions and 'reason' can lead to dangerous fanaticism). | |
| 156 | Hume: "There is no question of importance whose decision is not comprised in the science of man. Human beings matter more, physics is of secondary importance. Passmore: The emphasis of many philosophers has been on great abstractions, described as 'ultimate realities'; including 'humanity' rather than 'you and me'. | |
| Passmore: The emphasis of many philosophers has been on great abstractions, described as 'ultimate realities'; including 'humanity' rather than 'you and me'. [RT: Like Hegel, or Marx?] | ||
| 159 | 'Human nature' can't be ignored; "... the passions remain". This hasn't changed much since Roman times, as can be seen in Cicero or Tacitus. | |
| 161 | Induction is part of 'human nature'. Expectation of conformity to observed patterns exists in many animals too, but it isn't usually conscious. [RT: maybe except when learning? Pavlov's dogs again.] | |
| 162 | Like animals, humans are dependent on instincts as well as reasoning; as illustrated by the 'black swans' problem. | |
| 163 | Hume pointed the way to realization that science could be fallible. Most people thought Newton had 'cracked the code' for all time, but then along came Einstein. | |
| 165 | Oscar Wilde: "If we write intelligibly, we run the risk of being found out." | |
| Hume distinguished 'poetical enthusiasm' from 'serious conviction', but he never got round to explaining the difference. | ||
| Passmore: "the sceptic and the critic make awkward bedfellows". | ||
| 166 | Hume's continuing question to us is "Why is it still far better to rely on what scientists tell us [RT: despite the uncertainty involved], than on some silly ideas which someone thinks up as a best-selling piece of pseudo-science?" The answer must be in the scrutiny (like peer review) that is applied to scientific publications. [RT: of course, this process may still make mistakes.] | |
| 166-7 | Too many people see science as 'adding new certainties'. | |
| 167 | There are unimaginative arts people just as there are unimaginative scientists. Imagination is needed for most purposes [RT: including envisaging theories to be tested, or data to be collected.] | |
| Passmore: Hume is particularly disconcerting to those ... who are firmly convinced that there is no room for imagination in science. There are as many unimaginative novelists, artists or film directors as there are unimaginative scientists. | ||
| "There is not an absolute distinction between what we call 'bare facts' and 'theories'." | ||
| 8 - | Kant (1724-1804), with Geoffrey Warnock | |
|
YouTube | 174 | Kant introduced the concept of 'synthetic a priori' (SAP) propositions, which filled a gap between previous philosophers' 'truths of reason' (i.e. true by definition) and 'contingent propositions' (i.e. true or false by observation or experiment). |
| Kant also introduced a distinction between 'the world of appearances' (what we can experience through our senses) and 'things in themselves' (about which we can have no knowledge, and which he called 'noumenal'). | ||
| 175 | SAP propositions are "things that appearances must satisfy". | |
| What observational apparatus we have is a contingent matter (e.g., humans can see light, but not other electromagnetic waves). | ||
| "Only what fits in with our predispositions can be expressed". | ||
| 176 | Previous philosophers (e.g. Hume) though that laws of nature had to be either a priori (true by definition and deduction) or a posteriori (established following observation). Kant said some concepts are both, e.g. space and time (just appearances) and orderliness (ditto). | |
| 176-8 | An SAP example is our sensibility to space and time; which means we should also include geometry and arithmetic. | |
| 179 | The other category of SAP propositions is 'understanding'; we rely on there being order to things. [RT: this could be dangerous.] And Kant thought Newton was 'absolutely right'!] | |
| 180 | Knowledge is "bounded by possible experience". [RT: I suppose this means by what we could envisage.] | |
| 181 | Magee: Kant was clear that beliefs in God and a soul are a matter of 'unsecured faith', not of 'possible knowledge'. So why is such faith not vacuous? Warnock: Kant is slightly shifty on this. He says that it is inescapable that we should have such faith, and this leads to un-empirical doctrines, whose only foundation is our primitive moral convictions; Theology and metaphysics are a "rather frail, high-flying superstructure". | |
| Kant built his thought of God on the fact that we all seem to have some basic moral concepts. | ||
| In Kant's view, 'free will' means 'not governed by scientific laws'. | ||
| Magee: There has to be free will for any moral evaluation to be meaningful. [RT: otherwise, I suppose, we could all say "I couldn't help it".] | ||
| 182 | "... Whereas it is superstitious to rest on faith in a question that can actually be decided, if the question cannot be decided then it is not irrational to entertain a belief on one side of it." | |
| 182-3 | Warnock: There is room for concepts that are not in the world of appearances, but in the 'things in themselves', e.g. free will, rational agency, right and wrong, good and bad, and the soul. These can't be topics of knowledge, only of possibility. | |
| 183 | Warnock: And Kant could believe in these things. But Kant then doesn't have any idea on how they could make any difference in the world of appearances. | |
| But Kant has a big problem by separating the Will so much from the world. | ||
| 184 | Kant believed morality is built into rationality - hence his Categorical Imperative, i.e. "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law". [RT: I suppose some critics don't like this because it doesn't come from God and through organized religion (e.g. Alistair MacIntyre?)] | |
| "We simply have no way of acquiring knowledge of things as they are in themselves"; i.e., they are "screened off". | ||
| 185 | Theologians have been a bit chary of accepting Kant's proposition that all discourse on these topics is unintelligible to us. But Magee thought that many theologians today do accept it. | |
| 9 - | Hegel (1770-1831, H) and Marx (1818-83), with Peter Singer | |
| YouTube | 191 | For H, human nature isn't immutable - it develops according to a dialectic process of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis. |
| History is "always moving forward" [RT: not 'repeating itself'!] | ||
| 192 | Singer: H thought that Greek society (pre-Socrates) was one in which there was a harmony between reason and desire. [RT: I'm not sure - it was all built on slavery.] But Socrates spoilt it all by arguing about everything, thus introducing 'alienation' [RT: I think that's rubbish; I'm sure there was plenty of alienation around already.] | |
| H thought that Athens was right in sentencing Socrates to death. 'Individual conscience' (as brought in by Protestantism) had a similar effect more recently, and led indirectly to the French Revolution and the Terror. But what both destroyed was 'naive harmony' [RT: which probably couldn't have lasted long anyhow.] | ||
| 193 | "History is not a chapter of accidents." [RT: I disagree.] H's dialectic (Thesis threatened by Antithesis due to alienation, then moving forward through Synthesis) was all towards a goal, i.e. 'human freedom', "when 'Mind' sees that the world is in fact itself" (Singer). That's Mind with a capital M, not individual human mind. | |
| 194 | For H, what's moving forward is 'Geist' - the single spirit of everything. H's view is that reality is not material, it's all included in Geist. Singer: That might seem to accord with religion, but orthodox Christianity says that God (spiritual) is separate from this world (mundane and material). | |
| 194-5 | Christianity "contrasts God and the world". H's Geist is manifested in everything, but is not actually identical with things themselves. On that basis, H is a 'pantheist'. | |
| 195 | God, seen as a perfect, separate Being, is one cause of alienation. | |
| 196 | It's wrong ('alienating') to regard ourselves as miserable wretches separate from a perfect God; we are part of God as the Geist. | |
| The end point of the dialectic process is "Absolute Knowledge" and "Absolute Freedom", when "Mind sees that the world is in fact itself". [RT: I'd say that is too twisted a view for most of us.] | ||
| 198 | We aren't free "because things have been happening to us without us realizing, or without our understanding why they happened. We could not control our destiny because we thought of aspects of our own reality as foreign and hostile elements". "We have grasped ... the laws of historical development ... they are the very laws of our mind and our thinking." [RT: I say that's rubbish.] | |
| "Freedom consists in knowledge of reality, because when we see the rationality of reality we no longer struggle vainly against it." [RT: ditto.] | ||
| 199 | H's "rational conception of the state" seems not to "permit individual enterprise ... (and) initiative" - so it's not free. | |
| 200 | In practice, H's end point is "bound to lead to authoritarianism" - we aren't allowed any whims. | |
| It's misleading to claim people are free when their wants and desires are being manipulated. [RT: As in today's advertising and general public bullshit.] | ||
| 201 | H rejected Kant's "thing-in-itself" notion, as well as British Empiricism. He rejected the separation of 'knower' and 'what's known'. [RT: but 'spectating' is surely a real, possible, mode of our existence?] | |
| 201-2 | His answer to the view of 'an observer having mediated (by the senses) knowledge of the observed' was that everything is Mind anyhow, and so it's immediate, not mediated. [RT: sounds unnatural.] | |
| 204 | H thought the end point of his dialectic process was a society free of conflict between reason and desire. 'Right Hegelians' thought the Prussian state had reached H's ultimate goal. Of course the Prussian state was paying H's salary. | |
| 205 | Marx thought that what changed wasn't Geist, but matter, and that 'Production' was the dominant issue. Singer: All Marx did was substitute 'the world of material production' for Geist. | |
| Magee: Not only are right-wing and left-wing totalitarianism similar in practice, they have similar intellectual ancestry, i.e. Hegel. | ||
| 206 | But like Hegel, Marx thought "we are pawns in the game of history" - until, he thought, we control the economic forces. | |
| Hegel and Marx's views were boosted by Darwin's Theory of Evolution. | ||
| Singer: So, the lesson is that we shouldn't look at societies as timeless entities, but as always evolving. [RT: and maybe other systems too?] | ||
| 207 | Why did Hegel and Marx get misapplied (e.g. by Hitler and Stalin)? Singer put it down to "a faulty view of human nature". Both thought their process could overcome the difference between one person's interest and those of others. | |
| "Marx says, once we get rid of the economic structure which leads us to compete in the market place", those differences will disappear. "It seems, unfortunately [RT: for whom?], that this is false ... You don't get rid of the divisions between reason and desire". If suppressed they re-emerge in another form (e.g. Marxist states have conflict over positions in the rulership hierarchy). | ||
| 208 | If "you make it impossible, or very difficult, for people to compete with one another for wealth ... then they start competing for status or power". [RT: So, in the end, we should assume that competitiveness is a human instinct that won't go away.] | |
| 10 - | Schopenhauer ((1788-1860), S), with Frederick Copleston | |
| YouTube | 213 | S wanted to get a better handle on "underlying reality" (UR), Kant's 'thing-in-itself'. Since we can't differentiate between the "things in themselves", we should only talk about a single 'thing' - which is similar to Hinduism. |
| 215 | To get into it, we have to bracket out not just perception, but space, time and causation. | |
| Since without these we can't distinguish anything, 'it all' has to be just one single 'thing'. | ||
| 216 | That agrees with some Hindu philosophy. Magee: surely that argument won't wash - what about numbers? They are plural yet not differentiated in space, time or causation. | |
| S suggested that a clue to how to get some knowledge of the underlying reality is that we have some 'inside' knowledge of our own bodies that isn't mediated (i.e. it's beyond the 5 senses); but this is then still a phenomenon. | ||
| 217 | But isn't any 'inner' knowledge of our bodies still time-dependent, partial and relying on 'knower-known' duality? | |
| S postulated the subconscious way before Freud, but he wasn't the first. | ||
| 218 | Our bodily movements are an expression (not necessarily conscious) of a desire or 'Will'. | |
| The word 'Will', as in the title of S's 'The World as Will and Representation', is unfortunate. Energy is a bit better, but still isn't quite what S meant [RT: but that too has specific meanings in science.] | ||
| 218-20 | If he meant 'energy', that's in line with modern science, where energy is potentially convertible to matter. But scientists don't see that as 'metaphysical' energy. | |
| 220 | Maybe it's better to say that S's 'Will' "manifests itself as energy". | |
| 221-2 | S thought of the UR as malevolent (since we see so much suffering and injustice) [RT: presumably caused by 'desire' - which sounds like Buddhism.] But we can't really say that energy is "revolting". | |
| 222 | S introduced the Platonic 'Ideas' "as intermediate between the UR and works of art". | |
| 223 | S thought "the key function of art is a cognitive, not an expressive one". Its real purpose is not to express emotion, but to convey insight into the underlying nature of things - which may in turn induce emotion in us. | |
| Is there 'truth' in art? "Truth as correspondence" may be a useful approach (although it's just one possible model), but with art one needs "non-propositional truth". Anyhow, many artists felt that S's view "corresponded to their conception of what they were doing ... or flattered them!" | ||
| In our aesthetic responses to art, we are temporarily released from "the rack of willing" (Copleston). | ||
| 224 | S's ethics arose from the recognition that we are all part of the one same UR. But why does this conclusion not imply that there should be mutual strife? His pessimism leads to major contradictions. | |
| 224-5 | What can we do in the light of S's pessimism (i.e. that the UR is revolting)? We could make a strict 'fact-value distinction' and agree with S that it may be a fact, but disagree about his valuation; however some philosophers question the 'fact-value distinction'. | |
| 225 | Magee criticizes Schopenhauer on a 'value' rather than a 'fact' basis, but Copleston rejects the idea of 'value-free' statements (including history). | |
| 226 | Magee says he 'learns from' rather than 'accepts' Schopenhauer. | |
| 226-7 | S thought we should "deny the Will". This might mean going for something like some Buddhists' 'Nirvana'. But that is a lot different from Christianity, Judaism or Islam where God is basically the 'good' creator. [RT: Pragmatically, i.e. for living our lives] S's approach seems essentially self-defeating. | |
| 228 | S influenced Nietzsche, who however rejected S's pessimism and said we should go for creative action. | |
| 229 | Freud picked up both the unconscious and sexual motivation from S. | |
| 229-30 | Early Wittgenstein also derives a bit from S. | |
| 11 - | Nietzsche (1844-1900, N), with JP Stern | |
|
YouTube | 234 | Magee: "If there are no God and no transcendental realm, then morals, values, truth, rationality, standards of every kind, are not given to man from outside himself but are created by man to meet his own needs. ... At the very least, we collectively create our values." |
| 235 | Stern: (For man) "having to stand on his own feet without the support of faith or dogma of any kind is central." [RT: the question is, are most humans yet adult enough to do this?] | |
| Magee: "We are slaves to convention" - so, "its an inauthentic way of living". But what should we do instead? | ||
| 236 | Nietzsche's attack is not on Christ but on Christianity. We have come to overdo support for the unfortunate, and encouragement of the weak. Feeling compassionate isn't the problem - it's the recipient's being diminished by it. This is inauthentic and denies our vital spark. | |
| 237 | N attacked secular general laws (like Kant's Categorical Imperative) too, because those appropriate for the masses are over-restrictive for the 'supermen'. [RT: but a blanket objection to general laws seems impracticable for any society to operate under.] | |
| N wanted "each great man a law unto himself". [RT: the problem is, no-one is 100% great, and it's too tempting to take advantage and 'tread' on other people.] | ||
| N though pre-Socratic Greece was a Golden Age; heroism and tragedy were replaced by "Socratic argy-bargy" and rationality. [RT: Shades of Hegel, and awfully naive!] | ||
| 238 | It's a 19th century hang-up to think that the quality of the product (e.g. morals) is all due to its origins; this is "the genetic fallacy". | |
| 238-9 | N distrusts systems, even scientists putting forward evidence. Knowledge might upset the knower. | |
| 239 | In N's view, "German idealism simply takes over from Christianity a wholly negative attitude towards these unconscious drives in us [RT: e.g. competitiveness, desire to make things better?], and builds a civilization on their suppression." | |
| Knowledge in a civilization may become more than it can bear [RT: or 'handle'?] | ||
| 240 | Following Goethe, N thought that "excessive introspection doesn't get you anywhere". | |
| As with Marxism, N would suppress knowledge if it isn't 'socially useful'. | ||
| 242 | N's alternative morality was just "live life fully, adventurously, with élan vital". But his "recommendations make living together in some kind of harmony extremely difficult". "He saw mankind as a rabble led by an elite" who should be able to grab whatever they wanted. [RT: that doesn't seem so far from what we have now!] | |
| But, "you must conquer all that is comfortable, cowardly and less than adventurous within yourself ... and if you've done that you won't really want to be so very aggressive towards others". [RT: unlike the Nazis!] | ||
| 243 | N was against "all moralities which have actually existed", as these have "been, in practice, anti-life". | |
| N approved of Goethe, Napoleon, Luther and some of the great Borgia popes - even Socrates! | ||
| Truths that damage us should be subjugated. The criterion must be to serve life. | ||
| 244 | Evolution eliminates the unable, so why should we fight against that? That's like trying to throw evolution into reverse. | |
| N feared "that the democratic spirit, the spirit of the plebs, of the rabble, will take over and annihilate all these values". [RT: like the 'tall poppy' syndrome.] | ||
| Stern: But his prophecy for the 20th century was way off target - "The barbarism to come (world wars, Hitler, Stalin) didn't frighten him enough". | ||
| 244-5 | Four Nietzsche themes are: "Will to Power"; "Übermensch" (Supermen); "Eternal Recurrence" and "Aesthetic Understanding of Life". But N's idea of 'will to power' is confused and widely misunderstood. | |
| 246-7 | The same goes for 'übermensch' (superman). "The Superman is a human being whose instincts are not repressed." | |
| "The Superman does not naturally feel grudgingness - he is a wholly generous spirit." | ||
| 247 | N's idea of 'eternal recurrence' is also widely misunderstood. Stern thought all it could mean was something like "keep up the good work". | |
| 249 | Maybe we should look on 'it all' (i.e. human life) as "a huge cosmic drama". N wrote "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the being of man and the world are eternally justified." This sounds like "does it make a good story (or play)?". He means a plot in the style of pre-Socratic Greek tragedy, in which heroes face up to the worst aspects of human life. | |
| 250 | "Literary persons don't like to read heavy books: they like to read aphorisms". Nietzsche certainly obliged in that respect. | |
| 250-1 | Mussolini (rather than Hitler) was a fan of Nietzsche, but a lot of what N said was "absolute anathema to ... those gangsters". | |
| 251 | N re-orients us to what humans can do without constraints, rather than providing a panacea [RT: certainly not for a harmonious society!] | |
| 12 - | Husserl (1859-1938, Huss), Heidegger (1889-1976, Heid) and Modern Existentialism, with Hubert Dreyfus | |
| YouTube | 254-5 | 'Phenomenology' (introduced by Husserl) means taking it as read that the objects of our consciousness exist, 'bracketing out' the issue of whether they do have independent existence or not. |
| 256 | 'Intentionality' is a word used in this context to mean 'directedness' or 'point of view'. Huss said all our thought (except headaches and moods) are directed at something. | |
| 256-7 | His idea was to 'bracket out' the question of whether or not that 'something' really exists in the real world or not. | |
| 257 | 'Phenomenological deduction' means that instead of asserting "there is a table out there" we should say "I take it that there's a table out there". | |
| 257 | Heid thought that such a subject-object view wasn't our main concern - we are just in things, without conscious reflection, most of the time. His analogy was hammering nails; things are "ready-to-hand". | |
| There's a difference between 'knowing that' and 'knowing how'. | ||
| 258 | "We are not detached from the reality that is out there." | |
| Such 'ready-to-hand' activity is the primary concern; subject-object is secondary. We are 'being beings', not 'knowing beings'. | ||
| 260 | Driving a car is similar to hammering. But there's a place for contemplation, but only when the activity is new, or things go wrong. | |
| 261 | To do science, one has to 'bracket out' 'practical coping'. | |
| Things like predicate calculus (mathematical logic) are tertiary, even further removed from immediate concern. | ||
| Kant thought it was a scandal that no-one could prove the existence of the external world. Heid thought it was a scandal that philosophers kept trying, as if we were stuck in some internal world and couldn't get out. | ||
| We don't have to 'infer' the real world, we are 'in it'. | ||
| 263 | "What makes possible my relation to objects, then, is not something in my mind, ... but ... the world of shared things and practices" (i.e., something that doesn't need to be mirrored in the mind). This is what Heid means by 'Dasein', meaning 'being there' or 'existence'. | |
| Heid's "Dasein" = "our ongoing activity on the background of our shared understanding of being". 'Dasein' is the German word for 'existence', while 'da sein' means 'being there'. | ||
| 264 | Dreyfus: "Understanding of being in the shared, public 'clearing' makes possible the individual activity of clearing." [RT: needs better explanation.] | |
| "Everything is always laid out as a context of functional relations." 'Discourse' means that I can talk about this articulation. | ||
| 264-5 | Three aspects of Dasein are 'clearing', 'discourse' and 'understanding' (in the sense of 'for the sake of', a sort of goal orientation). These correspond in some respects to Past, Present and Future - hence the 'Time' in Heid's book 'Being and Time'. | |
| 265 | The structure of Dasein is 1) being in a mood so that things matter; 2) using things so as to articulate their possibilities (in functional relationships [RT: like Frolio]); and 3) pressing into new possibilities (goal-driven). These 3 constitute the 'time' component in his book 'Being and Time' (1927). | |
| Dasein is also 'care' [RT: a bit like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?] | ||
| 266 | Heid is 'social' from the start. "We become Dasein, or get Dasein in us, only when we get socialized into shared coping skills, moods, possibilities and so on." This is different from most philosophers, who seem to think individualistically first. | |
| "People are eager not to deviate from the norm" (or they can't communicate and be socialized). [RT: I agree that applies when one is younger and learning, but not so much in later years.] But, "We flee from the crowd the way one flees from the crowd". More generally, "One is what one does". | ||
| Perhaps this makes us all look like zombies. But "Autonomous individuals crystallize out of this rather amorphous public 'us'." This is very 'Existentialist'. | ||
| 267 | "Any Dasein is always dimly aware that the world is ungrounded." Hence there's anxiety. Two responses to this are a) conform (to the social norms) or b) accept the lack of meaning, and act as you personally feel is good. | |
| "There is no human nature, we are what we take ourselves to be." That's 'unheimlich'. | ||
| "To be Dasein ... to own up, means ... to hold on to anxiety rather than flee it." | ||
| "You don't embrace projects with the conviction that now at last this is going to make sense of your life." And, vice versa, you don't drop projects if they fail to do so. | ||
| 268 | "Liberation comes from realizing that there's no deep truth in the individual subject (as with Freud), no subject of history (as with Marx) to liberate." | |
| 271 | The later Heid thought that our understanding of Being is in fact more historically dependent. For ancient Greece, it was heroes - for mediaeval Christians, it was saints and sinners. Modern day anxiety, caused by our technical understanding, didn't apply then. Most philosophers thought these 'essential' things were unchanging over time. | |
| 272 | Heid, like some others, thought "all the philosophical moves have been tried and played out", and we're heading for Nihilism. Nihilism is when nothing stands out. | |
| 273 | Or maybe we are just chasing efficiency for efficiency's sake, on a single world-wide scale. But for what purpose? [RT: shops in many towns look virtually identical.] | |
| 274 | Heid's only way out is "the saving power of insignificant things". We need to get over our technological understanding of being, but not our technology itself. He recommends things like "friendship, backpacking, ... running, drinking the local wine with friends, and dwelling in the presence of works of art". Might that include rock concerts? | |
| There's no need to return to pre-Socratic Greece - "Japanese keep their VCRs and computers alongside their household gods and traditional tea cups". | ||
| "Language has the crucial role of reflecting and focusing the current practices in any epoch." A modern example might be the phrase 'laid back'. | ||
| 275 | "The poets and thinkers, not the priests and scientists, are receptive to - and use - new language; and so they can promote and stabilize new ways of being. They alone offer hope of some new, non-individualistic, non-willful world." | |
| Sartre tried to follow Heidegger but drifted back to Cartesianism. He said we should be pure spontaneity, lightness, freedom, nothingness, 'absurdly free' - allowing easy changes of mind. Human 'being' is the absurd and doomed attempt to find some stable meaning in life. | ||
| 276 | Merleau-Ponty supplemented Heidegger by filling some of the gaps he left: 1) we are constrained by our bodies; 2) perception is an embodied activity by which we can get an optimal grip on things. | |
| 277 | Heidegger would say that if you look to beliefs, desires etc to explain people's behaviour, you only get a description of what happens when there's a breakdown, when they aren't coping. | |
| 13 - | The American Pragmatists, with Sidney Morgenbesser | |
| YouTube | 281 | 'Pragmatism' isn't a unifying concept. [RT: perhaps it's a 'common theme', or 'tendency'?] |
| "Peirce (1839-1914, P) presented us with a pragmatic theory of meaning ... related to his theory of belief. William James (1842-1910, WJ - brother of novelist Henry) presented us with a pragmatic theory of truth. Peirce also developed a theory of 'inquiry', which was taken up by Dewey (1859-1952, D). D took some aspects of Peirce's theory and generalized it to apply to social and political philosophy as well." | ||
| 'Pragmatism' means that our conception of 'what effects something has' is the whole of our conception of that thing. The aim of all these philosophers was to link belief, meaning, action and inquiry through the lens of "what happens?". | ||
| P: "Consider what effects ... which have a practical bearing ... of a conception (are) ... (then that) is the whole of our conception of that ..." | ||
| 283 | "Meaning must always relate, or be relatable, to something that happens, or could happen." [RT: my italics.] | |
| "If no imaginable occurrence or set of occurrences could provide us with a way of distinguishing between a term's correct and incorrect use, then that term has no meaning." | ||
| We act on beliefs, desires and preferences. Within this, beliefs are "habits ... connecting behaviour with experience". This points to linguistic meaning in the sense "no possible experience, no meaning". | ||
| 284 | With 'ordinary belief', when in doubt, P regards methodical inquiry as preferable to "tenacity" [RT: presumably sticking to one's prior convictions] or "appealing to authority". His method is to start with certain beliefs, but to recognize that these are all fallible and revisable. He challenges the idea of a "quest for certainty". | |
| 285 | P's inquiry style is 1) abduction (theory forming); 2) deduction (testing); 3) induction (assessment, prediction). P coined the term 'Fallibilism' as applying to scientific knowledge. That means not simply accepting hypotheses if they are confirmed by experience and otherwise rejecting them. There are also matters of statistics and 'contextual factors' [RT: I suppose, the context may be different on another occasion.] | |
| P stressed the variety of contextual factors and the use of statistical hypotheses, but challenged determinism [RT: presumably meaning predictable cause and effect]. | ||
| 286 | The 'real' is independent of any single individual agent. We only know the 'real' through our theories, which are tested by a community of investigators [RT: sounds like my 'consensus' approach to me. But we also need language.] | |
| It's commonsense to say that some beliefs are 'true', but "a sentence may be both true and revisable". | ||
| P allows the 'truth' to be 'revisable'. A belief or opinion is 'true' if it is "destined to be accepted if inquiry continues". | ||
| 288 | William James considers things from the viewpoint of an involved 'agent'. | |
| "Facts about objects in the world cannot be divested of their conceptual shaping". | ||
| 288-9 | WJ thinks our beliefs must accord with the evidence, but where the decision is unclear we can include other criteria, summarized as "the choice with the richer consequences". | |
| 289 | WJ: "The scientist does not attend to the evidence alone ... he considers whether the theory will satisfy certain goals" (one of which might be "better explanatory value"). But "beliefs must [still] accord with the evidence". | |
| 290 | Peirce didn't totally agree with WJ's attempt to apply pragmatism to 'truth' ; If WJ's idea was Pragmatism, then P said he was a 'pragmaticist' instead. In particular, P wanted to include un-actualized 'possibilities' as well as actual facts or phenomena. | |
| P was more convincing with "pragmatism as a theory of meaning" than WJ was with pragmatism as a theory of truth. | ||
| 291 | Dewey asked "What is it about scientific activity that gives it such marvellous success?" and he wondered if its methodologies could be applied more widely. | |
| 292-3 | D said that scientific institutions receive social support because they have, among other achievements, enabled men and women to be more at home in the world. | |
| 293 | [RT: Methodical] inquiry (as in Science) "has proven to be a better predictor, a better manufacturer of knowledge than its competitors". | |
| (Methodical inquiry) is an activity, not a 'spectator' view of knowledge - the inquirer is "living within the process". [RT: a bit like 'Action Research?] | ||
| 294 | "Dewey opposed theories of knowledge which considered knowledge to be independent of its role in problem-solving inquiry." There should always be some doubt of a practical nature. | |
| D: "Inquiry is guided by thought and idea, but an idea is a plan for action; there is no conceptual gap between thought and action." | ||
| D: "There is no way to justify our beliefs about the world without appealing to other beliefs." [RT: e.g., about our methods?] | ||
| 295 | D was particularly interested in applying these ideas to institutions and their arrangements, in saying that they should in practice satisfy the socially recognized needs they claim to address - and not just appeal to some theory of human nature.. | |
| 296 | We [RT: always?] have to deal with the (particular) "current arrangements", and the people affected by an issue must be part of any deliberations. | |
| There should be some continuity between scientific inquiry and other forms of inquiry. Dewey challenged (p 295) the dualism between fact and value, i.e. that the former can be rationally discussed but the latter cannot. | ||
| 296-7 | D also applied his ideas to education, fighting against 'forced' learning. | |
| 14 - | Frege (1848-1925), Russell (1872-1970) and Modern Logic, with AJ ('Freddie') Ayer | |
| YouTube | 301 | Frege's task was to spring clean the whole logical basis for mathematics and the use of notations, beginning with logic and arithmetic. |
| 302 | "Frege insisted that logic was entirely objective and had nothing to do with psychological processes" (as others thought - even Husserl thought it was 'judgment'). And of course, mathematics, which sits on top of logic (e.g. numbers are defined as logical 'sets'), is therefore the same. | |
| 304 | Frege distinguished 'sense' ('helps identify') and 'reference' ('denotation, what is referred to'). [RT: It's a bit like variables and pointers in the computer language C, if the pointers are 'sense' and the variables are what's pointed to.] | |
| 306 | Russell proposed his paradox which exposed a hole in Fg's set-based arithmetic: what about the set of all sets that are not members of themselves? | |
| 307 | After this, Frege never wrote again. | |
| 312 | Russell, despite many other changes of viewpoint, insisted "that our beliefs should accord with the evidence for them. This principle, if taken seriously, sweeps away a great deal of not only traditional theology, but traditional philosophy as well. | |
| 313 | Certainly, belief in a "superior world, a world inhabited by gods or anything of that sort, was nonsensical". | |
| "We really can't be sure that science is true, but it has a greater chance of being true than anything else that can be set up as its rival." | ||
| 314 | Russell believed that all philosophical problems had a solution, and so didn't like 'linguistic philosophy' such as Austin's. | |
| 315 | Hume had said that "there is no necessity other than logical necessity" - certainly no such thing as 'causal necessity'. | |
| R thought "philosophy would not be worth doing unless it posed questions to which we could find the answers". | ||
| 15 - | Wittgenstein (1889-1951, W), with John Searle | |
|
YouTube | 323 | Wittgenstein's work was in two quite different phases. The value of his first phase (the 'Tractatus') was in the "picture theory of meaning". Language, by giving a picture of the underlying reality, is a clue to the arrangement of objects in the world. The names in sentences don't just denote, they picture, and indicate relationships. [RT: sounds a bit Frolio-like]. |
| A "sentence is like a picture of possible fact ... of possible arrangement of objects in the world". | ||
| "Unless language mirrors reality in some way, it would be impossible for sentences to mean." | ||
| It's the "mirroring of one structure by another which is the real key to the possibility of meaningful discourse about the world in language". | ||
| 324 | But the surface (visible or audible) features of ordinary language actually conceal the underlying logical structure. | |
| Analysis takes us down to "elementary sentences". "The 'word' only has a meaning in the context of a sentence." | ||
| 324-5 | The 'logical constants' - and, or, not, if etc - are outside the structure - they just link separate 'pictures'. | |
| 325 | W later felt that his early work (the Tractatus) was too limited to 'fact-stating' sentences, as if they were the only ones that can have any meaning. This leaves too much of what we say uncovered. | |
| 326 | Later, W changed from a 'picture' theory of meaning to a 'tool' or 'use' theory [RT: shades of pragmatism?]. And instead of "the structure of the real world determining the structure of the language, the structure of our language determines the way we think of the real world." | |
| 327 | Some words, e.g. 'game', have many meanings which only have 'family resemblance' to each other. | |
| 328 | Wittgenstein is militating against the traditional philosophical theory that words get their meanings by being associated with ideas in the mind. | |
| 329 | There are lots of language games, for different circumstances and fields of knowledge. | |
| "Many of the words that trouble us in philosophy are those involved in 'family resemblances', i.e. they have multiple meanings that are only vaguely related (e.g. 'game'). | ||
| 330 | Searle: "It's not our task to find some foundation or transcendental justification for our present language games. All we can say is 'This language game is played, and this is how it's played' ". | |
| In other words, "Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use." | ||
| "We play a language game of ethical discourse, of aesthetic discourse, (one) with the words 'cause', and (one) of identifying spatial and temporal relationships." These games are just 'things we do'. | ||
| 330-1 | Why the 'games' analogy? Because games are similarly social and rule-governed. W "was drawing a sober, serious analogy between certain structural features which are characteristic of most 'games' and (those) ... characteristic of verbal discourse". | |
| 331 | "We should see speaking a language as part of ongoing, regular, social, rule-governed behaviour." But we can't be external spectators - we are involved players. There isn't any point of view from 'outside' the language games, where we can stand back and appraise the relationship between language and reality. We are always operating within one language game or another. | |
| So does this mean we can't access the real world? | ||
| 332 | Although we can't take the detached view, we can still discuss (within some language game) what we mean by 'real world' and 'reality'. | |
| But there are still fact-stating language games, so W isn't anti-realist. | ||
| "Our task as philosophers is not to sit back and contemplate the sublime nature of reality and truth, but rather to get busy and describe how we actually use expressions like 'real' and 'true'." | ||
| 334 | We can't take language for granted. "Language has become immensely problematic for us." | |
| "Reality divides up the way we divide it, and we can think of how we divide it only from within language." | ||
| Magee: The 'later Wittgenstein' would say that there has been religious utterance in every known form of society; to understand it we must pay close attention to the way concrete examples of it function within given forms of life. | ||
| "It's simply no good appraising religious utterances as one would appraise scientific utterances." | ||
| 334-5 | "We ought to look at the role that different sorts of utterances play in people's lives ... (and then) ... find the meaning of these utterances." | |
| 335 | W refused to accept that the 30 years war had been fought over some mere hypothesis. | |
| Philosophical problems arise when we take a mode of experience from one language game and use it in another - we need to be careful. | ||
| 336 | Philosophy shouldn't have it's own language game. It should just be getting inside people's actual practices (especially linguistic ones), 'describing' what they do, and removing intellectual confusions. | |
| 337 | "No system is everywhere bounded by rules"; and obeying rules [RT: or not] is a 'social practice'. There are always gaps in the coverage of the rules, loopholes and new situations. And the rules are always subject to interpretations. Obeying a rule is a social practice; we act on it as we are trained. | |
| 338 | We don't, unlike Locke, Berkeley and Hume, build our knowledge of the world from the inside (inner experience) outwards. We learn it from others. | |
| 339 | We can't (as Descartes did) "start with private elements and reach out to the external world ... all the criteria of meaning are ultimately social, not personal, and still less private". | |
| Taking a similar line to Freud's, W says that philosophical problems are caused by unconscious hang-ups (language-wise), so the philosopher's job is to be therapeutic. | ||
| 343 | Searle's criticisms of Wittgenstein, apart from saying that he is "too anti-theory", are summarized below. | |
| 1) he ignores the fact that there is still a lot of 'representation' in language [RT: it's a top-level Frolio relationship type.] | ||
| 344 | 2) 'Propositional contents' (e.g. orders, wishes, predictions, questions) run through just about every language game, but he doesn't address these. | |
| 3) He says nothing about the brain and how it functions (i.e. neuro-physiological processes) affect mental phenomena such as hope, fear, love and hate. | ||
| 345 | Searle: The reason people play the language game of religion (e.g. prayer) is because they think there is something outside the language game that gives it a point. | |
| We should be aware of the 'depth grammar' of talk about 'mind' and 'matter' and realize in actual use they are often intertwined, e.g. "he has been groaning and in pain for the last two hours". | ||
| 346 | W [RT: a bit like Heidegger] says 'most of the time, we just do it'. | |
| 342-7 | Summary: Searle's pluses and minuses for Wittgenstein: | |
| – | He's obsessively anti any theory, possibly because he underestimates the importance of 'representation'; different language games may intersect and have things in common. | |
| – | He's wrong to think one can't have inner processes without external expression; e.g. 'pain' is a bodily fact. | |
| + | He's good on language and in overcoming Cartesian dualism without embracing Behaviourism. | |
| + | He recognizes a 'background' of things we do by animal instinct [RT: one of Searle's own specialties]. |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 19th June 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .