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Philosophy 1010
Class #7
Title:
Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor:
Paul Dickey
E-mail Address: [email protected]
Today
Return Midterm Exams
“Mop up Exam”
1/29/13
Read: Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text With
Readings, Chapter 4, Sections 4.1 – 4.5
Watch one of the movies discussed in Chapter
Three. See p. 147, 154, 165, 179, or 186 (12e).
Be prepared to discuss in class the movie in its
relation to the reading assignment.
“A pupil from whom nothing is ever
demanded which he cannot do, never
does all he can.”
It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in
modern teaching, to render as much as
possible of what the young are required
to learn, easy and interesting to
them. But when this principle is pushed
to the length of not requiring them, to
learn anything but what has been made
easy and interesting, one of the chief
objectives of education is sacrificed.”
J. S. Mill, Autobiography
Electronic/Online Course/Instructor Feedback
13/WI Availability until
2/19/14
Chapter 3
Reality and Being
(a Metaphysical Study)
***
Realism
•
Realism is the view that the real world exists
independent of our language, our thoughts, our
perceptions, or our beliefs about it.
•
Our common sense seems to demand of us
that we believe in realism.
•
But how can we know that “our wonderful
world is real?” Can we prove it? Or
alternately, do we have evidence? Can we
provide “reasons to believe” without “begging
the question?”
•
And what does it even mean for our world to be
“real?” If someone were to say that the world
was NOT real, what would he mean? What
would we understand that he was saying?
What Is Reality?
•
For now, let us assume we are realists, that is, we
believe in realism. So what is the reality we believe in?
•
Some might argue that reality is what we experience
through our senses.
•
Or would you perhaps argue that reality consists of
more than the material world? What about justice,
mathematics, liberty, freedom, truth, beauty, space,
time, and love?
•
Is language real?
•
Is God real?
•
Or the sub-atomic theoretical entities that physics
asserts? Are they real?
Metaphysics is the Study of What is Real
•
The most fundamental question in metaphysics may
be:
Is reality purely material or is there reality
beyond the material?
•
We already discussed this question to some degree
in terms of the mind/body problem, but now we will
begin to look at this issue in a much broader scope.
•
We have already seen the materialism of Thomas
Hobbes, particular in the context of the mind/body
problem. Hobbes, however, argued for Materialism
in a much broader sense.
Early Views of Materialism
The Pre-Socratics (460-360 B.C.E.)
Democritus. Reality was composed of material atoms. Attributes
of atoms are: solid, indivisible, indestructible, eternal, and
uncreated.
The composition of reality is atoms and empty space. The soul (or
reason) consists of atoms.
The Charvaka Philosophers of India
(about 600 B.C.E)
There is only one valid source of knowledge and that is what we
perceive through our senses.
What we perceive is physical and material.
What we cannot know cannot exist. There are no gods,
no soul.
Idealism & Plato’s Theory of
Forms
(a refutation of Materialism)
Idealism &
Plato’s Theory of Forms
•
The view that reality is primarily composed of
ideas or thought rather than a material world is
the doctrine known as Idealism. That is, an
Idealist would say that a world of material
objects containing no thought either could not
exist or at the least would not be fully "real."
•
The earliest formulation of this view is given to
us by Plato.
•
In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the world of
shadows is representative of the material world
and is not fully real.
Plato’s Theory of Forms
•
What is the problem with which Plato is faced?
•
How can one live a happy and satisfying life in
a contingent, changing world without there
being some permanence on which one can
rely? (The Ethical Problem)
•
Indeed, how can the world appear to be both
permanent and changing all the time. (The
Metaphysical Problem)
•
Plato observed that the world of the mind, the world
of ideas, seems relatively unchanging. Justice, for
example, does not seem to change from day to day,
year to year.
•
On the other hand, the world of our perceptions
change continuously. One rock is small, the next
large, the next…?
Plato’s Theory of Forms
•
To resolve this problem, Plato formalized the classic view
of idealism in his doctrine of Forms.
•
In everyday language, a form is how we recognize what
something is and unify our knowledge of objects. (e.g How
do we say two objects of different size, color, etc. are both
cars?)
•
Permanence comes from the world of forms or ideas with
which we have access through reason.
•
In Plato’s view, all the particular entities we see as
material objects are shadows of that reality. Behind each
entity is a perfect form or ideal. Ideal forms are eternal
and everlasting. Individual beings are imperfect.
•
e.g. Roundness is an ideal or form existing in a
world different from physical basketballs. Individual
basketballs participate or copy the form.
Plato’s Theory of Forms
•
Forms are transcendent, that is they do not
exist in space and time. That is why they
are unchanging.
•
Forms are pure. They only represent a
single character and are the perfect model
of that property.
•
Material objects are a complex
conglomeration of copies of multiple forms
located in space and time.
•
Forms are the cause of all that exists in the
world.
What is the Essence of
the Form of the Good?
•
Forms are the cause of all that exists in the world.
Forms exist in a hierarchy with the Form of The
Good being the highest form and thus is the first
cause of all that exists.
•
Forms are the ultimate reality because they are
more objective than material things which are
subjective and vary in our perception of them.
•
For Socrates and Plato, the question “What is a
thing?” is the question what is the essence of the
thing? That is, the attempt is to identify what
(presumably one) characteristic or property makes
that thing what it is.
What is the Essence of
the Form of the Good?
•
Further, Plato compares the power of the Good to the
power of the sun. The sun illuminates things and makes
them visible to the eye. The absolute or perfect Good
illuminates the things of the mind (forms) and makes
them intelligible.
•
The Good sheds light on ideas but, the vision of the idea
of the Good is, according to Plato, too much for human
minds.
•
When Plato emphasizes The Good as the cause (I.e. an
active agent) of essences, structures, and forms, as well
as of knowledge, he seems to be invoking the idea of the
Good as God. The Good as absolute order makes all
intermediate forms or structures possible.
Galileo & The Scientific Revolution
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), was an Italian physicist,
mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who
played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. Galileo
has been called the "father of modern observational
astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father
of science", and "the Father of Modern Science“
Galileo proposes that physics should be a “new
science” based on methods of observation not just on
the methods of reason.
Thus, Galileo discovered many things: with his
telescope, he first saw the moons of Jupiter and the
mountains on the Moon; he determined the parabolic
path of projectiles and calculated the law of free fall
on the basis of experiment.
Galileo & The Scientific Revolution
He is known for defending and making popular the
Copernican system, using the telescope to examine the
heavens, inventing the microscope, dropping stones
from towers and masts, playing with pendula and
clocks, being the first ‘real’ experimental scientist,
advocating the relativity of motion, and creating a
mathematical physics.
His major claim to fame probably comes from his trial
by the Catholic Inquisition and his purported role as
heroic rational, modern man in the subsequent history
of the ‘warfare’ between science and religion.
Towards A Modern View:
Cartesian Dualism
Descartes & Modern Philosophy
René Descartes (1596–1650) was a creative
mathematician of the first order, an important
scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician.
He offered a new vision of the natural world that
continues to shape our thought today: a world of
matter possessing a few fundamental properties
and interacting according to a few universal
laws. This natural world included an
immaterial mind that, in human beings, was
directly related to the brain.
In many ways, Descartes established
Philosophy as a modern endeavor and saw
science and philosophy as intricately linked in
their pursuit of knowledge.
Yet, Descartes embraced the Scientific Revolution
fundamentally differently that Galileo. Descartes
claimed to possess a special method, which was
variously exhibited in mathematics, natural
philosophy, and metaphysics, and which, in the
latter part of his life, included, or was supplemented
by, a method of doubt. He was still fundamentally
too much of a Rationalist in the traditions of Plato.
This method of conducting science is quite contrary
to the approach that was gaining sway with Galileo.
Galileo proposed a methodology which did not first
engage in a metaphysical search for first principles
on which to base his science.
Rationalism:
Similarities Between Plato and Descartes
Plato
Justification is by reason rather than by the
senses, not the world of the cave, which we find
out about by sensory experience, and toward to
world outside the cave, the world of Forms,
which we discover by means of reason)
The objects of knowledge, namely the
Forms, are eternal, necessary, and
unchanging (we want to find the
permanent order that underlies the flux)
The most important and basic knowledge
is a priori (that is, not based on sensory
information): this is true of knowledge of
mathematics, of goodness, of justice, etc.
Mathematics is a kind of model for the rest
of knowledge. (Think of the perfect circle.)
Descartes
Ditto. The skeptical arguments of the first
meditation show that the senses cannot be
trusted. Later meditations suggest that a
scientific picture of the world will not appeal to
sensory properties but to (primarily)
mathematical ones.
We can have knowledge of the physical world.
But the most basic objects of knowledge are
general principles (e.g. the basic laws of physics),
so the goal is still to penetrate behind the veil of
appearance.
We can gain some knowledge by means of
the senses, but only after establishing a
priori that they are more or less
trustworthy; the most basic knowledge is
a priori.
Ditto: the metaphor of building knowledge
up on firm foundations relies on a
mathematical model.
For Descartes, Galileo erred by
“without having considered the first
causes of nature, [he] has merely
looked for the explanations of a few
particular effects, and he has thereby
built without foundations”
But ultimately, it was Galileo (not
Descartes) that pushed the Scientific
Revolution forward.
Materialism
With the influence of Galileo, Hobbes develops
his social philosophy on principles of geometry
and natural science.
•
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) rejects
Cartesian dualism claiming that Descartes
Mind/Body problem itself refutes dualism.
•
Since mind and body cannot interact, they
cannot both exist within human nature.
•
There can only be one realm of human nature
and that is the material world.
•
All human activities, including the mental, can
be explained on the paradigm of a machine.
Materialism
•
Hobbes was reductionist in that he believed that one
kind of purported reality (the mind) could be understood
entirely in terms of another (matter).
•
New scientific techniques of observation and
measurement being used by Galileo, Kepler, and
Copernicus were making giant strides in understanding
the universe.
•
The spirit of his century suggested to Hobbes that all
reality would be explained in time in terms only of the
observable and the measurable.
•
Hobbes himself was unable to explain any mental
processes in terms of the physical.
•
Perhaps motivating Hobbes’ view was basically his
passionate faith in the advancement of science at the
time.
The Prima Facie (or Self-evident)
Case for Materialism
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The argument from common sense:
•
If there are other realities besides the material,
can they causally interact with the material
world?
•
If so, how can this interaction happen? If they
can not interact, what does it mean to say that
such a reality exists?
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Please note this may be more difficult that
even the mind/body problem where we do
seem to have direct evidence to believe that
our own consciousness exists.
The Prima Facie (or Self-evident)
Case for Materialism
•
The argument from science:
•
Science seems to be our most developed and
useful organized body of knowledge about the
world by focusing on observation and
measurement of the physical material world. In
the history of science, discussion of any kinds of
entities other than material entities largely have
been blind alleys.
•
The history of science is full of examples where
entities once thought to be necessary to explain
life and man have been replaced by fully causal
explanations in terms of chemicals and biological
processes. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that this
also may be the case with mental states? (4:58)
Modern Idealism
•
The founder of modern Idealism is Bishop George
Berkeley (1685-1753).
•
Berkeley argued against Hobbes’ Materialism that
the conscious mind and its ideas and perceptions are
the basic reality.
•
Berkeley believed that the world we perceive does
exist. However that world is not external to and
independent of the mind.
•
The external world is derived from the mind.
•
However, there is a further reality beyond our own
minds. Since we have ordered perceptions of the
world which are not controlled by an individual’s
mind, they must be produced by God’s divine mind.
(9:00)
•