An Introduction to Philosophy.

An Introduction to Philosophy

 Introduction

      The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one’s community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity. Over the course of the text I’ve tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. As an undergraduate philosophy major, one of my favorite professors once told me that philosophers really do have an influence on how people think. I was pleased to hear that the kind of inquiry I found interesting and rewarding might also be relevant to people’s lives and make a difference in the world. Then he completed his thought, “it only takes about 300 years.” Over the course of my teaching career, it has struck me that the opinions many of my students come to class with have just about caught up with David Hume. So perhaps things are not quite as bad as my professor suggested. While Hume did publish young, he was still an infant 300 years ago. My mission as a philosophy teacher has been to remedy this situation to some small degree. Most of the philosophy I read in graduate school was written by living philosophers, people I could meet and converse with at conferences. Every time I’ve done so I’ve come back with a new list of living philosophers I hoped to read. My experience with living philosophers has convinced me that philosophy has progressed as dramatically as the sciences over the last century or so. It is a great misfortune that the educated public by and large fails to recognize this. Philosophers, no doubt, carry much of the blame for this. At the cutting edge of the profession we have been better researchers that ambassadors. At no time in history have there been as many bright people doing philosophy as there are today. Clearly articulated fresh perspectives on important issues abound. But at the same time, philosophy’s “market share” in the university curriculum has fallen to historic lows. If the flourishing of philosophy over the past century or so is to continue, philosophy as a living discipline will have to gain a broader following among the general educated public. The front line for this campaign is the Philosophy 101 classroom. This is an open source text. It is freely available in an editable, downloadable electronic format. Anyone is free to obtain, distribute, edit, or revise this document in accordance with the open source license. No one is free to claim proprietary rights to any part of this text. Sadly, one of the main functions of academic publishing, both of research and textbooks, has become that of restricting access to information. This is quite against the spirit of free and open discourse that is the lifeblood of philosophy. Introductory students should be exposed to as many philosophical voices as possible. To that end, links to primary source readings and supplemental material are imbedded in the text. I’ve restricted myself to primary source materials that are freely available on the Web. Students should require nothing more than a reliable Internet connection to access all of the required and recommended materials for this course. Limiting primary and supplemental sources in this way has presented some challenges. Classic sources are readily available on the Web, though not always in the best translations. Many contemporary philosophers post papers on the Internet, but these are usually not intended for undergraduate readers. Most good philosophical writing for undergraduates is, unfortunately, proprietary, under copyright and hence unavailable for an open source course. The strength of an open source text is that it is continually open to revision by anyone who’d care to improve it. And so I’d like to issue an open invitation to members of the philosophical community to recommend writing suitable for this course that is currently available on the Web and has so far escaped my notice. Or, better yet, to write for this course.

 1. What Philosophy Is

What is philosophy? 

Many answers have been offered in reply to this question and most are angling at something similar. My favorite answer is that philosophy is all of rational inquiry except for science. Perhaps you think science exhausts inquiry. About a hundred years ago, many philosophers, especially the Logical Positivists, thought there was nothing we could intelligibly inquire into except for scientific matters. But this view is probably not right. What branch of science addresses the question of whether or not science covers all of rational inquiry? If the question strikes you as puzzling, this might be because you already recognize that whether or not science can answer every question is not itself a scientific issue. Questions about the limits of human inquiry and knowledge are philosophical questions. We can get a better understanding of philosophy by considering what sorts of things other than scientific issues humans might inquire into. Philosophical issues are as diverse and far ranging as those we find in the sciences, but a great many of them fall into one of three big topic areas, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. 

Metaphysics 

Metaphysical issues are concerned with the nature of reality. Traditional metaphysical issues include the existence of God and the nature of human free will (assuming we have any). Here are a few metaphysical questions of interest to contemporary philosophers: What is a thing? How are space and time related? Does the past exist? How about the future? How many dimensions does the world have? Are there any entities beyond physical objects (like numbers, properties, and relations)? If so, how are they related to physical objects? Historically, many philosophers have proposed and defended specific metaphysical positions, often as part of systematic and comprehensive metaphysical views. But attempts to establish systematic metaphysical world views have been notoriously unsuccessful. Since the 19th century many philosophers and scientists have been understandably suspicious of metaphysics, and it has frequently been dismissed as a waste of time, or worse, as meaningless. But in just the past few decades metaphysics has returned to vitality. As difficult as they are to resolve, metaphysical issues are also difficult to ignore for long. Contemporary analytic metaphysics is typically taken to have more modest aims than definitively settling on the final and complete truth about the underlying nature of reality. A better way to understand metaphysics as it is currently practiced is as aiming at better understanding how various claims about the reality logically hang together or conflict. Metaphysicians analyze metaphysical 6 puzzles and problems with the goal of better understanding how things could or could not be. Metaphysicians are in the business of exploring the realm of possibility and necessity. They are explorers of logical space. 

Epistemology 

Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and justified belief. What is knowledge? Can we have any knowledge at all? Can we have knowledge about the laws of nature, the laws or morality, or the existence of other minds? The view that we can’t have knowledge is called skepticism. An extreme form of skepticism denies that we can have any knowledge whatsoever. But we might grant that we can have knowledge about some things and remain skeptics concerning other issues. Many people, for instance, are not skeptics about scientific knowledge, but are skeptics when it comes to knowledge of morality. Later in this course we will entertain some skeptical worries about science and we will consider whether ethics is really in a more precarious position. Some critical attention reveals that scientific knowledge and moral knowledge face many of the same skeptical challenges and share some similar resources in addressing those challenges. Many of the popular reasons for being more skeptical about morality than science turn on philosophical confusions we will address and attempt to clear up. Even if we lack absolute and certain knowledge of many things, our beliefs about those things might yet be more or less reasonable or more or less likely to be true given the limited evidence we have. Epistemology is also concerned with what it is for a belief to be rationally justified. Even if we can’t have certain knowledge of anything (or much), questions about what we ought to believe remain relevant. 

Ethics 

While epistemology is concerned with what we ought to believe and how we ought to reason, Ethics is concerned with what we ought to do, how we ought to live, and how we ought to organize our communities. Sadly, it comes as a surprise to many new philosophy students that you can reason about such things. Religiously inspired views about morality often take right and wrong to be simply a matter of what is commanded by a divine being. Moral Relativism, perhaps the most popular opinion among people who have rejected faith, simply substitutes the commands of society for the commands of God. Commands are simply to be obeyed, they are not to be inquired into, assessed for reasonableness, or tested against the evidence. Thinking of morality in terms of whose commands are authoritative leaves no room for rational inquiry into how we ought to live, how we ought to treat others, or how we ought to structure our communities. Philosophy, on the other hand, takes seriously the possibility of rational inquiry into these matters. If philosophy has not succeeded in coming up with absolutely certain and definitive answer in ethics, this is in part because philosophers take the answers to moral 7 questions to be things we need to discover, not simply matters of somebody’s say so. The long and difficult history of science should give us some humble recognition of how difficult and frustrating careful inquiry and investigation can be. So we don’t know for certain what the laws of morality are. We also don’t have a unified field theory in physics. Why expect morality to be any easier? So we might think of metaphysics as concerned with “What is it?” questions, epistemology as concerned with “How do we know?” questions, and ethics as concerned with “What should we do about it?” questions. Many interesting lines of inquiry cut across these three kinds of questions. The philosophy of science, for instance, is concerned with metaphysical issues about what science is, but also with epistemological questions about how we can know scientific truths. The philosophy of love is similarly concerned with metaphysical questions about what love is. But it also concerned with questions about the value of love that are more ethical in character. Assorted tangled vines of inquiry branch off from the three major trunks of philosophy, intermingle between them, and ultimately with scientific issues as well. The notion that some branches of human inquiry can proceed entirely independent of others ultimately becomes difficult to sustain. The scientist who neglects philosophy runs the same risk of ignorance as the philosopher who neglects science.