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Glasgow
University Philosophy Department I’m
sometimes asked what philosophy is,
and how to get started … Analytic
philosophy is neither
about having a philosophy of life, such as “always look on the bright
side”, nor about scratching one’s chin at the pronouncements of
the great historical philosophers, extracted from the context that makes them
understandable and interesting.
So what is it about? The best way to find out is to
consider not a definition, but the questions that philosophers engage, paying
attention to how philosophers get to grips with them, and then grappling with
them yourself. ------------------------------------- With that in mind, here’s a short
list of some accessible
introductions to philosophy.
Don’t think you need to read either all or none. Reading just two or three chapters of
one of them will get the philosophical cogs turning. (All are available from Amazon.) · Simon Blackburn.
Think. (Oxford University Press, 1999) A good introduction to some central
philosophical issues and approaches. · Peter Singer.
Practical
Ethics. (Cambridge University Press, 1993) An influential engagement by a prominent
utilitarian (who thinks our moral obligation is to maximise overall
desire-satisfaction) with some concrete ethical issues, e.g. animal welfare
and euthanasia. · Simon Blackburn.
Being Good. (Oxford University Press, 2001) On the model of his Think, but about ethics (right, wrong, virtue, vice, etc.) · Peter Carruthers. Introducing Persons. (Routledge, 1986) A pretty accessible introduction to
questions about minds, brains, and consciousness. · Bertrand Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. (Unwin,
1946) For those more interested in a historical
look at the great philosophers, written by one of them—beautifully and
wittily, if not always accurately. · Jim Hankinson.
A
Bluffer’s Guide to Philosophy.
(Oval, 1985) The most amusing “introduction”
to philosophy, especially good on some of the crazy views and amusing deaths
of certain ancient philosophers; also not entirely without philosophical
content! · Ted Honderich
(ed.). Oxford
Companion to Philosophy. (Oxford University Press, 1995) A reference work. Comprehensive. Good to dip into. Shorter and also good is Blackburn’s
Oxford
Dictionary of Philosophy (OUP: 1994) ------------------------------------- And here is a
brief smattering of philosophical questions:
· Is euthanasia ever permissible? Or abortion? Or capital punishment? Or the intensive farming and killing
of animals
for food? If killing one person would save
ten, should we kill that person? · When is a government legitimate? Do we have rights that no government can
infringe? Under what conditions
might we legitimately break a law? What distribution of resources is just? What are our, and our
governments’, obligations to the poor? · Are moral
judgements the sorts of things that can be true or false,
reasonable or unreasonable; or are they just subjective expressions of taste
or feeling? What about aesthetic
judgements? · What does
the persistence
of a person consist in?
What would make it the case that you today are the very person shown
in a ten-year-old photo? Might we
survive our biological deaths?
Might we survive disembodied? · Might a
computer one day be built that could really think, or be conscious,
or have rights? Are we organic computers? · How can
we know
what the physical universe is like, or even that there is one? Might it be that only you and your
experiences exist? (The radical
view that only oneself exists is called solipsism: someone once wrote to Bertrand
Russell, “I am a solipsist, and I simply can’t understand why
more people aren’t”!) · What are
the grounds for, and the point of, scientific theories? Why should we believe the sun will rise
tomorrow? · Does God exist? What does “God exists”
mean? ------------------------------------- With these questions in view, a description of philosophy now has a
better chance of being helpful:
Philosophy is about rigorously and analytically engaging such question
as these—deep, difficult, and extremely general questions that are not
going to be answered in the laboratory.
It aims, as one philosopher said, “to understand how things in
the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest
possible sense of the term”.
It involves standing back from our ordinary thinking, and from other
fields of study—such as physics, biology, mathematics, and
history—and attempting to make explicit, and evaluate, their
foundations, presuppositions, and central concepts. Hence, for almost any subject, there
is a philosophy of that subject, e.g. the philosophy of physics or the
philosophy of maths. Other core
areas include ethics (right and wrong, the nature of moral judgement),
political theory (political legitimacy, distributive justice), metaphysics
(the study of what exists), epistemology (the study of knowledge), philosophy
of mind (minds, brains, and consciousness), philosophy of language
(linguistic meaning, reference, truth), and logic (the evaluation of
different kinds of argument). ------------------------------------- Finally, in case your appetite is whetted,
here is a bit
more
flesh on the bones of six
questions. 1. Freewill. Arguably, if some very quick and
intelligent person were around a second after the Big Bang, and knew the position
(and charge and mass etc.) of every particle in the universe at that moment,
and had the Complete Book of Scientific
Laws, then, at that moment, billions of years before you existed, that
person could have worked out precisely what you would do at every moment
throughout your lifetime. After
all, your actions are caused, and their causes are caused, and so on, all the
way back to the Big Bang. Such
predictability can make it seem as though you could never have done
otherwise, that you are at the mercy of the causes of your actions, that you
never freely and responsibly do anything. You might protest that there is
randomness in the universe. But
would that be reassuring? It is
precisely when someone acts unpredictably—out of character—that
we routinely question whether they
acted freely or responsibly. So
the causal ancestry of our actions seems both at odds with and yet necessary
for those actions to be free! It
might seem as though what is needed is that our actions be caused by events
that cause themselves. But is that coherent? Or perhaps, with Hume, we should
settle for the idea that free actions are those caused by our
decisions—even if those decisions are caused, and their causes caused,
and so on. 2. Induction.
Is it
reasonable to believe the sun will rise tomorrow? Perhaps it is provided it’s reasonable to believe that the following
principle will continue to hold: that
the future will (largely) resemble the past. But why do we believe it will continue to hold? Perhaps because it has held in the
past. But then it looks as though
we are using a principle to justify itself. That can’t be legitimate can
it? Yet it is crucial that we
provide some answer to this question if we are to retain the belief that
scientific laws are established rationally, and do not simply reflect
habitual expectations. 3. Scepticism.
Given that
our senses sometimes mislead us as to how things are—given indeed that,
when dreaming or hallucinating, we can fail to realise we are not perceiving
the world at all—the question arises how we can know anything about the
world on the basis of sense experience, e.g. on the basis of what we seem to
see and hear and touch? You might
not be worried. After all,
barometers too sometimes mislead us, but that does not prevent my reasonably
judging that it’s raining by looking at my barometer, provided I have in the past established the general
reliability of my barometer by independently checking on the weather to see
if it tends to be how my barometer says it is. But, actually, that sort of point is
not reassuring when it comes to my senses. For I have never, and surely could never, establish the general
reliability of my senses in any parallel way. I can’t check independently of
my senses that the world tends to be how my senses say it is. Commonsense certainly suggests I know
I am sitting at a table; but an
account is needed of how I could know that. 4. Ethics. Is it permissible to farm and kill animals
for food when we can survive healthily without doing so? It is tempting to argue that it is,
the reason being that the welfare and lives of animals matter less than the
welfare and lives of humans, simply because animals are not human—they
lack the crucial genetic code.
But that looks akin to racism or sexism. In and of itself, a genetic code looks
no more morally relevant than skin colour or gender. Perhaps the point is that humans tend
to have some other morally relevant feature, e.g. high levels of
intelligence, self-consciousness, plans and projects for the future. But, even if humans tend to have such features, and even if they are morally relevant, not all
humans have them. Newborn human
babies lack them, for example; normal adult pigs are more intelligent than
babies. Does this mean that we
should treat babies no better than we should pigs? You might say, “No, because
babies have more potential”.
(Notice foetuses do too, so here your view on one issue might commit
you to a view on another.) But it
needs explaining why potential is relevant, and, anyway, very severely
brain-damaged babies lack such potential. So should we treat them no better than we should treat
pigs (except, perhaps, out of concern for their parents)? Even if there is no way of avoiding
that conclusion—and perhaps there is—there is more than one way
of taking the point on board: one
is to think that we tend to treat very severely brain damaged babies better than we’re obliged to;
but the other is to think we tend to treat pigs worse than we’re obliged to. 5. Personal identity. In virtue of what are you now the person in
some ten-year-old photo?
You’ll have (almost) no cells in common with that person; most
of your cells are replaced every seven years or so. Maybe that should not stop us saying
you have the same brain; and perhaps that’s what counts. After all, suppose Osama bin Laden is
alive in a cave in Afghanistan.
There is a temptation to say that if Osama’s brain were transplanted
into Bush’s skull, that person in the White House, post-transplant,
would be Osama, albeit looking like
Bush. But why emphasise the brain
rather than some other organ?
Presumably because the brain supports mental states. But then perhaps the mental states are
really what matters. Hence Osama
would end up in White House even if we only scanned his brain before
destroying it, and then imprinted his mental states on Bush’s pre-wiped
brain. But what if the process of
psychological transfer went wrong and we imprinted Osama’s mental
states both on Bush’s brain
and on Putin’s? Is Osama
now in the White House or the Kremlin?
He can’t be in two places at once. One interesting approach is to say at
this point that a person is not a continuant thing, like a table, but an
unfolding event, like a football game, and that we should claim that what was
in the Afghan cave prior to the psychological transfer was not a whole person
but a person stage (akin to the
first half of a football game), and that the stage in question was an earlier
stage both of the person now
unfolding in the White House and of the person now unfolding in the
Kremlin. That can be hard to get
your mind around, and though it overcomes some of the difficulties, it
generates others. Hence some will
say we took a wrong turn right at the outset, when we tied the identity of
persons to psychological states rather than to the identity of the
animal—the human being—who has
those states. 6. God.
Different people mean different things when they say, “God
exists”. Some but not all
mean that there exists some non-physical agent who is omnipotent, omniscient,
and omnibenevolent, and who created and intervenes in the universe. Why believe in such a thing? Some argue that everything, including
the universe, needs a cause, so God must exist as a first cause. But why must there have been a first
cause? And, anyway, if everything
needs a cause, God does too. Some
argue that the fittedness of biological species to their environments, and of
their organs to their functions (e.g. eyes), is evidence that the universe,
or at least its animals, were designed.
But arguably Darwin’s alternative explanation is at least
equally satisfying, and simpler.
Some argue that to seek reasons for believing in God is to miss the
point: that theism is or ought to
be about holding beliefs out of faith, or even about something other
than belief, and, relatedly, that religious language functions differently
from other talk of explanatory posits, e.g. that the sentence “God
exists” has a quite different role from “electrons exist”. But, if the evidence game is being played,
some will argue not only that is there no evidence that God exists, but that
there is evidence that He doesn’t, namely the existence of
suffering. God could not prevent
murder, some reply, except by eliminating our freewill. But to the extent that we can make
sense of freewill (see issue 1 above), a universe in which everyone is free
and never murders is surely conceivable.
So if God exists, why didn’t He create it? And what about the suffering caused
not by human actions but by earthquakes?
Such suffering, some theists argue, is required for the development of
important virtues such as courage and compassion. Others thinks these virtues are
valuable only in a world with suffering.
The debate goes on! ------------------------------------- Thought
experiments. If you are
put off by the outlandishness of some of the above “thought
experiments”, e.g. brain transplants (or are they body swaps?!), then
consider the following discussion, and pretend it was had in
Aristotle’s day: Alf: “What being human consists in is
being relatively hairless, bipedal, and on Earth”. Ralph: “But surely you can at least
conceive of a human spending time on the Moon?” Alf: “Even if I can, such science
fiction fantasies have no relevance to how things actually are.” Ralph: “Yes they do: even if humans have not been to the
Moon, and indeed even if they never will, the possibility of their going
there shows that being human does not even partly consist in being
located on Earth.”—Surely Ralph always had the better side of
this argument, even before 1969! ------------------------------------- So, there you
go. The issues
above are examples of what philosophers think about; anyone thinking about
such issues is thereby a philosopher, whether they are employed by
universities or (like the philosophical giant, David Hume) not. Reflecting on such profound questions
is arguably important in itself.
It is also good for the mind, for honing one’s analytical
capacities. As for the answers
philosophers give, these are many.
(Which is absolutely not to say that any answer will do. It won’t; positions need to be
articulated clearly and evaluated rigorously.) Sometimes philosophers are compelled
by their arguments to bite some hard bullets, e.g. Hume concludes that there
is no good reason to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. At other times, philosophers put
things back more or less where they found them. When that happens, have we wasted our
time? Surely not, as suggested by
the following lines from T. S. Elliot: “We shall not cease from
exploration And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.” |