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Lecture 1

Subject and problems of the Philosophy and its role in the society.
For a revolution, you need more than economic problems and guns; you need a philosophy. Wars are
founded on a philosophy, or on efforts to destroy one. Communism, capitalism, fascism, atheism,
humanism, Marxism – all are philosophies. Philosophies give birth to civilizations. They also end them.
Philosophy is foundational to many other disciplines. What yesterday was called philosophy today is
often called psychology or government or physics or some other subject, or even just plain common sense.
Many of our basic concepts come from philosophy, maybe more so than from physics or psychology or
biology or sociology or any other field. Whether it is a concept about the way the world is, or about the way
people are or should be, or about what is and can be known, or about what is right and wrong and beautiful
and ugly – at bottom, it is in large part psychology. Other fields fill in the details, but the basic conceptual
framework is mostly pure psychology. Even the Judaeo (ju-dia)-Christian concept of God, which many of us
are familiar with today, owes much to philosophy. The questions philosophers raise can strike right at the
foundations of what we think and do and claim to know – and can send tremors through our entire edifice of
beliefs.
Philosophy once encompassed nearly everything that counted as human knowledge. Among the ancient
Greeks, nearly every subject that is currently listed in college catalogues was or would have been considered
philosophy. One by one, these intellectual enterprises gained sufficient maturity and stature to stand alone as
separate subjects. Mathematics, rhetoric, physics, biology, government, politics, law – all once fell under the
general heading of philosophy.
The word philosophy comes from the two Greek words philenin, which means “to love,” and Sophia,
which means “knowledge” or “wisdom.” Because knowledge can be discovered in many fields, the Greeks
thought of any person who sought knowledge in any area as a philosopher.
Consider physics for a moment. One of the first known Greek philosophers, Thales [THAY-leez], was
actually doing what we might call speculative physics (in contrast to experimental physics) when he claimed
that everything in the natural world was made of water. Two other ancient Greeks, Leucippus [loo-SIP-us]
and Democritus [dee-MOK-ru-us] arrived at the conclusion that all matter was made from tiny particles
(atoms) that were similar except for their size and shape: differences in large bodies were accounted for by
means of their different arrangements.
Should we think of these early thinkers as physicists or philosophers? The Greeks had no difficulty
answering this question, because they thought of physics as a part of philosophy. And this view of physics
persisted for over two thousand years. The full title of Isaac Newton’s Principles, in which Newton set forth
his famous theories of mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy, is Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy. Physics, even by the seventeenth century, however, physics had outgrown the nest and, though
it still has important points of contacts, is no longer considered a part of philosophy. Similar stories can be
told for each of the disciplines we have mentioned.
If philosophy can no longer claim those subject areas that gave grown up and moved out, what is left for it
to claim? As you will se by the end of this book, the current list of philosophical subjects is by no means
short and discloses the deep and wide concern of philosophy for some very important questions about the
universe, the earth, humankind and life, and each of us. Just what is this concern? What is philosophy today?

PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS
Mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, economics and political science, and the full array of
existing intellectual disciplines, including theology, leave unanswered in part some of the most important
and fundamental questions a person can ask.

 What is truth?
 Is it possible to know anything what absolute certainty?
 Does the universe have a purpose? Does life have a purpose?
 Is there order in the cosmos independent of what is put there by the mind?
 Could the universe be radically different from how we conceive it?
 Is a person more than a physical body? What is the mind? What is thought?
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 Do people really have free will?
 What is art? What is beauty?
 What is moral obligation? What is the extent of our moral obligation to other people and other living
things?
 What kind of person should I be?
 What are the ethically legitimate functions and scope of the state? What is its proper organization?
 Is there a God?
 What difference does it make if there is or isn’t a God?

It is possible to go through life and never spend a minute wondering about such questions; but most of us
have at least occasional moments of reflection about one or another of them. In fact, it is pretty difficult not
to think philosophically from time to time. For one thing, it is just plain boring always to be thinking and
talking about everyday affairs and objects – say, shopping, for instance. And what’s more, any time we think
or talk about a topic long enough, if our thinking or discussion is the least bit organized, we may well
become engaged in philosophy.
Manu philosophical questions concern norms. Normative questions ask about the value of something.
Science is interested in finding out how things are, but they cannot tell us how things ought to be. When we
decide that this or that is good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, we are applying ethical or aesthetic
norms, which are standards of one kind or another. Hoe can we establish that doing one thing is morally
acceptable, whereas doing something else is morally wrong? Doest it just strike us that way? Does what the
majority of think determine the issue? Is some feature of the action right or wrong, or it is the consequences
of the action? What is morally right, anyway? All these are philosophical questions, and nearly any answer
to each is based on commitment to some kind of ethical theory or principle. To many people philosophy is
ethics. However, many philosophical questions have nothing to do with ethics-but there is no denying that
ethics is important stuff. People may kill you if they think it is morally right to do so.
Often, too, philosophers ask questions about things that seem so obvious we might not wonder about
them-for example, the nature of change, an issue within that branch of philosophy known as metaphysics.
What is change? Perhaps that seems a strange thing to us because in a way we all know that change is. If
smth changes, it becomes different. But then-and here is the problem-if we have a different thing after the
change, then we are considering two things, the original thing and the new and different thing. If a smth
change, then it is different from the way it was, and if it is different then it is the same thing?
Further, if after the change we have a new thing, then were we wrong to speak of the original thing as
“changing”? Was not the original thing in fact “replace” rather than change? Isn’t there the only replacement
of, rather than change in, things, and so only continuous replacements, rather than changes, of the universe,
of the earth, and of each of us.
Here you may suspect an easy solution is at hand. When smth changes, it need not become entirely
different. It may change only in this or that respect. Or it may retain many of its original constituents or
features. Suppose a thing retains a lot of its original features or constituents. Then, if only a few other of its
feature or constituents change, it will still be the same thing. It will no have some different features or
constituents, true, but it will not be a different thing.
Unfortunately, this solution is not wholly satisfactory, and, in addition, it leads to further mystery. It is not
satisfactory because some things do change entirely-that is, in all respects.

So getting around the difficulties is not quite an easy as it might seem, and in fact a universally accepted
solution to the problem had yet to be found. To resolve things, we would have to get much clear than we
ordinarily are about what sorts of entities voluntary choices are, what causation amounts to, and what moral
accountability involves. These are large tasks, and they are all of them philosophical.

THE DIVISION OF PHILOSOPHY

Now, just how do the various philosophical questions and issues and relate to one another? First, philosophy
as an entire subject consists of seven interrelated branches or fields or main areas. These are:
 Metaphysic, which studies the nature of being. What is being? What are it is fundamental features
and properties? These are two basic questions of metaphysics. (As a branch of philosophy
metaphysics has precious little to do with the occult, but we’ll get to that later.)
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 Epistemology, the theory of knowledge. What is the nature of knowledge, and what are its
criteria, sources and limits? These are the basic questions of epistemology.
 Ethics, or moral philosophy the philosophical study of moral judgments, which includes, most
importantly, the question: Which moral judgments are correct?
 Social philosophy, the philosophical study of society and its institution. This branch of philosophy is
concerned especially with determining the features of the ideal or best society.
 Political philosophy, which focuses on one social institution, the state, and seeks to determine its
justification and ethically proper organization. Political philosophy is so closely related to social
philosophy that it is common to treat them as a single area, sociopolitical philosophy.
 Aesthetics, the philosophical study of art and of value judgments about art, and of beauty in general.
 Logic, the theory of correct reasoning, which seeks to investigate and establish the criteria of valid
inference and demonstration.

So philosophy, conceptualized as a big tree has seven major branches. However the various main
branches of philosophy do not each contain an equal number of theories or concepts or words. Your library
probably has more holdings under political philosophy than under the other areas, and fewest under
Epistemology or Aesthetics.
 Ancient philosophy (sixth century B.C. through approximately the third century A. D.)
 Medieval philosophy (third through sixteenth century approximately.)
 Modern philosophy (fifteenth through twentieth century)
 Contemporary philosophy (twentieth century)

There are other ways of dividing philosophy. Many universities offer philosophy courses that examine the
fundamental assumptions and methods of other disciplines and areas of intellectual inquiry, such as science
and mathematics. Some of the most important of these “philosophy-of-discipline” areas, listed in no
particular order, are:
 Philosophy of science
 Philosophy of mathematics
 Philosophy of law
 Philosophy of education
 Philosophy of biology
 Philosophy of psychology
Alternatively, many philosophers concern themselves with various subjects, for example, sports or religion.
Some of the more common “philosophies-of-subject” are:
 Philosophy of mind
 Philosophy of religion
 Philosophy of history
 Philosophy of sport
 Philosophy of love
 Philosophy of culture
 Philosophy of feminism (feminist philosophy)
Philosophies-of-discipline and philosophies-of-subject cut across the branches of philosophy and involve
issues from more than one branch. For example, philosophy of law involves questions of ethics,
metaphysics, and epistemology.
Philosophy can also be divided geographically, Eastern philosophy and Western philosophy being the
main divisions, with further subdivisions of the obvious sort: American philosophy, Indian philosophy,
Scandinavian philosophy and so on.
In the twentieth century the predominant interests and methods of philosophers in the West have trended
to separate philosophy into two fairly distinct traditions:
 Analytic philosophy: Analytic philosophers believe (or are the intellectual descendants of those
who did believe) that the proper method of philosophy is what is called analysis.
 Continental philosophy: Several approaches to philosophy fit under this heading, including
principally what are known as existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and
critical theory.
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Generally (and with important exceptions) analytic philosophy is the predominant tradition in English-
speaking countries. The expression Anglo-American philosophy often is used as a virtual synonym for
analytic philosophy. And generally (and again with important exceptions) the predominant tradition in
Continental Europe is, as you would expect, Continental philosophy. As odd as it sounds, if an American or
British philosopher happens to be most concerned with the issues discussed within Continental philosophy,
it is acceptable to refer to the person as a Continental philosopher even if he or she never sets foot on the
European continent.
And by the way, many philosophers would list Marxism along with analytic philosophy and Continental
philosophy as a third “tradition”, but we will treat Marxism as a species of political philosophy.
As is evident a whole range of classification schemes applies to philosophy. In this book, most of the
main divisions of philosophy will be discussed, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political
philosophy. We will also discuss some of the philosophies-of-subject; specifically, philosophy of religion,
philosophy of mind, and philosophy of feminism. In addition, we will provide some information on the
Continental tradition in philosophy as well as on Eastern and other non-Western philosophies. What you will
be getting is a historical overview of these various major components of philosophy.

THE BENEFITS OF PHILOSOPHY

The importance of some philosophical questions – Is there a God who attentive, caring, and responsive to
us? And is aborting morally wrong? – is obvious and great. A justification would have to be given for not
contemplating them. But, quite honestly, some philosophical questions are of more less obscure, and
seemingly only academic or theoretical, consequence. Not everything philosophers consider is dynamite.
The questions posed earlier about robots having feelings would be perceived by many as pretty academic
and theoretical.
But then, every field has theoretical and nonpractical questions. Why do astronomers wonder about the
distance and recessional velocity of quasars? Why are paleontologists interested in 135-million-year-old
mammalian fossil remains in northern Malawi? Why do musicologists care whether Bach used parallel
fifths? The answer is that some questions are inherently interesting to those who pose them. An astronomer
wonders about a quasar just because it is there. And some philosophical questions are like that too: the
philosopher wants to know the answer simply to know the answer.
But there are side benefits in seeking answers to philosophical questions, even those that are difficult,
abstruse, or seemingly remote from practical concerns. Seeing philosophical answers usually entails making
careful distinctions in thought, words, and argument, and recognizing subtle distinctions among things and
among facts. Philosophical solutions require logical and critical thinking, discussion, and exposition.
Students of philosophy learn to look carefully for similarities and differences among things. They also
develop an ability to spot logical difficulties in what others write or say and to avoid these pitfalls I their
own thinking. In addition, they learn to recognize and critically assess the important unstated assumptions
people make about the world and themselves and other people and life in general. These assumptions affect
how people perceive the world and what they say and do, yet for the most part people are not aware of them
and are disinclined to consider them at all critically. These abilities are of great value in any field that
requires clear thinking.
It is not surprising, therefore, that according to The Economist “philosophy students do better in
examinations for business and management schools than anybody except mathematicians – better even than
those who study economics, business or other vocational subjects.” It is possible, of course, that philosophy
attracts unusually capable students to begin with and that this accounts for results like these. But there is at
least some reason to believe that the kind of training philosophy provides helps students to think, read and
write, and possibly speak more critically, carefully, and cogently.
Finally, students who have learned their philosophical lessons well are not as likely as those who have not
to become trapped by dogmatism. Such students have learned the value of keeping an open mind and
seeking solutions to problems that meet standards of coherence and reasonableness. These general attitudes,
along stand a person in good stead when he or she is faced with many of the problems life generously
provides for us.
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TWO MYTHS ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

A couple of misconceptions about philosophy ought to be corrected right here at the outset.
First, there is the notion that in philosophy one person’s opinion is as valid as the next person’s and that
therefore anything you write or say goes – and probably should get a good grade. Some people who have
this idea may sign up for a philosophy course thinking that is an easy way to bolster the GPA.
We will jump all over this line of thought, but there is something in that is not completely false. As you
will see in Chapter 5, according to an old and respectable tradition in philosophy known as skepticism, there
is no certain criterion for judging the truth of anything; therefore, all arguments are equally valid. Now, a
good bit of hard and disciplined thinking has been done in support of these and other skeptical contentions.
But even though some philosophers may well be skeptics of ports, not many of them are likely to be much
impressed with some half-baked form of skepticism that someone assumes unthinkingly.
Most philosophers make a distinction between philosophy and mere opinion, the difference being that
philosophy at the very least involves opinion supported by good reasoning. Someone who expresses his or
her own views without providing the supporting reasoning may be commended by a philosopher for having
interesting opinions, but he or she is probably not going to receive high marks for having produced good
philosophy. Philosophy requires you to support your claims, and that is hard work.
A second wrong idea some people have is that philosophy is light reading, something you relax with in
the evening, after all the serious work of the day is done. In reality, philosophical writing is often complex
and technical and almost always takes time effort to understand. Philosophical prose often does not seem
particularly complex or technical, because it may be written in familiar, everyday language. But that
wrapping of familiar, everyday language is deceiving. It is best to approach a work in philosophy with the
kind of mental preparedness and alertness appropriate for a textbook in mathematics or science. As a general
rule of thumb, you might expect to be able to read an entire novel in the time it takes you to get through just
a chapter or two of good philosophy. To understand philosophy, you usually have to reread a passage
several times and think about it a lot.
Of course, you do not have to read a philosophy book slowly and carefully. But if you don’t you may well
find it dull and uninteresting, sort of like baseball is to someone who does not understand the game and does
not get involved in what is going on.
Philosophy is not light reading, and it is more than mere expressions of opinion. Philosophers support
their views to make it plan why, if we are reasonable, we will accept what they say. When someone supports
a belief by giving a reason for accepting the belief, he or she has given an argument. Setting forth
arguments is the most basic of philosophical activities and is one of the activities that distinguishes
philosophy from merely having opinions.
When you study other subjects, you may be expected to remember what person A or person B believed or
discovered or accomplished. When you study philosophy, you should try to remember not merely what the
philosopher believed but also arguments given. (This is difficult in the case of some early philosophers
about whose arguments we do not really have much information.)
For an example of an argument, think back to what we said about voluntary choices. Here, in outline
form, is the arguments we gave:
1. Whatever is caused had to occur, given the exact state of the world at the time.
2. If a choice is voluntary, it did not have to occur, given the state of the world at the time.
3. Therefore, voluntary choices cannot be caused.
4. Therefore, I do not cause my voluntary choices.
5. Therefore, it makes no sense to praise me for my voluntary choices.

The conclusion of a person’s argument is the point he or she is trying to establish; the reason the person
gives for accepting the conclusion is stated in the premises of the argument. In the argument outlined here,
line 3 is a conclusion that supposedly follows from lines 1 and 2, which are premises.
Philosophers do not usually present their arguments in outline form, but I can be helpful to restate
arguments that way. An outline makes the steps in an argument quite clear, and it may help to focus
discussion.
There are just two ways in which an argument – any argument – can fail or be “incorrect”. On one hand,
one or more of the premises might be questionable. On the other hand, even if none of the premises are
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questionable, they might fail to establish the conclusion. Logic, the theory of correct inference, is
concerned with the second type of failure.
Common mistakes in reasoning of the second type are called fallacies, and one important contribution of
logic has been identification, classification, and analysis of fallacies. Obviously, everyone concerned with
sound reasoning, including philosophers, tries to avoid fallacies, but even philosophers are not always
successful in doing so. Some fallacies are frequently encountered in philosophical discussion. (You’ll want
to avoid using them yourself, of course.)
 Argumentum and hominem (or in plain English “argument to the person”). Frequently people have
mistaken idea that they cab successfully challenge a view by criticizing the person who holds that
view. Suppose, for example, you think you can refute philosopher Martin Heidegger’s views on
technology by pointing out that Heidegger supported the Nazis. Then you would guilty of ad
hominem reasoning. Heidegger’s views cannot be discredited by discrediting Heidegger. Ad
hominem arguments are surprisingly common, and it can take a special effort to remember to
evaluate a person’s views on their merits and not on the merits of the person whose views they are.
 Appeals to emotion. Arguments that try to establish conclusions solely by attempting to arouse or
play on the emotions of a listener or reader. Suppose we try to “prove” to you that God exists with
the argument that “if you don’t believe it you will burn in hell.” We have not really given you a
proof at all; we are just trying to scare you into agreeing with us.
 Straw man. Sometimes people (people philosophers) will “refute” someone’s careful, we may think
the original view has been refuted rather than the “straw man” that actually has been attacked. When
the Irish philosopher George Berkeley [BAR-klee] maintained that physical objects are really just
clusters of sensations existing only in the mind, the English writer Samuel Johnson “refuted”
Berkeley by nothing that some physical objects are so hard that things just bounce off them. Johnson
then kicked a rock, trying to demonstrate that rocks are too hard to be mere sensations. But Johnson
had in fact mispresented Berkeley, for Berkeley had never maintained that rocks are not hard.
Johnson had set up a straw man that was easy to knock over.
 Red herring. To address a point other than the one actually at issue; that is, to bring in something
that is off the point. For example, suppose we wish to establish that people have free will; that is that
they could have acted otherwise than they did. Suppose, further, our “proof” is that people obviously
do lost of things they do not like to do, and therefore people must be able to make choices. We have
brought in a red herring. What we have proved is not that people could have acted otherwise than
they did but that they can make choices. (The fact that you chose to act is not equivalent to the fact
that you could have acted differently.)

As you can see, ad hominem arguments, appeals to emotion, and straw man arguments might all be said
to be red herrings because they all seek to establish something that is not quite the issue. If you like, you can
think of them as red herrings that have their own special names.

 Beginning the question. One premise rests on an assumption that is more or less identical to the
very thing you are trying to prove as your conclusion. For example, suppose what is at issue is
whether you can know that your friends are really people (not zombies or robots controlled by
Martians). Suppose someone then argues, “Of course your friends are really people, because they say
they are and they would not lie to you”. The problem with this “proof” is that one of its premises –
that your friends would not lie to you – rests on the assumption that your friends really are people.
And that is the very thing at issue. So the argument begs the question. The question is, Are your
friends really people? The argument does not prove they are; it merely assumes they are.
 Black-or-white fallacy(myth). Suppose someone says to you, “Either God exists, or there is no
explanation for the universe. Therefore, because the universe must have some explanation, God
exists.” This argument offers just two options. Either God exists or the universe has no explanation.
This argument ignores a third possibility; namely, that there is an explanation for the universe that
does not involve God. Arguments that limit us to two options when in fact more exist commit the
black-or-white fallacy. Other terms for this include “false dilemma,” “all-or-nothing fallacy”, and
“either or fallacy”.
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If you are reading this book as part of a philosophy course, there could be lots of discussion the class, and
the discussion is apt to involve arguments – not in the sense of people fighting with each other using words
but in the sense of people trying to support their views with reasons. It is certainly possible that you will find
examples of these fallacies (lies) among the arguments you hear. You may even find an example or two in
the arguments you read about in this book.
An instructor we know once had her students make signs saying “straw man”, “ad hominem”, and the like
and hold them up when someone in the class used one of these arguments. The problem, as we understand it,
was that her students began taking the signs with them to other classes – and holding them up when the
instructor spoke.