What is philosophy (lecture 1)

1.

Lecture 1
What is philosophy?

2.

The activity of philosophy
• Philosophy is the study of thought concerning
nature, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, being,
knowledge, logic, and all manner of
theory. “Philosophy” comes from Greek words
meaning “love of wisdom.” Philosophy uses the
tools of logic and reason to analyze the ways in
which humans experience the world. It teaches
critical thinking, close reading, clear writing, and
logical analysis; it uses these to understand the
language we use to describe the world, and our
place within it

3.

The activity of philosophy
• In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity
people undertake when they seek to
understand fundamental truths about
themselves, the world in which they live, and
their relationships to the world and to each
other. As an academic discipline philosophy is
much the same. Those who study philosophy
are perpetually engaged in asking, answering,
and arguing for their answers to life’s most
basic questions.

4.

The activity of philosophy
• It is difficult to define philosophy with precision, and
the attempt to do so forms an interesting and
important part of philosophy itself. Even though we
should not expect a pat definition, one way to define
philosophy is to see what it is that philosophers do.
• Sometimes people use the word philosophy to refer in
a very general way to a person’s overall theory or
outlook. For example, you might refer to someone’s
attitude toward doing business as a “business
philosophy” or an individual’s general outlook as that
person’s “philosophy of life.”

5.

The activity of philosophy
• “My philosophy is: honesty is the best policy,” a
recent advertisement said. Used in this way, the
term philosophy is a kind of synonym for outlook,
or general viewpoint. You will sometimes find
philosophers using the term in this general sense,
but more is implied by the word than that.
• In the minds of others, being philosophical means
having a passive attitude, taking life as it comes.
For these people, to be philosophical would be to
accept things without worrying about them.

6.

The activity of philosophy
• The ancient Stoics, believing that all things are
ultimately rational and orderly, argued for a somewhat
similar view, but not all philosophers have adopted a
passive attitude that calls for a calm acceptance of the
troubles of life.
• If you look in the dictionary you will discover that the
term philosophy is derived from two Greek words that
mean “the love of wisdom.” Philosophy, then, has
something to do with wisdom, but wisdom is also a
term that a lot of people use without knowing exactly
what they mean by it.

7.

The activity of philosophy
• When the ancient Greek thinkers referred to
wisdom, they usually meant the knowledge of
fundamental principles and laws, an awareness of
that which was basic and unchanging, as opposed
to those things that are transitory and changing.
• Ever since then, the term philosophy has taken on
something of this meaning and refers to attempts
on the part of serious thinkers to get at the basis
of things. Not the superficial, trivial details, but
the underlying fundamentals.

8.

The activity of philosophy
• Not how many chemical elements there are,
but what matter is in general; not what
differentiates Baroque from Romantic music,
but what art is in general. Unlike the social
scientist who specializes in one small area,
such as the initiation rites of a South American
tribe, philosophy traditionally looks for
principles underlying the whole of art,
morality, religion, or reality.

9.

The activity of philosophy
• Putting these meanings together results in a more
satisfactory definition of philosophy—the attempt to
provide for oneself an outlook on life based on the
discovery of broad, fundamental principles.
• First of all, then, philosophy is defined by its attempt to
discover the most general and fundamental, underlying
principles. But philosophy is also different in its
method, a method that can be described as rational
reflection. As one contemporary philosopher put it,
philosophy is not much different from simply the act of
thinking hard about something.

10.

The activity of philosophy
• Unlike the sciences, philosophy does not
discover new empirical facts, but instead
reflects on the facts we are already familiar
with, or those given to us by the empirical
sciences, to see what they lead to and how
they all hang together. You can see the
connection with the first point about
philosophy—that philosophy tries to discover
the most fundamental, underlying principles.

11.

The activity of philosophy
• Through rational reflection, philosophy offers
a means of coming to an understanding of
humankind, the world, and our
responsibilities in the world. Some of the
earliest philosophers inquired into the nature
of reality, or the philosophy of nature. Many
of their investigations formed the basis of the
natural sciences, but there was always a
residue of concern that could not be delved
into by the natural sciences.

12.

The activity of philosophy
• For example, what is reality, ultimately? Is it
merely matter in continuous motion? Or is
reality ultimately more akin to mind and
mental processes? Is nature merely a blind
and purposeless scheme, or does it exhibit
purpose? These and similar questions form
the basis of an inquiry known as metaphysics.

13.

Metaphysics
• At its core the study of metaphysics is the study
of the nature of reality, of what exists in the
world, what it is like, and how it is ordered. In
metaphysics philosophers wrestle with such
questions as:
• Is there a God?
• What is truth?
• What is a person? What makes a person the same
through time?
• Is the world strictly composed of matter?

14.

Metaphysics
• Do people have minds? If so, how is the mind related to the body?
• Do people have free wills?
• What is it for one event to cause another?
• Metaphysical questions directly lead into questions concerning
knowledge.
• How do we have knowledge?
• Is it through the five senses alone?
• Or must the senses be corrected by reasoning and judgment?
• Which is more reliable, the senses or reason?

15.

Epistemology
• These concerns are among those of the theory of
knowledge or epistemology.
• Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It is primarily
concerned with what we can know about the world
and how we can know it. Typical questions of concern
in epistemology are:
• What is knowledge?
• Do we know anything at all?
• How do we know what we know?
• Can we be justified in claiming to know certain things?

16.

Logic
• Closely allied with epistemology is the study
of correct thinking, known as logic. Logic deals
with the difference between a valid and an
invalid argument, how to spot fallacious
reasoning, and how to proceed in reasoning
so that the conclusion of an argument is
justified by the premises.

17.

Ethics
• Another important aspect of the study of
philosophy is the arguments or reasons given
for people’s answers to these questions. To
this end philosophers employ logic to study
the nature and structure of arguments.
Logicians ask such questions as:
• What constitutes "good" or "bad" reasoning?
• How do we determine whether a given piece
of reasoning is good or bad?

18.

Ethics
• Another ongoing concern of philosophy is ethics, or the
analysis of principles of conduct.
• The study of ethics often concerns what we ought to
do and what it would be best to do. In struggling with
this issue, larger questions about what is good and
right arise. So, the ethicist attempts to answer such
questions as:
• What is good? What makes actions or people good?
• What is right? What makes actions right?
• Is morality objective or subjective?
• How should I treat others?

19.

Ethics
• What makes an action right or wrong?
• What is my duty to myself and others?
• And what principles of action are consistent with
my understanding of the nature of human being.
• These and other concerns must be looked into
before one is in a position to decide about the
problems of ethics raised by advances in
medicine, where we are faced with difficult
decisions on abortion, euthanasia, and the
morality of organ transplants and genetic
manipulation.

20.

Ethics
• When the questions of ethics are broadened
to include an entire society, one is concerned
with social and political philosophy and the
problems generated by a desire to live in a
well-ordered society.

21.

History of Philosophy
• The study of philosophy involves not only
forming ones own answers to such questions,
but also seeking to understand the way in
which people have answered such questions
in the past. So, a significant part of philosophy
is its history, a history of answers and
arguments about these very questions. In
studying the history of philosophy one
explores the ideas of such historical figures as:

22.

History of Philosophy
• Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke,
Kant,Hegel, Marx, etc.
• What often motivates the study of philosophy is
not merely the answers or arguments themselves
but whether or not the arguments are good and
the answers are true. Moreover, many of the
questions and issues in the various areas of
philosophy overlap and in some cases even
converge. Thus, philosophical questions arise in
almost every discipline.

23.

History of Philosophy
• In general, the philosopher is trained to
rationally reflect on how the fundamental
questions relate to all human activities. Later
we will see how these same philosophical
methods can be applied to such specific
activities as art, history, education, science,
and religion.

24.

Early Greek philosophy
• Because it is the nature of philosophy to take
nothing for granted, philosophers look at
philosophy’s history as important for
understanding both the successes and failures
of their predecessors. Although every
generation asks its own questions, there is a
set of perennial issues that seems to recur:
What ought we to do? (ethics); What is
reality? (metaphysics);

25.

Early Greek philosophy
• How do we know anything? (epistemology);
What is the nature of correct reasoning?
(logic); What is art? (esthetics). Some of the
answers to these questions given by past
philosophers have led to dead ends. Other
answers seem only partial and incomplete.
Some of the issues even elude the best efforts
of past as well as present philosophers to
answer fully

26.

Early Greek philosophy
• One way to study philosophy is to take a problem
and see how it was handled by past philosophers
and how it is treated by contemporary ones. This
could be called the problems approach to
philosophy. Another way to study philosophy is to
see how each era defined the important issues
and responded to them. This is the historical
approach. The former is probably the best way
for beginning philosophy students to get a grasp
of the nature of philosophical reasoning.

27.

Early Greek philosophy
• Western philosophy appeared in Greece in the sixth
century B.C.E. as the first attempt to provide a
thoroughly secular and rational explanation of the
natural world. People have always tried to explain the
world, of course, but they had previously framed their
theories in religious, mythological, and magical terms,
leaning mainly on mystical and magical grounds for
support. The first group of philosophers, known as the
pre-Socratic Milesians, limited their explanation of the
world to natural elements, such as air, water, heat, and
condensation, and their mode of justification to
analytical reason and logic.

28.

Early Greeks
• Western intellectual history always begins
with the ancient Greeks. This is not to say
that no one had any deep thoughts prior to
the ancient Greeks, or that the philosophies of
ancient India and China (and elsewhere) were
in any way inferior. In fact, philosophies from
all over the world eventually came to
influence western thought, but only much
later.

29.

Early Greeks
• But it was the Greeks that educated the Romans
and, after a long dark age, it was the records of
these same Greeks, kept and studied by the
Moslem and Jewish scholars as well as Christian
monks, that educated Europe once again.
• We might also ask, why are the Greeks in the first
place? Why not the Phoenicians, or the
Carthaginians, or the Persians, or the
Etruscans? There are a variety of possible
reasons.

30.

Early Greeks
• One has to do with the ability to read and write,
which in turn has to do with the alphabet.
• It is when ideas get recorded that they enter
intellectual history.
• Buddhism, for example, although a very
sophisticated philosophy, was an oral tradition for
hundreds of years until committed to writing,
since the Brahmi alphabet was late in coming.
• It was only then that Buddhism spread
throughout Asia.

31.

Early Greeks
• The alphabet was invented by the Semites of the
Mediterranean coast, including the Hebrews and
the Phoenicians, who used simple drawings to
represent consonants instead of words.
• The Phoenicians apparently passed it on to the
Greeks.
• The Greeks improved on the idea by inventing
vowels, using some extra letters their language
had no use for.

32.

Early Greeks
• Prior to the invention of the alphabet, reading
and writing was the domain of specialized
scribes, concerned mostly with keeping
government records. Even in the case of the
Phoenicians, writing was more a tool of the
merchant class, to keep track of trade, than a
means of recording ideas. In Greece, at least
in certain city-states, reading and writing was
something “everyone” did.

33.

Early Greeks
• By everyone, of course, we mean upper class
males. Women, peasants, and slaves were
discouraged from picking up the skill, as they
would be and still are in many places around
the world. If you wonder where all the
women philosophers are, well, there were
very few indeed! The poet Sappho of Lesbos
is the closest we get to a female philosopher
on record in the ancient world

34.

Early Greeks
• Still, the alphabet does not explain
everything. Another thing that made the
Greeks a bit more likely to start the
intellectual ball rolling was the fact that they
got into overseas trading early. Their land and
climate was okay for agriculture, but not
great, so the idea of trading for what you can’t
grow or make yourself came naturally. Plus,
Greece is practically all coastline and islands,
so seafaring came equally naturally.

35.

Early Greeks
• What sea trading gives you is contact with a great
variety of civilizations, including their religions
and philosophies and sciences. This gets people
to thinking: If this one says x, and that one
says y, and the third one says z, what then is the
truth? Traders are usually skeptics.
• Still, the Phoenicians (and their cousins, the
Carthaginians) had the alphabet first, and were
excellent sea traders as well. Why weren’t they
the founders of western intellectual
history? Perhaps it had to do with centralization

36.

Early Greeks
• The Phoenicians had an authoritarian government
controlled by the most powerful merchants. The
Carthaginians had the same. Perhaps being
surrounded by powerful authoritarian empires forced
them to adopt that style of government to survive.
• The Greeks, on the other hand, were divided into many
small city-states, each unique, each fiercely
independent, always bickering and often fighting. It
may seem disadvantageous, but when it comes to
ideas, diversity and even conflict can be invigorating!

37.

Basics
• Consider that when Greece was finally united
under Macedonian rule, the flurry of intellectual
activity slowed. And when the Romans took over,
it practically died.
• The ancient Greek philosophers gave us the basic
categories of philosophy, beginning
with metaphysics. Metaphysics is the part of
philosophy that asks questions such as “What is
the world made of?" and "What is the ultimate
substance of all reality?”

38.

Early Greeks
• In fact, the ancient Greeks were among the first
to suggest that there is a “true” reality
(noumenon) under the “apparent” reality
(phenomenon), an “unseen real” beneath the
“unreal seen.” The question is, what is this true
reality? Is it matter and energy, i.e. something
physical? This is called materialism. Or
something more spiritual or mental, such as ideas
or ideals? This is called idealism. Materialism
and idealism constitute the two extreme
answers.

39.

Basics
• A second aspect of philosophy
is epistemology. Epistemology is the philosophy
of knowledge: How do we know what is true or
false, what is real or not? Can we know anything
for certain, or is it ultimately hopeless?
• Again, the Greeks outlined two opposing
approaches to the problem of knowledge. One is
called empiricism, which says that all knowledge
comes through the senses.

40.

Basics
• The other is called rationalism, which says that
knowledge is a matter of reason, thought. There are
other answers in epistemology as well. In fact,
empiricism and rationalism have never been entirely
exclusive.
• The third aspect of philosophy that we will be
concerned with is ethics. Ethics is the philosophical
understanding of good and bad, right and wrong. It is
often called morality, and most consider the two words
synonymous. After all, ethics comes from ethos, which
is Greek for customs, and morality comes from mores,
which is Latin for customs!

41.

Basics
• As we shall see, ethics is the most difficult of the
three aspects of philosophy. For the present, we
might want to differentiate the extremes
of hedonism and cynicism. Hedonism says that
good and bad come down to what I like and what
I don’t like, what gives me pleasure and what
gives me pain. Cynicism says that world is
essentially evil, and we can only work at
distancing ourselves from it and moving towards
the ultimate good, which is God.

42.

The Ionians
• Greek philosophy didn’t begin in Greece (as
we know it); It began on the western coast of
what is now Turkey, an area known then as
Ionia. In Ionia’s richest city, Miletus, was a
man of Phoenician descent called Thales (624546). He studied in Egypt and other parts of
the near east, and learned geometry and
astronomy.

43.

The Ionians
• His answer to the great question of what the
universe is made of was water. Inasmuch as
water is a simple molecule, found in gaseous,
liquid, and solid forms, and found just about
everywhere, especially life, this is hardly a bad
answer! It makes Thales not only the nominal
first philosopher, but the first materialist as
well. Since ultimate nature was known in Greek
as physis, he could also be considered the first
physicist (or, as the Greeks would say,
physiologist).

44.

The Ionians
• We should note, however, that he also
believed that the whole universe of material
things is alive, and that animals, plants, and
even metals have souls -- an idea called
panpsychism.
• His most famous student
was Anaximander (611-549), also of Miletus.
He is probably best known as having drawn
the first known map of the inhabited world.

45.

The Ionians
• Anaximander added an evolutionary aspect to
Thales’ materialism: The universe begins as an
unformed, infinite mass, which develops over
time into the many-faceted world we see around
us. But, he warns, the world will eventually
return to the unformed mass!
• Further, the earth began as fluid, some of which
dries to become earth and some of which
evaporates to become atmosphere. Life also
began in the sea, only gradually becoming
animals of the land and birds of the air.

46.

The Ionians
• Anaximander of Miletus (610–c. 546 BCE), tried
to give a more elaborate account of the origin
and development of the ordered world (the
cosmos). According to him, it developed out of
the apeiron (“unlimited”), something
both infinite and indefinite (without
distinguishable qualities). Within
this apeiron something arose to produce the
opposites of hot and cold. These at once began to
struggle with each other and produced the
cosmos.

47.

The Ionians
• The cold (and wet) partly dried up (becoming
solid earth), partly remained (as water), and—by
means of the hot—partly evaporated (becoming
air and mist), its evaporating part (by expansion)
splitting up the hot into fiery rings, which
surround the whole cosmos. Because these rings
are enveloped by mist, however, there remain
only certain breathing holes that are visible to
human beings, appearing to them as the Sun,
Moon, and stars.

48.

The Ionians
• Starting from Thales’ observations, Anaximander
tried to reconstruct the development of life in
more detail. Life, being closely bound up with
moisture, originated in the sea.
• All land animals, he held, are descendants of sea
animals; because the first humans as newborn
infants could not have survived without parents,
• Anaximander believed that they were born within
an animal of another kind—specifically, a sea
animal in which they were nurtured until they
could fend for themselves.

49.

The Ionians
• Gradually, however, the moisture will be partly
evaporated, until in the end all things will
return into the undifferentiated apeiron, “in
order to pay the penalty for their injustice”—
that of having struggled against one another.

50.

The Ionians
• Anaximander’s successor, Anaximenes of Miletus
(flourished c. 545 BCE), taught that air was the
origin of all things. His position was for a long
time thought to have been a step backward
because, like Thales, he placed a special kind of
matter at the beginning of the development of
the world. But this criticism missed the point.
Neither Thales nor Anaximander appear to have
specified the way in which the other things arose
out of water or apeiron.

51.

The Ionians
• Anaximenes, however, declared that the other
types of matter arose out of air by
condensation and rarefaction. In this way,
what to Thales had been merely a beginning
became a fundamental principle that
remained essentially the same through all of
its transmutations. Thus, the term arche,
which originally simply meant “beginning,”

52.

The Ionians
• acquired the new meaning of “principle,” a term
that henceforth played an enormous role
in philosophy down to the present.
• This concept of a principle that remains the same
through many transmutations is, furthermore,
the presupposition of the idea that nothing can
come out of nothing and that all of the comings
to be and passings away that human beings
observe are nothing but transmutations of
something that essentially remains the same
eternally.

53.

The Ionians
• In this way it also lies at the bottom of all of
the conservation laws—the laws of
the conservation of matter, force, and
energy—that have been basic in the
development of physics. Although
Anaximenes of course did not realize all of
the implications of his idea, its importance can
hardly be exaggerated.

54.

The Ionians
• The first three Greek philosophers have often
been called “hylozoists” because they seemed
to believe in a kind of living matter
(see hylozoism). But this is hardly an adequate
characterization. It is, rather, characteristic of
them that they did not clearly distinguish
between kinds of matter, forces, and qualities,
nor between physical and emotional qualities.

55.

The Ionians
• The same entity is sometimes called “fire” and
sometimes “the hot.” Heat appears
sometimes as a force and sometimes as
a quality, and again there is no clear
distinction between warm and cold as physical
qualities and the warmth of love and the cold
of hate. To realize these ambiguities is
important to an understanding of certain later
developments in Greek philosophy.

56.

The Ionians
• Like Thales, Heraclitus (540-475) was an Ionian,
from Ephesus, a little north of Miletus. And, like
Thales, he was searching for the ultimate
substance that unifies all reality. He decided on
fire, or energy -- again, not a bad guess at all.
• The multiplicity of reality comes out of fire by
condensation, becoming humid air, then water,
and finally earth. But this is balanced by
rarefaction, and the earth liquifies, then
evaporates, and finally returns to pure energy.

57.

The Ionians
• Like Thales, Heraclitus (540-475) was an Ionian,
from Ephesus, a little north of Miletus. And, like
Thales, he was searching for the ultimate
substance that unifies all reality. He decided on
fire, or energy -- again, not a bad guess at all.
• The multiplicity of reality comes out of fire by
condensation, becoming humid air, then water,
and finally earth. But this is balanced by
rarefaction, and the earth liquifies, then
evaporates, and finally returns to pure energy.

58.

The Ionians
• Taking fire as his ultimate substance led to a more
dynamic view of reality. Change, for Heraclitus, is
the only constant. “Panta rhei, ouden menei” -all things flow, nothing abides -- is his most
famous saying. He is also known for the saying
that we cannot step into the same river twice,
because new water is constantly flowing onto us.
Fire is also associated in his theory with mind or
spirit. And, just like any other fire, he points out
that our individuality eventually dies. There is no
personal immortality. Only God -- the divine fire - is eternal.