Blue Sky Thinking…

Philosophy as an Activity: a selection of approaches

Tony Stuart 2010

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Contents Alastair MacIntyre on Philosophy and Social Theory………………………… 3 Analysis……………………………………………………………………………5 Argument – an example from John Searle…………………………………….. 7 Aristotle and his Philosophy…………………………………………………….. 9 Austin’s Approach to Philosophy………………………………………………. 11 On Baruch Spinoza (1632-77)……………………………………………………12 Kant’s Freedom and Reason……………………………………………………. 13 Philosophy?!............................................................................................................ 14 What is Philosophy For?........................................................................................ 15 Definitions………………………………………………………………………… 16 John Dewey (1859 – 1952)……………………………………………………….. 18 Foucault: Words and Power…………………………………………………….. 20 What is a Philosopher?............................................................................................21 Philosophy as an exercise in freedom…………………………………………….22 Janet Radcliffe Richards………………………………………………………… 23 The Philosophers Moore and Austin……………………………………………. 25 On Bertrand Russell and Philosophy…………………………………………… 26 On Karl Popper ………………………………………………………………….. 27 Plato ………………………………………………………………………………. 30 Reduction ………………………………………………………………………… 33 Universities and Philosophy ……………………………………………………. 34 Philosophy and Tradition ………………………………………………………. 35 Philosophy as Therapeutic ……………………………………………………… 36 Philosophy as an Activity – comments from William James…………………. 38 Dialogue in Philosophy 1. Berkeley ……………………………………… 39

2. Hume ………………………………………… 40 3. Socratic Dialogue – Meno …………………... 42 4. Plato’s Socrates ………………………………. 43

Dialectic ……………………………………………………………………………45 Nietzsche 1. Genealogy as a philosophical method ………………………. 47

2. Of the Three Metamorphoses ………………………………… 48 3. On Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) ………………………… 50

Scepticism 1 ……………………………………………………………………… 52 Scepticism 2 – an example of its positive use…………………………………… 54 Scepticism 3 – a positive example from Radcliffe Richards ………………….. 57

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Alasdair MacIntyre on Philosophy and Social Theory In the mid-1950s, political philosophy was declared dead by a number of professional philosophers. Since that time, there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in the area which has come about for three main reasons. The first is probably still unrecognized by many people. One of the most important aspects of British philosophy when it was strongly influenced by positivism1 was a belief that the history of philosophy was a mere addendum, a source-book of problems. It held that although knowledge of the history of philosophy might be quite useful, one could be a very good philosopher indeed without knowing very much about the history of philosophy. When British writers do write about the history of philosophy their method is customarily to treat the historical figure concerned as much like one of their contemporaries as possible and to debate with him as they would with a colleague at the Aristotelian Society. One of the influences in reviving philosophical thought on political and social matters has been the number of excellent histories which have been produced, studies of the works of Hobbes or of Locke or of Mill, in which the relationship between epistemology and political philosophy of a particular thinker has become so clear that the attempt to separate these, or to treat them in a way that the positivists did, becomes very implausible. When we understand how closely Hobbes’ political philosophy is linked to epistemology, or when we realize how systematic a thinker Mill is, then we come to realize that in our own time the notion that we can pursue philosophy as primarily an epistemological subject without worrying about its implications for political and social affairs begins to seem bizarre. Why should we in our time be so different from Hobbes and Mill? It’s at least worth taking seriously the hypothesis that we are not. Secondly, an extremely important influence on reviving political philosophy has been the impact on philosophy of actual political concerns. Examples of this are the concepts of freedom and equality discussed by Berlin and Wollheim respectively. Freedom and equality are extremely important terms because we use them both to evaluate and to characterize societies. They are precisely expressions which are not going to be easily disposed of by approaching them with a neat factual-evaluative dichotomy, and trying to find factual elements and evaluative elements and separating them out (as the positivists claim we should do). Indeed, when we characterize societies as more or less free, or as free in one respect and not in another, and when we characterize some society as providing quality of opportunity but not other kinds of equality, then the question of the precise criteria employed in making these judgments, and the relationship between meaning and criteria, and all the other epistemological questions, become central to political and social philosophy. Furthermore, if our epistemological analyses and our conceptual analyses do not provide us with an apparatus which will enable us to understand our use of these terms, then this puts a question-mark against our epistemology and our analysis of concepts. This is the kind of area in which political and social philosophy is a source of epistemological thought and not a mere postscript to it. 1 Positivism holds that the highest or only form of knowledge is the description of sensory phenomena. In the 20th century the logical positivists used this doctrine to cut away as meaningless many of the traditional metaphysical questions of philosophy since they could not be examined or resolved through experience. Thus, for example, whether God exists is meaningless.

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If one pursues still further the question about what kinds of concept and what kinds of judgement are involved when we speak about freedom and equality in characterizing and evaluating societies, then one comes to a third important influence. Thus, the work of the later Wittgenstein and the work of Austin, bring out the need for patient descriptive labour in answering the question of how concepts of different kinds are used, of how the widely ranging vocabulary of political and social life is deployed. Austin showed us how what some have taken for minute differences between negligence, inadvertence and irresponsibility of other kinds, can be extremely important in characterizing the way in which an agent’s intention was or was not embodied in his actions on a particular occasion. These descriptive labours result, of course, in reports of how people do actually use discourse and therefore they have an empirical basis. They provide some of the data which we need if we are to return to the problems of classical political philosophy. At the core of such enquiries is the large general question of how we do and how we ought to characterize what a man is doing when he does something. How do we distinguish between his action and its effects, consequences and results? This whole family of questions raises the issue of how we understand the actions of ourselves and others in our social relationships. Thus what contemporary philosophy has brought us to is a realization that we do not as yet understand how to understand what we are doing in those elementary social relationships which are relationships of everyday action and everyday conversation, just because we have not adequately clarified yet our basic concepts.

from Modern British Philosophy ed. Bryan Magee (OUP 1971) [822 words]

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Analysis This is the philosophical method, or set of methods, characteristic of much twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy. It expresses allegiance to rigour and precision, science, logical techniques and – perhaps most distinctive of all – careful investigation of language as the best means of investigating concepts. Analysis is pre-eminently a style, not a body of doctrine. It is piecemeal and particular in its interests. Some practitioners have expressed open hostility to the sort of system-building efforts of philosophers such as Spinoza and Hegel. In sharp contrast to such efforts, philosophical analysis is best understood by analogy with analysis in chemistry, as being a process of investigation into the structure, functioning, and connections of a particular matter under scrutiny. Although analytical philosophers look back to Aristotle and the British Empiricists, especially Hume, as major influences on their tradition, it is the work of Bertrand Russell and G E Moore at the beginning of the twentieth century which is the proximate source of analysis so called. Moore conceived the philosopher’s task to be a quest for definitions as a way of clarifying philosophical claims. This involves finding a definition of the concept or proposition (not merely the words used to express them) under discussion. Russell’s conception of analysis, on the other hand, derived from his work on logic. On his view, the surface forms of language can mislead us philosophically and we must penetrate to the underlying logical structure to clarify what is being said. His classic example is the assertion ‘The present King of France is wise’. This seems to be meaningful as a sentence but is it true or false, or neither? Russell argued that it is a concealed three-part conjunction asserting: a) there is a king of France; b) that there is only one such thing (‘the’ implies uniqueness); and c) that it is wise. Since the first conjunct is false, the whole is so. These early techniques of analysis were soon extended and varied into practices not restricted either to the giving of definitions or to the attempt to unearth underlying logical structure. Some philosophers who would standardly be classified as belonging to the analytic tradition – a broad church – have explicitly repudiated both the claim that language has a hidden logical structure (the later Wittgenstein) and the idea that the chief task of philosophy is to state definitions. Analysis has sometimes been claimed to involve reduction of one kind of item to items of another kind. For example, phenomenalists argue that statements about physical objects are to be analysed into (translated into) statements about sense-data. In the philosophy of mind, physicalists claim that mental phenomena can be exhaustively analysed in terms of physical phenomena in central nervous systems. Other concepts of analysis have been influential. On Michael Dummett’s view, analysis consists in elucidating the nature of thought by investigation of language. The idea is that to get a philosophical understanding of the world, we have to proceed by way of what we think about these matters; but our chief and perhaps only access to what we think is what we say; so analysis comes down to the philosophical study of meaning. For P F Strawson analysis is the descriptive task of tracing connections

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between the concepts in our scheme of thought, with a view among other things to seeing what order of dependence obtains among them, thereby helping us to see why, for example, various forms of scepticism need not bother us. These remarks show that the concept of analysis is not univocal; there is no one method or set of methods which can be claimed to be definitive of it. Philosophers in the analytic tradition have in practice agreed with the celebrated dictum of Deng Xiaoping concerning methodology, that ‘it does not matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice’. But although there is no defining method of analysis, there can be said to be a defining manner, embodied in the ideal of any careful, detailed, and rigorous approach which throws light on the nature and implications of our concepts, characteristically revealed by the way we employ them in discourse. Entry in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy submitted by A C Grayling.

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Argument – an example from John Searle Besides setting out an argument in a particularly clear way, Searle provides us with a short commentary to help us follow his argument to the inescapable conclusions. Taken from ‘Can Computers Think?’ in ‘Minds, Brains and Science’ (1984) The argument has a very simple logical structure so that you can see whether it is valid or invalid. The first premise is: 1. Brains cause minds. Now, of course, that is really too crude. What we mean by that is that mental processes that we consider to constitute the mind are caused, entirely caused, by processes going on inside the brain. That’s just a fact about the way the world works. Now for proposition number two: 2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics. That proposition is a conceptual truth. It just articulates our distinction between the notion of what is purely formal and what has content. Now, to these two propositions, let’s add a third and a fourth: 3. Computer programmes are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical, structure. That proposition, I take it, is true by definition; it is part of what we mean by the notion of a computer program. 4. Minds have mental contents; specifically, they have semantic contents. And that, I take it, is just an obvious fact about how our mind works. My thoughts, and beliefs, and desires are about something, or they refer to something, or they concern states of affairs in the world; and they do that because their content directs them at these states of the world. Now, from these four premises, we can draw our first conclusion; and it follows obviously from premises 2, 3 and 4: Conclusion 1. No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a system a mind. Programs, in short, are not minds, and they are not by themselves sufficient for having minds. Now, this is a very powerful conclusion, because it means that the project of trying to create minds solely by designing programs is doomed from the start. And it is important to re-emphasise that this has nothing to do with any particular state of technology, or any particular state of the complexity of the program. This is a purely formal, or logical, result from a set of axioms which are agreed to by all (or nearly all) of the disputants concerned. Hence, the project of ‘strong Artificial Intelligence’ [getting computers with minds] is incapable of fulfilment.

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However, once we have these axioms, we can derive a second conclusion: Conclusion 2. The way that brain functions cause minds cannot be solely in virtue of running a computer program. And this second conclusion follows from conjoining the first premise together with our first conclusion. That is, from the fact that brains cause minds and that programs are not enough to do the job, it follows that the way that brains cause minds can’t be solely by running a computer program. Now that also I think is an important result, because it has the consequence that the brain is not, or at least not just, a digital computer. … [A]nything can trivially be described as if it were a digital computer, and brains are no exception. But the importance of this conclusion is that the computational properties of the brain are simply not enough to explain its functioning to produce mental states. And indeed, that ought to seem a commonsense scientific conclusion to us anyway because all it does is remind us of the fact that brains are biological engines; their biology matters. It is not, as several people in artificial intelligence have claimed, just an irrelevant fact about the mind that it happens to be realised in human brains. Now, from our first premise, we can also derive a third conclusion: Conclusion 3. Anything else that caused minds would have to have causal powers at least equivalent to those of the brain. And this third conclusion is a trivial consequence of our first premise. It is a bit like saying that if my petrol engine drives my car at 75mph, then any diesel engine that was capable of doing that would have to have a power output at least equivalent to that of my petrol engine. Of course, some other system might cause mental processes using entirely different chemical or biochemical features from those that the brain in fact uses. It might turn out that there are beings on other planets, or in other solar systems, that have mental states and use an entirely different biochemistry from ours. […] But now, from our first conclusion and our third conclusion, our fourth conclusion follows immediately: Conclusion 4. For any artefact that we might build which had mental states equivalent to human mental states, the implementation of a computer program would not by itself be sufficient. Rather the artefact would have to have powers equivalent to the powers of the human brain. The upshot of all this is it reminds us that mental events are biological phenomena. Consciousness, intentionality, subjectivity and mental causation are all a part of our biological life history, along with growth, reproduction, the secretion of bile, and digestion.

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Aristotle and his Philosophy Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers: a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements. Though biographical information is sketchy, one thing about him can be said with reasonable confidence: throughout his life Aristotle was driven by one overmastering desire – the desire for knowledge. His whole career and his every known activity testify to the fact: he was concerned before all else to promote the discovery of the truth and to increase the sum of human knowledge. He did not think himself singular in possessing such a desire, even if he pursued his object with singular devotion; for he affirmed that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, and he claimed that each one of us is, most properly speaking, to be identified with his mind, so that life – a fully human life – is ‘the activity of the mind’. In an early work, the Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy, Aristotle announced that ‘the acquisition of wisdom is pleasant; all men feel at home in philosophy and wish to spend time in it, leaving all other things aside’. The word ‘philosophy’ designates, etymologically, the love of wisdom; and a philosopher, in Aristotle’s book is not a cloistered academic engaged in remote and abstract speculation – he is someone who searches for ‘knowledge of things human and divine. In one of his later works, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that ‘happiness’ – that state of mind in which men realize themselves and flourish best – consists in a life of intellectual activity. Is not such a life too god-like for mere mortals to sustain? No; for ‘we must not listen to those who urge us to think human thoughts since we are human, and mortal thoughts since we are mortal; rather, we should as far as possible immortalize ourselves and do all we can to live by the finest element in us – for if in bulk it is small, in power and worth it is far greater than anything else’. One of Aristotle’s ancient biographers remarks that ‘he wrote a large number of books which I have thought it appropriate to list because of the man’s excellence in every field’: there follows a list of some 150 items which, taken together and published in the modern style, would amount to perhaps fifty volumes of print. Choose a field of research and Aristotle laboured in it; pick an area of human endeavour, and Aristotle discoursed upon it. Most of the surviving writings were perhaps never intended to be read; for it seems likely that the treatises which we possess were made up from Aristotle’s lecture notes. In the light of this, it will hardly be a surprise to find that the style of his works is often rugged. Plato’s dialogues are finished literary artefacts, the subtleties of their thought matched by the elegance of the language. Aristotle’s writings for the most part are terse. His arguments are concise. There are abrupt transitions, ugly repetitions, obscure allusions. Paragraphs of continuous exposition are set among staccato jottings. The language is spare and sinewy. This is due in part to his attitude to the written word – he was not enamoured of overly-polished sentences, favouring

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simplicity: ‘In every form of instruction there is some small need to pay attention to language; for it makes a difference with regard to making things clear whether we speak this or that way. But it does not make much of a difference: all these things are show and directed at the hearer – which is why no-one teaches geometry this way’. The reader who opens his Aristotle and expects to find a systematic disquisition on some philosophical subject, or an orderly textbook of scientific instruction, will be brought up short: Aristotle’s treatises are not like that. But reading the treatises is not a dull slog. Aristotle has a vigour which is more attractive the better it is known; and the treatises, which have none of the camouflage of Plato’s dialogues, reveal their author’s thoughts – or at least appear to do so – in a direct and stark fashion. It is easy to imagine you can hear Aristotle talking to himself. Above all, Aristotle is tough. Not only is he tough, he can be vexing. Whatever does he mean here? How on earth is the conclusion to follow from these premises? Aristotle’s treatises offer a peculiar challenge to their readers; and once you have taken up the challenge, you would not have the treatises in any other form.

Abstracted from Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Barnes (2000) [808 words]

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Austin’s Approach to Philosophy Austin took the highly unusual view that philosophy could be – even ought to be – a group activity. He thought the job of philosophy was to get things really settled. To that end, it should employ the more scientific approach of having a team of people working in an organised way on small points – though perhaps collectively on a large problem – combining their results, criticizing each other’s work, and really coming up with some agreed, solid conclusions at the end. An example would be a time when he was concerned about the notion of a rule – a notion important in all sorts of fields. Austin parcelled out the problem to people who regularly attended his so-called ‘Saturday mornings’ (weekly meetings held in Oxford during term time in Austin’s rooms). One would look in detail at the rules of bridge, another the rules of cricket, another the rules of evidence, and so on. Then they would discuss what they’d come up with and, it was hoped, from this a clearer idea of the notion of rule would emerge which would be more satisfactory than before. This emphasis on ‘getting things settled’, i.e. eliminating open-ended questions might seem to make philosophy a suicidal subject – one which eliminates itself. Austin did see it this way, but not in the negative way that might be implied in ‘suicidal’. He thought that the most one could say for philosophy was that it consisted of a great mass of unclear issues of all sorts of shapes and sizes, and that one thing one could hope for in the way of philosophical advance, was that bits of this great confused mass should from time to time detach themselves and set up on their own. In this way he thought that logic, for instance, had started life as a more or less confused part of philosophy, and had then become detached and set up on its own, with its own criteria, standards and so on. Psychology similarly had become in due course an independent discipline, distinguished from philosophy, and one might say that linguistics by now has also made good a very flourishing independence. He certainly thought this was not in any way a bad thing, but should be seen as the natural way things went – the clearer one became about what one was discussing and how questions of a certain sort might be settled, the more there would be a tendency for those questions, so to speak, to float away from the residual gaseous mass of philosophy and be recognized as a discipline in their own right. Abstracted from Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee - his conversation with Geoffrey Warnock. (429 words)

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On Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) Spinoza subscribed to a modified form of Descartes’ method, and drew the standard philosophical conclusion. He became convinced that the fundamental premises of human knowledge must be established not by experience but by reason, since reason alone can provide insight into the essence of things – an essence being precisely that which is captured in a ‘clear and distinct idea’. […] Scientific knowledge, therefore, must begin from self-evident axioms, which treat of essences. And it must proceed therefrom by the method of clear and distinct ideas: in other words, by deduction. The 17th-century philosopher had a paradigm of such a rational science in the geometry of Euclid, which seemed precisely to begin from self-evident premises and to proceed by chains of clear and distinct reasoning to conclusions which were as compelling and as universally valid as the premises from which they were derived. The ambition therefore arose to generalize the geometric method: that is, to find, for each science, a set of axioms and definitions that would contain the clear and exhaustive statement of its basic postulates. […] In his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663) Spinoza provided a paradigm of the geometrical method by reducing Descartes’ philosophy to a set of axioms and definitions, and deriving therefrom the main Cartesian conclusions. This system, which seemed both to have completed the Cartesian system, and to have shown its fundamental points of error, greatly enhanced the authority of the geometric method. Spinoza’s own Ethics was therefore conceived entirely in geometric terms, each of its five parts beginning from axioms and definitions and proceeding by mathematical proof towards its conclusions. As the title indicates the book was not intended simply as a treatise of metaphysics. Of equal importance for Spinoza were the problems of human nature, human conduct, and human destiny. These too, he believed, could be treated in a geometrical fashion, and the resulting answers would have the certainty, necessity and universality of the basic laws of mathematics. His system, therefore, endeavours to move with equal mathematical rigour towards the proposition that ‘a substance is prior in nature to its modifications’, and towards the proposition that ‘there cannot be too much merriment, for it is always good; but on the other hand, melancholy is always bad’. (The proof of the second proposition involves, when traced back to its original axioms, something like 100 steps; this idea of a mathematics of laughter seems less strange when set beside Spinoza’s view that merriment is more easily conceived than observed.)

from Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction (pp. 32-3) by Roger Scruton OUP 2002.

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Kant’s Freedom and Reason The placing of normativity* at the centre of philosophical concern is the reason behind another of Kant’s signal innovations: the pride of place he accords to judgment. In a sharp break with traditions, he takes it that the smallest unit of experience, and hence of awareness, is the judgment. This is because judgments, the application of concepts, are the smallest unit for which knowers can be responsible. Concepts by themselves don’t express commitments; they only determine what commitments would be undertaken if they were applied. I think that philosophy is the study of us as creatures who judge and act – that is, as discursive*, concept-using creatures. And I think that Kant is right to emphasize that understanding what we do in these terms is attributing to us various kinds of normative status, taking us to be subject to distinctive sorts of normative appraisal. So a central philosophical task is understanding this fundamental normative dimension within which we dwell. Kant’s own approach to this issue is based on the thought that genuine normative authority (constraint by norms) is distinguished from causal power (constraint by facts) in that it binds only those who acknowledge it is binding. Because one is subject only to that authority one subjects oneself to, the normative realm can be understood equally as the realm of freedom. So being constrained by norms is not only compatible with freedom – properly understood, it can be seen to be what freedom consists in. I don’t know of a thought that is deeper, more difficult, or more important than this. Kant’s most basic idea is that judgement and action are things we are in a distinctive way responsible for. What does it mean to be responsible for them? I think the kind of responsibility in question should be understood to be task responsibility: the responsibility to do something. What (else) do judging and acting oblige us to do? The commitments we undertake by applying concepts in particular circumstances – by judging and acting – are ones we may or may not be entitled to, according to the rules (norms) implicit in those concepts. Showing that we are entitled by the rules to apply the concept in a particular place is justifying the commitment we undertake thereby, offering reasons for it. That is what we are responsible for, the practical content of our conceptual commitments. In undertaking a conceptual commitment, one renders oneself in principle liable to demands for reasons. The normative appraisal to which we subject ourselves in judging and acting is appraisal of our reasons. Further, offering a reason for the application of a concept is always applying another concept: making or rehearsing another judgment or undertaking or acknowledging another practical commitment (Kant’s ‘adopting a maxim’). Conceptual commitments both serve as and stand in need of reasons. The normative realm inhabited by creatures who can judge and act is not only the realm of freedom, it is the realm of reason. *Discursive – proceeding by argument or reasoning, not intuitive. *Normativity – concerned with the grounds for requirements or standards of behaviour. (Norms are rules for behaviour, signalled by ‘ought’ and ‘should’.) From Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise by Robert Brandom in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (488 words)

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Philosophy?! As a so-called activity, philosophy is a waste of time. Of course, a good number of those clever philosophers will immediately object that this is nonsense, that what philosophy has discovered has lasting value and influence. I say: show us the evidence. Anything more than a cursory glance at philosophy shows that it settles nothing; that it has established no truths; that it has made no difference to the world. It has all been as big a waste of time as, say, football: entertaining enough in its way (and even providing some meaning to life for many benighted fools) but hardly a thing that can be respected as worthy of humanity. All philosophers are good at is arguing about things that make no difference. Who cares if ‘soft compatibilism’ is or is not an answer to the ‘free will problem’? Get a life and then get on and live it! Poring over musty books and bleating on and on about ‘fundamental questions’ is a life I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. (Well, perhaps I would just to keep him out of the way.) They can’t even agree about what philosophy is all about – and yet they want to claim that ‘everything is philosophy and everyone is a philosopher’! Any fool can say something like that – indeed, only a fool would say that because, obviously, it is totally meaningless. It’s only because they dress up the nonsense with a lot of big words like ‘epistemological necessity’, ‘noetic modulus’ and ‘felicific calculus’ that they have got away with it for all these years. If you’re looking at a philosopher, you’re looking at a pseud. Run a mile is my advice.

Short extract from Thinking Big by Jeremy Clarkson [287 words]

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What is Philosophy For? There is far too much philosophy, composed under far too wide a range of conditions, for there to be a general answer to that question. But it can certainly be said that a great deal of philosophy has been intended as (understanding the words very broadly) a means to salvation, though what we are to understand by salvation, and salvation from what, has varied as widely as the philosophies themselves. A Buddhist will tell you that the purpose of philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainment of ‘enlightenment’; a Hindu will say something similar, if in slightly different terminology; both will speak of escape from a supposed cycle of death and rebirth in which one’s moral deserts determine one’s future forms. An Epicurean (if you can find one nowadays) will pooh-pooh all the stuff about rebirth, but offer you a recipe for maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering in this your one and only life. Not all philosophy has sprung out of a need for a comprehensive way of living and dying. But most of the philosophy that has lasted has arisen from some pressing motivation or deeply felt belief – seeing truth and wisdom purely for their own sakes may be a nice idea, but history suggests that a nice idea is pretty much all it is. Thus classical Indian philosophy represents the internal struggle between the schools of Hinduism, and between them all and the Buddhists, for intellectual supremacy; the battle for the preferred balance between human reason and scriptural revelation has been fought in many cultures, and in some is still going on; Thomas Hobbes’ famous political theory tries to teach us the lessons he felt had to be learned in the aftermath of the English Civil War; Descartes and many of his contemporaries wanted medieval views, rooted nearly two thousand years back in the work of Aristotle, to move aside and make room for a modern conception of science; Kant sought to advance the autonomy of the individual in the face of illiberal and autocratic regimes, Marx to liberate the working classes from poverty and drudgery, feminists of all epochs to improve the status of women. None of these people were just solving little puzzles (though they did sometimes have to solve little puzzles on the way); they entered into debate in order to change the course of civilization.

From Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by Edward Craig [394 words]

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Definitions It is crucial that everyone knows what they are talking about when arguing. Without a definition of the terms involved, it is easy to argue at cross-purposes. So, for instance, if a question of ethics hinges on whether or not a particular president ‘had sex’ with a particular intern, it pays to make sure everyone agrees what ‘having sex’ means. Much of our language is inherently ambiguous and so, to discuss things as precisely as possible (as philosophy aims to do), adequate definitions are required. Clarity A well-known example of how a definition of terms helps resolve a disagreement is provided by the philosopher William James who, in a walking party, came across two people arguing. The disagreement concerned a squirrel. These two people had been walking towards a tree and a squirrel was clinging to the trunk at about eye-level. As they approached, the squirrel scurried around to the other side of the tree, out of sight. The two people walked around the tree catching sight of the squirrel but it too was moving away from them, trying to keep the tree between itself and the people. The two of them walked right around the tree, then stopped and the argument began: one maintained that they had ‘walked round the squirrel’; the other maintained they had not ‘walked round the squirrel’. Relieved by the arrival of a third party, they appealed to James for judgement. James pointed out that they were both right depending on their definition of ‘walk round’. True, if ‘walk round’ means to completely circle something, then the two people had walked round the squirrel. True, if ‘walk round’ means to pass in front of, to the side of, to the back of, then the two people had not walked round the squirrel. The argument dissolved. Though this was a rather trivial matter, it exemplifies an important point. For the contentious concepts that arise in philosophy, definition is necessary. Constraint A further point is that once a definition has been given, the conclusions drawn from it only apply to the term as defined. Thus, if free trade is defined as ‘trade that is not hindered by national or international law’ any conclusions reached apply only to that definition. If someone else has a different (perhaps better) definition, then such conclusions may well not apply. Thus, a clear definition both helps but also constrains discussion. Breadth of definition It is important to choose a definition that is going to be able to do the work asked of it. Choosing a definition that is too narrow might mean that one’s conclusions will have to be equally narrow. Defining ‘man’ as “male, adult, bearded” and using this in an argument which concluded that ‘men are sexual predators’ would mean that whole swathes of what most people would regard as ‘men’ would be eliminated from this conclusion. On the other hand, too broad a definition may lead to misleading, even wrong, conclusions. For example, if you define it as ‘wrong’ to “deliberately inflict pain on another person” then an inoculating medic must be doing ‘wrong’. From this, another way to criticize someone’s argument is to show that a particular case fits the definition but is not one that the other person would wish to include in it.

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Rule of Thumb Generally, it is better if your definition corresponds as closely as possible to the way the term is ordinarily used. That said, given that ‘everyday usage’ might be regarded as positively misleading, sometimes a new usage must be coined2, even a new term introduced. In discussion of memory, for instance, philosophers feel that it is important to distinguish between memories which have actually been experienced by the subject (such as a memory of having been in C4 before) and memories that appear to the subject to have actually been experienced, but have not. The latter are referred to as ‘quasi-memories’ or ‘q-memories’. A long tradition Historically, many philosophical questions are, in effect, quests for definitions. What is knowledge? Beauty? Good? Here it is not enough to merely define the term as in a dictionary. Rather, it is the search for definition that best articulates the concept in question. ‘Pen’ might easily be defined as ‘writing instrument’ but an exploration of types of pen (to discover what such an ‘instrument’ might include) and their usage (what does ‘writing’ include?) as well as asking what might be excluded (why is a pencil not a pen since it is used as a ‘writing instrument’?) will be really informative about what the term means. Much of philosophical work along these lines has involved conceptual analysis or the attempt to unpack and clarify the meanings of important concepts. What is to count as the best articulation, however, requires a great deal of debate. Indeed, it is a viable philosophical question as to whether concepts such as ‘beauty’ can be defined. Many ancient and medieval thinkers (eg Plato, Aquinas) adequate definitions meant giving verbal expression to the ‘essence’ of things – essences that exist separate from us. Many more recent thinkers (pragmatists like James, post-structuralists like Foucault) have held that definitions are nothing more that conceptual instruments that organize our interactions with each other and the world, but in no way reflect the nature of independent reality. Some thinkers (eg Wittgenstein) have gone so far as to argue that all philosophical puzzles are essentially rooted in a failure to understand how ordinary language functions. From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl (2003) Blackwell

2 This requires caution. For example, Descartes’ ‘ideas’ are quite carefully defined in his Meditations but are often confused because people thinks he means the usual ‘thoughts in general’, or even Plato’s ‘ideas’. Schopenhauer made a huge mistake in calling his driving force in the Universe ‘will’ since this has led many to find his philosophy confusing or erroneous on the grounds that ‘will’ usually means something quite different.

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John Dewey (1859 – 1952) Dewey was one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th century and is associated with what is known as the pragmatic school of philosophy. Darwin’s theory of evolution was very influential in the structuring of Dewey’s thought, particularly the notion that organisms are not immutable and perfect, but rather that, like the natural world in which they live, they are fluid and dynamic. This notion of continuous change Dewey applied to the concept of human nature: he rejected the idea that we have a fundamental essence and argued instead that human beings are constituted in their interaction with multiple aspects of their environment. Humans are through and through the product of a lived practice. At the centre of Dewey’s approach to philosophy is his theory of enquiry. This aimed to show how though emerges as people interact with their environments, and how the measure of true belief – or belief for which there is warranted assertability – is that it facilitates satisfactory responses to the circumstances which people confront. To put this another way, it provides successful rules for conduct. The best way to understand this idea is first to consider what Dewey meant by the notion of ‘habit’. As we have seen, he did not think that humans have a fixed, determinate nature. However, it is nevertheless the case that people tend to behave in fairly predictable ways. This is because they have learnt, via the process of socialization, particular socially sanctioned habits. It is in this fashion that people are able to get by in their lives; they have adopted the modes of behaviour which function to achieve specific goals in certain circumstances. However, sometimes these habits break down; the actions and responses people can draw upon prove inadequate in terms of the situations they confront, and they cannot go on. It is as this point there appears the kind of genuine doubt which necessitates inquiry. In How We Think Dewey emphasized that this sort of doubt is not purely cognitive, not the doubt of a sceptical philosopher, it is felt doubt: ‘In cases of striking novelty or unusual perplexity, the difficulty…is likely to present itself at first as a shock, as emotional disturbance, as a more or less vague feeling of the unexpected, of something queer, strange, funny, or disconcerting. In such instances, there are necessary observations deliberately calculated to bring to light just what is the trouble, or to make clear the specific character of the problem’. Having identified that there is a difficulty which needs addressing, in order to avoid the fairly ad hoc construction of possible solutions, the next stage in the process of inquiry is to identify the significant elements of the problematic situation. Once this is achieved, then it is necessary to determine a number of hypotheses in order to solve the difficulty. This is a creative, imaginative process, and it involves going beyond what is given in the situation ‘…it is more or less speculative, adventurous…it involves a leap, a jump, the propriety of which cannot be absolutely warranted in advance, no matter what precautions be taken’ (How We Think). The final stages in the process involve working through the implications of the various hypotheses which are being entertained, and then, critically, testing them experimentally: ‘Reasoning shows that if the idea be adopted, certain consequences

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follow. So far the conclusion is hypothetical or conditional. If we look and find present all the conditions demanded by the theory, and if we find the characteristic traits called for by rival alternatives to be lacking, the tendency to believe, to accept, is almost irresistible’ (How We Think). The resolution of this process involves the incorporation of new beliefs into the framework of habits which allows people to act in concert with the events in their lives. Truth is what works. What counts is whether our beliefs provide us with rules of conduct which help us to interact with the world. For Dewey, ‘true beliefs’ are better described as ‘warranted assertions’ – ‘knowledge’ consists in beliefs confirmed by a community of genuine enquirers. However, then extent of the warrant varies, and all beliefs are subject to revision. This includes our value judgements which underpin our aesthetic and moral beliefs.

from The Great Philosophers by J.Stangroom and J.Garvey (Arcturus, 2005) [703 words]

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Foucault: Words and Power

Do you use language, or does language use you? If you are at all suspicious that language might be in the driving seat, you may be sympathetic to an enormously influential form of criticism that developed over the past 30 years on the basis of the work of the French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (1926-84). Foucault undertook to show how our words and concepts have fitted into historical layers of thinking and acting (what he calls ‘discursive formations’) that in many ways order our lives and thinking. This challenges those who believe that it is we who consciously order and control these things. In short, Foucault’s theory diminishes the importance (perhaps the very existence) of the individual, human agent and self. His view has also been controversial in its claim that it is through these multifarious discursive formations that power is exercised. Hence, through the concept of ‘madness’, seventeenth and eighteenth-century social formations laying claim to ‘rationality’ excluded those who didn’t fit into them. In the nineteenth century the concept of ‘madness’ was also deployed against those who did not adhere to the norms of bourgeois morality such as the promiscuous. Foucault tried to show (in Discipline and Punish) how concepts clustering around criminality and the techniques of managing those called ‘criminal’ have changed over time. In this tracing out the ‘genealogy’ of a concept he was following a method used by Nietzsche. This method is not merely historical but also subversive. It aims to uncover the trivial, petty, arbitrary, and sometimes nasty, purposes and effects of what it investigates. While, for example, many have seen the changes in the criminal justice system as efforts to become more humane, Foucault argues that the changes have, instead, been organized around developing new, more effective techniques of social control. Unlike other forms of social critique (such as Marxism), Foucault maintains that there is no comprehensive system of social order. Rather, he argues that there are many different power systems interweaving and operating simultaneously. Among the most famous objects of Foucault’s scrutiny was Bentham’s plan for a model prison called a ‘panopticon’. (One has actually been built and put to use in Cuba.) The prison does not have cells with barred doors. Instead, it is constructed so that the prisoners come to believe that they are always under surveillance of the guards – and so they come to discipline themselves. Foucault challenges us to ask ourselves in what ways we live in panopticons of our own making. Do credit cards, mobile phones, government and company records, computers, security cameras place us under constant surveillance (including self-surveillance) or fear of constant surveillance? If so, will this not affect the way we act, feel and think? Another powerful tool of Foucault’s critique is his analysis of normalization. He argues that in various ways orders of power seek to diminish the range of human possibility by privileging certain beliefs and practices as ‘normal’. Hence sexual practices, family structures, religions, ways of speaking and acting that differ from the ‘normal’ are called ‘deviant’ and through various oppressive techniques are quashed, reducing individuals to ‘docile bodies’ needed to serve the rising industrial society.

From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl (2003) Blackwell.

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What is a Philosopher? Simply having a degree or a title is not enough to be called a philosopher: a degree in physics doesn’t make you a physicist any more than a teacher of history is a historian. Rescher defines a philosopher as one who ‘actively contributes to the intellectual resource of the discipline’. This definition suggests an institutional theory to answer the question of ‘what is philosophy?’ This institutional theory is parallel to Danto and Dickie’s institutional theory of art: something is a work of art when decreed to be such by a loose constellation of individuals who are defined by their institutional identities to be with something called the ‘art world’: curators, art writers, collectors, dealers, and, of course, artists themselves. By analogy then, philosophy is what is recognised as such by those in the ‘philosophy world’: university administrators, book reviewers and journal referees, editors, students and, of course, philosophers themselves. Just as the institutional theory of art belongs with an art no longer committed to some master narrative of what art has been and should be, so the institutional theory of philosophy is no longer united by a substantive understanding of what philosophy has been and should be. This should not be a worry. The production of art is not limited by a lack of agreement about an answer to the question ‘what is art?’ and hence philosophy can continue to flourish despite our inability to give it much definition. Indeed, not having the constraints of definition encourages philosophical exploration of a much greater diversity of subjects than the traditional ones that crop up time and again in philosophy books and classes. New subjects include Society for Machines and Mentality, Informal Logic, Ethics and Animals, Analytical Feminism, the Philosophy of Sex and Love. Such diversity is probably the reason for more and more people being drawn to philosophy – and then, of course, as contributors ‘to the intellectual resources to the discipline’ we get more and more philosophers. Adapted from Philosophy in Search of Itself by Karsten Harries in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (326 words)

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Philosophy as an exercise in freedom Aristotle turns his account of the origin of philosophy into a celebration of free enquiry: ‘It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.’ Thus, the origin of philosophy is in those familiar dislocations and derailments that are part of everyday experience: we find ourselves stuck in some place; or we have lost our way; or we cannot find something we need to complete some task. We all run into difficulties that prevent us from just going on with whatever we were doing – that force us to pause, take a step back in order to determine just where we have come from, where we are, what possibilities are open to us, and what should be done. Note how such derailments open to us possibilities that remain unconsidered as long as life is on track. By opening up possibilities, they also open us to our freedom. Dislocation, freedom and wonder belong together. To say philosophy has its origin in wonder is to say also that its beginning is the awakening of freedom. Only a free being is capable of wonder. There is, of course, a decisive difference between such ‘obvious difficulties’ and the ‘greater matters’ that Aristotle has as occupying the philosopher. While these ‘obvious difficulties’ receive their significance from projects that are part of life, Aristotle’s ‘greater matters’ are pursued only to escape from ignorance, only for the sake of truth. A philosopher’s irrevocable commitment to the truth implies a leave-taking from the everyday world and its concerns; there is a sense in which the philosopher stands in this world as an outsider, as Plato took pains to show with his description of Socrates: although placed in Athens, belonging to it by birth and upbringing, Socrates yet transcends such belonging, transcends himself as the Athenian he knows himself to be, just because he is a philosopher. Such self-transcendence is inseparable from the freedom that defined philosophy and its search for truth. Philosophy is an exercise in freedom. Adapted from Philosophy in Search of Itself by Karsten Harries in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (374 words)

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Janet Radcliffe Richards The Sceptical Feminist is a book which exemplifies Radcliffe Richards’ approach to philosophy. Rather like a modern-day Aristotle, her starting point is often arguments and ideas that enjoy widespread support in contemporary society, rather than arcane positions held only by professional philosophers. This ensures that her work always has a practical resonance and is of interest to people beyond her profession. ‘I began to notice after some years that all the most striking arguments I was producing in moral and political contexts took a particular form, which I am trying to get more and more systematic,’ she explains. ‘Essentially it depends on first establishing the direction of onus of proof and then issuing a challenge on the basis of it. So if you can show that some policy has some clearly bad aspect, you take that as providing a prima facie case for rejecting it. You then challenge its supporters to produce an argument that defeats that assumption. ‘It’s amazing how many familiar views you can dispose of in this way, because most argument in ordinary life seems to work on the basis of starting with the conclusion you want to defend and then inventing a justification for it. This gives philosophers a potential field day because arguments constructed this way round frequently contain mistakes of logic.’ The method’s strength is also its simplicity. ‘In a sense, I take myself to be doing baby-level philosophy,’ she says. ‘I’m not very interested in the kind of ethics which consists of manipulating high level theoretical counters: if you have to get the meta-ethical framework in place before you have serious discussions of ground-level, practical problems, you might as well give up. The challenge is to see how many practical moral conclusions can be reached without settling the fundamentals of ethical theory – say Kantian or utilitarian ones.’ But why should this method be so effective, when it is by its own lights so simple? ‘The thing which gives so much scope for getting the philosophical needle in, is that people’s real reasons for reaching their practical conclusions are rarely the ones they give in their arguments. I’m particularly interested in what happens when there are widespread intellectual changes – in world view, or political and moral principles – but people have deep convictions about the way things ought to be left over from previous frameworks. When this happens people try to fudge a justification for the old convictions in terms of the new principles – and it hardly ever works. This is what happened with feminism. After the Enlightenment, the idea that people were born to a particular place in life gradually became unacceptable, but most people were still convinced of traditional ideas about the natural position of men and women. So they tried to justify these old beliefs in terms of new political ideas – and ran straight into logical absurdities that they didn’t even notice, because they were so convinced of both the old conclusion and the new premises. Exposing these absurdities forces into the open the unacceptable moral views that are really doing the work.’ One unforeseen consequence revealed by her approach is that it produces psychological predictions. An illustration of this came from her investigation of the ethics of abortion. ‘Essentially, the argument as I saw it was this: if you are going to

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recommend a policy with one intrinsically bad element – in this case forcing a woman to have a child she does not want – what good reason do you have? ‘Of course, it sounds easy to find a reason – you mustn’t kill human beings and a foetus is a human being – but this is not a reason that can be used by people who allow some abortions but not others. After much searching, the only coherent principle that I could find that might provide a distinction between allowable and prohibited abortions was punishing women for sex. It sounds preposterous but it just seemed the only principle that came anywhere near fitting the practice. ‘Then what was interesting was the amount of empirical evidence that supported it, like the original policy of not giving anaesthetics during abortions. And there does seem to be a high correlation between opposition to abortion and disapproval of sexual freedom. It astonished me: I was not expecting to find philosophical argument generating psychological hypotheses in this way. But I find it happens a lot. It happened with the euthanasia debate, for instance. It takes some argument to show it, but I think the details of most anti-euthanasia attitudes can be coherently justified only by a deep assumption that suicide is wrong – probably because life belongs to God.’

Adapted from Darwin, Nature and Hubris in What Philosophers Think edited by J Baggini and J Stangroom (2003) published by Continuum

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The Philosophers Moore and Austin Both G.E.Moore and J.L.Austin are little-known outside the world of English-speaking philosophy. Moore published some books but his influence was most greatly felt through personal contact in teaching and conversation, discussion, seminars and lectures. This is even more outstandingly true of Austin who published no books at all and who was probably the most influential philosopher in Oxford since the second world war. What the two have in common is that they were both exceptionally clever men – even among philosophers of reputation – and in their temperament: they insisted that philosophy should as plain as possible in expression; they liked extreme exactness and explicitness of argument. Both had an extreme distaste for eloquence, rhetoric, looseness and rapidity in philosophical writing. They were also both very impressive men – people you took notice of, people who were not to be disregarded or treated lightly – both were rather formidable men, and simply by the force of their personalities made a considerable impression, quite apart from the merits or content of what they actually said. Moore’s book on ethics, according to Keynes, influenced a whole generation of younger men at Cambridge and was taken almost as a Bible by the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. This was surprising given the extremely dry, intensely academic, nature of the book. One can guess that few read it, fewer still understood it. The influence lies rather in these peoples’ acquaintance with Moore’s powerful personality. Austin was sympathetic to Moore – indeed, as mentioned above, they were very similar in many ways. Whether Austin’s way of doing philosophy merely copied Moore, or whether he would have gone this way if he’d never met him, is a moot point. Certainly he liked Moore’s approach – and certainly he disliked Bertrand Russell’s later philosophy in which he dealt with huge problems at very high speed, using writing that was beautifully smooth and swiftly-flowing. Austin thought that crucial points and distinctions were constantly whizzing by too quick for the eye to catch. He was always very distrusting of that way of operating. Many would criticize Austin’s analytical style as pedantic, scholastic and boring. Of course, this way of approaching philosophy actually can be boring and unproductive – but then, is there a way of doing philosophy that can’t be? If one is asked to take more than usual care over details, its being boring or otherwise depends on whether or not this care turns out to be illuminating or not. Austin always objected to asking in advance if what was doing was important and illuminating. He thought you could only tell afterwards whether a detail was worth struggling with. Abstracted from Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee - his conversation with Geoffrey Warnock. (435 words)

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On Bertrand Russell and Philosophy Many people, including some great philosophers of the past, have come to the subject hoping it will solve major metaphysical questions about the ultimate nature of reality, right and wrong, beauty and so forth, but, Russell says, this is a vain hope. Philosophy doesn’t give simple answers. Philosophers ask questions; often they cannot answer those questions. Indeed, Russell acknowledges that philosophy has not been particularly successful in answering with any certainty most of the questions that philosophers ask. But that does not mean that philosophy is a waste of time. By asking deep questions we make life more interesting and reveal that a little below the surface of our comfortable assumptions lies a much stranger world. So anyone coming to philosophy expecting it to provide knowledge of reality is likely to be disappointed. What philosophy can provide, however, is the possibility of ordering our less than certain beliefs and getting some insights into ways in which we acquire them. Even if it can’t provide us with certainties, philosophy can make us less likely to be wrong about our basic beliefs than if we had left them unexamined. There is a clear distinction between philosophy and science, though historically many of the problems of philosophy have later become scientific questions. Science can be extremely useful to us even if we never study it: all of us have the potential to benefit from medical science, science-based technology and so on, whether or not we understand the science underpinning the inventions. Philosophy differs from this. Studying philosophy can have a profound effect on the student who thinks through the issues; but those who don’t study the subject are only likely to benefit from the effects on the student of philosophy. There are no direct benefits from philosophy for those who don’t actually study it themselves. The real value of philosophy, however, Russell declares, lies in its uncertainty. If you never question your beliefs, then you can cling to prejudices that need never be subjected to critical assessment. If, however, you begin to question beliefs that have previously seemed uncontroversial, with the help of a philosophical approach you will free yourself from the ‘tyranny of custom’ and awaken a less dogmatic sense of wonder at the strangeness of the world and our position in it. This opening up of possibilities enriches our imaginations. Philosophical contemplation takes us away from the purely individual concerns of our lives, moving us towards becoming ‘citizens of the universe’. Our minds become great by contemplating greatness in this impartial spirit. In the combination of these factors lies philosophy’s value to humanity. One traditional approach to philosophy (usually known as rationalism) has been to attempt to prove truths about the nature of reality a priori, that is independently of any experience, by pure reason alone. In place of this Russell offers something much closer to Locke’s account of the philosopher as ‘underlabourer’ to science. For Russell, philosophy is the activity of investigating the principles that we use both in science and in everyday life, and subjecting them to a critical scrutiny that reveals any inconsistencies. This, Russell believed, shouldn’t result in a destructive scepticism that leaves everything in doubt. Indeed, one theme of The Problems of Philosophy is that there are beliefs, such as that our perceptual experiences exist, that are beyond doubt. In contrast, the belief that physical objects are really as they appear to us, is open to philosophical doubt.

From Philosophy: The Classics by Nigel Warburton (3rd edition 2006) [572 words]

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On Karl Popper

Magee: The orthodoxy explaining scientific advancement since Bacon was that scientists accumulated data from observation and experiment until general features emerge, then frame hypotheses about this particular aspect of the world. They then try to confirm these hypotheses with further observation and experiment. Where these attempts are successful, the hypothesis becomes established as a law – and lo, another Secret of Nature has been unlocked. This process of generalising laws from observed particulars is called induction. Why do you say that this is not the way science advances, why there is no such thing as induction in science? Popper: According to my view, animals and men are born with a great store of instinctive knowledge – of ways of reacting to situations, of expectations. Such inborn knowledge may be disappointed – thus it is conjectural. The way we learn is not by observation but by trying to solve problems. A problem arises whenever our conjectures or our expectations fail. We try to solve our problems by modifying our conjectures. These new tentative conjectures are our trial balloons – our trial solutions. This leads to new behaviour which may succeed or may fail. The point is that we learn by trial and error: by tentative solutions and by their elimination if they prove erroneous. This method is one used by all creatures, down to the Amoeba. The distinction between this pre-scientific method and that used by Einstein is this. On the pre-scientific level we hate the very idea that we might be mistaken so we cling dogmatically to our conjectures as long as possible. On the scientific level, we systematically search for our mistakes, for our errors. This is the great thing: we are consciously critical in order to detect our errors. Thus, on the pre-scientific level, we are often ourselves destroyed, eliminated, with our false theories; we perish with our false theories. On the scientific level, we systematically try to eliminate our false theories – we try to let our false theories die in our stead. This is the critical method of error elimination. It is the method of science. It presupposes that we can look at our theories critically – as something outside ourselves. They are no longer our subjective beliefs – they are our objective conjectures. Thus, the general picture of science is: we choose some interesting problem. We propose a bold theory as a tentative solution. We try our very best to criticize the theory; and this means that we try to refute it. If we succeed in our refutation, then we try to produce a new theory, which we shall again criticize; and so on. In this way, even if we do not succeed in producing a satisfactory theory, we shall have learned a great deal: we shall have learned something about the problem. We shall know where the difficulties lie. The whole procedure can be summed up by the words: bold conjectures, controlled by severe criticism which includes severe tests. And criticism, and tests, are attempted refutations. Magee: And, since it is only at this second stage that observation and experiment comes in, induction is not a part of the scientific process. Popper: Yes.

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Magee: And, from your point of view it follows that we never really know anything – that there are only differing degrees of uncertainty… Popper: There are various senses of the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ but in the sense of ‘I know and cannot be mistaken about what it is that I know’ you are right: there is always the possibility of mistake. But I think this is trivial and unimportant. What is important is the distinction between knowledge in the subjective sense and knowledge in the objective sense. Magee: Perhaps you’d better explain that distinction. Popper: Knowledge in the subjective sense consists of dispositions to act in certain ways, or to believe certain things, or to say certain things. Knowledge in the objective sense consists of spoken, or written, or printed statements. Both kinds of knowledge are uncertain or conjectural or hypothetical. Magee: But is there really all that crucial a difference in logical status between the knowledge I have in my head and the same knowledge written down? Popper: Yes. Putting our ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an important difference. For in this way they become criticizable. Magee: But if we never actually know anything, what are the grounds for our criticism? On what grounds would a scientist accept some hypotheses and reject others? Popper: The grounds are provided by our critical discussion of the various competing theories. In these discussions we try to compare them by asking which of them appears to come nearest to the truth. Magee: But if there’s no certainty, no knowledge, what do you mean by ‘the truth’? Popper: Correspondence to the facts. We know what it means for a theory to correspond to the facts even if you can’t decide whether it does correspond to the facts or not. I use the term ‘verisimilitude’ for this approximation to the truth. What we do in our discussion of competing theories is to found out which has the greatest verisimilitude. We may find good reasons for preferring one theory to any of the others: the theory to prefer, the one with greatest verisimilitude, is the one for which we can provide the best rational defence. Magee: Doesn’t this introduce a note of relativism – that our preferred theories are merely our current cultural ones? Popper: No. It does introduce a historical element; but not an element of relativism. Every unambiguously formulated theory is either true or false: there is no third possibility. But one false theory may be nearer to the truth than another. Also, one theory may contain more truth than another: it’s ‘truth content’, as I call it, may be greater. Thus, for example, if the time is truly 12 o’clock then the statement ‘it is five to twelve’ is false, but nearer the truth than the statement ‘it is ten to twelve’. Also, the false statement ‘it is five to twelve’ has a greater truth content than a vague true

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statement such as ‘the time is between eleven and one o’clock’ because a larger class of true statements follows from it. Magee: And what is it that separates science as an enterprise from other ways of claiming knowledge? Popper: A theory belongs to science if it is in principle capable of being refuted. This does not mean that theories outside science are untrue, or that they are meaningless, simply that they are not scientific.

From Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee (OUP 1971)

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Plato The jury’s problem Imagine that you are on a jury, listening to Smith describe how he was set upon and robbed. The details are striking, the account hangs together, and you are completely convinced; you believe that Smith was the victim of a violent crime. This is a true belief; Smith was, in fact, attacked. Do you know Smith was attacked? This might at first seem like an odd thing to worry about. What better evidence could you have? But you might reflect that this is, after all, a courtroom, and that Smith is making a case which his alleged attacker will then try to counter. Can you be sure that you are convinced because Smith is telling the truth, or might it be the way that the case is presented that is persuading you? If it is the latter, then you might be worried; for then you might have been convinced even if Smith had not been telling the truth. Besides, even if he is telling the truth, is his evidence conclusive as to his being attacked? For all you know, he might have been part of a set-up, and it’s not as though you had been there and seen it for yourself. And so it can seem quite natural to conclude that you don’t actually know that Smith was attacked, though you have a belief about it which is true, and no actual reason to doubt its truth. In his dialogue Theaetetus Plato raises this issue [of the possible difference between knowledge and true belief]. What can knowledge be, young Theaetetus asks, other than true belief? After all, if you have a true belief you are not making any mistakes. But Theaetetus is talking to Socrates and, as often, the older man finds a problem. For persuading people in public is something that can be skilfully done. He means the skill of what we would call lawyers, although he is talking about a system in which there were no professional lawyers. The victim had to present his own case, though many people hired professional speech-writers, especially since they had to convince a jury of not 12 but 501 members. Socrates continues:

SOCRATES: These men, at any rate, persuade by means of their expertise, and they don’t teach people, but get them to have whatever beliefs they wish. Or do you think that there are any teachers so clever as the teach the truth about what happened adequately, in the short time allowed, to people who weren’t there when others were robbed of their property or violently attacked? THEAETETUS: No, I don’t think they could at all, but I think they could persuade them. SOCRATES: And by persuading them don’t you mean getting them to have a belief?

THEAETETUS: Of course. SOCRATES: Well, when a jury has been persuaded fairly about something about which you could only have knowledge if you were an eyewitness, not otherwise, while they judge from what they’ve heard and get a true belief, haven’t they then judged without knowledge, though they were persuaded of what’s correct, since they made a good judgement?

THEAETETUS: Absolutely. SOCRATES: But look, if true belief and knowledge were the same thing, then an excellent juryman wouldn’t have a correct belief without knowledge. As it is, the two seem distinct.

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This sounds convincing, indeed perhaps blindingly obvious. But, like the jury, we can raise the question of whether we should be convinced. Why don’t the jury know that Smith was robbed? What is required for knowledge? One reason put forward by Plato for the claim that the jury lack knowledge is that they have been persuaded, by someone whose main aim is to get them to believe what he wants them to believe. In this case he has persuaded them of the truth, but we may think that he would have been able to persuade them even if his story wasn’t true. At first, this worry might seem far-fetched: if you have acquired a true belief in a certain way, why worry that you might have been persuaded of something false in the same way? How can what didn’t happen cast doubt on what did? But, in fact, this worry about the power of persuasion is serious, because it casts doubt on the route by which the belief is acquired. If it is a route by which I can acquire false beliefs as readily as true ones, then it cannot guarantee me only true beliefs. And this does raise a doubt in most people’s minds that a belief that I have acquired by that route could amount to knowledge. Another reason put forward in the passage is that the sort of fact the jury have been persuaded of, namely that Smith was attacked, is not the sort of fact that you could have knowledge of anyway unless you had been there and seen it for yourself. However convinced we are that Smith is telling the truth, all we are getting is a version that is second-hand, and conveyed by an entirely different kind of route from Smith’s own. He experienced and saw the robbery; we are only being told about it. However vivid the telling, it’s still just a telling; only someone who was there and saw it can have knowledge of it. Again, this may at first seem far-fetched. If we limit knowledge to what we can actually experience first-hand for ourselves, then there won’t be much that we can know; nothing we read or hear second-hand will count. Yet there is a powerful thought being appealed to here, one that can be expressed by saying that nobody else can know things for you or on your behalf. Knowledge requires that you acquire the relevant belief for yourself. What it is to acquire a belief for yourself will differ depending on the kind of belief it is, but with the belief that Smith was robbed the only way you can acquire it for yourself with no intermediary is, it seems, to be there yourself and actually see it. A problem for us Plato has given us two kinds of reason for rejecting the idea that the jury’s true belief could amount to knowledge. Both are strong, but how well do they go together? The problem with persuasion was that it turned out to be a route that could not guarantee that the beliefs we acquired from someone else could be true. But for this to be a problem with persuasion there has to be the possibility of a route of this kind that did have such a guarantee. Socrates complains that the victim has to convince the jury in too short a time, and in circumstances that are too emotional and fraught, for their acquisition of beliefs to be the right kind for knowledge. This complaint is pointless unless there could be a way of acquiring beliefs that didn’t have these disadvantages – say, one where there were no time constraints, and each member of the jury could examine witnesses and victim as much as they required to satisfy every last scruple. So it looks as though we are assuming that there is a way of conveying beliefs that could amount to knowledge, though it isn’t persuasion.

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The second point, however, suggested that no way of conveying beliefs, however careful and scrupulous, could amount to knowledge, since any belief conveyed to you from another will be second-hand, and thus something that you cannot know, because you cannot know it for yourself. Relying on someone else’s testimony, however sound, is never the same as experiencing the fact for yourself. The problem now is that the second objection seems to conflict with the first. The second supposes that knowledge cannot be conveyed, but must be acquired by each person in their own case; but the first found fault with persuasion in a way suggesting that there could be a way of acquiring a belief from someone else which would amount to knowledge, so that knowledge is conveyable. The reader comes in At this point the reader is forced to think for herself about the passage, and what Plato is doing. The simplest response would be to conclude the Plato has given Socrates mutually conflicting demands on knowledge because Plato himself is confused; he just hasn’t noticed that he is requiring knowledge to be both conveyable and not conveyable. Unsympathetic readers may stop at this point. We might probe a little further, however. For one thing, Socrates in this dialogue repeatedly stresses that his is not putting forward positions of his own, only arguing against those of others. He produces two objections to Theaetetus’ suggestion that true belief might amount to knowledge. Each is powerful against that suggestion. Do we have to suppose that Plato, the author, was unaware that these objections run up against each other? Not necessarily (and if we do not have to suppose the author unaware of this, we also do not have to suppose that he intended to portray Socrates as unaware of this problem – though this is a further matter on which readers may disagree). And given the sophisticated level of argument in Theaetetus, the reasonable course is to suppose that Plato was aware of how these two objections are related. Why then does Plato not appear to think that it matters? Here we have to take seriously Socrates’ stress in the dialogue that he is only arguing against the views of others. This does not mean he has no ideas on the subject himself, but it does mean that the point of the dialogue is not to put these forward. The problem we find when we reflect on Socrates’ two grounds for rejecting Theaetetus’ suggestion don’t undermine the conclusion that that suggestion won’t do; they do show that when we, or Plato, are working on a positive account of knowledge we need to be aware of this problem. […] In many ways, the jury passage from Theaetetus provides a good introduction to Plato’s way of writing. We find right away that it is important to pay attention to the way in which Plato writes, particularly to the role of argument in supporting one’s own position or attacking those of others. We find also that the reader is drawn into the argument herself, needing to challenge Plato’s arguments even where Socrates in the dialogue easily wins. From: Julia Annas Plato: A Very Short Introduction (2003) OUP

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Reduction ‘Reductionism’ is often employed as a term of abuse. A reductionist is seen as someone who takes what is complex, nuanced and sophisticated and breaks it down into something simplistic, sterile and empty. This is unfair. Reductionism is simply the process of explaining one kind of phenomenon in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena. This approach lies at the heart of science (put there by Descartes in his Discourse on Method). A useful illustration is that in order to understand why water boils you need to understand the underlying phenomenon: that water consists of particles in motion and that this motion is affected by heat energy. The phenomenon of boiling is less fundamental than the underlying phenomenon of particles in motion because it depends on the latter. Not only does the phenomenon of particles in motion explain boiling of water (and other liquids), it also explains pressure changes in gases and expansions in solids. The particle explanation is fundamental in that it explains the other phenomena whereas the other phenomena (such as boiling) cannot explain the particle motion. Reductionism has proved successful in science and there are many examples of the reductionist approach offering solutions to major philosophical questions. One example is the question of what knowledge is. This has been reduced to three simpler terms: belief, truth, justification. Here, the single, amorphous concept of knowledge is explained in terms of three simpler features: knowledge comprises a belief that is both justified and true. The reductionist can take these further by giving reductive accounts of what justification, belief and truth each in turn comprise. Philosophy and science are often said to have begun in a reductionist moment – when Thales of Miletus (c.620 – c. 555BC) asserted that ‘all is water’. He reduced the vast multiplicity of natural phenomena (sky, earth, sea, animals, fire, etc.) to a single principle. Reductionist accounts can be found in ethics where a term like ‘goodness’ might be analysed into something simpler. A utilitarian, for example, explains goodness in terms of what increases happiness and/or decreases suffering – notice that ‘increasing happiness’ is much more precise than ‘being good’. Reductionism is opposed because, to many, it is not at all obvious why all questions in philosophy should be answered reductively. Maybe you get nowhere by trying to break down a concept into ‘its parts’. So, for instance, Wittgenstein argued that words like ‘knowledge’ are to be understood in terms of the way in which they function in communities of competent language-users. One cannot describe this activity in reductionist terms. It is worth pointing out that you don’t have to choose between a reductive and a non-reductive approach. One could use reductionism as a heuristic device (a device where no agreed rule applies). Thus, one could try the reduction not because you think that there is an underlying, more fundamental phenomenon which will explain something more comprehensively, but that the reduction might reveal interesting things from which one can learn. From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and PS Fosl (2003) Blackwell.

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Universities and Philosophy The university now is the place where philosophy thrives. This strikes me as both a good and a bad thing. It is bad because, as the university becomes increasingly professionalized, it has increasingly professionalized philosophy. This, in my opinion, has rendered much more of philosophy sterile, empty and boring. What institutions demand from individuals, institutions get. And what universities, even the best universities, now demand from individual professors, on the whole, is quantity of publication, frequency of citation in the professional literature, widely certified distinction in the profession, and other quantifiable measures of an impressive resume. And that is what professors of philosophy are on the whole providing – to the detriment of philosophy as I see it. But the connection between philosophy and the university is a good thing, too. It provides a place in which philosophy can be done, and with wise leadership can be done in conditions in which it can thrive. It requires teaching: the need to say clear things in public, and to make them accessible to others and subject to critical assessment. And teaching is what passes on the subject, or the tradition, if only in the form in which it is received by those now entering it. The university also provides a freedom to think about something for a long time, and in new ways that might show no beneficial social effects. Philosophical work (even work that seems to go nowhere) is officially supported by the university, and so by the society at large, and not for any of the specific conclusions it is expected to reach. It is regarded as more important that the activity should go on than that it should have this or that specified outcome. Results, in the form of conclusions reached, or propositions established, are not what matters. This is a good thing, as I see it, because I do not regard philosophy as a set of results or doctrines, in the sense of conclusions reached, or propositions established. It may well be that every society or culture needs ideas or beliefs or doctrines to give sense and direction to the lives of its members. And accepting a belief or doctrine, or espousing an ideology, is a form of thought, of thinking. But it is not the kind of thought that philosophy is. Or rather, that kind of thought is compatible with the absence of philosophy, or of what is valuable about philosophy at its best.

Professor Barry Stroud in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (418 words)

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Philosophy and Tradition The need for a past, for a tradition to start from, is a commonplace in the history of painting. Painters paint as they do in response to the painting that precedes them. André Malraux dramatized the familiar point this way: It is a revealing fact that, when explaining how his vocation came to him, every great artist traces it back to the emotion he experienced at his contact with some specific work of art…An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd-boy Giotto sketching sheep. But, in true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting; but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of a man like Cimabue. What makes the artist is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent. Something like this is no less true, I believe, of philosophy. G.E.Moore reports in his autobiography that he thinks “the main stimulus to philosophize” for him was “certain philosophical statements which [he] heard made in conversation.” He says, “I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences.” This is often cited as a defect or limitation of G.E.Moore and his philosophy, and indeed, sometimes, of so-called analytic or linguistic philosophy in general. It is thought to reveal the superficial and derivative, even parasitic, character of that philosophy, its dry academic or professional sources, and its distance from “real” problems that the world presents to any thoughtful, sensitive human being who is directly and passionately engaged with it. I think rather that this observation shows Moore’s acuteness and his honesty. Whatever one might think of Moore’s limitations, perhaps even his blindnesses, as a philosopher, he was not blind or limited in this case. What he reports about himself is something I believe to be true of philosophy in general. I find it interesting that many philosophers would deny it, and would regard it as demeaning or indicative of shallowness to acknowledge that it is true of them.

Professor Barry Stroud in What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (389 words)

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Philosophy as Therapeutic We need to see where philosophical problems come from in order to understand the special character of what is said in attempts to solve them. One word sometimes applied to the kind of philosophical attitude or curiosity I am recommending is therapeutic. The term is unfortunate, and does not capture what I have in mind. Wittgenstein does say that there are different methods in philosophy, ‘like different therapies.’ But that might mean, allowing for the bad grammar, only that there are different methods in philosophy, just as there are different therapies in psychotherapy. That does not imply that the different ways of doing things in philosophy are therapies. On that reading, the remark means only the equivalent of ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat.’ With a cat there is no obscurity or uncertainty about the goal: you either end up with a fully skinned cat or you don’t. But what is the analogue, even in psychotherapy, of the skinned cat? And if you think in that case that you can identify in advance a clear goal what could be reached by several different therapeutic means, what is the parallel in philosophy? What goal are different methods in philosophy all designed to achieve? Therapeutic as a term puts too much weight on an identifiable outcome. I prefer the word diagnostic. What philosophers need now is a diagnosis or uncovering of what they regard as their problems or their questions, and some understanding of the nature and sources of the kinds of things they think philosophy should account for. Wittgenstein also says, as translated by Elizabeth Anscombe: ‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’ This suggests that the philosopher, or the philosopher Wittgenstein approves of, treats a philosophical question like an illness – or even that he thinks a philosophical question is an illness. I think that is an unfortunate suggestion. The thing to do with an illness, after all, is to get rid of it. Hence the idea of therapy or cure. But, as we have just seen, Wittgenstein also says there are many different therapies, and you can get rid of something in lots of different ways. Why should ‘philosophical methods’, if there are any, be any better that anything else that works? Best of all would be not to get the thing in the first place. And with philosophical questions, that can be arranged. So on this reading, Wittgenstein would be suggesting that nothing would be lost without philosophy. I think Wittgenstein’s remarks should be taken another way, which puts it much closer to the conception of philosophy or philosophical activity I think we now need – or need to resuscitate. It makes a place for philosophy. What Wittgenstein writes, in the German, is ‘Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage: wie eine Krankheit’, which could be put something like this: ‘The philosopher treats a question: as an illness (is treated).’ The stress is on the verb. The philosopher treats a question; the doctor treats an illness. The parallel is with what is done, not necessarily with what it is done to. Well, how is an illness treated? First of all, and crucially, it has to be identified. ‘What have we got here exactly,’ we ask, ‘and how does it differ from other things that are very similar but different?’ These symptoms must then be diagnosed. What are they indications of? What lies behind them? How did things develop so that these

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symptoms show up in this form here and now? The time for therapy and cure come only after these questions have been answered. The point is that treatment begins with identification and understanding, and an illness to be treated is understood in terms of its origins or causes. We understand what it is in terms of how is came to be. Treating a question is not the same as answering it. Answering it may be the worst thing to do with it. I believe that happens in philosophy. Answering a question before understanding what it is and where it comes from is like applying a cure for an illness without having identified what illness it is. It can make things worse, and certainly harder to identify and understand. To understand what philosophical theses or theories are, we have to understand the nature and source of the problems to which they are answers. And to understand those problems we have to identify and understand their sources. I do mean we must always seek their temporal or historical sources. We need to identify the assumptions, the demands, the preconceptions, and the aspirations that lead to a question’s having the particular significance it now has for us, but that need not mean going back to earlier stages of the philosophical tradition. The particular frame of mind what is responsible for the question is something we are in right now. That does not mean it is therefore easy to identify. But given that philosophy is always in part a response to previous philosophy, we can be pretty sure that the source of questions that now lie within us, and to that extent seem uncontroversial, are the products of earlier philosophizing or earlier ways of thinking about the world. That is why I think philosophy is inseparable from the history of philosophy. But not every particular attempt to plumb the sources of a philosophical problem must take us backward in time. The important thing is to gain some understanding of the origin and special character of the problem or issue right now, whatever that takes.

Professor Barry Stroud from What is Philosophy? (eds Ragland and Heidt) (929 words)

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Philosophy as an Activity – comments from William James I am not sure how many of you live close enough to philosophy to realize fully what I mean by this last reproach [that rationalistic philosophy ‘keeps out of all definite touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows’], so I will dwell a little longer on that unreality in all rationalistic systems by which your serious believer in facts is so apt to feel repelled. I wish that I had saved the first couple of pages of a thesis which a student handed me a year or two ago. They illustrated my point so clearly that I am sorry I cannot read them to you now. This young man, who was a graduate of some Western college, began by saying that he had always taken for granted that when you entered a philosophic classroom you had to open relations with a universe entirely distinct from the one you left behind you in the street. The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies. They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so powerful an appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether ‘refined’ is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips. Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild. [from Pragmatism by William James, 1906, Dover Publications] [492 words]

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Dialogue in Philosophy

1. Berkeley Philonous is trying to persuade Hylas that there is nothing ‘real’ about the physical world. Hylas has just been forced to concede that sounds might not be real when Philonous turns to the case of colours which he says are unreal in the same way that sounds are. Hylas: Pardon me: the case of colours is very different. Can anything be plainer than

that we see them on the objects? Philonous: The objects you speak of are, I suppose, corporeal subjects existing without

the mind? Hylas: They are. Philonous: And have true and real colours inhering in them? Hylas: Each visible object hath that colour we see in it. Philonous: How! Is there anything visible but that we perceive by sight? Hylas: There is not. Philonous: And do we perceive anything by sense which we do not perceive

immediately? Hylas: How often must I repeat the same thing? I tell you we do not. Philonous: Have patience, good Hylas; and tell me once more, whether there is anything

immediately perceived by the senses, except visible qualities. I know you asserted there was not: but I would now be informed whether you still persist in the same opinion.

Hylas: I do. Philonous: Pray, is your corporeal substance either a sensible quality, or made up of

sensible qualities? Hylas: What a question that is! Whoever thought it was? Philonous: My reason for asking was, because in saying, each visible object hath that

colour which we see in it, you make visible objects to be corporeal substances; which implies either that corporeal substances are sensible qualities, or else that there is something beside sensible qualities perceived by sight: but as this point was formerly agreed between us, and is still maintained by you, it is a clear consequence, that your corporeal substance is nothing distinct from sensible qualities.

Hylas: You may draw as many absurd consequences as you please, and endeavour to perplex the plainest things; but you will never persuade me out of my senses. I clearly understand my own meaning.

Philonous: I wish you to make me understand it too. But since you are unwilling to have your notion of corporeal substances examined, I shall urge that point no farther. Only be pleased to let me know, whether the same colours which we see exist in external bodies, or in some other.

Hylas: The very same. Philonous: What! Are then the beautiful red and purple we see on yonder clouds really

in them? Or do you imagine they have in themselves any other form than that of a dark mist or vapour?

Hylas: I must own, Philonous, those colours are not really in the clouds as they seem to be at this distance. They are only apparent colours.

Philonous: Apparent call you them? How shall we distinguish these apparent colours from real?

From Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous by George Berkeley. First printed in 1713. This extract from Berkeley: Philosophical Works (1975). Everyman.

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2. Hume

Pamphilus to Hermippus It has been remarked, my Hermippus, that, though the ancient philosophers conveyed most of their instruction in the form of dialogue, this method of composition has been little practised in later ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those, who have attempted it. Accurate and regular argument, indeed, such as is now expected of philosophical inquirers, naturally throws a man into the methodical and didactic manner; where he can immediately, without preparation, explain the point, at which he aims; and thence proceed, without interruption, to deduce the proofs, on which it is established. To deliver a SYSTEM in conversation scarcely appears natural; and while the dialogue-writer desires, by departing from the direct style of composition, to give a freer air to his performance, and avoid the appearance of author and reader, he is apt to run into a worse inconvenience, and convey the image of pedagogue and pupil. Or if he carries on the dispute in the natural spirit of good company, by throwing in a variety of topics, and preserving a proper balance among the speakers; he often loses so much time in preparations and transitions, that the reader will scarcely think himself compensated, by all the graces of dialogue, for the order, brevity, and precision, which are sacrificed to them. There are some subjects, however, to which dialogue writing is peculiarly adapted, and where it is still preferable to the direct and simple method of composition. Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious, that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important, that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate the triteness of the subject, where the vivacity of the conversation may enforce the precept, and where the variety of lights, presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant. Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation. Reasonable men may be allowed to differ, where no one can be reasonably positive: opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement: and if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company, and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and society. Happily, these circumstances are all to be found in the subject of NATURAL RELIGION. What truth so obvious, so certain, as the being of God, which the most ignorant ages have acknowledged, for which the most refined geniuses have ambitiously striven to produce proofs and arguments? What truth so important as this, which is the ground of all our hopes, the surest foundation of morality, the firmest support of society, and the only principle, which ought never to be a moment absent from our thoughts and meditations? But in treating of this obvious and important truth; what obscure questions occur, concerning the nature of that divine being; his attributes, his decrees, his plan of providence? These have always been subjected to the disputations of men: concerning these, human reason has not reached

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any certain determination: but these are topics so interesting, that we cannot restrain our restless inquiry with regard to them; though nothing but doubt, uncertainty, and contradictions have, as yet, been the result of our most accurate researches. This I had lately occasion to observe, while I passed, as usual, part of the summer season with CLEANTHES, and was present at those conversations of his with PHILO and DEMEA, of which I gave you lately some imperfect account. Your curiosity, you then told me, was so excited, that I must of necessity enter into a more exact detail of their reasonings, and display those various systems, which they advanced with regard to so delicate a subject as that of natural religion. The remarkable contrast in their characters still further raised your expectations; while you opposed the accurate philosophical turn of Cleanthes to the careless scepticism of Philo, or compared either of their dispositions with the rigid inflexible orthodoxy of Demea. My youth rendered me a mere auditor of their disputes; and that curiosity, natural to the early season of life, has so deeply imprinted in my memory the whole chain and connection of their arguments, that, I hope, I shall not omit or confound any considerable part of them in the recital. Introductory section to Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume. First published in 1778, this is from the Penguin Classics edition (1990) – and preserves the original punctuation.

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3. Socratic Dialogue – Meno Socrates has been conversing with Meno about where knowledge comes from. He has just been questioning a slave-boy of Meno’s and elicited from him the knowledge of Pythagoras’ Theorem. Socrates: What do you say of him, Meno? Were not all these answers given out

of his own head? Meno: Yes, they were all his own. Socrates: And yet, as we were just now saying, he did not know [the theorem]? Meno: True. Socrates: And yet he had those notions in him? Meno: Yes. Socrates: Then he who does not know still has true notions of that which he does

not know? Meno: He has. Socrates: And at present these notions are just wakening up in him, as in a

dream; but if he were frequently asked the same questions, in different forms, he would know as well as any one at last?

Meno: I dare say. Socrates: Without any one teaching him he will recover his knowledge for

himself, if he is only asked questions? Meno: Yes. Socrates: And this spontaneous recovery in him is recollection? Meno: True. Socrates: And this knowledge which he now has must he not either have

acquired or always possessed? Meno: Yes. Socrates: But if he always possessed this knowledge he would always have

known; or if he acquired the knowledge, he could not have acquired it in this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any one ever taught him? You must know that, if, as you say, he was born and bred in your house.

Meno: And I am certain that no one ever did teach him. Socrates: And yet has he not the knowledge? Meno: That, Socrates, is most certain. Socrates: But if he did not acquire this knowledge in this life, then clearly he

must have learned it at some other time? Meno: That is evident. Socrates: And that must have been the time when he was not a man? Meno: Yes. Socrates: And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time

when he was and was not a man, which only needed to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?

Meno: That is clear. Socrates: And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is

immortal…

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4. Plato’s Socrates

The following features are common to the dialogues: Characterization of Socrates Socrates is predominantly characterized, not as a teacher, but as an enquirer. He disclaims wisdom and seeks, normally in vain, elucidation of problematic questions for those he speaks with. The method he uses is known as elenchus (or the elenctic method). This is the Greek term for cross-examination which, he feels, is the way to get to the truth. (Note that in some dialogues (notably Protagoras and Gorgias) this questioning stance does give way to a more authoritative tone.) Definition Many of the dialogues are concerned with the attempt to define a virtue or other ethically significant concept. Examples are ‘piety’ (Euthyphro); ‘temperance’ (Charmides); ‘courage’ (Laches); ‘beauty’ (Hippias Major); and virtue or excellence in general (Meno, Protagoras). In all these dialogues the discussion ends in ostensible failure, with Socrates and his interlocutor(s) acknowledging that they have failed to find an answer to the central question. Ethics All these dialogues are concerned with ethics in the broad sense of how one should live. Besides the ones above, Crito deals with a practical ethical problem (should Socrates try to escape from prison); and both Gorgias and Euthydemus examine what the aims of life should be. From Socrates: A Very Short Introduction by C C W Taylor (1998) OUP Crito – an example plus comments Socrates is in prison, condemned to death, his execution imminent. His rich friend Crito comes to try and persuade him to escape. Crito: Oh! My beloved Socrates, let me entreat you once more to take my

advice and escape. For if you die I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is another evil: people who do not know you and me will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money [as bribes], but that I did not care. Now can there be a worse disgrace than this – that I should be thought to value money more than a life of a friend? For the many will not be persuaded that I wanted you to escape but that you refused.

Socrates: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons worth considering, will think of these things truly, as they are.

Crito: But do you see, Socrates, that the opinion of the many must be regarded - as is evident in your own case - because they do the greatest evil to anyone who has lost their good opinion.

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Socrates: I only wish, Crito, that they could; for then they could also do the greatest good, and that would be well. But the truth is that they can do neither good nor evil: they cannot make a man wise or make him foolish; and whatever they do is the result of chance.

Crito: Well, I will not dispute about that; but please tell me, Socrates, whether you are not acting out of regard to me and your other friends: are you not afraid that if you escape from here we may get into trouble with the state for having stolen you away, and lose either the whole or the greater part of our property; or that even a worse evil might happen to us?

This is a fairly typical example of the style used in the dialogues: quick-fire and conversational. It allows a straight-forward and brisk treatment of philosophical problems, couched in terms and contexts that are readily understood by most educated readers. However, the necessity for the conversational nature of the form does mean that what might be argued is limited: the degree of rigour that certain philosophers would demand cannot be met without artificiality (“but your ninth premise might fall through incompatibility with your third intermediate conclusion due to…” could never ring true as the normal spoken word). Notice that in the first speech by Crito above, he brings up the question of whether being thought to be more caring of money than friendship is disgraceful. Socrates does not answer this question directly – he chooses to talk about the value of what the majority of people think. Of course, the latter is interesting (and pertinent) and can be used to answer Crito’s question – but there is nothing explicit about the money/friendship issue. Hence, just as in real conversations, points are raised but not necessarily dealt with exhaustively. Later in the excerpt, Socrates says that what the majority says has no power at all; that all that really matters is whether one is wise or foolish; that what is done by the majority does is done by chance. All of these claims might legitimately be thought to require more argument – particularly the idea that wisdom is all that ultimately matters. Crito, however, just lets it pass and returns to the earlier issue of the effect of Socrates’ death on his friends. The very personal style of the dialogue continues in the rest of the piece: Crito gets more heated and pressing, even becoming offensive to the extent of implying Socrates is being cowardly. Socrates is unperturbed, forgives Crito for his warmth, carries on pressing his point about wisdom. In fact, Socrates forces the issue of his willingness to escape down to just one thing: he simplifies the complexity of considerations (such as harming one’s friends and family; obedience to the laws; exile as a condition; opinion of the majority; personal integrity; his prospects in the next life) to just one issue: one’s duty to the state. This simplification, so necessary to the dialogue form, might be argued as being wrong-headed in that it misses (or fails to address) the true complexities of life. Translation of Crito by Jowett in The Essential Plato. Some of the comments come from Philosophy by Edward Craig.

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Dialectic

A great deal of philosophical examination has taken the form of ‘dialectic’. In a nutshell, dialectic thinking is a sort of philosophical dialogue – a back and forth process between two or more points of view. There are various ways one might formulate the process. One way would be like this: 1. One party advances a claim. 2. Some other party advances a contrary claim, or the other launches into a critical analysis of the claim, looking for incoherencies or logical inconsistencies or absurd implications in the claim. 3. The first party attempts to defend, or refine or to modify the original claim in the light of the challenge brought by the other. 4. The other responds to the first party’s defence, refinement or modifications. 5. Ultimately, a more sophisticated and/or accurate understanding of the issue at hand emerges. You can see, then, that dialectical thinking involves some ‘other’ and some sort of opposition or contrariety between various thinkers engaged in the process. This sort of opposition is often thought of as the ‘negative moment’ of the first claim. Otherness and oneness The dialectical process is often thought of as a sort of engine for philosophical progress – perhaps as the most powerful sort. By struggling through a series of negative moments and resolutions to them, dialecticians believe that understanding of the truth emerges. Typically, dialecticians hold that thinking begins in a murky, incoherent morass of many, different, other opinions – some having a glimmer or partial grasp of the truth. Through confrontations with these others and their negativity, a more complete and comprehensive grasp of the one or oneness that is truth emerges. Hence dialectic can be said to aim at wholeness or unity, while ‘analytic’ thinking divides that with which it deals into parts. Kant, however, argues (in Critique of Pure Reason) that when it comes to metaphysics, thinking fails to achieve wholeness, completion and truth, but yields instead only endless, irresolvable conflict and illusion. Hegel Hegel is associated with the most well-known model of dialectic (though, in fact, he did not use it in the terms which follow. It was the poet Schiller who developed these – and the philosopher Fichte who deployed it). According to this model, one begins with a ‘thesis’ against which is opposed an ‘antithesis’. The result of the confrontation is a ‘synthesis’ which subsumes and resolves the apparent conflict between the thesis and antithesis in an upward, transcending motion called ‘sublation’. Dialectical materialism Marx and Engels have become associated with a way of understanding the world which is called ‘dialectical materialism’ (a term coined by the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov). Like Hegel did, Marx and Engels regarded history as a

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progressive dialectical process driven by clash of oppositions. But for Marx and Engels the process entails not a clash of theories and ideas but instead the struggle of economic classes. So, for Hegel, the result of the dialectical process is ‘absolute knowledge’ of the comprehensive whole of truth, for Marx and Engels the result of the material dialectic is the perfect, classless society they describe as ‘communism’.

From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl (2003) Blackwell.

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Nietzsche

1. Genealogy as a philosophical method Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality is in part a working out of the implications of the absence of any God and the consequence for morality. He argues that we have inherited outmoded moral concepts based on Christianity’s false beliefs. Laying bare the origins of these concepts in bitter, resentful emotions, Nietzsche seems to believe, will allow us to see them for the soul-cramping injunctions that they are, and free us to replace them with a more life-enhancing approach. This, it must be stressed, is implicit rather than explicit in the text: most of the book is devoted to an analysis of the origins, both psychological and historical, of several key moral concepts. But Nietzsche’s aim is not simply to replace one morality with another; he wants to call into question the value of morality itself. To the question of what ultimate value morality has, Nietzsche provides no clear answer. His methodology in the book is genealogical. Literally, this is the tracing of ancestors, establishing a pedigree. Nietzsche means by it tracing of particular concepts, largely by examining the history of the changing meanings of words. His application of the genealogical method in On the Genealogy of Morality is intended to show that received opinion about the source of morality is misleading, and that, historically, concepts such as moral goodness, guilt, pity and self-sacrifice originated in bitter emotions turned against others, or against oneself. Genealogy, however, is meant to provide not just a history of these concepts, but also a critique of them. By uncovering their true origins, Nietzsche intends to reveal their dubious pedigrees and thereby question their exalted place in the morality of his day. This approach to moral philosophy is, like most of Nietzsche’s thought, highly controversial, both as a methodology and in terms of its alleged findings. Some have criticized Nietzsche’s method as flawed through its committing the genetic fallacy. The fallacy is in the assumption that how something was necessarily tells you something about how it is. Just because oak trees come from acorns doesn’t imply that oak trees have anything in common with acorns; just because ‘nice’ once only meant ‘fine’ (a ‘nice fit’ is where the fit is as near perfect as we could get) doesn’t reveal anything important about the current use of ‘nice’ as ‘pleasant’. However, for the most part, Nietzsche’s method is simply revealing that moral concepts are not absolute, that values have been re-evaluated in the past and so might be again. This use of the method does not involve the genetic fallacy: in order to cast doubt on the absolute nature of moral uses of the word ‘good’, for instance, it is sufficient simply to show that it has been applied very differently in the past.

From Nigel Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics [458 words]

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2. Of the Three Metamorphoses

I name you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit shall become a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

There are many heavy things for the spirit, for the strong, weight-bearing spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest.

What is heavy? thus asks the weight-bearing spirit, thus it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well laden.

What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? so asks the weight-bearing spirit, that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.

Is it not this: to debase yourself in order to injure your pride? To let your folly shine out in order to mock your wisdom?

Or is it this: to desert our cause when it is celebrating its victory? To climb high mountains in order to tempt the tempter?

Or is it this: to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul?

Or is it this: to be sick and send away comforters and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what you ask?

Or is it this: to wade in dirty water when it is the water of truth, and not to disdain cold frogs and hot toads?

Or is it this: to love those who despise us and to offer our hand to the ghost when it wants to frighten us?

The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into its desert.

But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert.

It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to its ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call lord and God? The great dragon is called ‘Thou shalt’. But the spirit of the lion says ‘I will!’

‘Thou shalt’ lies in its path, sparkling with gold, a scale-covered beast, and on every scale glitters golden ‘Thou shalt’.

Values of a thousand years glitter on the scales, and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: ‘All the values of things – glitter on me.

‘All values have already been created, and all created values – are in me. Truly, there will be no more “I will”!’ Thus speaks the dragon.

My brothers, why is the lion needed in the spirit? Why does the beast of burden, that renounces and is reverent, not suffice?

To create new values – even the lion is incapable of that: but to create freedom for new creation – that the might of the lion can do.

To create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty: the lion is needed for that, my brothers.

To seize the right to new values – that is the most terrible proceeding for a weight-bearing and reverential spirit. Truly, to this spirit it is a theft and a work for an animal of prey.

Once it loved this ‘Thou shalt’ as its holiest thing: now it has to find illusion and caprice even in the holiest, that it may steal freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this theft.

But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even a lion cannot? Why must the preying lion still become a child?

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The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.

Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.

I have named you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit became a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.

Thus spoke Zarathustra. And at that time he was living in the town called The

Pied Cow.

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3. On Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) [Nietzsche has been a source of study and appropriation for a huge range of thinkers since his death.] Before we move into an account of his views, it is worth stopping briefly and pondering what it might be about his work which has proved to attractive to such diverse movements and schools of thought. Only later will a clearer answer emerge. But it seems, as a preliminary explanation, that it is precisely the idiosyncrasies of his manner that are first found refreshing. His books, after the early The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the Untimely Meditations (1873-6), are usually composed of short essays, often less than a page long, and verging on the aphoristic, though, as we shall see, crucially different from aphorisms as normally composed and appreciated: that is, one- or two-line encapsulations of the nature of human experience, demanding acceptance through their lapidary certainty. The number of subjects discussed is vast, including many that it is surprising to find mentioned by a philosopher – such matters as climate, diet, exercise, and Venice. And often his reflections are in no particular order. That means that he is much easier than most philosophers to dip into, and his frequently expressed loathing of systems means that one can do that with a good conscience. Many of his quasi-aphorisms are radical in content, and though one may gain only a vague impression of what he favours, one will certainly find out a great deal about his dislikes, most often expressed in terms that are both witty and extreme. What he seems to dislike is every aspect of contemporary civilisation, most particularly that of the Germans, and for the reader that is very bracing. His underlying view that if we don’t make a drastically new start we are doomed, since we are living in the wreckage of two thousand and more years of fundamentally mistaken ideas about almost everything that matters – in, as it were, the decadence of what was anyway deadly – offers carte blanche to people who fancy the idea of a clean break with their whole cultural inheritance. Nietzsche was under no illusions about the impossibility of such a schism. Even so, the variety of interpretations of his work, which far from diminishing as the decades pass, seems to be multiplying, though in less apocalyptic forms than previously, needs more explanation. It suggests to the outsider that he must have been exceptionally vague, and probably contradictory. There is something in both these charges. But they seem more impressive and damning than they are if one does not realize and continually keep in mind that, in the sixteen years during which he wrote his mature works, from The Birth of Tragedy onwards, he was developing his views at a rate that has no parallel, and that he rarely went to the bother of signposting his changes of mind. What he more often did was to try to see his earlier works in a new light, surveying his career in a way that suggests he thought one could not understand his later writings without a knowledge of his previous ones, to see how he had advanced; and thus taking himself to be exemplary of how modern man, immured in the decaying culture of the nineteenth century, might move from acquiescence in it to rebellion and suggestions for radical transformation. In 1886 in particular, when he was on the verge, though he could not have known it, of his last creative phase, he spent a great deal of energy on his previous books, providing new, sometimes harshly critical, introductions to them, and in the case of The Gay Science writing a long new final Book. No doubt this was part of his programme for showing that nothing in one’s past should be regretted, that there need be no waste. […]

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None of this explains adequately how Nietzsche could come to be portrayed as the Man of Sorrows, or indeed in many other guises. For all his ambiguities and his careful lack of definition of an ideal, one would have thought there were limits to the extent of possible misrepresentations. All I can lamely say here is that evidently there appear to be no limits. If someone develops a reputation as vast as his rapidly became, once he is no longer in a position to do anything about it, it seems that he will be unscrupulously used to give credentials to any movement that needs an icon. Here, as in other respects, he does with awful irony come to resemble his antipode, the ‘Crucified One’. Almost the last words he wrote were ‘I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom: Listen to me! For I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me with what I am not!’ (preface to Ecce Homo). In the century since he wrote that, few of his readers, fewer still of those who have heard about him, have done anything else. From Nietzsche by Michael Tanner (pp. 3-6) OUP 1994

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Scepticism 1 This is the destructive side of philosophy, casting doubts on arguments and beliefs. Scepticism has been a great spur to philosophical progress and is sometimes used as a tool in its own right. Descartes famously used scepticism as a tool to show that, in fact, an outright scepticism could not be sustained: certainty was possible. However, scepticism can also be relentlessly negative. The problem is that you can ask a sceptical question about virtually anything and not get a cast-iron rebuttal. It may be the case that there actually are no grounds for certainty, that there will always be room for the sceptic to raise doubts about our claims. If this is the case, then the job of philosophy is to rise to the challenge of recognizing when it is, or is not, appropriate to set aside sceptical doubt and when to take it seriously. Alternatively, perhaps philosophers have to learn to philosophise within the context of doubt – to learn to live with the permanent possibility that the sceptic is right without either dismissing the sceptic too readily or allowing the sceptical possibility to stand in the way of philosophy’s constructive side. History Conventionally, scepticism begins with Pyrrho of Elis (c.365-c.273BCE) though a claim can be made that Socrates was sceptical in his assertion that he was the wisest person because he knew that he knew nothing. Pyrrho was characterised as being so sceptical, refusing even to believe the evidence of his senses, that he needed constant protection from falling over precipices. In any event, Pyrrhonism (or Scepticism) flourished as a means for attacking another school of philosophy at that time, Stoicism. It receded in its influence and did not resurface until the Renaissance (14th – 16 century revival in non-Christian thought and art) when it became woven into the early modern project of building a new science. Types of scepticism What might be called naïve scepticism lies with the blunt claim that ‘knowledge is impossible’. This is self-refuting since the claim ‘knowledge is impossible’ is itself a claim that this piece of knowledge is possible. In other words ‘knowledge is impossible’ requires that ‘knowledge is possible’ which is obviously contradictory. More sophisticated scepticism avoids this flat negativism. Sceptics have suggested or tried to show that there is a kind of wisdom, or appreciation, or acknowledgement of human limitations and the fragile character of human knowledge. They have also tried to provide a kind of therapy for various philosophical pathologies that result from misguided attempts to understand our relationship to the world, ourselves and others exclusively as issues of knowing. Nearly all sceptical thought is united in exploring what has come to be known as the problem of the criterion: are there any criteria by which we can, without doubt, distinguish knowledge from error? It seems impossible to resist any candidate criterion being forced into an infinite regress. This is because any criterion put forward must itself be justified as a standard. The criterion cannot be used to standardize itself since this would be circular. Therefore, another criterion is needed to justify the standard – and is then itself in need of justification by another, different, standard. And so on.

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A J Ayer attempted to resist scepticism by arguing that the sceptic sets the standards of knowledge so high that they cannot be met. In doing this, the sceptic scores an empty victory: ‘he robs us of certainty only by so defining it as to make it certain that it cannot be obtained.’3 Ayer’s point is that the sceptic only wins if we accept his rules. But why should we accept them? Shouldn’t we reject the sceptic’s standards because they are necessarily unobtainable? It is not just that we could obtain what they demand if we thought harder or were more intelligent. Nothing we can do will ever satisfy him. But perhaps rejecting scepticism on these grounds is just arbitrarily changing the rules to suit ourselves? Thomas Nagel4 argues that reason is a criterion which, by its nature, can be shown to resist the sort of sceptic who insists that reason cannot be a criterion for knowledge. (He refers to this as subjectivism.) Briefly, he says that such an argument is self-refuting. Subjectivists say that reason is inadequate as a criterion for knowledge because they think that reason is merely subjective, that it lacks the objectivity required for universal acknowledgement of a truth. As Nagel points out, whenever subjectivists make claims along this line, they are using reason as a criterion which is objective: they believe that everyone will agree with their argument. It is self-refuting because (objective) reason must be used to establish that (objective) reason cannot be used. 3 In The Problem of Knowledge (1956) 4 In The Last Word (1997)

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Scepticism 2 – an example of its positive use. Extracts from What is it like to be a bat? by Thomas Nagel5 Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psycho-physical identification, or reduction. But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique…is ignored. Every reductionist has his favourite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of the mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well-understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body – why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. […] Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life…and, no matter how the form of consciousness varies, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. […] We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analysable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing. It is not analysable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behaviour – for similar reasons. I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behaviour, nor that they may be given functional characterisations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defence of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. […] While an account of the physical basis of mind must explain many things, this appears to be the most difficult. It is impossible to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from a reduction in the same way that one excludes the phenomenal features of an ordinary substance from the physical or chemical reduction of it – namely, by explaining then as effects on the minds of human observers. If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be

5 Philosophical Review, vol. LXXXIII

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given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view. […] I assume we all believe that bats have experience. […] Bats present a range of activity and sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid. […] I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats perceive the external world primarily by echolocation. Their brains are designed to correlate outgoing high-pitched noises with subsequent echoes which then allow precise discrimination of their external world. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion. Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. Insofar that I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and these resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. […] I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. […] It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one’s own […]. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other’s experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view – to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise. In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view. This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience – facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism – are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. […] We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of

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reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means of other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. […] Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit this pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it is like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity – that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint – does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it. […] What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.

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Scepticism 3 – a positive example from Radcliffe Richards Logical incoherence Logical incoherence is not as easy to spot as the simple examples of a discussion of 4-sided triangles or whether it should be either ‘I will a banana’ or ‘I would a banana’. In her book The Skeptical Feminist6, Janet Radcliffe Richards points out a subtler form of incoherence. Her subject is the nature of women and she considers how the environment in which a woman grows up and lives affects her nature. What is clear is that the environment does have an effect on how women think and behave. But, she argues, it is a mistake to believe that in such circumstances, we see women as they are not, and that if we were to take away these influences, we would find women as they ‘really are’. Such a view rests on an assumption that something’s true nature is how that thing is in its ‘true’ environment, or, even worse, in no environment at all. Both these views suffer from conceptual incoherence. In the second case, it is obvious that all things have to be in some environment or another. Even a vacuum is an environment. So to say that something’s true nature is revealed only when it is examined in no environment at all is incoherent, because nothing could ever possibly be in such a situation. It is also incoherent to think that something’s real nature is revealed when it is in its correct environment. First of all, the whole notion of a ‘correct environment’ is problematic. Isn’t the notion of what is correct relative to various concerns? The correct environment for a salmon when cooking one is in a heated oven. The correct environment for a salmon spawning is something else. But more importantly, to know something’s nature is to know how it is in a variety of environments. Iron’s nature, for example, is most fully understood if we know how it behaves in extremes of heat and cold, in water, under pressure, and so on. Knowing how iron behaves in it’s single ‘natural’ state is extremely limited – so much so, that one could not really claim to know it at all. Radcliffe Richard’s critique shows us that what seems to make sense at first glance (women’s true nature only being revealed when environmental influences are subtracted, or when in the ‘correct environment’) is, in fact, incoherent. From The Philosopher’s Toolkit by J Baggini and P S Fosl

6 Published in 1980