User:Dbuckner/philosophy

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The word Philosophy has a variety of meanings. It can mean a system of belief, values or tenets as in Buddhist philosophy, or the Tao; the personal outlook or viewpoint sometimes called "my philosophy of life"; the truth found in mystical experience, or even alchemy and astrology, such as the philosopher's stone.

This article, however, concerns what is sometimes called 'academic philosophy'. This (generally academic) discipline involves the rational and systematic investigation of the nature of universe and our place in it. It is different from science in that its results do not depend on observation or experiment (except for so-called thought experiment), and from religion or mysticism, in that its method of inquiry is entirely rational, and assigns no place to faith, mystical insight or revelation.

It can also involve the critical investigation of the basic principles and concepts of intellectual disciplines (e.g. philosophy of mathematics). While its scope is wide (e.g. philosophy of sex), its core subjects are generally agreed to consist of

• The discipline that was once called logic, but which is now known as philosophical logic, formal logic now being regarded as part of mathematics. Philosophical logic is concerned with the relation between formal logic and ordinary language (or whether any such relation exists).
• metaphysics, or the systematic and rational investigation of the nature of reality, particularly the question of what sorts of things can be said to have real existence.
• epistemology – the theory of knowledge, its limits and its connection with belief.
• ethics or the nature, meaning and logic of moral judgment.

Note that philosophy once had a wider scope. Early scientists, regardless of their field of study, called themselves 'Natural philosophers' (this is why people who have never studied philosophy are still awarded a 'PhD' or 'Doctor of Philosophy'). However, it is now generally agreed that what distinguishes philosophy form the natural sciences is its "second order" nature: it thinks about rather than employs the concepts that we employ to think about reality. Philosophy is "thinking about thinking".

Contents 1 History 1.1 Greek and Roman philosophy 1.2 Medieval philosophy 1.3 Renaissance philosophy 1.4 Early modern philosophy 1.5 Enlightenment Philosophy 1.6 Nineteenth Century philosophy 1.7 Modern Philosophy 1.8 Postmodern Philosophy 2 Division of Philosophy 2.1 Logic 2.2 Metaphysics 2.3 Theory of Knowledge 2.4 Ethics 3 Applied philosophy 4 References

[edit] History

Philosophy divides into a number of overlapping periods and traditions, as follows.

[edit] Greek and Roman philosophy

This is a thousand year period that encompasses many different, sometimes competing schools of philosophy. The pre-Socratic period includes everything before the fifth century BC. The thought of the earliest known philosophers, such as Thales and Heraclitus is known only from secondary sources, and consists largely of cryptic sayings, such as 'All is water' (Thales), 'Death is all things we awake, all we see asleep is sleep' (Heraclitus). The first comprehensive and systematic work (which we have mostly as primary material) is by Plato and Aristotle. Plato's work is in the form of dialogues between Socrates and his pupils. Aristotle's work is a highly systematic and methodical development of Plato's thought. Crudely, Plato thought that general ideas represented by common terms such as 'man', 'circle', 'good' signify universal things - Ideas or 'Forms. These

1. have an eternal existence before there were any individual things that were men, or circles, or virtuous men &c
2. exist in every individual to which the words apply, and define the essence, or which 'kind that individual is (a man, a circle &c)
3. are the only true object of knowledge in human beings.

Aristotle rejected the first of these ideas as speculative, but generally agreed with his master on the second two. He argued that every individual consists of matter and form ('form' being equivalent to the Platonic 'Idea'), that the 'form' is common to all the individuals which possess it, and that the object of human contemplation is the form of things, rather than their matter.

The dispute about whether 'forms' or 'universals' exist later became the problem of medieval philosophy.

[edit] Medieval philosophy

This period divides into an early phase, from about the fourth century AD until the twelfth century, the scholastic period, from about the twelfth to the fourteenth century, and the late scholastic period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

At the very beginning of the early phase (strictly, at the end of the Roman period) stands Augustine, one of the most significant figures of the whole medieval period. He was the first theologian to think systematically and in a philosophical way about Christianity. He is important both because of his knowledge and understanding of Greek and Roman philosophy (and also the Stoic and Neoplatonist schools), which allowed him to stand between the ancient and medieval traditions, and because of the conceptual questions he deals with, central to the whole medieval period, such as God, the nature of Eternity, Sin, and Creation. He had a profound influence on the first great philosopher of the Middle Ages, St Anselm.

The first part of the medieval period (up until about the twelfth century) is one where the three main religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, struggled to reconcile their religious traditions and sacred writings with Aristotelian philosophy. It is summed up in Anselm's famous phrase fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding).

The scholastic (or 'high scholastic') period begins around the twelfth century, when the complete works of Aristotle became available in the Christian West, together with detailed commentaries by writers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes (the latter having such influence that he was referred to as 'The Commentator'). It is dominated by advances in logical technique, and particularly semantics, and a highly systematic approach to philosophical questions. The leading figures of this period are Thomas Aquinas, who achieved a lasting synthesis of the Christian and Aristotelian traditions, known as Thomism, and William of Ockham, who developed the philosophical doctrine of nominalism, the anti-metaphysical view that error in philosophy proceeds from mistaking the true or logical form of language.

[edit] Renaissance philosophy

Renaissance philosophy dates roughly from the 14th to the 16th century. It is characterised by the struggle, often bitter and bloody, between humanist and secular-minded philosophers, who rejected the barbarous neo-Latin of the medieval schools in favour of the style of the classical Latin authors, against the hegemony of the Catholic church and the Christian philosophers.

The former include Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for his beliefs, Pico della Mirandola, who argued that all systems of thought could be reconciled on the basis of common truths, Galileo, who opposed Aristotelianism, arguing that mathematics was the key to understand nature, and Niccolo Machiavelli, who rejected the concept of an ideal Christian society, in which people would have to differ from the way that they really are (i.e. weak and foolish), in favour of an society that was governed in an autocratic, brutal, and (to Christians) immoral way.

The period is also notable for the revival of Scholastic philosophy in Spain, following political unification and also the discovery of America. The centre of this movement was the University of Salamanca. The key figures are Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez and Domingo de Soto. Suarez argued that it was not legitimate to impose faith by war, and also defended the rights of Native Americans to property and self-government.

It coincides with the period of counter-reformation philosophy, and the formation of the Jesuit order. Suarez was a leading figure of the order, and his work (the Metaphysical Disputations) is one of the great achievements of scholastic philosophy (as well as its last).

[edit] Early modern philosophy

The early modern period is characterised by a rejection of the Latinate and Aristotelian system of philosophy, in favour of a system that depends on experimental methods and induction. The key figures of this period are Francis Bacon and Descartes.

It is also marked by a preoccupation with the theory of knowledge, perhaps as a result of Descartes discovery in 1638 that vision was caused not by the emanation of rays from the eye, but by light falling on the eye to create a retinal image. Sensation is not an immediate and direct action upon the world, but the passive reception of images and ideas, which are mere copies of reality, suggesting the possibility that the images and ideas exist only in our imagination. This sceptical thought was developed in the work of George Berkeley, who argued that for the ideas, called subjective idealism, material substance is unreal and that all perception originates in God, and David Hume, who argued against the idea of God, and even the self or soul.

[edit] Enlightenment Philosophy

The 'Enlightenment' is a period of eighteenth century thought in which the theme of rationality is central. The fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment are that beliefs should be accepted on the basis of reason only, and not on the authority of the church, of sacred texts, that all people are essentially rational, that differences between races, and 'national characteristics' and beliefs are mere irrational peculiarities, and that (in general) all men (perhaps also women) are united in a common brotherhood (possibly sisterhood) of reason.

Immanuel Kant was one of the great thinkers of this era (as well as the last). He argued that sapere audi – have the courage to reason – was the watchword of the enlightenment.

Romanticism, Nationalism and Postmodernism were later reactions to the thought and values of the Enlightenment. Fascism was an extreme reaction.

[edit] Nineteenth Century philosophy

This period is dominated by German philosophy, and particularly by Idealism, which was a development of Kant's attempt to solve the problems raised by Berkeley's subjective idealism. If all perception is a representation (Vorstellung), it is a picture of reality, mere imagery. But then we cannot distinguish what is objectively true from what is imagination. Kant argued for a 'transcendental' idealism, by which the distinction between subjective and objective, and is only a distinction within appearances within us. The 'Thing in Itself' (Ding an Sich) is unknowable. Even Space and Time are simply forms of 'sensible intuition'.

Johann Fichte introduced the term 'Absolute', and the philosophy that became known as absolute idealism. Fichte argued that we should not begin with knowledge, but the 'I' or pure Ego, which (as Kant held) must accompany all our representations. The ego exists only because of its awareness of itself. But to be aware of itself the ego must limit itself, by positing something other than itself (the 'non-ego'). Thus the ego is involved in a contradiction, for it both posits and negates itself. Fichte's thought had a considerable influence on Schelling and particularly Hegel, who argued that that consciousness and self-consciousness are identical, hence (to simplify his thought somewhat) there is a universal self-consciousness, a universal idea (Begriff) or Absolute of which reality ultimately consists. This was further developed, by English Idealists such as Bradley and Bosanquet, into an extreme (some say overblown) form of Monism in which there is only one thing, all distinctions within which are merely appearance. (See e.g. Appearance and Reality).

The second half of the century saw the beginnings of a reaction to these ideas (and particularly the idea propounded by logicians such as Bosanquet and Rudolf Hermann Lotze that logic and logical laws are merely laws of thought or psychology). The key philosophers of this later period are Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl.

[edit] Modern Philosophy

This period, beginning in the late nineteenth century to the 1950's, is marked by a developing schism in philosophy between 'Continental' tradition, which is mainly Franco-German, and the English and American 'Analytic' tradition.

Both traditions are appear radically different, yet they have a common root, namely a rejection of the Cartesian and empiricist tradition that dominated philosophy since the early modern period, and particularly of the psychologism that pervaded the logic and method of Idealist philosophy.

What underlies the analytic tradition is the view (originally defended by Ockham) that philosophical error arises from misunderstandings generated by language. We imagine that to every word (e.g. 'baldness', 'existence') there corresponds something in reality. According to analytic philosophers, the true meaning of ordinary language sentences is, somewhat misleadingly, concealed by their grammatical form, and we must translate them into their true form (known as logical form) in order to clarify them. The difficulty, as yet unresolved, is to determine what the correct logical form must be. Some philosophers (beginning with Frege and [[Bertrand Russell]), have argued that first order logic shows us the true logical form of ordinary language sentences. Russell's The Philosophy of Logical Atomism is an outline of such a project, Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a more detailed attempt, although famously obscure and aphoristic.

Continental philosophy, in the hands of the phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, took a different turn, in its preoccupation with consciousness. A fundamental assumption of this school is that mental phenomena have intentionality, they have objects, external to and independent of the mind itself. Thus an important theme of phenomenology is an attack on the subject-object dualism of Cartesianism.

Yet this is an assumption shared by analytic philosophers. A similar idea (though developed from a somewhat different starting point) is the view known as externalism defended recently by philosophers such as John McDowell and Gareth Evans. This is that proper names ('Socrates', 'George Bush') refer directly to their bearers, and that their meaning is not mediated by any 'sense' or subjective meaning. Thus the thought 'Socrates is wise' has Socrates himself as a component, and thus there can be no question of our being radically mistaken as to the nature or existence of an external world. Such a mistake would make no sense – literally so, for if the question of whether the Eiffel Tower, London exists, were intelligible, we would have to admit the possibility that those names have no meaning, and thus that the question was not intelligible in the first place. This is strikingly similar to themes found in 'Continental' writers such as Heidegger, who argues that the 'scandal of philosophy' is not that the proof of the existence of an external world has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again. To have faith in the reality of the "external world", presupposes a subject which is worldless. But we are embedded in the world.

[edit] Postmodern Philosophy

One theme of postmodernism is another phase in the reaction to the values of the Enlightenment, and of the hegemony of reason in Western thought.

Certain philosophers such as Richard Rorty have seen as an 'end to philosophy' as a privileged discipline

Rorty began his career as an analytic philosopher, but in his work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he challenges the idea that it is possible to judge our beliefs from any objective standpoint. His argument is a development of the Idealist rejection of the Correspondence Theory of Truth. We have no access to the things which our beliefs and thoughts are about, except through other beliefs and thoughts.

[But please develop this section as I am not competent in the area of 'Continental' Philosophy.]

[edit] Division of Philosophy

The following divisions are generally recognised as the core topics of the philosophical tradition.

[edit] Logic

Philosophy has always been preoccupied with Logic, because all disputes in philosophy revolve around argumentation of some kind, and Logic involves the classification and analysis of valid argumentation. Thus it has seemed to many that solving philosophical (and theological) problems is a matter only of identifying the good arguments, and defusing the bad arguments which led to false or contradictory conclusions. Ockham was notoriously enthusiastic about this method:

We see many [people] who, neglecting this science [of Logic] [and nevertheless] wishing to devote themselves to learning, wander about all over the place scattering various errors around in [their] teaching, making up opinions full of absurdity with no restraint or order, weaving and putting together scarcely intelligible statements, suffering from something like the dreams of sluggards and the fictions of poets, ignorant of the meaning of their own speech. They are all the more dangerously in error the more they regard themselves as wise in comparison with others, recklessly hurling falsehoods indiscriminately in place of truths at the ears of their listeners. (Summa Logicae, transl. Spade).

Ockham argued that the source of errors in philosophy is the idea that 'a distinct signified thing always corresponds to a distinct word in such a way that there are as many distinct entities being signified as there are distinct names or words doing the signifying' ((Summula Philosophiae Naturalis III, chap. 7 (OP VI, p. 270), see also Summa Logicae). Thus he proposed to resolve the famous problem of universals.

This project was seen as unsuccessful, and the idea of Scholasticism as sterile logic chopping contributed to the bad reputation of that school. But Ockham's logic used the term logic of Aristotle, which is unsuited to many forms of argument (including mathematical argument). Logic received a new direction with the invention of the predicate calculus in the late nineteenth century, which revolutionised the subject. It provided firm and secure foundations of mathematics, and seems to have resolved the disputes about infinity which were such a feature of many medieval works. However, modern logic has had less success in resolving philosophical disputes. The main challenge for contemporary philosophical logicians is the recalcitrant residue of problems that defy analysis by the methods of first order logic. See the article on philosophical logic for an elaboration of these problems.

[edit] Metaphysics

The term 'metaphysics' is widely abused, often used (as in metaphysical poetry, metaphysical painting) to refer to things which transcend everyday experience (or attempt to). In its strictest sense, it refers to the subject matter of the book of the same name (literally 'After the Physics') written by Aristotle. This book concerns what sorts of things exist, and to what categories they belong.

Aristotle elaborated a complex theory of Being, according to which only individuals ('substances') fully have Being, but other things (relations, quantities, qualities and other categories) have a derived sort of Being, dependent on individual substances. Even 'being true' is a mode of Being.

This field also includes anti-metaphysics, which is the view that metaphysics is a 'fertile field of delusion propagated by language' (Mill op. cit., I. vii. 5.). According to anti-metaphysicians such as Christopher Williams, Aristotle's theory of 'accidental being' is a theory of 'kooky objects' resulting from a mistake about the logical form of sentences. For example, I say I feel like a bowl of Sultana Bran, and so metaphysicians suppose there is an object (a kooky one) corresponding to what I feel like having. Or that blue buttercups do not exist, leading metaphysicians to look for certain objects (blue buttercups) that have the mysterious property of 'non-existence'.

It is because such objects are hard to find that philosophers have produced so many extravagant theories of accidental and intentional and other off-colour varieties of being. The mistake is to accept the word of the traditional grammarian for the status of the phrases in question as subject-terms whose job is to 'refer' to objects. (1992 p. 115).

Williams' argument is a classic piece of analytic philosophy, although the term 'metaphysics' had already got a bad reputation in the nineteenth century, through the extravagant and overblown speculations of the German and English Idealists.

[edit] Theory of Knowledge

The theory of knowledge (known grandly as epistemology) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the 'ultimate' basis of our knowledge. It has been a preoccupation with philosophers in all periods, but it was a focus for philosophers of the early modern period, following discoveries about the nature of human perception (see above).

The physiology of perception suggests that all we are given are ideas of different kinds, and that we have no direct interaction with the world (even though it seems as though we directly interact with it). Why can't we be radically mistaken about the existence of the world itself? What justification do we have for supposing that our ideas and images, that we suppose to be ideas and images of a real world, are ideas or images of anything at all? If our only direct knowledge of reality is a copy of reality, how can we be said to know anything about reality at all. Perhaps everything exists only in our imagination (an idea which received a spectacular, if not wholly accurate portrayal in popular films such The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor).

Philosophers throughout this period, convinced that there is an external reality, have worked out ways of addressing the problem. Berkeley thought our ideas come from God. Hume took the sceptical view that we cannot prove the existence of an external world, but that this did not matter, because we believe in it anyway, once we leave our desk and the worries of philosophers fade away. The Absolute Idealists took the view that all reality was mental anyway.

Modern philosophers tend to reject the problem entirely, arguing that the question of whether we could be systematically deceived makes no sense. This is a theme of Strawson's work, and of the ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin.

[edit] Ethics

The field of ethics is characterised by questions such as

• Is there a difference between morally right and wrong actions (or values, or institutions)?
• If so, what is that difference? Which actions are right, and which wrong? * Are values absolute, or relative?
• How should I live?
• How are 'right' and 'wrong' defined?

[edit] Applied philosophy

Anti-metaphysicians such as Wittgenstein refuses even to be professional philosophers. Arguing that the main purpose is conceptual clarification

The development of the various "philosophies of," such as philosophy of law, philosophy of medicine is intended to provide practitioners in those fields with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of their discipline.

Critics would argue that ...

[edit] References

Aristotle, Categories, trans. E.M.Edgehill, in The Works of Aristotle Volume I ed. Ross Oxford 1924. Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora Books I & II, transl. G.R.G.Mure, in Ross op cit. Aristotle, Metaphysics, transl. W.D.Ross, in in Ross op cit Berkeley, G., A Treaty Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Bosanquet, B, Logic, Oxford 1888 Bradley, F.H., Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893 Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference, Oxford 1982 Heidegger, M. Being and Time, transl. Macquarrie & Robinson, Oxford 1967. Honderich, T., (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford 1995. Kant, I. The Critique of Pure Reason transl. N.K. Smith Kaplan, D. "DThat" in Syntax and Semantics 9, ed. Peter Cole, New York 1978, pp. 221-253. Kretzmann N. & Stump E., The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Texts, Vol I. Cambridge 1988. Lotze, R.H., Logic, Oxford 1888 Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding ed. Pringle Pattison London 1924. Ludlow. P. 'Logical Form and the Hidden Indexical Theory', Journal of Philosophy. Martin C. & Armstrong, D., Locke and Berkeley London. Mill, J.S. A System of Logic, (8th edition) London 1904 Ockham, W. (transl. Spade) Summa Logicae. - - - Summula Philosophiae Naturalis III, chap. 7 (OP VI, p. 270), see also Summa Logicae) Phillips, R.P. Modern Thomistic Philosophy London 1934. Russell, B. The Problems of Philosophy. Russell, B. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, lecture delivered in London in 1918, in the Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, ed. Slater, London 1986, pp. 160-261. Sartre, J.P., Being and Nothingness, transl. Barnes, London 1969. Williams, C.J.F., Being, Identity and Truth, Oxford 1992. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921, translated by D.F.Pears & B.F.McGuiness, London 1961.