Introducing Philosophy

God, Mind, World, and Logic

Neil Tennant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317560869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Written for any readers interested in better harnessing philosophy's real value, this book covers a broad range of fundamental philosophical problems and certain intellectual techniques for addressing those problems. In Introducing Philosophy: God, Mind, World, and Logic, Neil Tennant helps any student in pursuit of a 'big picture' to think independently, question received dogma, and analyse problems incisively. It also connects philosophy to other areas of study at the university, enabling all students to employ the concepts and techniques of this millennia-old discipline throughout their college careers – and beyond.

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS:

-- Investigates the philosophy of various subjects (psychology, language, biology, math), helping students contextualize philosophy and view it as an interdisciplinary pursuit; also helps students with majors outside of philosophy to see the relationship between philosophy and their own focused academic pursuits

-- Author comes from a distinguished background in Logic and Philosophy of Language, which gives the book a level of rigor, balance, and analytic focus sometimes missing from primers to philosophy

-- Introduces students to various important philosophical distinctions (e.g. fact vs. value, descriptive vs. prescriptive, norms vs. laws of nature, analytic vs. synthetic, inductive vs. deductive, a priori vs. a posteriori ) providing skills that are important for undergraduates to develop in order to inform their study at higher levels. They are essential for further work in philosophy but they are also very beneficial for students pursuing most other disciplines

-- Is much more methodologically comprehensive than competing introductions, giving the student the ability to address a wide range of philosophical problems – and not just the ones reviewed in the book

-- Offers a companion website with links to apt primary sources, organized chapter-by-chapter, making unnecessary a separate Reader/Anthology of primary sources – thus providing students with all reading material necessary for the course

-- Provides five to ten discussion questions for each chapter, helping instructors and students better interact with the ideas and concepts in the text

Part I

The Nature of Philosophy

1 The Main Features of Philosophy

1.1 Philosophy as a conceptual and reflective discipline

Philosophy is a conceptual discipline. Its method is introspective and reflective. It is based on our intuitions and on our grasp of the meanings of our words. Yet it aspires now, after two and a half millennia of refinement, refutation and re-thinking, not to be provincial to any particular language. Nor is it confined to any particular historical period, cultural milieu, socio-political system or religious affiliation. Philosophy strives to be of universal appeal, to any rational intellect, human or otherwise. In that regard, it is a lot like Mathematics. Philosophy tries not to depend on empirical considerations, even though one of its main contemporary aims is to come to mutually enlightening terms with natural science. There has been increased interest of late in so-called ‘experimental philosophy’. This purports to be a form of Philosophy while being a branch of empirical inquiry. ‘X-phi’ strikes this author, however, as a straightforward branch of social psychology or sociology or anthropology. For it involves the use of surveys and questionnaires to find out what ordinary people think about certain philosophical issues. (And when the survey-respondents are chosen from within the philosophical community, X-phi is a poor substitute for simply reading the journals.)

The archetypical philosopher (and henceforth we drop the adjective) does not perform real-world experiments, or make observations in the field, or conduct opinion polls. The philosopher’s tool-kit contains no measuring rules, no scales, no clocks. The most one will find, in the literal sense of ‘tool-kit’, is paper and pencil – or, nowadays, a laptop computer. In the more figurative sense, what one would hope to find in the philosopher’s tool-kit is a mind wide open, ready to turn on the searchlights within. The philosopher must be prepared to mull over words, stretch concepts to their limits, imagine far-fetched, bizarre situations, and consider principles of the highest level of abstraction and the widest domain of application.

Philosophical method in its purest form is, in one simple phrase, a priori, not a posteriori. The cliché for this is ‘the armchair method’. Another hackneyed expression is ‘putting one’s thinking-cap on’. Methods of investigation, and the knowledge they enable us to obtain, are called a priori when they do not depend in any way on our sensory experience. Also, truths are called a priori when they can be known in that way. By contrast, a posteriori truths are those that can be known only by appeal to sensory experience.

A closely related distinction is that between analytic and synthetic truths. A sentence is said to be analytically true just in case it is true solely in virtue of its meaning, quite independently of any appeal to ‘facts about the world’. Mere a priori reflection on one’s grasp of the meaning of such a sentence should be enough to enable one to recognize that it is indeed true. Thus analytic truth is a priori. Put another way, it is truth that is accessible ‘merely by reflecting on the meanings of the words involved’. Simple examples are ‘All red things are colored’ and ‘Every bachelor is unmarried’. Once one has grasped the concepts and/or the meanings of the words involved, one can tell that these sentences are true without any further recourse to sensory experience. And that last observation is true regardless of the fact that one needed sensory experience in order to acquire mastery of the concepts involved (or knowledge of the meanings of the words involved).

Truths that are not analytic are called synthetic. Given the foregoing characterization of analytic truths, it is clear that a synthetically true sentence must owe its truth not only to its meaning, but also to ‘facts about the world’. Thus synthetic truths tell us something informative about the world. A firm grasp of both these distinctions is vital for a proper appreciation of philosophical debates that took place in the twentieth century – including debates over the question whether the two distinctions are of any value at all. For more detailed discussion of this issue, see §5.2.

We have stressed that Philosophy is done a priori. Philosophy is also fundamentally argumentative. It seeks to establish conclusions firmly, with the help of logic, from clearly stated premises. A critic can disagree with such argumentation in two important ways. (This holds good for any intellectual discipline, not just for Philosophy.) One can rejectapremise – or, at least, refuse to accept it. Alternatively, one can demur at a particular step within the argument, complaining – very often with justification – that it is fallacious. A fallacious step of reasoning is one that cannot be guaranteed always to transmit truth from its immediate premises to its conclusion.

The intellectual aim of philosophizing is to achieve reflective equilibrium. This the philosopher does by synthesizing, integrating, and reconciling all our immediate intuitions, important insights, arduously deduced results, and inspired hypotheses. The philosopher seeks to resolve paradoxes and eliminate inconsistencies, and to provide proper foundations where appropriate. The aim is to attain some overarching understanding both of the human condition within the natural cosmos, and of the connections among thought, language, and the world; emotion and reason; fact and value; being and truth.

1.2 The main areas of Philosophy

The five main areas of Philosophy have traditionally been Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics (also known as Moral Philosophy) and Aesthetics. (A recent, and disappointing, departure from this tradition has been the comparative neglect, of late, of Aesthetics among the ranks of professional philosophers. This may be because theorizing in Aesthetics has migrated to other university departments catering to students with appropriate interests, such as Literature, Music, and Art History. If so, this is a pity, for it incurs the risk of aesthetic theorizing becoming less general and systematic. One hopes that the trend might be reversed.)

Here are some general comments about, and sample questions from, each of these respective areas.

1.2.1 Metaphysics

The area of Philosophy known as Metaphysics is concerned with the necessities and possibilities governing existence. The name of this area derives from the Greek word ‘meta’, meaning ‘after’: the relevant book by Aristotle (384–322 BC), which attended to these deeper concerns about existence, tended to be anthologized immediately after his book on physics.

Today, however, we understand the prefix ‘meta’ as indicating a sort of conceptual or theoretical ascent, ‘going one step higher’, in our contemplation of the world through particular ‘lower-level’ scientific or philosophical disciplines. In Metaethics, for example, one inquires into what sort of facts moral facts might be – indeed, whether there could be any such facts at all. There is even a branch of contemporary Philosophy called Metaphilosophy, concerned with the nature, purpose and direction of Philosophy itself.

Metaphysical questions typically arise ‘at the edge’ or ‘at the limits’ of scientific or mathematical inquiry. They concern ‘ultimate’ matters, to which some default answer is usually presupposed by the intellectual disciplines in question. So, for example, Physics can investigate what kinds of fundamental particles there are, and what laws govern their interactions. Most philosophers believe, however, that it lies beyond the reach of Physics, and of science in general, to explain why there should be something rather than nothing; or why there should be any regularities in nature at all.

Some sample metaphysical questions follow. Note that some of them are not entirely independent of scientific theorizing. For example, the question whether every event has a cause receives a negative answer from quantum physics. This is because of the random and completely unpredictable nature of the radioactive decay of individual fundamental particles. These uncaused events were discovered, however – by Marie Curie (1867–1934) – only about a century ago; so it has been only since then that the question whether every event has a cause has begun to strike some cognoscenti as a little dated.

By contrast, however, consider the question concerning how consciousness relates to the workings of mere matter. This question was stoutly maintained, by prominent European scientists and philosophers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and has been maintained by many Anglo-American analytical philosophers since then, to be, in principle, beyond the reach of any scientific determination. The phrase ‘in principle’ here, which is often used in such discussions, str...