Philosophy for Life: Teach Yourself

The Ideas That Shape Our World and How To Use Them

Mel Thompson

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781473657885
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473657915
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Philosophy For Life is the definitive introduction to the history of Western thought, but more than that, it is a toolkit for using philosophy in your daily life. As you read, you will develop your own critical and creative thinking, exploring the key ideas in Western Philosophy and the arguments that continue to shape our world. You will discover what philosophy is really about, learn to be a sceptic, meet Plato and Aristotle, explore the concept of mind, question free will, use philosophy to be happy, find out about Marx and materialism, see how philosophy relates to everything from comics to coffee, and ask whether god exists. Philosophy is a life-tool, a set of skills for engaging with any subject, and in Philosphy For Life, you will discover a body of wisdom and a way to develop your own critical and creative thinking. ABOUT THE SERIES
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1

The What and How of Knowing

In this chapter you will:

• Explore how some philosophers have sought to explore the most basic and general feature of existence

• Examine whether knowledge starts with thought or with experience

• Consider whether your own approach should be sceptical or pragmatic

Why?

How exactly do we know what to believe? Is anything certain? Should I trust my senses or my rationality? Why do intelligent people differ in their beliefs? Making sense of life requires skill and clarity in thinking and balanced judgement in reflecting on what we already know. Asking how we understand the world is a good starting point for philosophy. But be warned: in a confusing world, philosophy does not always offer certainties and often raises more questions than it answers.

There are two basic questions which have been asked throughout the history of philosophy and which affect the way in which many different topics are considered:

• What can we know?

This question is about the basic features of existence; not the sort of information that science gives about particular things, but the questions that lie beneath all such enquiry: questions about the fundamental nature of space, time or causality; about whether concepts like ‘justice’ or ‘love’ have any external, objective reality; about the structure of the world as we experience it. In the collected works of Aristotle, such questions were dealt with after his material on physics and were therefore called metaphysics. But as soon as we start considering metaphysics, yet another question arises:

• How can we know it?

Is there anything of which we can be absolutely certain? Do we depend entirely on our senses, or can we discover basic truths simply by thinking? How can we justify or prove the truth of what we claim? All such questions are considered under epistemology – the theory of knowledge.

Metaphysics is the oldest and most fundamental branch of philosophy, but not always the most popular. However, it is important to start with these basic questions, as they introduce us to some of the great philosophers of the past.

As a starting point, to illustrate why metaphysical questions might be interesting, we could ask ‘Which is more real, the whole or the parts of which it is comprised?’ – the question may sound abstract to the point of being irrelevant. However, unpack it and we arrive at issues that are of importance both morally and politically. The basic problem here concerns reductionism, the attempt to reduce complex entities or general concepts to the parts of which they are made, or even to deny their existence. Consider these questions:

• How does a painting relate to the individual pigments or threads of canvas of which is it made?

• How does music relate to vibrations in the air?

• How does a person relate to the individual cells in his or her body?

• How does a nation relate to the citizens from which it is made up?

A ‘reductionist’ approach to metaphysics takes the ‘nothing but’ view, for example that music is ‘nothing but’ vibrations in the air.

Key idea for life

When, on Christmas Day, the British and German soldiers facing one another in the First World War came out of their trenches, played football together and shared cigarettes, they ceased to be merely representatives of nations and acted as individuals. Later, they returned to their trenches and continued to kill one another. There are many practical and moral issues here, but also a metaphysical one. Which is more real – a nation or the individuals who make it up? Should we act as a group of loosely connected individuals, framing political decisions on the basis of what we want as individuals, or should we give primacy to the ‘nation’ or the ‘class’, even if individuals have to suffer as a result?

That is a matter for ethics, but we can go further and ask, ‘Do nations actually exist? Is there any such thing as society, or are there just people and families?’ Does ‘justice’ exist over and above individual actions that we might choose to call ‘just’? These are fundamental and rather abstract questions, but they have important practical and moral consequences. People have been jailed in the name of ‘freedom’, killed in the name of ‘honour’ or given their lives in the quest for ‘justice’; so, it is always worth thinking about the status of such abstract ideas.

If you believe that what is ultimately real is matter – the solid, external world that we experience through our senses – then you are probably going to call yourself a materialist or a naturalist. A full-blown naturalist tends to see philosophy as a relic of the past, to be replaced by the various branches of science – replacing metaphysical speculation with solid facts and data.

On the other hand, if you hold that the basic reality is mental – that the world of your experience is in fact the sum of all the sensations and perceptions that have registered in your mind – you may call yourself an idealist. Although idealism sounds improbable, consider this: How can you tell whether, at this moment, you are experiencing the external, physical world rather than dreaming it? If you just consider the experience you are having, it’s not quite as simple as common sense would suggest. We shall examine this approach again in examining the philosophy of mind.

Knowledge and justification: are you certain?

Within epistemology (the theory of knowledge) there is a fundamental issue about whether our knowledge originates in, and is therefore dependent upon, the data we receive through our senses, or whether (because we know that all such sense data is fallible) the only true certainties are those that come from our own minds – from the way in which we think and organize our experience; from the principles of reason and logic.

The following are two key terms:

• empiricism – all knowledge starts with the senses

• rationalism – all knowledge starts with the mind.

However, the issue of experience and the way the mind categorizes it is far from straightforward.

Whenever I experience something, that experience involves two things:

• The sensations of sight, sound, taste, touch or smell, all of which seem to me to be coming from outside myself, and therefore to be giving me information about the world.

• My own sense organs. If I am partially deaf, I may be mistaken in what I hear. If I am colour-blind, I will not be able to distinguish certain patterns, or appreciate the subtleties of a multi-coloured fabric. If I am asleep, all sorts of things may go on around me of which I am quite unaware.

Imagine that I am taken to a police station and questioned about something that is alleged to have happened in the recent past. I give my account of what I have heard or seen. If it sounds credible, or agrees with the evidence of others, I am likely to be believed. On the other hand, the police may ask, ‘Are you sure about that? Is it possible that you were mistaken?’ The implication is that, even if I am trying to be accurate and honest, the senses may be mistaken, and there may be two quite different ways of interpreting an experience.

When philosophers ask, ‘What can be known for certain?’ or ‘Are the senses a reliable source of knowledge?’, they are trying to sort out this element of uncertainty, so as to achieve statements that are known to be true.

Basically, as we saw above, there are two ways of approaching this problem, corresponding to the two elements in every experience.

Empiricists are those who start with the sensations of an experience, and say that all of our knowledge of the world is based on sensation.

Rationalists are those who claim that the basis of knowledge is the set of ideas we have – the mental element that sorts out and interprets experience. Rationalists consider the mind to be primary, and the actual data of experience to be secondary.

However, before we look at these approaches in more detail, let us be clear about one category of things that we can know for certain. If I say that 2 + 2 = 4, there is no doubt about the truth of that statement. Mathematics and logic work from agreed definitions. In gene...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Taking it further
• Meet the author
• Introduction: Thinking to Enhance Your Life
• 1 The What and How of Knowing
• 2 Existentialism, Integrity and Happiness
• 3 The Philosophy of Science
• 4 Language and Communication
• 5 Minds, Bodies and Brains
• 6 Art and Creativity
• 7 The Philosophy of Religion
• 8 Ethics
• 9 Political Philosophy
• 10 The Philosophy of Everything
• Glossary
• Copyright