Drawing on the writings of the great philosophers, You Kant Make it Up sends the reader on thrilling, non-stop tour of their most outrageous and counter-intuitive conclusions. Harry Potter is real. Matter doesn't exist. Dan Brown is better than Shakespeare. All these statements stem from philosophy's greatest minds, from Plato to Nietzsche. What were they thinking? Overflowing with compelling arguments for the downright strange - many of which are hugely influential today - popular philosopher Gary Hayden shows that just because something is odd, doesn't mean that someone hasn't argued for it. Spanning ethics, logic, politics, sex and religion, this unconventional introduction to philosophy will challenge your assumptions, expand your horizons, infuriate, entertain and amuse you.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access You Kant Make it Up! by Gary Hayden in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The Greek philosopher Socrates (c.469–399 BC) placed great faith in the power of human reason. He believed that reason, properly cultivated, will make us virtuous and happy; that once we truly know what is good we will do it; and that anyone who acts wrongly does so only through ignorance.
The sceptics among us might well wonder what planet Socrates was living on. We know from bitter experience just how impotent reason can be, and what an immense gulf there is between knowing what’s right and actually doing it.
The voice of reason
Of course, we wouldn’t expect a philosopher of Socrates’ stature to make such an outrageous-sounding claim without having his reasons. And, indeed, he did have his reasons. His supporting argument runs as follows.
We are all hedonists. That is, everything we do is prompted by the desire to experience pleasure or to avoid pain. This means that all talk of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ultimately boils down to considerations of pleasure and pain. Whatever leads to pleasure we call ‘good’; and whatever leads to pain we call ‘bad’.
Clearly, no one knowingly chooses pain over pleasure. But this is equivalent to saying that no one knowingly chooses the bad over the good (since the terms are interchangeable). Therefore, anyone who does choose the bad in preference to the good must do so in error: because he mistakes it for the good.
Sound reasoners, then, will always do what is good for themselves. But will their wisdom also make them virtuous? Will it lead them to treat others well too? Socrates thought so. Here’s why. Acting unjustly, he said, is harmful not only to those we wrong but also to ourselves. When we act unjustly we damage our own souls. So doing what is right toward others is doing the right thing for ourselves too.
The voice of experience
Socrates claimed, then, that when we truly know what is good we will do it; that knowledge is virtue. The obvious rejoinder is that his argument cannot be sound since its conclusion is palpably false. People do very often choose the bad – even when they know it to be bad.
For example, a morbidly obese person may be in no doubt that his high-fat, high-sugar diet is ruining his health, making him unattractive and damaging his self-esteem. But his knowledge is impotent. Time after time, he finds himself knowingly choosing the bad in preference to the good.
Socrates’ response
Socrates anticipated this objection. He said: ‘[Most people] suppose that though present in a man, often not knowledge but something else is in control – now high spirits, now pleasure, now pain, sometimes sexual desire, and often fear.’
But, he insisted, the problem in such cases is not that knowledge is impotent, but rather that what appears to be knowledge isn’t really knowledge at all. Anyone who chooses a wrong course of action does so only because he is not truly convinced that it is the wrong course of action.
How could Socrates know this? Well, because we are all hedonists and will therefore always choose the greatest quantity of pleasure and the least quantity of pain – provided we do our calculations correctly. It is simply absurd to suppose that anyone will knowingly choose the lesser pleasure or the greater pain. Therefore wrong choices simply must be the result of miscalculation.
If the morbidly obese man truly understood the nature of his choice, and was skilful enough in calculating its consequences, he would choose the seafood salad in preference to the burger and chips every time.
No true Scotsman
Socrates here seems guilty of using the No-True-Scotsman Move: an intellectual dodge designed to protect one’s claims from being falsified by counter-example. The No-True-Scotsman Move was identified and labelled by the British philosopher Antony Flew (1923–2010) in his 1977 book, Thinking Straight. A simple example goes like this:
John: No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.
Jane: But Angus McSporran’s a Scotsman, and he puts sugar on his porridge.
John: Maybe so. But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge!
Isn’t this pretty much what Socrates does?
Socrates: Anyone who knows the good will choose it.
Phaedo: But Jonathan McGreedy knows the good, and he doesn’t choose it.
Socrates: Ah, but if he truly knew the good he would certainly choose it.
21. OUCH! I FEEL GOOD
30. NO ONE’S TO BLAME
43. THE UNEXAMINED LIFE
2
COULDN’T BE BETTER
Any reasonable person must concede that in many respects the world is a bit rubbish. Joy and beauty there may be; but there is also ugliness, anguish and pain. This poses a problem for theists (those who believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly benevolent God) since if God is all He’s cracked up to be, why has He created such a second-rate world?
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), a theist through and through, was acutely aware of this problem and addressed it in his 1710 work, the Theodicy. He presented the anti-theist’s challenge along the following lines:
1. If God were all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly benevolent then He would create the best of all possible worlds.
2. But this is no way the best of all possible worlds.
3. Therefore God isn’t all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly benevolent.
Possible worlds
What is meant by all this talk of ‘possible worlds’? Well, there are an infinite number of ways the world might conceivably have been. Each of these worlds is possible, and therefore God might have created it, provided that it is logically consistent. (Not even an all-powerful God can create a logically inconsistent world: for example, one in which two plus two equals five; or one identical to ours in every respect, including pig-physiology and the laws of physics, in which pigs fly.)
One way to think about this is to visualise some of the ways our world might have been. For example, this book might have had an extra chapter; the 2010 Haiti earthquake might never have happened; pigs might fly; and so on. These worlds of the imagination are all (provided they pass the test of logical consistency) possible worlds. In addition, there are any number of possible worlds so different from ours that the imagination balks at them.
Best possible world
Having cleared that up, we can now examine Leibniz’s response to the anti-theistic argument stated above. God’s reputation survives unscathed, Leibniz said, because this world, the one we inhabit, is the most perfect there can be. This is the best of all possible worlds!
This seems outrageous. Can Leibniz seriously have claimed that no world could possibly be any better than this one? How about a world with less pain, disease and suffering? How about, to take a specific example, a world in which a 2010 earthquake doesn’t lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold misery in Haiti?
In the Theodicy, Leibniz responded to this objection in two ways. First, he pointed out that although we can conceive, easily enough, of individual aspects of the world that might be improved, we are incapable of judging what the knock-on effects might be. Changes that appear to be for the better may, in fact, make things worse overall. God, on the other hand, sees everything, and, taking everything into account, creates the world with the highest possible ratio of good to bad.
Take mankind’s capacity to do evil, for example. There’s no doubt that this is the cause of much misery and suffering. God could, it seems, have created a world without moral evil but only by depriving us of free will. And since free will is, in Leibniz’s view, a superlative good, such a world would be inferior to the world we inhabit.
Second, Leibniz said that the standards we use to judge the merits of possible worlds are too parochial. We tend to judge purely in terms of human happiness whereas God applies other, richer, criteria. One of Leibniz’s suggestions is that from God’s perspective the best possible world would be the one in which the maximum variety of phenomena are produced by the simplest set of natural laws.
Fair enough. Let’s allow that for argument’s sake. But even so, how could Leibniz be sure that this world, with its precise ratio of phenomena and laws, and its precise admixture of good and evil, is the...
