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October 8 - October 24, 2020
Wisdom for Socrates was not knowing lots of facts, or knowing how to do something. It meant understanding the true nature of our existence, including the limits of what we can know.
Every aspect of life in Plato's ideal republic would be strictly controlled from above. It's what we would now call a totalitarian state.
Happiness in this sense is your overall achievement in life, something that can be affected by what happens to others you care about. Events outside your control and knowledge affect that. Whether you are happy or not depends partly on good luck.
When it happens you won't be there. The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein echoed this view when he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘Death is not an event in life’.
Their basic idea was that we should only worry about things we can change. We shouldn't get worked up about anything else. Like the Sceptics, they aimed for a calm state of mind. Even when facing tragic events, such as the death of a loved one, the Stoic should remain unmoved.
The problem as he saw it was not how short our lives are, but rather how badly most of us use what time we have.
One problem he agonized over was why God allowed evil in the world.
But if God is all-powerful and doesn't seem inclined to stop it, how can he be all-good? That didn't seem to make sense. It puzzles many people today too. Augustine focused on moral evil. He realized that the idea of a good God who knows that this kind of evil happens and does nothing to prevent it is difficult to understand. He wasn't satisfied with the idea that God moves in mysterious ways that are beyond human comprehension. Augustine wanted answers.
It's often known as the Free Will Defence. This is theodicy – the attempt to explain and defend how a good God could allow suffering.
Mortals, Philosophy explains, are foolish to let their happiness depend on something so changeable. True happiness can only come from inside, from the things that human beings can control, not from anything that bad luck can destroy.
If God already knows what we are both going to do, how can either of us have a genuine choice about what we are going to do? Is choice just an illusion? It seems that I can't have free will if God knows everything.
If Anselm is right, we can be certain that God exists simply from the fact that we have an idea of God. This is an a priori argument, one that doesn't rely on any observation about the world to reach its conclusions.
Machiavelli stresses that it's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved. Ideally you would be both loved and feared, but that's hard to achieve. If you rely on your people loving you, then you risk them abandoning you when times get tough. If they fear you, they will be too scared to betray you.
The solution, Hobbes argued, was to put some powerful individual or parliament in charge. The individuals in the state of nature would have to enter into a ‘social contract’, an agreement to give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake of safety.
Another serious problem with Pascal's Wager is that it doesn't take into account the possibility that in following it you might have opted for the wrong religion, the wrong God.
himself to believe in a personal God, revealed in a letter that he did believe in Spinoza's God.
Spinoza's God, as we have seen, was impersonal and had no human characteristics, so would not punish anyone for their sins.
Some philosophers feel that Locke went a bit far with his emphasis on self-conscious memory as the basis of personal identity.
Thomas Reid came up with an example showing a weakness in Locke's way of thinking about what it is to be a person. An old soldier can remember his bravery in a battle when he was a young officer; and when he was a young officer he could remember that he had been hit when as a boy he'd stolen apples from an orchard. But in his old age, the soldier can no longer remember this event from his childhood. Surely this pattern of overlapping memories would mean that the old soldier was still the same person as the boy? Thomas Reid thought it was obvious that the old soldier was still the same person
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Though according to George Berkeley (1685–1753), an Irish philosopher who became Bishop of Cloyne, anything that stops being observed ceases to exist.
Berkeley summed up this strange view in Latin as ‘Esse est percipi’ – to be (or exist) is to be perceived.
He gave the answer that Epicurus might have given (see Chapter 4): he was, he said, no more worried about the time after his death than he was about the time he had not existed before his birth.
‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ he declared at the beginning of his book, The Social Contract.
The General Will is whatever is best for the whole community, the whole state. When people choose to group together for protection, it seems that they have to give up many of their freedoms. That's what Hobbes and Locke both thought.
genuinely free and yet live in a large group of people – there have to be laws to keep everyone in check and some restrictions on behaviour. But Rousseau believed that as an individual living within a state you can both be free and obey the laws of the state, and that rather than being in opposition, these ideas of freedom and obedience can combine.
True freedom, for Rousseau, is being part of a group of people doing what is in the interest of that community. Your wishes should coincide with what is best for all, and laws should help you to avoid acting selfishly.
Indeed, there is something slightly sinister about the idea of Rousseau, who had complained about humanity being in chains, suggesting that forcing someone to do something is another kind of freedom.
We can know about the phenomenal world, though, the world around us, the world we experience through our senses.
Synthetic knowledge, in contrast, requires experience or observation and it gives us new information, something that isn't simply contained in the meaning of the words or symbols we use.
Immanuel Kant, that wouldn't be a moral action at all. Your sympathy is irrelevant to the morality of your action. That's part of your character, but nothing to do with right and wrong. Morality for Kant wasn't just about what you do, but about why you do it.
That, again, isn't a universalizable maxim. Ask
It's all about how you feel. Happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. More pleasure, or a greater quantity of pleasure than pain, means more happiness.
Take into account how long the pleasure will last, how intense it is, how likely it is that it will give rise to further pleasures. Then subtract any units of pain that might be caused by your action. What you are left with is the happiness value of the action. Bentham called this its ‘utility’, meaning usefulness, because the more pleasure an action brings about the more useful it is to society. That's why the theory is known as utilitarianism.
What worries many readers of Hegel is that in the sort of ideal society imagined by Hegel those who don't fit in with the powerful organizers' view of society will, in the name of freedom, be forced to accept this ‘rational’ way of living. They will, in Rousseau's paradoxical phrase, be ‘forced to be free’
The main idea at the heart of it is quite simple. Reality has two aspects. It exists both as Will and as Representation. Will is the blind driving force that is found in absolutely everything that exists. It is the energy that makes plants and animals grow, but it is also the force that causes magnets to point north, and crystals to grow in chemical compounds. It is present in every part of nature. The other aspect, the World as Representation, is the world as we experience it.
The World as Representation is our construction of reality in our minds. It is what Kant called the phenomenal world.
For Schopenhauer, harming other people is a kind of self-injury. This is the foundation of all morality. If I kill you, I destroy a part of the life force that joins us all together.
When someone harms another person it is like a snake biting its tail without knowing that it is sinking its fangs into its own flesh. So the basic morality that Schopenhauer taught was one of compassion. Properly understood, other people aren't external to me. I care what happens to you because in a way you are part of what we are all part of: the World as Will.
Harm Principle. Every adult should be free to live as he or she pleases as long as no one else is harmed in the process.
For Kierkegaard, it is not a simple decision to believe in God, but one that requires a kind of leap into the dark, a decision taken in faith that may even go against conventional ideas of what you should do.
If God is dead, what comes next? That's the question Nietzsche asked himself. His answer was that it left us without a basis for morality. Our ideas of right and wrong and good and evil make sense in a world where there is a God. They don't in a godless one.
This slave morality, as Nietzsche calls it, treated the acts of the powerful as evil and their own fellow feelings as good. The idea that a morality of kindness had its beginnings in feelings of envy was a challenging one.
interests. Worse still, it was an idea that the Nazis took from Nietzsche's work and used to support their warped views about a master race, though most scholars argue that they distorted what Nietzsche actually wrote.
‘Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.’
He was something far more common but equally dangerous: an unthinking man.
For Popper a key feature of any hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable.
the healthy patient and slice up the body to provide the organs for the unhealthy ones? Hardly. No one believes that it would be acceptable to kill the one healthy person, remove his heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and implant them in the five. Yet that is a case of sacrificing one to save five. What's the difference between that and the runaway train?
There is a famous violinist who has a kidney problem. His only chance of survival is to be plugged into a person who shares his very rare blood group. You have that same blood group. One morning you wake up to find that while you were asleep doctors have attached him to your kidneys. Thomson argues that in such a situation you don't have a duty to keep him plugged into you, even though you know that he will die if you pull the tubes out. In the same way, she suggests, if a woman is pregnant even though she used contraception, the developing foetus inside her does not have an automatic right to
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His central idea is very simple: design a better society, but do it without knowing what position in society you'll occupy.
