Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

incommensurable

Goya’s full motto for his etching is, ‘Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of her wonders.’ That is how we should take it to be.

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) used this lovely metaphor for our body of knowledge: We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom.

It is good, then, to remember four options in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). There is rational foundationalism, as attempted by Descartes. There is natural foundationalism, as attempted in Hume. There is coherentism. And brooding over all of them, there is scepticism, or the view that there is no knowledge.

Leibniz, remember, wants there to be a ‘rational’ relationship between the physical and the mental, so that the mental event of seeing a colour is some kind of rational expression of what is going on physically, not an accidental annexation to it.

since there was no reason for that thought to enter your mind, you were a victim rather than a free agent.

Contextual Freedom; determined on information and knowledge

So thinking in terms of an ‘I’ now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpreting experience in the way we do—as experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects, amongst which we move. The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

When we think back to the ‘big bang’ our next question is why that event, then? We are not happy with the answer ‘no reason’, because we are not happy with events ‘just happening’: the drive to explanation grips us. So we postulate something else, another cause lying behind this one. But the drive now threatens to go on forever. If we have cited God at this point, we either have to ask what caused God, or cut off the regress by arbitrary fiat. But if we exercise an arbitrary right to stop the regress at that point, we might as well have stopped it with the physical cosmos. In other words, we are in the position of the Indian philosopher, who asked what the world rested on replied ‘an elephant’, and asked what the elephant rested on, replied ‘a tortoise’, and asked what the tortoise rested on, begged to change the subject.

Second, the argument is ‘a posteriori’. That is, it argues from experience,

There are no natural playpens, in which the weak are segregated from the strong. We have to try to create our own safe areas.

His own pov

your inability to believe is the result of your passions, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe... Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions...

The French sceptic Voltaire said that God created mankind in his image, and mankind returned the compliment.)

The breakthrough that cracked this problem created modern logic. It was made by the German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925),

Uncovering the hidden presuppositions behind questions and opinions is an important part of thinking.

Chance is just as good at throwing up improbabilities as design.

For example, it took a century of effort for scientists to learn to identify the energy of a mechanical system as its salient feature, whose conservation enabled them to predict its behaviour. This is a historical fact that science teachers should be made to write out a hundred times, when they upbraid children as ‘dumb’ because they do not cotton onto the idea immediately.

Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) argued that indeed they can. ‘Normal’ science proceeds in the light of a set of paradigms, or implied views about what kind of explanations we should hope for. Periods of revolutionary science occur when the paradigms are themselves challenged. Science is to be seen as ‘a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions’. After the revolutions, our sense of what makes for a comfortable explanation of why things hang together changes.

Paradigms can be asked to show their worth, and some of them do not stand up.

What is often called ‘postmodernism’ is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts.

Annie may be completely dejected at the thought of leaving Bertie. But, like cutting the grass, it has to be done.

Psychologists, especially, have been apt to think of desire in terms of a kind of build-up of tension, and what the agent is driven to do is to release the tension.