Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

A historian, for example, is more or less bound at some point to ask what is meant by ‘objectivity’ or ‘evidence’, or even ‘truth’, in history. A cosmologist has to pause from solving equations with the letter t in them, and ask what is meant, for instance, by the flow of time or the direction of time or the beginning of time. But at that point, whether they recognize it or not, they become philosophers.

the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues, did not pride himself on how much he knew. On the contrary, he prided himself on being the only one who knew how little he knew (reflection, again). What he was good at—supposedly, for estimates of his success differ—was exposing the weaknesses of other peoples’ claims to know.

To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alternatives, and so on. To sum up: our ideas and concepts can be compared with the lenses through which we see the world. In philosophy the lens is itself the topic of study. Success will be a matter not of how much you know at the end, but of what you can do when the going gets tough: when the seas of argument rise, and confusion breaks out. Success will mean taking seriously the implications of ideas.

Reflection bakes no bread, but then neither does architecture, music, art, history, or literature. It is just that we want to understand ourselves. We want this for its own sake, just as a pure scientist or pure mathematician may want to understand the beginning of the universe, or the theory of sets, for its own sake, or just as a musician might want to solve some problem in harmony or counterpoint just for its own sake.

here is a middle-ground reply. Reflection matters because it is continuous with practice. How you think about what you are doing affects how you do it, or whether you do it at all. It may direct your research, or your attitude to people who do things differently, or indeed your whole life. To take a simple example, if your reflections lead you to believe in a life after death, you may be prepared to face persecutions that you would not face if you became convinced—as many philosophers are—that the notion makes no sense. Fatalism, or the belief that the future is fixed whatever we do, is a purely philosophical belief, but it is one that can paralyse action. Putting it more politically, it can also express an acquiescence with the low status accorded to some segments of society, and this may be a pay-off for people of higher status who encourage it.

Here reflection on the nature of knowledge—what philosophers call an epistemological inquiry, from the Greek episteme, meaning knowledge—generated the first spectacular leap of modern science.

So the middle-ground answer reminds us that reflection is continuous with practice, and our practice can go worse or better according to the value of our reflections. A system of thought is something we live in, just as much as a house, and if our intellectual house is cramped and confined, we need to know what better structures are possible.

Goya believed that many of the follies of mankind resulted from the ‘sleep of reason’. There are always people telling us what we want, how they will provide it, and what we should believe. Convictions are infectious, and people can make others convinced of almost anything. We are typically ready to believe that our ways, our beliefs, our religion, our politics are better than theirs, or that our God-given rights trump theirs or that our interests require defensive or pre-emptive strikes against them. In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other. It is because of ideas about what the others are like, or who we are, or what our interests or rights require, that we go to war, or oppress others with a good conscience, or even sometimes acquiesce in our own oppression by others. When these beliefs involve the sleep of reason, critical awakening is the antidote. Reflection enables us to step back, to see our perspective on a situation as perhaps distorted or blind, at the very least to see if there is argument for preferring our ways, or whether it is just subjective.

People like to retreat to within a thick, comfortable, traditional set of folkways, and not to worry too much about their structure, or their origins, or even the criticisms that they may deserve. Reflection opens the avenue to criticism, and the folkways may not like criticism. In this way, ideologies become closed circles, primed to feel outraged by the questioning mind. For the last two thousand years the philosophical tradition has been the enemy of this kind of cosy complacency.

The problems Descartes raised for himself are as old as human thought. These are problems of the self, and its mortality, its knowledge, and the nature of the world it inhabits; problems of reality and illusion.

Pronounced Day cart

The Polish astronomer Copernicus had discovered the heliocentric (sun-centred) model of the solar system.

Both Copernicus and Galileo fell foul of the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition, for this scientific picture seemed to many people to threaten the place of human beings in the cosmos. If science tells us all that there is, what becomes of the human soul, human freedom, and our relationship with God?

Descartes was smart.

Revolutionary information

He invented standard algebraic notation; and Cartesian coordinates, which enable us to give algebraic equations for geomet...

But Descartes was also a pious Catholic. So for him it was a task of great importance to show how the unfolding scientific world—vast, cold, inhuman, and mechanical—nevertheless had room in it for God and freedom, and for the human spirit. Hence his life’s work, culminating in the Meditations,

Imagination is a matter of contemplating the shape or image of a corporeal thing (a body, or thing extended in space).

An argument is valid when there is no way—meaning no possible way—that the premises, or starting points, could be true without the conclusion being true

The senses sometimes deceive us. We cannot distinguish occasions when they do from ones when they do not. So for all we know, any particular sense experience maybe deceiving us.

But if only we could see the rest of reality, mind, body, God, freedom, human life, with the same rush of clarity and understanding! Well, one philosophical ideal is that we can. This is the ideal of rationalism: the power of pure unaided reason.

For these philosophers, the best contact between mind and the world is not the point at which a mathematical proof crystallizes, but the point at which you see and touch a familiar object. Their paradigm was knowledge by sense experience rather than by reason.

The harmony between our minds and the world is due to the fact that the world is responsible for our minds. Their function is to represent it so that we can meet our needs; if they were built to represent it in any way other than the true way, we could not survive.

This approach is usually called ‘coherentism’. Its motto is that while every argument needs premises, there is nothing that is the premise of every argument. There is no foundation on which everything rests.

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.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) considered the example of time. How do I know that the world did not come into existence a very few moments ago, but complete with delusive traces of a much greater age? Those traces would include, of course, the modifications of the brain that give us what we take to be memories. They would also include all the other things that we interpret as signs of great age. In fact, Victorian thinkers struggling to reconcile the biblical account of the history of the world with the fossil record had already suggested much the same thing about geology. On this account, around 4,000 years ago God laid down all the misleading evidence that the earth is about 4,000 million years old (and, we can now add, misleading signs that the universe is about 13,000 million years old). This was never a popular move, probably because if you are sceptical about time, you quickly become sceptical about everything, or maybe because it presents God as something like a large-scale practical joker. Russell’s possibility sounds almost as far-fetched as Descartes’s Evil Demon.

Similarly, the argument goes, it is as if God or Nature had less to do, to make the world as it is today out of nothing, than to make the lower-entropy world as it is supposed to have been some thirteen billion years ago out of nothing. Therefore, it is more probable that it happened like that. In a straight competition for probability between Russell’s outlandish hypothesis and common sense, Russell wins. I leave this for the reader to ponder.

Does this apply when the age of the Universe had the potential to be infinite? Anything less than that is infinitely less entropy, so it doesn't truly make a difference. Plus, if it could've been any time at all, that makes it continuous, and we know that taking a single value has a probability of 0, so it cannot be continuous.

How then should we regard knowledge? Knowledge implies authority: the people who know are the people to whom we should listen.

Literally appeal to authority.

even if I can climb out of the seas of doubt onto the Cogito, I cannot climb out onto the nature of your mind. So how then do I know anything about your mental life? How do I know, for instance, that you see the colour blue the way that I do? Might it be that some of us feel pain more, but make less fuss about it, or that others feel pain less, but make more fuss? How do we begin to think about mind and body, brains and behaviour?

Cartesian dualism, the possibilities we all naturally believe in, namely that other people are not Zombies, and not Mutants, are themselves unverifiable!

Cartesian Dualism: There are 2 kinds of substance: the material and the mental. The material cannot think, and the mental has no place in space. This provides a way for the soul to outlive the body, as their properties don't need to match, allowing for an immortal soul. A branch of substance Dualism.

Why do philosophers talk so much about bizarre possibilities that other people happily ignore (one of the things that gives the subject a forbidding look and a bad name)? The reason is that the possibilities are used to test a conception of how things are. Here they are being used to test the conception of mind and matter that gives rise to them. The argument is that if mind and matter are thought of in the Cartesian way, then there would be wide-open possibilities of a bizarre kind, about which we could know nothing. So, since this is intolerable, we should rethink the conception of how things are (this is called the metaphysics). A better conception of mind and its place in nature should foreclose these possibilities. The aim is not to wallow in scepticism, but to draw back from any philosophy that opens up the sceptical possibilities. We would say: according to Cartesian dualism the Zombie possibility and the Mutant possibility are both wide open. But that just shows there is something wrong about Cartesian dualism. The mental and the physical just aren’t as distinct as it is claiming.

On this account, the way forward is to reject the picture of mind and body given to us by Cartesian dualism. And we should be encouraged to reject Cartesian dualism by metaphysical as well as epistemological pressures. Can we really get a possible picture of how the world is from Cartesian dualism, never mind about whether we know it is like that? Consider the Zombie again. His physical functioning is identical with ours. He responds to the world in the same way. His projects succeed or fail in the same way: his health depends on the same variables as ours. He may laugh at the right places, and weep at appropriate tragedies. He may be good fun to be with. So what is the lack of consciousness doing? Or, putting it the other way round, what is consciousness supposedly doing for us? Are we to conclude that in us, non-Zombies, mental events exist but do not do anything? Is consciousness like the whistle on the engine: no part of the machinery that makes things happen? (This is the doctrine known as epiphenomenalism.) But if minds do not do anything, why did they evolve? Why did nature go in for them? And if mental states really don’t do anything, how do they enter memory, for example? This is the problem of brain-mind interaction, as it presents itself to Cartesian dualism.

It is due to what Locke elsewhere calls the ‘arbitrary will and good pleasure’ of God, ‘the wise architect’ who ‘annexes’ particular modifications of consciousness to particular physical events. In Descartes’s terms, Locke thinks we have no ‘clear and distinct’ idea of just what kinds of system God might choose as suitable places for him to superadd consciousness. It would just be a brute fact that the universe is organized so that some kinds of system do, and others do not, possess consciousness at all. And it is just a brute fact that their consciousnesses change and acquire definite properties at the time that their physical selves change and acquire particular properties. The contrast is between a rational and intelligible connection, such as we find in the a priori discipline of mathematics, and the fact that certain ‘motions’ just do produce the sensations in us that they do. This is the brute fact, the consequence of God’s good pleasure.

occasionalism, which was embraced by another contemporary, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). According to this, physical events do not strictly cause or bring about mental events at all. Rather, they provide the occasions upon which God himself inserts mental events of appropriate kinds into our biographies. Strictly speaking, our bodies do not affect our minds, but only provide occasions on which God does. Locke himself does not say this, but we might reflect that there is precious little difference between, on the one hand, God intervening at his good pleasure to make it that the dividing of the flesh by the steel brings about a sensation of pain, and, on the other hand, God directly injecting a sensation of pain into the soul whenever there is a dividing of flesh by the steel.