Philosophy Test 1

Argumentum ad hominem

"argument against the person" - The attempt to discredit a view by discrediting the person holding the view - The fact that a person has changed his or her mind on an issue does not itself show that the person's current position is contradictory or even incorrect. That someone has changed positions is a fact about the person, not the position, though confusing the two is perhaps the most common mistake in reasoning. - Arguments must be evaluated on their own merits; whether a person actually believes his or her own argument is irrelevant.

Alternative views

"neither-nor" What exists is ultimately neither mental nor physical "both-and" Called "double aspect theory" (what exists is ultimately both mental and physical—the mental and physical are just different ways of looking at the same things, which in themselves are neutral between the two categories)

sophia

("knowledge" or "wisdom"

1. Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.)

- Aristotle's & founder of the" Academy" of Athens - His Metaphysics: The Theory of Forms or "Ideas" The immaterial "idea" is the most perfect form of a thing, whereas the material manifestation is only an imperfect reflection. Example: particular objects, such as circles, have a lesser reality than the ultimately real Form of circularity (here illustrated in other "dimension" as a perfect circle illuminated by the Form of the Good as if illuminated by the sun). Drawn circles participate more or less in the Form of circularity. Plato introduced into Western thought a two-realms concept of a "sensible," changing world (a world of ignorance) and a world of Forms that is unchanging (the source of all true Reality).

Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.)

- Native of the city-state of Athens - Mentor of Plato - Works appear second-hand in Plato's writings Socrates wanted to discover the essential nature of knowledge, justice, beauty, goodness, and the virtues (such as courage) by using the Socratic or dialectic method: searching for the proper definition of a thing that will not permit refutation under Socratic questioning.

Anne Finch, The Viscountess Conway (1631-1679)

A forerunner of Leibniz's monadology, Lady Conway's view was that all things are reducible to a single substance that is itself irreducible but that there is a continuum between material and mental substances so that all created substances are both mental and physical to some degree or other.

Red herring

A general term for those arguments that address a point other than the one that is at issue.

worldview

A person's view of the world, consisting of the set of beliefs on which he bases his life.

Reductio ad Absurdum

A reductio ad absurdum demonstrates that the contradictory of a thesis is or leads to (i.e., "reduces to") an absurdity. Most famously applied by St. Anselm in a proof of God's existence that assumed (for sake of argument) that God (a being "greater than which cannot be conceived") does not exist; which "reduces" to the absurdity that a being greater than which cannot be conceived is not a being greater than which cannot be conceived. So, the argument concludes, God exists.

3. Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.)

Addendum: Theory of Love and Becoming For Plato, love is the force which brings all things together and makes them beautiful; it is the way in which all beings can ascend (as if up a ladder!) to higher states of self-realization and perfection to true knowledge. Platonic love is intellectual or spiritual, though it does not exclude the love of physical beauty. Physical love begets mortal children; intellectual or spiritual love immortal children. To love the highest is to become the best.

3. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

All knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge is derived from experience. Hume believed that knowledge came from experience alone.

False dilemma (either-or fallacy)

An argument that assumes there are only two options when in fact other options exist

4. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) - Knowledge

Aquinas's proofs for God's existence rely on the idea that things must have an ultimate cause, creator, designer, source of being, or source of goodness (i.e., God). But our knowledge of God's nature is in terms of what God is not—unmoved and unchangeable (eternal), not material and without parts (utterly simple), not a composite (God's essence is his existence).

8. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Aristotle is known as the "father of logic." His work on the syllogism (in which one proposition—the conclusion—is inferred from two others—called premises) is fundamentally important. (To infer one proposition from other propositions is to see that the first one follows from the others.) Aristotle's logic is linked to his metaphysics because he believed that the forms of thought in which we think about reality represent the way reality actually is.

The Socratic Method.

As practiced by the Greek philosopher Socrates, the Socratic method proposes a definition (of knowledge, for example), rebuts it by counterexample, modifies the definition in light of the counterexample, rebuts the modified definition, and so on, which helps advance the understanding of such concepts and aids in improving one's arguments.

circular reasoning

As used by logicians or philosophers, the term means more or less assuming the very thing that the argument is intended to prove.

2. Augustine (354-430)

Augustine accepted the Old Testament idea that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing) and the New Testament Gospel accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Augustine believed that God took on human form in the person of Jesus, a position unthinkable for Neoplatonists, who thought that the immaterial realm could not be tainted with the imperfection of mere gross matter.

Hypatia (c. 370-415)

Born in Egypt, educated in Athens, died in Alexandria, Epgyt. Hypatia of Alexandria, a pagan, was the last major commentator on the geocentric astronomical system of Ptolemy Claudius, whose work was eventually overthrown by Nicholas Copernicus in the sixteenth century. She tried to improve the mathematics of the Ptolemaic system and tried to demonstrate the completeness of Ptolemy's astronomy. Ptolemy's work fit with the prevailing Christian theology in teaching the centrality of humankind and of the earth in God's creation.

1. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Born in Roccasecca, Province of Lazio (close to Rome); Dominican friar Aquinas: Though a person can have true knowledge of the natural world (the kind of knowledge science produces), such knowledge is insufficient. The realm of supernatural truth, dealing with the most profound aspects of Christian belief, goes beyond human reason but is not contrary to that reason. Human reason, for example, could know that God existed and that there was but one God; but knowledge of the Trinity could come only by divine revelation. For Aquinas, philosophy is theology's servant.

Plotinus (c. 205-270)

Born in the Deltaic Lycopolis in Egypt The great philosopher of Neoplatonism found reality in unity and permanence: the One. Reality emanates from the One as light emanates from the sun; matter is the final emanation and stands on the edge of non-being. The One can be apprehended only by a coming together of the soul and the One in a mystical experience. Unlike the Christian God, Plotinus's god was not personal.

Thought experiments

Commonly used in philosophy (and also in science), the thought experiment imagines a situation in order to extract a lesson of philosophical importance.

7. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Definition - Genus and Specific Difference Aristotle sought to define things by determining how a thing is similar to other things (genus) and how it is specifically different (species, or specific difference).

Early Moderns

Descartes Hobbes Anne Finch and Leibniz Spinoza

2. René Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes could doubt at first everything except the truth expressed in "cogito, ergo sum." Descartes took an epistemological detour in trying to discover metaphysical truth about what is through epistemological inquiry about what can be known.

2. 1.Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) - Metaphysics

Following Aristotle, Aquinas said that all physical things are composed of matter and form, and that the form of a thing does not exist apart from matter. But Aquinas went beyond Aristotle in pointing out that what something is is not the same as that it is (its existence). Existence (or "act of being" - cf. Aristotle) is the most important actuality in anything, without which even what something is (its form) cannot be actual. Aquinas also emphasized that nothing could cause its own existence and must be caused to exist by something already existing, and, ultimately, by the Uncaused Cause of Existence (God). Aquinas went beyond Aristotle's conception of God as Pure Act (because God is changeless) to an understanding of God as Pure Act of Existence.

3. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) - Metaphysics

For Aquinas, the "essential form" of the human body is the soul. The soul is pure form without matter and as such is immortal. Each soul is a direct creation of God and does not come from human parents. It stands in a relationship of mutual interdependency relative to the body. A human being is a unity of body and soul. Without the soul the body would be formless; without a body the soul would have no access to knowledge derived from sensation.

1. George Berkeley (1685-1753)

For Berkeley, the objects of human knowledge consist of "ideas" conveyed to the mind by the senses, perceived by the mind when the mind reflects on its own operations, or compounded or divided by the mind with the help of memory or imagination. What exists, therefore, are ideas and the minds that have them.

Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von Leibniz (1646-1716)

For Leibniz, reality consisted of monads, indivisible units of force or energy or activity. They are entirely nonphysical.

2. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Further, to qualify as experience, sensory stimulation must be connected together or unified in a single, unified consciousness. Kant said his theory explained how it can be known that no one will ever experience uncaused change: to qualify as experience in the first place, a change must be subject to causation (that is, the mind "imposes" causation on experienced change).

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Hobbes in his natural philosophy thought that all that exists is bodies in motion, this being true not only of what ordinarily is viewed as physical bodies but also of mind and emotion.

5. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Human beings have three souls which form a single unity in their form or essence: The vegetative soul is the source of nourishment. The animal soul is the basis of sensation and movement. The intelligent or spiritual soul (nous) is pure and immortal and is the source of conceptual thought and the understanding of being.

1. David Hume (1711-1776)

Hume believed that knowledge is limited to what is experienced; that is, sensory impressions. Though he displays total skepticism in some passages, in most he appears to be a modified skeptic who focuses on the nature of the self, causality, induction, God, and the external world.

3. David Hume (1711-1776)

Hume on cause and effect. We have no experience of a cause actually producing an effect. Even after we observe a frequent and constant conjunction between a cause and its effect, there is no rational justification for supposing that that conjunction will repeat itself in the future.

4. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

If a thing exists (and not merely "Forms"), then what is it? Substance refers to the individual, particular thing and to what a thing is in common with other things. The latter is known as a thing's essence, its definition. A person's essence = rational animal. The physical world can be divided into the essences, or species, of mineral, vegetable, and animal. To be a specific thing is to have a set potential which is in continuous process of actualization. Happiness is a way of measuring to what degree a human being is fulfilling his or her potential.

2. George Berkeley (1685-1753)

It is contradictory to suppose that material substances exist outside the mind that perceives them. Esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived").

1. John Locke (1632-1704)

Locke's fundamental thesis is that all our ideas come from experience and that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank slate). Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu ("nothing exists in the mind that was not first in the senses").

2. John Locke (1632-1704)

Locke's representative realism—we perceive objects indirectly by our ideas or representations of them—is now thought to be so much common sense. The illustration shows the "mind" observing ideas (represented by the screen), not the outside world directly.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Main themes of Hegel. (1) What is most real (the Absolute) is thought thinking of itself; (2) the objective world is an unfolding or expression of infinite thought; (3) reality is an integrated whole in which each proposition (each state of affairs) is logically connected with all the rest; (4) the Absolute (the sum total of reality) is a system of conceptual triads (thesis, antithesis, synthesis).

Idealism

Only the mental or spiritual exists.

Materialism (or physicalism)

Only the physical exists.

Metaphysics

Philosophical study of being as being - in other words, studying what exists simply as it is

Epistemology

Philosophical study of how one knows what exists

Hellenistic and Christian Philosophy

Plotinus Hypatia Augustine vs. the Skeptics Aquinas

Universals

Realism (universal terms, like "man," denote something that exists outside the mind); Conceptualism (universal terms correspond only to concepts in the mind); and Nominalism (universal terms can be accounted for without resort to concepts in the mind or reference to real things out in the world).

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

Schopenhauer famously attacked Hegel's exuberant rationalism. Schopenhauer regarded all phenomena as the objectification of the will. Will-in-itself is the originating source of everything that happens and is not determined by anything else. Blind and purposeless, will-in-itself manifests itself in the constant striving of human beings. The world is in disarray because persons are witless lackeys of this errant, cosmic will which blows, like the wind, hither and yon.

2. Skepticism

Sextus Empiricus, a Pyrrhonist, the greatest skeptic of ancient times, set forth in Ten Tropes arguments by the ancient skeptics against the possibility of knowledge. For example, one cannot know how any object really is in itself, because what one perceives or thinks it to be is always in relationship to, never independent of, that perceiver.

1. René Descartes (1596-1650)

Skepticism as the key to certainty. His system he employed came through the dream conjecture.

Ancients

Socrates Plato Aristotle

Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677)

Spinoza regarded thought and extension as different attributes of one basic substance equated with God. A living person is not the composite of mind and matter, but rather a "modification" of the one substance. The mind and body are the same thing, conceptualized from different viewpoints. Thus, there is no problem explaining how the mind interacts with the body: they are one and the same thing. Spinoza was a pantheist: God is all. There is no personal immortality after death, and free will is an illusion.

1. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Student of Plato Metaphysics Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato: there is no separate and superior realm of Forms and then a world of "reflections" down below. For Aristotle, to be is to be a particular thing; each "thing" is composed of matter in a particular form - not the perfect form/idea and then imperfect participations of that perfect idea. With the exception of God (who he taught was purely spiritual or immaterial), neither form nor matter is ever found in isolation from the other.

Augustine's Reply to Skeptics

Surprise! The very act of doubting assures us of our existence! Opening the box of skepticism gives the skeptic a surprise: Septicism is refuted by the principle of noncontradiction; by the very act of doubting—from the fact of my very doubting it follows that I am; and because sense perception itself gives a rudimentary kind of knowledge (we make no mistake if we assent to the bent appearance of a stick as it enters the water).

Fallacies

Switching the Burden of Proof - Trying to prove a position by asking an opponent to disprove it - circular reasoning

Straw man

The alleged refutation of a view by the refutation of a misrepresentation of that view

1. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

The ordering principles of the mind. For sensations to qualify as experience, they must be subject to spatial-temporal shaping (the perceiving part of the mind must perceive them as objects existing outside us in space and time) and they must also be conceptualized—brought under concepts.

2. David Hume (1711-1776)

The quarter experiment. "The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions." Hume held, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, that we may observe a conjunction or relation of cause and effect only between different perceptions and can never observe it between perceptions and objects. Therefore, from the existence of perceptions, we can never form any conclusion concerning the existence of objects.

2. Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.)

Theory of Knowledge or Epistemology For Plato, the Forms cannot be apprehended through sense perception. Knowledge based on one's sense perception can't be real knowledge, since perception varies from person to person. Instead, the Forms are known through reason. Plato used the image of a "divided line" to contrast true knowledge with mere belief and opinion. Most of us live our lives in the "mere belief and opinion" section of the line. Most people generally know the "reflections" more than the "forms" themselves. Myth of the cave

6. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Theory of knowledge For Aristotle, discursive reasoning defines things by way of their limitations, samenesses, and differences; it is the basis of science and provides an understanding of everyday human life. Intuition is an immediate, direct seeing of a certain truth. That which is absolutely simple and first, God, can only be understood through intuition; and the most fundamental principles of knowing (such as the principle of contradiction, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect) must also be known intuitively. Metaphysics and knowledge:

1. Augustine (354-430)

Through Augustine's thought, the Christian belief in an eternal and unchanging nonmaterial actuality that is the ground of all being and truth received a philosophical justification, essentially Platonic and Neoplatonic in substance. However, Augustine identified this ultimate ground not with the Forms of Plato or the nonpersonal One of Plotinus but with the triune Christian God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

2.Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

To understand a thing, we must understand its causes, which, generally speaking, are four. The formal cause is the form of the thing—what it is. Second, the material cause deals with what the thing is made of. Third, the efficient cause looks at what made the thing. Finally, the final cause deals with a thing's purpose

1. Skepticism

Total skeptics maintain that nothing can be known (or profess to suspend judgment in all matters); modified skeptics do not doubt that at least some things are known but deny or suspend judgment on the possibility of knowledge about particular things, such as God, or within some subject matter, such as history or ethics. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods after Plato there were two schools of (total) skepticism, the Pyrrhonists, who suspended judgment on all issues, and the Academics, who maintained that "all things are inapprehensible.

3. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Understanding a thing's being There are ten categories of being: substance, quantity, quality, relationships, place, time, posture, constitution, passivity, and activity that make possible the comprehension of that thing's being, whether it be a flower, a person, a rock, or a rabbit. The soul (psyche) is the principle of independent movement within each human being providing the purposes and ultimate end which human beings pursue.

Dualism

What exists is either physical or mental, or, in the case of human beings, some combination of both.

mental model of reality

a framework of ideas & attitudes about the world, ourselves, and life, a comprehensive system of beliefs — with answers for a wide range of questions

Logic is the study of

correct inference

Four Branches

metaphysics values epistemology logic

philosophy-of-discipline areas

philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and so on.

philein

to love