Introduction to Philosophy (Main Text) – PHL XXXXXXXXXX-...
1
An Introduction to Philosophy
W. Russ Payne
Bellevue College
Copyright (cc by nc 4.0)
2015 W. Russ Payne
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the
terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of
this license. A copy of the license is found at http:
creativecommons.org/licenses
y-nc/4.0
2
Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………. 3
Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5
Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11
Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23
Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38
Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50
Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58
Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72
Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79
Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94
Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108
Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120
3
Introduction
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical
oots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is
to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and
frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include
philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic
ecent progress.
This text concludes with four chapters on ethics,
oadly construed. I cover traditional theories of
ight action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for
themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical
issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The
end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one’s community to be good.
Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates
the course of development into moral maturity.
Over the course of the text I’ve tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the
historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make
significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
As an undergraduate philosophy major, one of my favorite professors once told me that
philosophers really do have an influence on how people think. I was pleased to hear that the kind
of inquiry I found interesting and rewarding might also be relevant to people’s lives and make a
difference in the world. Then he completed his thought, “it only takes about 300 years.” Over the
course of my teaching career, it has struck me that the opinions many of my students come to
class with have just about caught up with David Hume. So perhaps things are not quite as bad as
my professor suggested. While Hume did publish young, he was still an infant 300 years ago.
My mission as a philosophy teacher has been to remedy this situation to some small degree.
Most of the philosophy I read in graduate school was written by living philosophers, people I
could meet and converse with at conferences. Every time I’ve done so I’ve come back with a
new list of living philosophers I hoped to read. My experience with living philosophers has
convinced me that philosophy has progressed as dramatically as the sciences over the last
century or so. It is a great misfortune that the educated public by and large fails to recognize this.
Philosophers, no doubt, ca
y much of the blame for this. At the cutting edge of the profession
we have been better researchers that ambassadors. At no time in history have there been as many
ight people doing philosophy as there are today. Clearly articulated fresh perspectives on
important issues abound. But at the same time, philosophy’s “market share” in the university
cu
iculum has fallen to historic lows. If the flourishing of philosophy over the past century or so
4
is to continue, philosophy as a living discipline will have to gain a
oader following among the
general educated public. The front line for this campaign is the Philosophy 101 classroom.
This is an open source text. It is freely available in an editable, downloadable electronic format.
Anyone is free to obtain, distribute, edit, or revise this document in accordance with the open
source license. No one is free to claim proprietary rights to any part of this text. Sadly, one of the
main functions of academic publishing, both of research and textbooks, has become that of
estricting access to information. This is quite against the spirit of free and open discourse that is
the lifeblood of philosophy.
Introductory students should be exposed to as many philosophical voices as possible. To that
end, links to primary source readings and supplemental material are imbedded in the text. I’ve
estricted myself to primary source materials that are freely available on the Web. Students
should require nothing more than a reliable Internet connection to access all of the required and
ecommended materials for this course. Limiting primary and supplemental sources in this way
has presented some challenges. Classic sources are readily available on the Web, though not
always in the best translations. Many contemporary philosophers post papers on the Internet, but
these are usually not intended for undergraduate readers. Most good philosophical writing for
undergraduates is, unfortunately, proprietary, under copyright and hence unavailable for an open
source course. The strength of an open source text is that it is continually open to revision by
anyone who’d care to improve it. And so I’d like to issue an open invitation to members of the
philosophical community to recommend writing suitable for this course that is cu
ently
available on the Web and has so far escaped my notice. Or, better yet, to write for this course.
5
1. What Philosophy Is
What is philosophy?
Many answers have been offered in reply to this question and most are angling at something
similar. My favorite answer is that philosophy is all of rational inquiry except for science.
Perhaps you think science exhausts inquiry. About a hundred years ago, many philosophers,
especially the Logical Positivists, thought there was nothing we could intelligibly inquire into
except for scientific matters. But this view is probably not right. What
anch of science
addresses the question of whether or not science covers all of rational inquiry? If the question
strikes you as puzzling, this might be because you already recognize that whether or not science
can answer every question is not itself a scientific issue. Questions about the limits of human
inquiry and knowledge are philosophical questions.
We can get a better understanding of philosophy by considering what sorts of things other than
scientific issues humans might inquire into. Philosophical issues are as diverse and far ranging as
those we find in the sciences, but a great many of them fall into one of three big topic areas,
metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Metaphysics
Metaphysical issues are concerned with the nature of reality. Traditional metaphysical issues
include the existence of God and the nature of human free will (assuming we have any). Here are
a few metaphysical questions of interest to contemporary philosophers: What is a thing? How are
space and time related? Does the past exist? How about the future? How many dimensions does
the world have? Are there any entities beyond physical objects (like numbers, properties, and
elations)? If so, how are they related to physical objects? Historically, many philosophers have
proposed and defended specific metaphysical positions, often as part of systematic and
comprehensive metaphysical views. But attempts to establish systematic metaphysical world
views have been notoriously unsuccessful.
Since the 19th century many philosophers and scientists have been understandably suspicious of
metaphysics, and it has frequently been dismissed as a waste of time, or worse, as meaningless.
But in just the past few decades metaphysics has returned to vitality. As difficult as they are to
esolve, metaphysical issues are also difficult to ignore for long. Contemporary analytic
metaphysics is typically taken to have more modest aims than definitively settling on the final
and complete truth about the underlying nature of reality. A better way to understand
metaphysics as it is cu
ently practiced is as aiming at better understanding how various claims
about the reality logically hang together or conflict. Metaphysicians analyze metaphysical
6
puzzles and problems with the goal of better understanding how things could or could not be.
Metaphysicians are in the business of exploring the realm of possibility and necessity. They are
explorers of logical space.
Epistemology
Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and justified belief. What is
knowledge? Can we have any knowledge at all? Can we have knowledge about the laws of
nature, the laws or morality, or the existence of other minds? The view that we can’t have
knowledge is called skepticism. An extreme form of skepticism denies that we can have any
knowledge whatsoever. But we might grant that we can have knowledge about some things and
emain skeptics concerning other issues. Many people, for instance, are not skeptics about
scientific knowledge, but are skeptics when it comes to knowledge of morality. Later in this
course we will entertain some skeptical wo
ies about science and we will consider whether
ethics is really in a more precarious position. Some critical attention reveals that scientific
knowledge and moral knowledge face many of the same skeptical challenges and share some
similar resources in addressing those challenges. Many of the popular reasons for being more
skeptical about morality than science turn on philosophical confusions we will address and
attempt to clear up.
Even if