Alignment

Driving just the other day flipped on the radio in my zipcar and NPR was broadcasting an episode of Philosophy Talk. I like this show. My lovely wife gifted me a year subscription to their podcast a couple years ago. I am not totally sure who the guest was on this particular show as I jumped in halfway through but I think it was Richard Hanley as he was talking about a book he wrote regarding philosophy and pop culture, particularly South Park.

Both of the hosts of philosophy talk are professors at Stanford, and for the most part they run an awesome show. However, I feel sometimes that they underestimate their listeners. To be honest this particular episode was a bit uninteresting barring one important, throbbing question which was asked and then moved passed. I didn't listen to the whole show so it may have been addressed earlier or later, but I find this to be the MO of the show. A surface scraping.

They show was concerned with philosophy in pop culture and in discussing different manifestations of philosophical conundrums in pop culture the question was posited: Do these philosophical questions arise intentionally or do they surface in pop culture naturally?

I tend to think that there is a sort of case by case basis for these sort of things but the latter part of this question really got me thinking as it touches on something I posted long long ago on this here blog.

Philosophical questions do arise naturally. As I have said before: we are sentient beings and sentient beings must deal with a whole slew of questions that arise out of the act of being conscious. The concept of "I" brings with it a chest of philosophical gold.

So when we see deep questions in things like Finding Nemo, The Big Lebowski, or more blatantly The Matrix, etc... they are byproducts of the telling of the human experience.

We are all philosophers.

let's start at the very beginning...

Socrates.

A familiar name.

The truth about Socrates is that we do not know much (if anything) about him. All that we know is from second hand accounts; if Socrates wrote anything (which is unlikely) none of it has survived. Most of what we know has been conveyed to us by Plato. Many of Plato's works are still with us today and Socrates is a main character, or vocal piece in most of them.

The most significant contribution to philosophy that Socrates gave us was the Socratic Method which is a method of teaching someone what they already know. Thats the beauty of it. It works like this: Socrates would ask a question of someone such as, "what is piety?" the person then answers, ands then Socrates pokes at the validity of the answer. The point of the socratic method is to be a teacher that does not lecture, but would rather ask: "As a student what do you know? Why do you know that? Are you justified in believing that?" Socrates had a way of forcing you to describe your beliefs in such a way that they become arguments.

At least thats what we think Socrates did. As I said, all of the accounts we have of Socrates are second hand. Socrates is an ambiguous fellow, more on him when we talk about

Plato.

399bc

Thought experiments

A thought experiment is basically a hypothetical situation.

Any philosophical stance can be strengthened by a thought experiment; a bare bones argument is just premises and a conclusion, a thought experiment is a hypothetical situation that illustrates your argument. Each thought experiment is designed to apply to a specific argument. It is not important (depending on the argument) that thought experiments be plausible or feasible in reality.

Some examples of thought experiments:

Molyneux's problem

Suppose there was a man born blind. He is made familiar with a metallic cube and a metallic sphere of the same material roughly the same size. Using his sense of touch he easily can tell one from the other. One day due to a miracle the blind man attains his sight. If the man was presented with the sphere and cube on a table, could he discern which was which without touching them?

Brain in a Bucket (the matrix)

What if reality as you know it is all an elaborate science experiment. You think you are who you are and live where you do but in reality you are a brain in a bucket in this mad scientist's laboratory hooked up to some sort of reality generating machine. Everyone and everything you know is a lie; a rouse.


What if the cube and the sphere had a particular smell? What if the reality machine was conveying the false reality of being a brain in a bucket? Thought experiments do not work if you do not accept them as they are. You cannot change a thought experiment to prove a point; if you did you would be creating a new thought experiment all together. Creating a new thought experiment is fine and well, but try not to do so until you have answered all the questions the original thought experiment has posed.

Next a philosopher spotlight!

Art and aesthetics

After a long hiatus, I'm back! I'm ready to fill your brain with stuff again. 2010 has been quite unkind to me so far...

The Greeks were concerned with many things philosophically; the concept of "beauty" was one of them. At first glance, this subject can seem a bit trivial. Compared to contemplating what exists, or the concept of good and evil, 'what is beauty?' seems to lack a little weight, but there are some very interesting and important questions loaded in the concept of beauty. In this post 'beauty' should be considered that which is aesthetically or visually pleasing.

I had prepared some research on the subject over a month ago but a couple things this past week re-sparked my motivation to tackle the intro course to this subject. The first was a movie The Art of the Steal and the second a show I saw this morning, This is Civilization titled "Uncertainty." "Uncertainty" provided a comprehensive look at the history of 20th century art and the very best description of abstract/abstract expressionist art I have heard.

The movie was about the art collection of Alfred C Barnes. It follows the control of the foundation that is in charge of it, and the legal battle of where and how it should be displayed. It is an interesting documentary about something I didn't know anything about. What sparked my interest specifically was not the magnitude of the collection itself, estimated to be worth between 25 billion and priceless (the Barnes Foundation has the largest collection of post-impressionist art in America and, to some, the most impressive collection in the world) but specifically was how Mr. Barnes acquired this art.

He became a millionaire around the turn of the 20th century and soon after fostered an interest in collecting art. He traveled to France and around Europe and started meeting with artists and buying paintings that he liked. When he brought these paintings back to Philadelphia and showed them to the public he was ridiculed for showing ugly, uninteresting paintings. Lo and behold some 15 years later the art Alfred had begun collecting grew exponentially in value as post-impressionist art swept the world. Mr. Barnes would tell you that he was just collecting paintings that he enjoyed, but in effect what he did was predict the next large movement in the global art culture.

Aesthetics as a philosophical subject is concerned with which objects are considered visually pleasing whether they are art or not. Artists create art objects as representations (of the human experience, etc...) in doing so they are commenting directly on their personal aesthetic philosophy. The very creation of art is a philosophical statement. Because of this a large chunk of the philosophy of aesthetics concerns itself with art, however it is also concerned with the beauty in non-art objects.

Art creates an interesting aesthetic dilemma: should the standard for beauty be the same for art objects and non-art objects?

Until next week...

and we are all metaphysicians...

Metaphysics is one subject in philosophy that can be hard to wrangle a good definition for. The word "metaphysics" has itself a sort of storied history. Aristotle is credited with the oldest known writings we have on "metaphysics," yet he himself would not have defined this particular collection of writings as metaphysics. You may or may not know that a good chunk of what in Aristotle's day was considered "philosophy" would today be considered biology, general science, and physics. It was a translator after his death that dubbed the writings we speak of now as "ta meta ta phusika" which translates roughly to "the ones after the physical ones." Indeed these chapters did directly follow Aristotle's physics, as it happens they would become a subject all their own.

Enough jibber jabber. What IS metaphysics? A very broad generalization of metaphysics can be summed up in a very broad general question:

What exists?

Simple as that question is there are an infinite number of questions that can fit inside that tiny two worded question. For example:

Is mathematics an actual thing existing outside our understanding, or is it a thing we use to understand? Is time an actual thing outside our understanding or is is something we use to understand? Do I exist? Do you exist? What is qualia? Do animals experience qualia? Do i have a soul? Is there a god? Are there gods? Does the world exist as I perceive it, or is it affected by my perception? When/where did the universe start (and why)? Is time an actual thing outside our understanding or is is something we use to understand? What is free will? As I age and my tastes and knowledge change, do I change or am I the same? What is causality?

This is truly the tip of the metaphysical iceberg.

When we ask "what exists?" the "what" is the important part of the question. THERE ARE SO MANY WHATS!!! When people think of philosophy as a subject it is often metaphysics they think of instinctively.

why are we here?

Metaphysics is an exciting, storied, and extensive philosophical discipline.

So what do we REALLY know?

Since we have realized as conscious beings that we know stuff, it has dawned on some to ask the bigger question: What exactly do we know? It seems like a silly question at first but it is an ultimately important one and not just in the realm of philosophy.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge; it is concerned with two core questions: What do we know? How do we know it?

When we analyze things that we know they can generally be categorized in two groups, "that" statements and "how to" statements, for example:

I know that spiders have eight legs.

I know how to distill whiskey.

"How to" statements are the less interesting of the two types; if what we know is how to distill whiskey, how we know that is because we either learned somewhere how to do that or taught ourselves.

"That" statements are a little more tricky to analyze. If what we know is that spiders have eight legs, how do we know that is so?

The ancient Greeks came up with a rubric with which to determine what knowledge is. For something to be counted as knowledge it must be a justified, true, belief. The statement that spiders have eight legs is my belief. It is true because one of the requisite characteristics of being a spider is having eight legs. I am justified in believing so as I have seen a spider and counted its legs. That last step is it is the most important.

Say someone asked me who the fathers of calculus were and I immediately answered "Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton." That statement happens to be true. Can I be justified in saying so? What if I knew the names of two mathematicians (Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton). Had you asked me who the fathers of algebra or game theory were I would have answered, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, or both. On the other hand I could have just guessed. In either case I would not be justified in providing my statement and thus be able to count my answer as genuine knowlege.

It was this way until a man named Gettier published an important paper (more on this next time)... In the mean time here is some reading I used to prep for this lesson.

So, who cares? Well, as philosophy is concerned with posing questions and answering them the veracity of the answers becomes an issue. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy unto itself, and yet every branch of philosophy has some sort of epistemic skeleton.

To govern the people...

Aside from an innate sense of "right" and "wrong" there is another sense that we humans have an opinion on naturally (it also has to do with ethics as well). When defining the boundaries and definitions of any other branch of philosophy is an appropriate starting point, when it comes to political philosophy we should start with is most base question and go from there:

(i) What sort of laws and/or governmental structure (if any) is/are the most appropriate for our community (and for the communities of others for that matter)?

Political philosophy is, to be honest, not my favorite branch of philosophy, but it is one that everyone has an opinion on and to be fair, a very important one. While making conjectures about ethics or metaphysics or logic or epistemology political philosophers are often commenting on the current practices in government. Anyone who has an opinion about (i) is a political philosopher. This is where political philosophy becomes diverse, because there are so VERY MANY ANSWERS to (i).

There are a multitude of types of government. Each of these types of government all have variations, and those variations have their own variations, and so on. Indeed, even the absence of government has variations because the absence of government is itself a political philosophy.
The best way to attack political philosophy is to start with the type of government you are most interested in studying and jump down that rabbit hole; there will be ample reading to follow.