Philosophy For Dummies (US Edition)

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All that glitters is not gold. Appearances and realities can diverge. We live today in a world of hype, exaggeration, and hyperbole. Plato’s Cave is bigger and deeper than ever before (see Chapter 2). Illusions rule the world. Everyone has something to sell, and we’re bombarded every day by claims that we must be able to evaluate. In a world of conflicting views vying for acceptance, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, the collectibles from the trash? Caution is necessary. We need discernment. And discernment — assessment — also is a skill that philosophy can nurture. To start with, I think some of the best philosophy books for beginners comes from the A Very Short Introduction series, published by Oxford University Press. Consulting the great thinkers of the past, as we draw our own philosophical maps for the present and future, is like stopping to ask a cabbie or a cop for directions, rather than just wandering around lost. It’s getting the advice of those who know, people who have been in the neighborhood before and can find their way around. We inevitably do a little exploring of your own, but any good advice and direction we get can help. The book seeks to demystify dense philosophical ideas via tons of beautifully designed infographics. Yet, despite avoiding heavy jargon, it doesn’t shy away from raising the big questions about life, consciousness, religion, and more. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Heidegger’s most celebrated pupil, and the leading French existentialist. Philosopher, novelist, playwright, and political activist, Sartre lived the existential mantra of engagement in the world.

Key contributions: Popularizing existentialism; summarizing the existential perspective in the phrase existence precedes essence; developing existentialism as a philosophy of freedom The ancient philosopher Aristotle believed that goodness comes down to how well things function in reference to their intended use or purpose. A good hammer serves its purpose well. So does a good watch. We consult the writings of the great dead philosophers not for any final word on the ultimate questions of philosophy, but rather to help get us started, using the insights and avoiding the pitfalls already discovered by those who have gone before us. Early in this century, William Ralph Inge explained,Design Arguments see features of our universe, such as its fundamental simplicity arising out of very few basic laws at bottom, or its intelligibility to science, or the fine-tuning of its laws and conditions within incredibly precise ranges to be indicators of intelligent design. The Cosmological Argument points to the strange fact that there is a universe at all and asks why, concluding that we must conclude there is a personal explanation, arising out of the choice of a personal agent or doer. Before looking at the arguments for and against functionalism, it is necessary to clarify the idea that, for mental states, being is doing. There are many more variations among functionalist theories than can be discussed herein, but the above clarifications are sufficient to give a flavor of the various nuances. It is safe to say that in one version or another, functionalism remains the most widely accepted theory of the nature of mental states among contemporary theorists. Nevertheless, recently, perhaps in view of the difficulties of working out the details of functionalist theories, some philosophers have been inclined to offer supervenience theories of mental states as alternatives to functionalism. But as Jaegwon Kim correctly pointed out, supervenience simply allows us to pose the question about the nature of mental states, it is not an answer. The question is: Why do mental states supervene on the physical states of the creatures that have them, or at least of the world altogether? Functionalism provides one possible answer: Mental states supervene on physical states because mental states are functional states, i.e., they are realized by physical states. Much remains to be said about such a theory, and to many philosophers the arguments for it do not seem as decisive as when they were initially offered. But there is no denying that it is an intriguing and potentially powerful theory. 9. References and Further Reading a. References bullet (C3) Is it correct? For a position to merely be coherent and complete isn’t enough; the available evidence must point in its direction as the correct contender for truth. Coherence is necessary; completeness is important; but only correctness, in addition, gives you what you fully need. An internally consistent viewpoint that’s comprehensive in its sweep but at odds with the facts doesn’t do you much good in a practical way. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855): The Danish son of a wealthy merchant, Kierkegaard never held an academic post, but he wrote voluminously. Seen by many as the founder of existentialism, particularly Christian existentialism.

Philosophers want to know what the ultimate truth is about all of this, because it’s important. What are you, anyway, at the most basic level imaginable? Are you just a living body, or are you a soul or mind inhabiting a body? This is relevant to all sorts of further questions, such as whether human beings survive bodily death. And there are interesting arguments to consider on all sides if you want to uncover the final truth.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): Seen by some as a mere mouthpiece of Sartre, de Beauvoir was a brilliant thinker in her own right, and she made significant contributions to literature, feminism, and existentialism. Polger, T. 2000. Zombies Explained. In Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, D. Ross, A. Brook, and D. Thompson (Eds). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Why, for that matter, should any busy business executive take time out to read philosophy? Why should a parent at home engaged in the demanding tasks of raising children ever sneak away with a book of philosophy? What’s its relevance? What could possibly be the payoff? The following sections may give you some answers. Paralysis without analysis Things have their seasons, and even certain kinds of eminence go in and out of style. But wisdom has an advantage: She is eternal. The trouble with the Optimistic Argument is that it is question-begging. It assumes that one can create artificial thinking things without duplicating the kinds of brain states that human beings have, and that is just what the identity theory denies. The trouble with the Pessimistic Argument is that it seems to exploits a very high standard for knowledge of other minds — namely infallibility or certainty. The objection gets its grip only if the requirement to infer facts about others minds does undermine the possibility of knowledge about those minds. But we regularly acquire knowledge by inference or induction, and there is no special reason to think that inferences about minds are more problematic than other inferences.

Is the ultimate story behind the universe, or any multiverse of mindboggling scope that may exist, a tale of just matter and energy, or one of consciousness creating all else? Theists and atheists have battled this out over the centuries. The theist says there’s a creator God (“ theos” in Greek) and the atheist denies there is any such being.That is a vivid image of the ultimate task of philosophy. Its goal is to free us from illusion and to help us get a grip on the most fundamental realities. So, philosophers have examined the issue of whether death is just a great change or rather an absolute ending of the person. There are, as you might imagine, arguments to be made on both sides, and an able assessment of these arguments may turn on a bigger question about the overall context of life and death. Is conscious existence a fragile aberration in the universe, inevitably extinguished by stronger forces, or is it anchored at the deepest level in reality? And that leads to the next big issue, discussed in the next section. Some days later, we received a call from the store that the grill was in, assembled, and ready to go. My wife bought the burgers and hot dogs, and all the other normal cookout stuff, and prepared for a feast. When the delivery guys arrived, they pointed out that I would have to hook up the gas tank to the grill itself when I was ready to use it. They explained that they were required to deliver it unattached. I assumed it was dangerous to transport the tank hooked up. Poisonous gas might take out the delivery guys. You’ve probably seen this book lying around your local bookstore. In my opinion, it’s one of the best philosophy books for beginners available, thanks to its accessibility. Wisdom may not be just the same thing as knowledge, but it’s deeply related to knowledge. Wise people know who they are, what they value, and where they want to go. They also know how to evaluate what others might say. A good place to start in any exploration of philosophy is with the idea of knowledge — what it is and how it works.

Virtue ethics states that character matters above all else. Living an ethical life, or acting rightly, requires developing and demonstrating the virtues of courage, compassion, wisdom, and temperance. It also requires the avoidance of vices like greed, jealousy, and selfishness.So, to have knowledge, it’s not enough to have a firm belief. You have to have some good evidence or reason to think the belief is true. This is a high standard, which is why the world is much fuller of opinion than it is of genuine knowledge. If your actions are all forced on you by conditions beyond your control, you are then just a puppet and not a free agent of any kind. But this is precisely the suggestion that’s been made against the common belief in freedom, and there are versions of this challenge that come from such different directions as theology, logic, and science. Whether you think you are just your body, or that you are something more than that is often closely tied to a broader question about the universe: Is there just one sort of fundamental substance in reality, like matter, or one-dimensional strings of energy out of which everything else is made, in all the wonderful diversity of the world? Or could there be more than one fundamental reality composing the wide variety of things? For a long time, my family had wanted to own a gas grill, the kind that has a fat tank of propane under it. But people had warned me about the dangers of propane gas. It’s really combustible. And, breathed, they said, it’s toxic. I seemed to remember that I had heard or read somewhere that in its natural state, propane gas is without odor, but that refiners added a smell so that any leaking gas could be detected immediately and avoided.