Philosophy

Continental philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

Epistemology

The study of knowledge.

• Skepticism
  • 1637. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method: Cogito, ergo sum.
• Rationalism: reason is the main source and test of knowledge.
• Empiricism: empirical evidence is the main source of knowledge.
  • 1677. Baruch Spinoza writes Ethics.
  • 1739. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
    • In contrast, Thomas Reid argues for direct realism.

The Socratic method, Socratic dialogue, or Socratic questioning uses disciplined questioning to examine beliefs and test their validity.

• Teachers can ask Socratic questions to help students understand their beliefs and develop critical thinking skills.
• Sift through information and form a connection to prior knowledge.
• Evidence and origins of beliefs: Why do you say that? Why does that hold here?
• Assumptions: Is this always the case?
• Alternative viewpoints: can anyone see this another way?
• Implications: if X happened, what else would result? How does it affect Y?
• Questioning the question
  • Why do you think that I asked that question?
  • Which of our questions turned out to be the most useful?
• Socratic paradox: “I know that I know knothing”
• “The unexamined life is not worth living”
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maieutics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshiva
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elenctics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_skepticism

A semantic dispute or semantic discord revolves around differences in concepts or word definitions rather than the underlying ideas, beliefs, or values. It is a false disagreement that lacks substance, which can be cleared up simply by using more precise language or refocusing on the ideas that the words represent.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_argument

All real-world concepts are fuzzy, vague, and contextually dependent.

• Sorites paradox: how many grains are needed to form a pile of sand?
• What temperatures are warm?
• Which atoms are part of this chair?
• Leaky abstraction

350 BC. Aristotle

• Organon on logic and dialectic.
  • Categories
    • Ten fundamental types of being: Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, relative position or pose, having or condition, action, being affected.
    • Primary substances are fundamental individual objects, while secondary substances are universals, kinds, or classes of objects that can be predicated of primary substances.
  • Square of opposition.
• Medieval scholasticism dominant from 1100 to 1700. Rigorous dialectic analysis based on Aristotle.
• Mereology: study of part-whole relationships.

Logical positivism

• Truth comes from the scientific method instead of subjective interpretation.
• By Auguste Comte.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1922) includes the verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness.
  • Wittgen later repudiates this position in Philosophical Investigations (1953), which argues that a word’s meaning comes from how it’s used within a specific context, a “language game”.
  • Family resemblance: object concepts such as games might not be defined by a single essential feature, but instead might be connected by a series of overlapping similarities.
• Karl Popper rejects inductionism and the justified true belief theory of knowledge. Instead, he favors a correspondence theory of truth based on simple theories and falsification.

Metaphysics

Mind vs. matter

• Dualism: reality consists of mind or spirit and matter.
• Idealism: mind or spirit is the fundamental reality.
  • Material entities like rocks are mental constructs or imaginations within a larger mental realm.
  • The physical world is a representation or projection of a deeper mental reality.
  • Plato’s Republic
    • Theory of Forms
  • Some idealists emphasize the mind of God as the ultimate creator.
  • Solipsism
    • Analogies of playing a game, a simulation, brain in a vat, the matrix.
• Materialism: matter is the fundamental reality.

Consciousness, subjective experience, and theory of mind

• Materialism believes that the human mind is made of neurons interconnected in intricate ways to form a cognitive processing system.
  • Emotions emerge from reward functions.
• A qualia is a sensation or other direct subjective experience.
• A philosophical zombie behaves like me and says they feel emotions, pain, etc. But they don’t actually have any feeling.
• Why do I experience the world from “my” point of view? Physics is universal and symmetric.
  • Materialists: cognitive processing gives rise to subjectivity. Cognitive agents build models of the world, which are necessarily subjective.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Irving_Lewis

Identity: what makes me me?

• A fuzzy concept.
• Only certain physical properties are relevant for identity.
  • “you can never step into the same river twice”
• Physical objects can be duplicated, so there can be multiple objects which are “the same”.
  • a physical copy of myself is also me.
  • a teleporter which destroys the original atoms does not kill me.
    • Teleporter thought experiment: what if the process is slightly delayed, and you open your eyes and realize you are the copy that was left behind?
• Physical continuity
  • A more restrictive definition of identity: this specific chair, instead of any rock which is physically identical.
  • Ship of Theseus: gradual changes in physical composition can accumulate into discontinuous identity.

Free will

• Free will is the capacity to choose between different possible actions.
  • Important for our decisions to be meaningful.
  • People don’t like being controlled.
• Determinism: all events are causally inevitable.
  • Note that arbitrary randomness is irrevelant for understanding free will.
• Compatabilism: deterministic agents can have free will.
  • We can freely make decisions and take actions that we believe will best achieve our personal desires.
  • As agents, our cognitive computation uses our bodies which run on the laws of physics. It’s still our decision, even if we are deterministic functions.
  • Absolute free will is impossible: on what basis do you choose? you eventually need some set of basic preferences or moral axioms, which was not your choice; it was biologically and evolutionarily determined.
  • In this view, a calculator has free will: it takes some inputs, and decides an output based on those inputs. For a given input, no outside agency can change the calculator’s decision output without directly interfering with the agent itself.
  • Of course, having a will implies some basic cognitive capacities and sense of self like desires and emotions.
• If the outcome tomorrow is predetermined, does that mean we can’t choose or change it?
  • No, it’s still our choice: the consequences depend causally on our choice.
• Whatever we choose, we could not have chosen otherwise.
  • People can have tumors or brain injuries that make them hyper-aggressive or completely change their personality. We think of these as external to the “real” person.

History

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophists
  • Use rhetoric to entertain, impress, or persuade an audience to accept their point of view.
• 400 BC. Democritus formulates an atomic theory of the universe.
• Socrates. Founder of Western philosophy. Did not write any texts. Known mainly through his students Plato and Xenophon.
  • Gadfly who posed upsetting questions at authorities. Indifferent to material pleasure, rarely bathed, walked barefoot, and owned one ragged coat.
  • 399 BC. Sentenced to death by hemlock for impiety or godlessness. Refuses to request exile or escape from prison.
• 375 BC. The Republic by Plato.
  • Theory of forms. Objects in the physical world are mere imitations of Forms, which are the ideal, absolute, timeless essence of all things.
  • Allegory of the cave.
• 370 BC. Xenophon is a student of Socrates and writes the Memorabilia, a collection of Socratic dialogues.
• 350 BC. Aristotle supports the primacy of substance or underlying reality, which is form (essence) and matter (passive potentiality).
  • Form is not separate from particulars.
  • An acorn has the potential to be an oak tree.
  • Four Causes: material, formal, efficient (agent), final purpose or telos.
• Idealism
  • 1686. Gottfried Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics. He proposes that the world is made of monads or simple substances, and argues that our world is the best possible world. He states the principle of sufficient reason that everything that exists must have a reason.
  • 1710. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
  • 1800. Friedrich Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism.
  • Vertiginous question

Ethics

• deontologism
• empathy and connection
• Relativism
• Objectivism
  • Violent crime (murder, torture, and rape) is wrong.
• egoism: everyone is selfish. People take selfless actions ultimately to make themselves happy.
  • Seems to be a semantic dispute that is indistinguishable and unfalsifiable. If a person follows a moral framework, do we care about their motivation for following that framework?

Plato’s Republic

• Problem of akrasia: why do we willingly do bad?
• Ring of Gyges grants invisibility. Thought experiment on whether a rational person would steal if invisible. Plato argues that the user has in fact enslaved himself to his appetites.

Aristotlean ethics include Nicomachean Ethics argues that the telos or highest good for a human is eudaimonia (“human flourishing”).

German idealism

• Immanuel Kant founds modern ethics and aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Sapere aude (“dare to know”).
  • Categorical imperative
• Arthur Schopenhauer writes The World as Will and Representation (1818).
• Ficht dialectics: progress via thesis, antithesis (contradiction), and synthesis.
• Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).
• Frankfurt school
  • Theodor W. Adorno
  • Erich Fromm
  • Ernst Bloch
• Slavoj Žižek writes The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

Utilitarianism: choose actions based on the expected utility of outcomes.

• The ends justify the means.
• Jeremy Bentham founds utilitarianism.
• John Stuart Mill writes on utilitarianism.

Existentialism

• Either/Or (1843) by Søren Kierkegaard.
• Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
  • The Birth of Tragedy (1872): Apollo and Dionysus represent reason and chaos.
• Martin Heidegger: Being and Time (1927). Dasein, human existence, requires phenomenology to examine our experiences: our sense of wonder and our fear of death. Metaphysics is a transcendental curiosity about the world and our place in it.
• The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus.
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness (1943).
  • No Exit (1944) play. “Hell is other people”: three people are locked in a room for eternity. Name is a literal translation of the legal term in camera (“in a chamber”), a private process.

1971. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice

Topics

• Why do we value human life?
  • Many religions believe life is inherently valuable.
  • Sentience?
    • In the case of sick people, potential for sentience.
• Do animals deserve rights?
• Euthanesia.

Virtue ethics

piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice
Love: charity is the giving of things, kindness is the giving of self. -Ansel Adams

• Justice
  Moderation
  Honesty
• Sincerity
  Humility
• It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor. -Seneca
  Courage
• Resolve, Dependability, Industry, Tranquility
• Quotes on failure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arete

• 300 BC. Epicurus teaches limiting desire and achieving modest, sustainable pleasure through ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain).
• 300 BC. Stoicism teaches “virtue is the only good” and indifference (adiaphora) to worldly influence. Founded by Zeno of Citium.

Aesthetics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_philosophy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/how-do-we-create-our-corpus-examples/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Adages

Idioms
ablaut reduplication changes the vowel: chit-chat, zig-zag, tic-tac-toe.

Heroism

• Cometh the hour, cometh the man: in times of need, a hero will step up.
• Opportunity makes the man
• Necessity is the mother of invention.

Work

• to throw a spanner in the works, or a monkey wrench
• through thick and thin: determined progress through the English countryside
• pearls before swine
• let the cat out of the bag
• revenge is a dish best served cold
• Broadway auditions: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
• a tall tale or tall story is unbelievable, embellished, or fanciful.
• talk through their hat is to talk nonsense.
• taken for a ride means to be misled or cheated, or to be killed.
• take the piss or take the Mickey: tease
• Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Don’t

• keep a dog and bark yourself: old English proverb.
• bite off more than you can chew
• throw good money after bad.
• count your chickens before they are hatched
• cut off your nose to spite your face
• look a gift horse in the mouth
• put the cart before the horse
• shut the stable door after the horse has bolted
• throw the baby out with the bathwater
• upset the apple-cart
• burn your bridges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oxford_Dictionary_of_Quotations