hello and welcome to this online section
of introduction to philosophy
this series of videos is recorded for
my HUP 101 course
a class that I teach at laguardia community
college
my name is doctor richard brown and i
will be the instructor of this course
uh... this series of videos is, um, uh,
primarily intended for classes
uh... my online classes at laguardia
colleges as I just mentioned uh... but
i've taught this course of for many
years i taught it at brooklyn college
before i came to laguardia
and so uh... these slides these powerpoint
slides also accompany
the Chaffee book
uh...the philosopher's way which is the
book that students
in this course will be using
and so, um
uh... these slides then
represent what I kind of drew on the board, or whatever
a complete course in philosophy
and um...
in order to do that
the first question that we've got
to start with
just by way of introducing the topic
uh...is well, what is philosophy?
what is it that we're going to be studying in
this series of lectures?
and answering this question is very
difficult because if you ask
a hundred different philosophers what it
is they do you're liable to get a hundred
different answers
um so it's not a very easy question
to answer. Different people think
of philosophy as different things.
now, typically
uh...
sometimes people conceive of philosophy as
asking certain kinds of questions
well you know very deep questions about the meaning of life and
what's real and those kinds of things and it's true that
philosophers do ask those questions
and so one way of talking about
philosophy is talking about those kinds
of questions that philosophers deal with and the kinds of answers that they give
and so we'll talk about that at the
very end this lecture, talk about the
various branches philosophy
uh... another way of thinking about
philosophy is
looking, well, sort of
what the word means and how people have thought about it historically
and so that's what I want to turn to first uh...
i want to actually spend a little bit of
time
talking about what i call the pre
philosophical way of thinking
uh... or
uh... the way that people thought about
reality
before philosophy
uh... was discovered
and there was some characteristic
differences
in this historical way and so one
thing you'll notice uh... in these lectures is
that
I'm very historically orientated
and i think that it's very important
for us to put
the questions were interested in in this kind of historical perspective so we
will be going uh... historically in
order
all right so
to start with then at the beginning
let's give a very brief introduction to
the origins of society and all of this
should be taken with a grain of salt, of course
because when we're looking back on
history we're doing our best to
reconstruct events
uh... that
uh... only uh... fragmentary evidence of
which survives so we must always remember
that we're doing the best that we can
so we'll be referring to this timeline
here
over the course of the class
and so here I'll mark where we are now
the present-day CE
and those of you probably know that we used to use 'BC' and 'AD'
'BC' for 'before christ' and 'AD' for 'Anno Domini'
which uh... means in latin 'the year of our lord'
uh... and year one here is supposed to
mark the historical birth of uh... jesus
of nazareth
not everybody is a christian and so
having these christian-centric dates
uh...there is a movement away from
naming them that way so we changed it to
'CE' for
'common era'
and 'BCE' for 'before the common era' and
i use those prefixes here suffixes here (whatever)
but the turnaround date is still year
one there where historically
many have thought
jesus was actually born. There is some
debate about that, as i said earlier,
all of this is sort of piecemeal
knowledge that we have
but there are...some scholars think well
maybe he was born slightly earlier than year one
or slightly later than year one, by which I mean the actual historical jesus
uh...
uh... so we're not sure but that's the date that year one is set
uh... and that's why it's set at year one
now of course there are many cultures
that don't
have uh...
their dating system this way so
there are cultures that don't start over when they
think that jesus was born and so for
them
uh... they will number the year not 2011, like us, but five thousand something
but so roughly speaking then if this
timeline were to extend
all the way to the left
a good space using this same kind of rough metric that I've had here
you'd have to go another
seven
to 10 thousand years in the past
uh... to find human beings
as we
think of ourselves now settling down
uh... so this is the invention of
farming you may not think of farming
as an invention but it is an invention
there are certain technologies which are required
in order to farm; you need to be able to irrigate, you need to be able to
control water
um, by having
buckets for instance or uh...
irrigation channels, you need to be able to use a hoe
planting seeds in nice orderly rows, etc
so we have evidence and again none of this is
hard and fast um
ten thousand
roughly or so
uh... years before year one
people started farming
so then for roughly seven thousand years
people lived in this way
farming, settling down, domesticating animals
no longer living
hunter-gatherer lifestyles
no longer being nomads
but nothing like a city developing
there are still these tribal associations, it's still
very
family oriented, extended family
and etc
but around three thousand
five hundred years before year one
we find city life as we know it so what
we call civilization
civilized life
developing
and cities back then of course would've been
much smaller
a large city would comprise about
a thousand, two thousand people
something that we don't consider to be very large
but of course the population back then
would've been much smaller so there
would have been very large cities with a thousand to two thousand people
and of course
what corresponds with the origins of
civilization are
the invention of writing
and human beings around this time
seemed to have developed
writing in various places
around the world so it's not just in the
western world
that we find writing,
cuneiform tablets, etc, being developed
uh... but also of course everyone knows about Egypt
and the hieroglyphs
and
lesser-known perhaps in the americas they were also
developing forms of writing and in china and the east
as well
people are developing writing around this time and
it's interesting to look back at some of
these
earliest
kinds of writings...um...they give us some kind
evidence of what the people thought
at the time
and the way they viewed themselves in the in the grander
scheme so I want to take a look at
that
but first i want to focus on the places
that we're going to talk about so
here's some pictures this is the map of
ancient Mesopotamia
uh... over on the right over there is
where we're going to be focusing on
uh... babylon and sumer. Babylon is where
the tigris and euphrates rivers meet
and those of you uh... who are aware of current...uh...
...um...
nations and politics
will recognize
what is babylon there as modern day Iraq. So, there's Egypt there,
the Sinai peninsula
and of course the out of africa theory
which uh...
uh...
some scientists think describes the way
uh... we
human beings evolved
has it that human beings evolved in Africa
and then
migrated nomadically up and across the
the peninsula there and then settled down
uh... started farming in babylon
uh... in areas in Egypt and so on where these cities later developed, and so,
uh...
what we find from these early areas are
actually pieces of writing
which are very
illustrative so i want to look at one in
particular
and this is, um...
famously known as the Epic of
Gilgamesh.
Now
if you haven't read the Epic of Gilgamesh you probably should
it's a great story and it used to be read n English 101 classes, I don't
know if they still do or not, or in English 102 or something like that
uh... but it's an epic in the sense of
an epic adventure
and it tells the story of a king
named Gligamesh who was a great king of one of these ancient cities
and Gilgamesh wants to know
why people die, what the meaning of life
is and how we can be immortal.
So, he really wants to know the
answer to this question
and he decides that the way he's going
to answer it is to
go on a journey
to where the gods live
and to demand of the gods that they tell him, Gilgamesh, the answers to these questions.
and so he does.
A lot of adventures ensue.
uh... and I won't rehash all of the stuff that happens
He eventually gets to the gods and asks them this question
and they set him a bunch of tasks. They say 'Gilgamesh, if you complete these tasks
we'll answer your questions, tell you everything you want to know'.
the tasks are very much like
the kinds of things you find in greek mythology, um he has to kill a certain beast, he has to climb a certain mountain, he has to divert a certain
river
uh... and etc. So, he does all of that stuff.
and finally he comes to the last task the gods
the gods tell Gilgamesh 'you must stay awake for three days and three nights'
and if he does this
they will tell him the answer
So he says 'no problem'
but of course he doesn't have red Bull
or caffeine or any of the other luxuries, No-Doze, that modern people use to do all nighters
so he stays awake for three days
and two nights
and on the third night
he falls asleep.
So, poor Gilgamesh wakes up in the morning
to see the gods saying,
'oh well, you were so close but now you'll never know.'
they just...he does not complete the tasks
and he does not get to know the answer
he becomes very angry
and then he finds out, uh, comes to a
realization
that the way to be a immortal for a human
is to have your name remembered by doing great things. By building a great city, by being a fair ruler and so on
an so forth
this story, this very brief synopsis, a butchering, of a story
uh... illustrates two points that I want to make.
So, the first point is
that it's sort f wrong to think of philosophy as simply a group of questions
because notice the kind of question that Gilgamesh is asking here
are very deep questions
why do we die? What's the meaning of life? How do we
become immortal?
What's the right way to live?
It is not as though
only philosophers are interested in those questions
human beings are interested in
those kinds of questions
That seems to be
something
that afflicts us in a certain way. We want
to know the answer to these questions
but of course there are different ways
of answering
those questions
and gilgamesh
embodies a particular way of answering those questions
Notice he never once
entertains the idea
that he himself could figure out
the answer to these questions on his own.
Immediately from the beginning
the proposed solution to the problem
is to fid out those who know, the gods
and to ask them
and this is the general theme of the pre
philosophical way thinking
that human beings are
not capable knowing
the way the word is...only
...they are like children
who can't understand the most simplest things
the world is filled with the
supernatural personalities who really know.
The world of the gods
as you might be familiar
from uh...
retellings of these stories. Zeus, Athena and so on
um, that's who controls reality
and if you want to know
then you've got to ask. Now of course
uh... these would have been different
gods for
Gilgamesh
and people like him
but the idea that this roughly the same
so there's a conception of human beings
as supplicants
as not being able to know as uh...
having to be told by
divine revelation
the way reality really is
now there's another story that
illustrates this point as well and this is
something that we can see from the Code of Hammurabi.
Now, the Code of Hammurabi is famous because it is one of the earliest
written
laws we have
and you can actually go to the website of the Louvre and read a translation of the
Code of Hammurabi. It's there on their website. It's extremely interesting
i recommend that you do it if you have
the opportunity
if you do this you'll be struck by
two things. So, one is
the thing I was mentioning earlier, namely that
they're dealing with the same kind of
questions that
and problems that we deal with so their lives
are roughly
very similar to our lives. They live in a city. They're around people they don't know and
aren't related to
and there are various questions of how
you ought to interact with them. What obligations they owe to you, what obligations you owe to
them
and ways of coordinating behavior
such that
you can discourage certain kinds of behavior and
encourage other kinds of behavior. Very ordinary kinds of problems. So, that'll be the first thing you're struck by.
Now, of course
the way they discouraged behaviors was by a very eye for an eye type of justice
and uh... that will be something which
is kind of a shock to modern people their
system of punishment was very, very, eye for an eye, very
brutal I guess we might say
but, uh,
So, I don't want to dwell on that, that's not really the main point.
so the other point is
the source of the justification of these laws
So, the laws were
written on a giant
pole
ascribed around it
which was
smack dead in the center of the
entering gate of the city that
Hammurabi controlled
so that any person who walked into the city
would be faced first
with this inscription of all the laws. So that there was no excuse and everybody knew what the laws were
they were right there
you could check them.
But why should you obey those laws? Who was Hammurabi
to tell you these are the right laws?
Why these ones as opposed to some other set?
or no set at all?
Well, the answer is contained in the
preamble
of the Code of Hammurabi and the answer is roughly this:
Hammurabi is the son of god
He is the slayer of Tiamat, the great dragon, the orderer of chaos etc, etc, blah, blah, blah
he built this, he did that, god is his father, etc, etc, and so who else
better to know
than Hammurabi?
so again we see this appeal to divine
intervention
divine revelation
as the only
real way of knowing
what these laws are
so notice that nowhere in that
preamble is there anything like
well
we've thought about it carefully and these
appear to be the best way
to
achieve the goals that we've set for
ourselves uh... Goal One:
Coordinated behavior, Goal 2
Commerce, etc
so nothing about
us discovering the truth but
a lot about
the truth being revealed by a greater
source and that really is
what's contrasted with
the origin
of western philosophy
so, now, again, just before we move on I want to take a second to emphasize
that, um,
I'm talking here about western
philosophy and
we could tell a different story talking
about the origins of eastern philosophy
or american philosophy
so since we're talking about the sort
of society of the west which has its
origins in
Ancient Greece
uh... that's where we're going to be
focusing but that's not the say there's
anything overly specifically special
about the greek people at this time
uh... people
have been interested in these questions
and people around the world
have developed answers to them
although people n Ancient Greece
uh, have one
really definitively
western ways of dealing with these
problems
and questions which has influenced uh...
the spread of our culture so we'll be
taking a look at that
so again here's our timeline
uh... now there remember farming
invented about ten thousand years before
year one
civilization begins the invention of
writing
uh... uh... about thirty five hundred
years roughly again debatable but
roughly around that area
uh... before year one
and so when does philosophy start? Well
we date the origins of western philosophy
to about six hundred years
before year one
notice that's roughly
three thousand years from the beginning
of writing
to the origins of philosophy so during
that time period
the pre philosophical way of thinking as
i have characterized it
dominates
and we can think right around twelve
hundred BCE
so that's right around the mark there where it says '1000'
uh... was where many scholars think
that moses lived and of courses moses
gave us the ten commandments and that's prototypical of this pre philosophical way of
thinking
what's the right way to live your life?
Well you can'y answer that question
moses goes to mountain, god reveals to him
directly
the correct rules
for living
a good life and then moses comes back and
says god told me this is the right way
to do it
so that's the uh... another way of
thinking about and of course if you
don't do it god intervenes and punishes you
So these are kind of the twin ideas
of the pre philosophical way of thinking
when there's an earthquake god's
punishing you for breaking some rule
when there's a nice bountiful harvest god's rewarding you for following the rules
and so it's important for us to know
what the rules are and the way the world
works but we can't know for ourselves
so we're dependent on
somebody else, the gods,
handing that down and then them handing that down to us
so that's roughly the pre
philosophical way of thinking
and the philosophical way of thinking begins
around six hundred years before year one
and i should caution um... just so that
there's no misunderstanding
it's not as though once philosophy is
discovered
this older way of thinking goes out
of date. People still subscribe to this
view and people did at that time as
well
it's just that
this is the earliest
that we know of where people start advocating
some other way of thinking about human
beings
and our relation to
reality
so let's take a look
so this is where we're going to be
spending uh... roughly one third of the
class is spent in ancient greece
almost uh...
over a third of the class actually so
it's good to get familiar with it so
just look at the map for second you can
see the aegean sea there
separating Greece on the left from Ionia
on the right
'Ionia' was the ancient name
for that land mass nowadays we
would call that that's where turkey is
uh... buts this is a
map of ancient greece
so the isle of crete down there at the bottom
the Cretans who lived on the Isle of Crete,
even in the ancient period had a
reputation for being liars aristotle
famously wrote
that he was perplexed by the sentence 'all
cretans are liars'
so i don't know what those ancient cretans were up to but uh...
they seem to have developed a bad rep
so then moving on up you can see
uh, Corinth there and Corinth is famous from the letters from the
Corinthians and to the Corinthians which are included in the Bible
Then up top there's the oracle at delphi
and delphi and the oracle will play an
important part of the story of the life
of socrates and we'll talk about that
but you must know the oracle from
uh... delphi from
other sources
uh... more than likely you'd know it as
the source of
the prophecy
uh... that a certain person would mary their
mother
and killer father
and uh... I'll leave you to fill in the name of that famous person
but i'm sure you know who I'm talking about
uh... ok and then there's athens which is where
a lot of the action will take place
because there is where socrates and
plato and aristotle
socrates was an Athenian
uh... plato was the student of socrates and
starts the Academy there and Aristotle
goes to study there so
with plato at the academy and then starts his own school
and so athens has always been an important part of
ancient philosophy
but actually the story starts over
in Ionia in a city called 'Miletus'
and the earliest philosophers as far as
we know and again remember history is
mostly a guessing game because
we're always trying to figure out what
happened on the basis of incomplete
evidence
so we don't really really know what
happened
six hundred years before the birth
uh... jesus but we have some ideas and
most of them come from historical
writers
uh...like aristotle
at for instance and Theophrastus and there
are others
who are writing about this period and we
have those writings
so a lot of it is pieced
together
and so we're not saying that no one ever
had these ideas before it's quite
possible that there was a person
before this period of time who had a lot of
similar ideas
but we don't have anything
written down which have survived
which indicate that this is  so what we
have now the best evidence suggests
what we're going to call philosophy
um... originated in Miletus
roughly six hundred years before year one
and in particular with a
individual named Thales and Thales
uh... was roughly born in this 620's
a six hundred and twenty
years before year one we don't really
know
because the ancients didn't really
keep birth records they weren't interested
in when someone was born
uh... there were more interested in when
someone dies so we have really complete
death records
we know that he died in five forty six
now notice that these dates go
backwards and that's because of course
we're counting down
to year one
whereas where we are now in the year two
thousand eleven we're counting away from
year one so
uh... it's not weird to be born in six
twenty and die in five forty six
uh... that's the way we date things back then
and thales is a real interesting person
uh... there's a lot that can be said
about him
and i'll spend some time talking about
thales
and the people around him other uh...
greeks, Anaximander and
uh
Anaximenes
uh... those are the hard to say, wait until you see how there're spelled
okay so
And these are collectively are known as the 'pre-Socratic philosophers'
and there're some other ones we'll talk about
there is a whole section on pre socratic philosophy
don't worry about why it's called that
for now but that's what
we'll talk about that later but that is what
it's called
so these
thales for instance was interested in
questions about the makeup of
the physical world he wanted to know
whether or not there were some
fundamental stuff
some thing out of which all of the other stuff
was made
and he also rejected
any kind of supernatural explanations
for the things he was interested in
and these kinds of twin
interests and ideas here
came to dominate a lot what happened in early
Miletus uh... these...uh, excuse me
in early Miletus in other words
uh... the philosophers who were
uh... the earliest philosophers who came before Socrates plato
and aristotle
So let me give you some example of the
kinds of things
thales was interested in
he was interested in the shape of the
earth and this has been something that
people had been interested in for a very long time
and there were various theories about the
shape of the earth
uh...but
the reasons given
for believing in the shape being this or that
were usually
uh...
uh...
related to religion or being revealed by
 a god or being revealed in a trance so
what thales did was to try to give
arguments
that we could figure out what the shape of the
earth was ourselves if we paid close
attention to our environment so for
instance
he famously claimed that you would have
different experiences of a ship
coming in from sea or going out to
sea
depending on the shape of the earth so if
the earth were round
you would expect the ship the
disappeared gradually part by part
whereas if the ship were excuse me, if the earth were flat you would expect
the ship to just disappear altogether all at
once as it faded away
uh... gradually
and that experience bore out the first
claim that you would see the
first part, the lower parts of it disappear
first and higher parts of it disappeared
later
because it's going around
a bend or a curve
so secondly also it had been known for a
thousand years at least the babylonians
kept very, very
meticulous records of eclipses and the
activities of the uh... stars and
planets and so on
and it had been known or thought that
uh... what happened during an eclipse
was that the shadow of the earth was
being cast
on the thing being eclipsed, so when the moon is eclipsed that's earth's shadow that
you see
and thales argued that since this the
shape of the shadow of the earth
would give you some evidence to the
shape of the actual earth itself since
that was the thing that was casting its
shadow
and that the shape of the earth was circular
perhaps spherical
uh... and so that would give you some
good reason to believe that that was the
shape that the earth actually had
so now notice again what's important, the point that's being made here is
that
thales is not the first person to ever
suggest that the earth is round or spherical
people had suggested that before
for instance there are people who claim that the earth is the shape of an egg
and this is because
it was revealed to them that way. There was some mystical
divine source
to the idea. Whereas what thales is arguing is that
well even if that
is revealed to you
and so he is not particularly criticizing belief in gods here
even if that is the case we still
ourselves
can determine it
so that we can tell what the shape of the
earth is by by thinking about it by
looking carefully
now thales also thought that he had an answer to this idea
uh... the question was everything
fundamentally unified some how
and though people debate about exactly what he meant by this
but he's famous for, or at least aristotle cites him as saying
that the fundamental principle of reality is water somehow
that the...that's taken to mean that the original state of the universe was water
or that things are somehow still
composed of water so that
a piece of wood would be like
ice really really compactified
but the basic idea that thales had and that other pre socratic
Miletian
philosophers
these earliest philosophers had
was that there was some
fundamental stuff
which existed
sort of un formed and contained within it
the essences of everything else and somehow
that stuff
was transformed into the many things
that we see around us
and that was a basic idea
that these guys had. That there was some basic fundamental stuff
out of which other things came and then they would debate about well,
what the fundamental stuff
uh... and they would give arguments so for
instance some people would claim that, uh,
water is a better candidate than
uh... say for instance fire
because water uh... is frozen and turns into
ice and can be in
uh... also
evaporated into
gas forms and so we can see already how it occupies different states
and then people would debate so that's just...
now to get into these debates, we'll touch on some of the pre socratic debates
in that section but just to give you a
flavor
of the kinds of things that these
guys were interested in and also
uh...
to try to show you that they weren't merely
saying that this was revealed to them
but we're trying to discover the
fundamental nature of reality
on their own
okay and also
they give naturalistic answers
so whereas earlier
for instance an earthquake might have been thought of
as uh...
an expression of the wrath of god for not
following some rule of theirs
thales argues
that these are not appropriate
explanations
that the world around us is an orderly
system
which is constructed according to certain kinds of
rational principles
and that we as rational human beings
can kind of try to figure out what those
rational principles are
for instance thales argued that what an earthquake was was on analogy to a
boat
in the water when the boat is floating and the
wind blows the boat rocks back-and-forth
and someone on the boat would think of that as a quaking
and so an earthquake, thales hypothesized
must mean that the earth is floating on water
and rocking back-and-forth like a boat would
now of course we know that that's wrong
uh... we talk about
tectonic plates and pressures
um, causing earthquakes we don't talk about earth floating
on water in fact we don't think that islands technically
uh... float on water
so
uh... we know that thales is wrong in
these instances but
notice the approach that he is taking
uh... is radically different
we can figure out what an earthquake is
and there's kind of evidence that it might be something like this given that there's a
similar phenomena
so thales is here thinking that we
ourselves
have the abilities
to figure out the way the world works
and
uh... he's not necessarily criticizing religion
there can still be gods and there can still
be divine revelation
uh... that can be one way of knowing
but thales is advocating another way of knowing
one that involves
use of human reason
so let's take a second to sum up the
things that i've been talking about in
this first
part of the lecture
I've been trying to...
one theme I've been trying to emphasize
is that
philosophy isn't really
distinguished
by the questions that it asks because
people've asked those questions all the time
they've always ask them
really what makes uh...
so those questions are just common to human beings
what makes something philosophical is rather the approach one takes
to the questions themselves
rather than
the actual asking of the questions because
i want to say that
Gilgamesh was asking the same question
about the meaning of life
and immortality that a philosopher might ask
but that he
his way of answering it is very different
whereas he wants to appeal the divine
revelation
the philosopher says
that
we don't appeal to divine revelation
so the pre philosophical way of thinking
is really characterized by those
two claims there on the bullet points
the first is that
divine revelation is the only source of knowledge. Human beings
aren't capable of knowing
on their own
and secondly
that the physical world around us
is controlled by these supernatural
personalities
and they can intervene at any point that
they want to enforce their will
so it's up to to us to try to figure out
what they want
and uh...
make them favor us as opposed to disfavor us so that's what i'm calling the pre
philosophical way of thinking
thales and his
contemporaries
deny
both of these claims
so rather then divine revelation thales says reason
argument and observation are
sources of knowledge about the world
so now notice combined in there are things we would call science, things
that we would call philosophy
uh... and part of the history of this is
the
gradual separation of things which we
called science
and things which we call philosophy
but at this time they're all wrapped up
into one and people don't really
recognize
a distinction
between philosophy and science
except for
that they're different kinds of philosophy
so natural philosophy would have been
the philosophical study of the natural world
as opposed to...uh,
so the way that physical objects move
would have been thought of as a branch of philosophy and indeed
newton
who...who writes his book on gravity etc...publishes it
under the title
'the mathematical principles of natural
philosophy' so newton call, referred to what
he was doing as natural philosophy
so we'll see a distinction get made
eventually but doing it historically
these ideas are all wrapped up so reason
argument and observation
are sources of knowledge
and that's a denial that
revelation
is necessary for knowledge but again be
careful
it's not a denial that revelation
can be a source of knowledge
so there is no conflict with religion
in the definition
of philosophy that we're talking about
here
you can be a religious philosopher, you could be someone who thinks that reason and argument are sources of knowledge
and also someone who thinks that
God can reveal knowledge to us if
he, she, it so chooses
so there's no conflict between religion
and philosophy
the only conflict here is between
views on which human beings are incapable of finding
answers to these questions on their own
and views on which they are capable of finding answers to these questions on their own.
Now of course
this doesn't mean that we'll like the
answers that we find
we may find out the answers to be
contrary to what we thought
hoped etc
but the idea is that by reason
observation and
careful reflection
we'll be able to discover the way things
are and that was really what thales
and the other pre socratic
philosophers
thought
distinguished them
from the other way of thinking about the
world
where human beings are
supplicants always asking to be told but
never
taking action
never figuring it out on their own
and what this amounts to for thales
really is an emphasis on mathematics
and at this point in time in history of
the universe
geometry in particular
so I want to stop for a second and say
something about geometry because it
really is important for understanding
this whole period in
ancient philosophy
so it's hard for us modern contemporary people to think about geometry in the right way
geometry seems to us to be something you learn in 7th grade, some very basic, simple math
uh... something you memorize some formulas for squares and circles and area and
blah blah
and then later on you learn more interesting and important things like trigonometry
and
calculus
but of course
that's not the way the ancient
people thought about geometry
Geometry actually originated not in Greece
but in Egypt
for a very practical purpose
so if you think about the word 'geometry' you actually see its original purpose
encoded
so the words comes from 'geo metria'
'geo' meaning Earth and 'metria' meaning measurement
and so 'geo metria' is literally the measurement of the earth
and the Egyptians needed this
very practical ability to measure areas on the ground
because of the flooding of the nile which
was a regularly
scheduled event so to speak in Egypt
even to this day
so the ancient egyptians would set their calendar
by the flooding of the nile
they would say 'that's day one right there, when the nile floods, that new year's, that's month 1'
uh... so
but uh...this is a very reliably reoccurring
disastrous event
and of course if you own property
and you have a fence up
and the nile floods and your fence goes away then you
need a way to reestablish where the
fence went
so you need a way to say how
wide five
hectares of land, five square hectares of land really is
you need a way to say
where that fence actually gets
reestablished
um, now thales gets the credit um for
introducing
geometry into greece
the story goes that he went to egypt, as was common
for greek men in their education to
spend uh... the last year of it abroad
So thales goes to egypt and studies with egyptians
and sees them doing this, measuring the earth
and he brings geo metria back to greece
but instead of using it for this
practical applied
purpose
thales becomes interested in proving theorems about geometry
he becomes interested shown for instance
that
if you take two right triangles
who have a certain area and combine them
you can always make them into a square
and the area of the square will have exactly the same area as the sum of both of the right right triangles
so, very basic facts about geometry...these are
things which are known by
reason
and this method
becomes something that the
ancient philosophers really become
transfixed by and the history of philosophy is a
struggling with
whether this is really true or not
but its one of the very earliest ideas
uh... philosophical ideas that
people had
and that was that
there seems to be some things which can be
known directly by reason
and that reason is a special sense in a way
kind of like seeing
uh... but in a different way
it gives us access to the way things have to be the way things must be
and this becomes a very important theme
uh... at and it's all analogized to this
idea that the in
geometry what do you is
you start of the set of axioms
which are indisputable
which are known directly by reason
and then you expand from those and prove
various other truths
about
reality
the way reality must be
which you didn't know before hand
so for instance
one of the axioms of geometry is the
parallel postulate the idea that two
parallel lines will never meet
so if you look at these two lines of text
on the bullet points here
those two lines are parallel to each other
and you don't need to walk the lines
and make sure they never cross you can kind of just tell by thinking about it
they'll never cross
the definition of a line on which all of geometry is founded in some sense
simply a line, a straight line
is the shortest distance between two points
you can't really prove that
there's no way that you can say
ah here's the argument for why that's
the case it's just something that you
can kind of
see has to be true
but not see with your eyes
seeing with reason
this idea becomes extremely influential
that the way that
mathematics works is kind of a a guide
for how we'll discover the way reality works
by using reason to
reverse engineer
the principles
which govern
the way reality is that was in some sense,
i think a unifying theme
uh... all of ancient philosophy
and as will see, because we'll go through these periods of time in philosophy
we'll see this idea gets developed
debated
refined and it's still a current theme of uh, uh
philosophers today
now of course
the other claim here is this commitment
to the world being natural
and by natural what they mean is that
it's explainable
assuming rational law like
relationships
you're not going to appeal to the
anger of Zeus to explain what lightning is
but rather you'll appeal to some natural
phenomenon which generalizes
and gives a nice
universal explanation
for why things
work that way
so that's what i wanted to say, suggest really is at the heart of what philosophy is
philosophy is this commitment to the
claim
that we're going to find out the way things are
that's how it begins that's how it sees
itself
self-consciously
at its origin. It sees itself as a way of standing
against the idea
that human beings are incapable of achieving this kind of
knowledge
so let's turn now to our second way of
thinking about
what philosophy is because  remember that's  the overarching goal of this first lecture
to give us a sense of what philosophy is
what philosophers do
so the more traditional way of doing
this is the start with the meaning  of the
word 'philosophy'
there's an interesting history there
so this I think is probably well known and so we won't spend
overly
too much time on it but we will spend
some time because its standard
and not everyone knows it perhaps.
so, the word 'philosophy' again come from greek and that's the interesting thing about
English is that
the more latin and greek you know the more english you know because
most of our
important words
uh... come from
those sources
so now as you probably know like I said
uh...the source of this word is
'phila sophia'
'phila' meaning love  and 'sophia'
meaning wisdom so this is rather famous
now what may be is less famous is who
coins this term
it was actually originated by Pythagorus
and Pythagorus was alive in five seventy bce
uh... so now remember thales  was
alive in six twenty
so you might ask yourself well was that before or after pythagorus?
and of course the answer is that thales came
before pythagorus since six twenty
is further away
from year one
than five seventy is uh... and we don't
know a lot about the Pythagoreans although
they're very interesting and we will talk
briefly about
pythagorus and his followers when we talk about
pre socratic philosophy
more fully instead of just this introductory way
Pythagorus is more famous for his theorem A squared plus B squared equals C squared which is a
theorem of geometry
and it describes the behavior of a right triangle and the relationships of its sides to each other
so that's basic
uh... geometry but pythagorus suggested that
we should be called philosophers
as a way to distinguish
what they were interested in from
another group
of people
which they called the 'sophists'
this really is uh... the way that socrates
and plato saw the line up
so the sophists
were a loose group of philosophers
uh... who were united
by a couple of themes
and these are the themes here
excuse me, these are the themes here. So 'sophist' of course means 'wise people'
from sofia there
and in english we still use this word so that's where we say 'sophisticated' means sort of
wise/intelligent
but also as sophisticated has a kind of
negative connotation if you
in certain uses something can be too
sophisticated
and that's retaining some of this older
use of the world; 'sophistry'
so sophists were often skeptics
a skeptic is someone who thinks
that we can't know what the truth is
uh... or more radically someone who thinks there is no such thing as the truth
and so they would often argue that look
you know whatever you think it's true
that's just true for you
and there's no such thing as The Truth of the matter, or anything like that
uh... so famously uh...
a sophist named
Protagerous
proclaimed
that man was the measure of all things
people took that to mean that look, whatever you think is true, is true (for you)
philosophy in this sense of the word
was opposed
to that kind of view
philosophy stood for
the search for
the truth
wisdom being kind of the idea that
we are looking for the truth here
so a philosopher was someone who wanted to
know
the way
things really were they had a...uh,
they didn't know
so it wasn't as though they
actually had that knowledge
but they wanted to know
uh... and so they saw themselves more
in line
with the early Miletians namely
in the sense of thinking there is a truth and that
we're able to discover it
we haven't discovered it yet but we want to discover it
we're sort of
wounded
and that's where the word 'wonder' has
its roots from this kind of wounding
by these intellectual questions
you just are burnt up with
curiosity over whether there is a fundamental stuff out of which everything else is made or
what the real nature of reality is
uh... uh... is movement possible these kinds of
questions eat you up at night
uh...so that's the idea of the philosopher
as the seeker of truth as opposed
to the sophists
who don't really care about the truth
and instead are interested in
power
and rhetoric
where rhetoric is simply the idea that you convince the other person that you are right
and so we'll see some of this get played
out when we look at socrates
and the Platonic dialogues
where socrates talks to a famous
sophist whose name is Thrasymacus
and we'll see this idea that
well he'll only talk if he's paid
he doesn't really love it he's just doing it for
the money
and he's only interested in power
uh... who's controlling other people
as opposed to
the philosopher
who's really interested in the truth, is a seeker of  knowledge and of wisdom
so now
this adds to
the previous way of thinking so it's still a way of saying well look
we can figure out what's going on but it adds a deeper dimension
of commitment
to finding out the way things really are
and merely convincing other people that
you're right
okay so finally now coming to our
third and final part of the lecture
we can talk about the various traditional branches of philosophy
and the
questions that philosophers deal with
or some of them anyway
the first branch of philosophy
perhaps the most fundamental although we can debate about that
often thought to be the most fundamental is the branch known as metaphysics
which is defined as the study of the ultimate nature of
reality
now where the word 'metaphysics' comes from uh... it just comes from the name
of the book aristotle wrote on this so
there's no real special meaning attached
to
uh... metaphysics
uh... aristotle wrote a book on physics where he talked about how objects move
and then he wrote a second book on what it meant to be an object at all and on what kinds
of objects could exist and so on
and that simply became known as the book after the physics
'after the physics' you say in greek 'ta meta ta physica' after, meta, physics
so it became shortened
through history
simply referred to as metaphysics and
that's where the word comes from
often students are disappointed that there is no special hidden meaning to the term 'metaphysics'
but even so you can see that that
that it's an appropriate title because
meta means something that comes before uh...
in physics uh... the study of physical
world so often metaphysicians think that
what they're interested in comes prior
or is at a somehow higher level of abstraction
than what physicists
are interested in physicists are
interested in describing the actual laws
of nature
and metaphysics are interested in describing the
way things could be the way things have
to be the way
they must be
so what kind of questions then do the
discuss
well we've already looked at one of the basic questions in metaphysics
excuse me
which is
whether
there are fundamental parts out of which
everything else is made
or
whether as the famous story goes
it's turtles all the way down
Now if you don't know this story let me just tell you really quickly
uh... it used to be wondered what the earth rested on
and of course uh... atlas
was thought to hold the earth on his shoulders
in greek mythology
and when people asked 'well, what does atlas stand on?'
and then someone says he stands on a giant turtle
and then someone says, well what does that turtle stand on?
and then someone says,
that turtle stands on another turtle
and someone says, well what does that turtle stand one?
and the teacher replied,
'son it's turtles all the way down'
so it's a turtle on a turtle on a turtle
and so that's a joke of course but you can see what the point is supposed to be
is there an infinite series of smaller parts and smaller parts and smaller parts
and smaller parts?
or is there some fundamental level
at which parts stop?
and there is a basic set perhaps of things
out of which
uh... other things are constructed
that's a basic question in metaphysics
and and there are various answers to it
uh...
uh... it was thought for long time that
there was a basic stopping point which was known as the atom
and the greeks
came up with that word. In greek atom means 'a tomos' or unsplittable
a basic element which couldn't get any smaller. We'll look at some early greek versions
of atomism
uh...but
modern physics suggests that the atom has parts
quarks, electrons, protons. Those things have parts
quarks
some suggest that those are composed of strings
so it's a open question right now still
unresolved whether there is a smallest
part or whether it's turtles all the way down
so we'll look at some of the
historical
positions on this which are very
interesting
so a related question is one about whether
reality is completely physical or
whether there are non physical elements to
reality
this a very deep and vexing question which
has a long history so uh all kinds
of things have been thought at one point
were candidates for being non physical
these range from
everyday objects like numbers
one two three five seven 100
some philosophers have argued those are non
physical objects
things like god
being perfect unchangeable
existing at all times
uh... some have argued that um...
uh... moral facts that it's wrong to
kill innocent
people
for no reason is
a non physical fact about reality
which can't be captured by any physical
thing out there
and um...
uh...these transcend from
simple things like ghosts and ectoplasm
all the way to the
perfect
divine unity so that there are of course
excuse me I almost forgot
another main
candidate for being non physical is the
human mind or whatever makes humans
human
so we'll look at
various proposed
metaphysical schemes where
things are physical or not physical
uh...
very deep and perplexing questions here
now of course another deep and perplexing
question
which we'll look at is what the
nature of causation how does
one thing cause another. It seems to be
commonplace in our ordinary experience
we know that changes are brought about
through cause and effect and so the concept
of change the concept of cause and
effects what they are in the world
is going to be something that philosophers are very
concerned about metaphysicians
another very large branch of metaphysics
is uh... questions about whether the will
is free whether uh... my actions are
determined
uh... by laws of physics for instance or
by god's foreknowledge  are the traditional
ways of putting it
now in this class we won't be focusing too
much on these issues
although they are central and deserve to be focused on
i usually focus on them in my ethics
class
where issues of freedom and moral responsibility arise and
in my philosophy of religion class
where issues of freedom and the problem of
evil and god's foreknowledge come up
so uh... although and there's just not
enough time to cover everything so free
will gets sort of
left on the side in this class
although uh...
i've always felt guilty about that and maybe now in this new online format
might include some
lectures on it
but uh...
because i have them from the other courses so I'm not sure
but i'd be interested to hear what
people thought about that
so then concluding this is  um question
about what exists
what does it mean to exist?
uh...
Do numbers exist? If so how, what does it
mean to say that something exists
physically or something exists non
physically what's the difference there?
so when you're talking about these kinds of
questions which focus narrowly on
existence
people have uh... often referred to it under the term 'ontology'
and 'ontology'
comes from
the greek word 'ontos' meaning being
and 'ology' meaning
study of
so ontology is the study of being or what it means to have being
and uh... these kinds of questions are
inherently metaphysical
although sometimes you will use ontology
you will hear the word 'ontology' being
used to talk about
what a particular person thinks is real
so in your ontology you might include
things like numbers ghosts god
persons tables chairs dogs cats electrons quarks
you might exclude things like numbers gods cats etc
so
debates about ontology are debates about
what has existence what does it mean to
have existence
and we'll see some of these ancient people were very
interested in this question
but it's also one that we still are
dealing with
in are contemporary times
okay so on the flip side of that so on
the one hand we have questions about the
nature of reality what is really real if
that makes any sense and how is that
reality
on the other hand  we have questions
about how we come into contact with that
reality how we know about
so the greek word for one kind of knowledge is 'episteme'
therefore epistemology is the study of
knowledge
now there are various questions epistemologists addressed one of the
more fundamental questions is
what is truth what does it mean for a
sentence to be true
the traditional answer the one which
seems commonsensical that somehow
our language describes reality and
sentences are true when it describes it
correctly
leads to all sorts of interesting results
in metaphysics namely
that there must be something out there
correctly described
by the things
that we say and talk about
and as you'll see this is what starts a
lot of trouble
uh...
maybe therefore it even leads us to believe
that numbers have to exist
or even possibly that all things have to
exist because we can talk about
things
which don't seemingly exist
so there all sorts of questions about
uh... the relationship between things we
say and think and the way the world is and
those
are epistemological questions
so now of course the big question in
epistemology is what knowledge it is
what does it mean to know something?
and we'll look at various accounts
of what that means uh... plato theory
of knowledge which is
fairly well developed
and this is still in the area of contemporary debate
so now of course
we want to know what the difference from
is between belief and knowledge so one
thing the you can say is what seems like
you can believe things that are false
but it doesn't seem like you can know something that is false
well, so these are different states then
what's the relationship?
uh... traditionally people have thought
knowledges belief plus something else
and have wondered what that something
else is
more contemporary issues
take a knowledge...
knowledge first view and say well knowledge is
we know we know things
and then belief must be
somehow less than knowledge and then
they look for what's missing so there
are various views about what this
relationship is and we're not going to
really
talk about them in the class but for people who are interested later these are going to be
be very
important questions
and of course as i just said we want to
know how
this thing is related to truth
merely having a true belief doesn't mean
you know it
for instance
it could be
that you have a belief that's true but
it's accidentally true a famous case of
something like this would be
for instance maybe looking at a clock
which is broken
it's on the wall it's says  four o'clock
as it happens it turns out it really is
four o'clock when you look at the clock
so you form a belief that it's four
o'clock
it's true that it's four o'clock
you have some reason to believe that
it's four o'clock o'clock the clock has been
reliable in the past
but it doesn't seem like you really know it
and then people debate
this issue. Do you know it?
do you not know it? if so why not
so there are interesting questions about
what the
general concept of knowledge is
now here's one that the history of
philosophy
uh...
has struggled with
and one that we'll be looking at a lot in
this class
assuming we do know things
where do we get it?
and as we've seen already the early
philosophers had this mixed
idea
that there are some things which are
knowable by reason
like that parallel lines don't cross and
that the shortest distance between two
points is a straight line
and then there are other things which you
know by the senses
like that the shape of the
shadow of the earth is spherical
or gives us reason to believe that the
earth is spherical etc
so
uh... there's a uh... large dispute
about what the real sources of knowledge
are
and we'll see
um... that uh... one popular interpretation of the history of philosophy
this actually was made
popular by kant who looked
back at the history of philosophy and said look
here's what you see and lots of people have agreed
with him
is namely
a struggle between what are known as
rationalists who think that knowledge come
from reason
and is all based on mathematics and logic and
stuff like that
and those were called empiricists
who believe that science and empirical
observation are the real sources of
knowledge
so there is a way of looking at the
history of philosophy where these views
are fighting
and the earliest view as you might have guessed is a kind of rationalist
view
where the senses are downplayed
and science comes in later as a
challenge to this kind of view and so
that's one way of looking at the history of
philosophy
and we'll roughly approach things that
way although I'll point along the way
where people disagree
here's another question about epistemology how you know that you know
something when you in fact do know it
so for instance rationalists like to
think that there's a way of
telling that you know something
it it there's a certain kind of
experience
uh... a rational
kind of
compelling
a forcing, a feeling of forced to
believe something
when reason tells you it has to be that way
like for instance
when you think about the parallel
postulate that
parallel lines cannot meet
you know that that's gotta be true you know
that you know it you have knowledge that
that's true and you know it because it
feels special in a sense
now of course there's been a debate
about that
and we'll look at the various counter
examples in fact it turns out maybe
the parallel postulate is itself
one of these counter examples although
people have responded that it can be
interpreted in a way that's consistent
so we'll look at those kind of questions
now of course is another big question
uh... what about the skeptic? is a
possible know anything at all?
the skeptic says look you don't know
that the laws of nature are necessary and
universal you don't know that the
physical world exists you don't know
that the world wasn't created five
minutes ago and that all your memories
aren't false
so there's a real serious challenge here
uh... how do we
how can we be sure that what we have is
really knowledge
uh... as opposed to something else and
we'll look at that there are some
serious arguments for skepticism
we'll look at the way that people tried
to deal with those arguments
okay now
metaphysics and epistemology are clearly
related to each other as
two sides of a coin are
so
as soon as you say what's real you're telling me that you know what's real
so you're already talking about
you must have some way to know that
the things your talking about are that way
now of course as soon as you start talking abut what knowledge is
you talk about which things can be known and so which things are real
and so
the two are
intimate related... intimately related
and we cross back and forth from
talking about epistemology to talking about
metaphysics
but it's extremely important to keep them clear
no matter how related they are they are
different
types of questions one
a question about what is real, what is out
there
the other a question of what we know
a question about us
and we'll see a gradually a separating at
these
uh... as we move through this stuff
now uh...
apart from these two major branches we
can also see the branch of uh...
the branch of philosophy known as ethics
ethics can be
informally defined as the study of right
and wrong or good and bad
where what do we mean right
actions good persons
which things should we not do which things should we do
it's in general the study of which things
have value
what is the nature of value that's a
question
uh... which uh... ethicists wanna know
what does it mean, are there
objective values that are things which all
persons have to value?
or there're really only relative values?
so
now if you think about sort of value
theory in this broad sense that's going
to include the branches of philosophy
traditionally known as aesthetics and
political philosophy
so aesthetics is the
study of the beautiful
what's the nature of art?
uh... but really it's a question about what's valuable
uh... whether art is valuable what's
the the relation of beauty to value
and of course
political philosophy questions about
what the best form of government is
these are all value judgments and there's
relationships between these three
although ethics
aesthetics, the study of art and beauty and
political philosophy
uh... are separate they can all be branched under one
major category known as the  study of
values
so now ethics more traditionally
construed as the subject of the study of
right and wrong, good and bad, um, what we're
interested in there what actions are
moral
is abortion immoral?
uh... is abortion moral? or is suicide immoral? is suicide moral? lying? etc
now of course the big question in ethics is
the skeptical one the
one about whether we can know the moral
truths or whether there are any such
things as moral truths in the first place
the relativist thinks there's no such thing
as real truth its relative to you or this
or the other thing
whereas relativism about
mathematics has never been very popular
relativism about ethics
remains extremely popular and so there's
a serious question
about whether it's true or not uh... and
uh... a large part of an ethics class is
is spent
dealing with the arguments for and
against
relativism
now another question which it falls under
this category but which is not so much
addressed by contemporary persons as
it used to be by ancient persons
this is the question of what kind of
life one should live
is it better to live a life of seeking
money or of seeking intellect?
or seeking pleasure?
and there are various answers to that
question in history of philosophy
we're not going to be talking too much about
ethical questions
although we will talk about
uh... briefly
some of the issues
because socrates was interested in them
you can talk about socrates without
bringing these questions out
okay
but this is primarily a class on
metaphysics epistemology
and primarily the history of that
uh...and the way it interacts with what we think currently
okay so finally then the last branch
bringing this all to a close the study of
logic
which can be defined as the art of good and
bad reasoning
or of good and bad
arguments
and so notice that this is extremely
important because um... earlier i was
talking about philosophy as
the use of reason and argument
to discover what is true or what can be
known
if that's the case logic is extremely
important because it's our science of
determining which arguments are good and
which reasoning is bad
and so it occupies a very central
place
and we will touch on some logic in fact I'll give a brief introduction to
syllogistic logic, the logic of aristotle
and extend it sort of
to truth-functional logic, contemporary logic, just briefly enough
to uh... hopefully interest one in taking a
logic class uh... because logic is
something
that improves
one's ability to reason
and uh...
even though it's related to mathematics
in a certain sense
it's more fundamental perhaps than
mathematics
and hopefully
uh... mathematical truths are expressible
in terms of logical truths or at
least
that was the hope of one group of
philosophers and maybe by the end of the
class
uh... we'll be position say something
about that
uh... although i'm not sure
so that concludes
