Fall 2009 Philosophy of Human Nature Lecture Notes

This page is primarily for notes for class lecture and discusion.

Return to Human Nature

9/2: Course Intro, Philosophy, and the Real

1. Course Goals
2. Roll Call
3. Schedule, Grading Schemes, Wiki, Journals, Study Questions
4. Philosophy

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy is a discipline of inquiry directed toward a wide range of basic questions about the nature of the universe and our experience in it. It involves a turn toward "basic questions". It also involves meta-level cognition.

Logos, Mythos, and Theos

locating philosophy in relation to Mythos and Theos

Logos (Human culture associated with discovery of truths about a wide range of objects)

Associated with Philosophy, Interpretation, and Science

Requires belief in the truth on conclusions.

Aspires toward rational knowledge.

Theos (Human culture associated with our relationship to totality and to the divine)

Associated with Religion.

Commitment to truth of beliefs, but no longer typically asserted as rational knowledge.

Includes both individual and communal experience which produce insight and knowledge about important matters in life.

Mythos (Human culture associated with myth and story in drama, books, and other media.)

Typically associated with fiction, but includes dominant myths of the culture.

Does not require belief in the reality of objects in the story.

Claim to truth derived from indirect reference.

It is important to acknowledge that these three areas of culture interpenetrate each other extensively. There are stories and philosophies at work in religions. Philosophy attempts to purge itself of narrative, but some saying that is never successful. And story telling almost always seems to imply a view of life and a hence a range of philosophies.

What is Real? (1st Exercise)

We discussed some ways of identifying the "real". We'll pick this up briefly next class as we talk more about Plato's answer.

The Nature of Philosophy and Philosophical Method

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy is a discipline of inquiry directed toward a wide range of basic questions about the nature of the universe and our experience in it. It involves a turn toward "basic questions". It also involves meta-level cognition.

Identifying the Philosophical

• Turn toward basic questions
• Meta-level cognition in general - theorizing
• In the Structure of Knowledge -- Philosophy as queen of the sciences.

Other ways of identifying Philosophy

• in relation to science
• as speculative
• as dealing with matters of direct importance to living
• as dealing with matters of great uncertainty

Philosophical Methods

Rauhut Chapter Two

Go to Philosophical Methods

Main Philosophical Topics for the Class

Plato, Euthyphro

10: Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? What's at stake?

Plato, Apology

Image of Socrates as a Philosopher

Philosophy in Society - What's the lesson of Socrates' death?

What is Love?

getting ready for Symposium by constructing a preliminary philosophy of love.

9/14

Continued work on the Nature of Love

List of things we would want a good theory of love to do:

• Explain how love emerges, what sustains it, and what destroys it.
• Distinguish types or kinds of love; define the scope of the phenomena.
• Explain the value of love in a human being's life.
• Distinguish love from its cultural variations. Romantic love / arranged marriage /
• Distinguish "lust" from love.

Next steps:

• Venturing definitions (list)
• Venturing hypotheses (list)

Introduction to Platonic Metaphysics

Plato's answer to the question, "What is Real?"

The real is what persists through all changes and manifestations.

Key Elements of Plato's Worldview

1. Essential Definitions

Through the project of giving essential definitions (relentlessly asking, "What makes all instances of X (horses) "X" (capable of having the word "horse" predicated of it), Plato is led to focus on form as persistent reality.

2. Mathematics and the structure of reality (Show parabola video, or first 1:38 of it. [1])

Plato holds that mathematics is a tool for seeing the deep structure of reality.

3. Hierarchy of reality in the process of enlightenment.

Following to some degree from the first two commitments, Plato recognizes that things "participate" in reality to different degrees. This applies to both reality and to the forms of intellectual we make of it. The two main images of the "hierarchy of reality" in Plato's thought are in the Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line.

Allegory of the Cave -- The Allegory of the Cave gives us an image of the implications of Plato's metaphysics for his view of human existence. We'll read the Allegory (Republic 514) and discuss it briefly in class.

Divided Line

Philosophical Methods

• Review first three methods: Looking carefully at phenomena, Using rationales, and Giving Definitions.
• Comment on other definition strategies aside from Plato's: Lexical defintions, stipulative definitions, precising definitions, extensional meaning and intensional meaning.

9/21

Note on Philosophical Method

From the list: Questioning Presuppositions.

Example from Plato: Plato's "two worlds view" is a consequence, not a presupposition of his view. However, his view that reality is intelligible is a presupposition of his view.

Two statements about the value of philosophy

Small Groups: If possible, mix group with Kant and Russell writers. From your group discussion, get a concise statement of each author's view and rationales. Compare and contrast and get ready to evaluate.

• Timeline for locating Kant and the Enlightenment

Kant:

Russell:

Some Notes on Greek History, or, How did we ever get to the Apology?

• Reference Map for Xerxes invasion

• Reference Map for Peloponnesian War

More Really Important Dates

2220 bc Creatan Minoan Culture

1000 bc Destruction of Mycenean Palace Culture

900-800 revival of population on Peloponesis, use of iron in tools and weapons.

750 city states growth.

750-550 period of Greek colonization.

480 Xerxes, ruler of Persia attacks at Thermopylae and Salamis

477, Athens governs Delian League

495-429, Pericles.

450-429, Period of "Periclean Athens" - democratic and legal reforms. great playwrights such as: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides

431-404, Peloponnesian War, starting with Spartan invasion of Attica, ending with Athens surrender in 404

415, Alcibiades defects to Sparta.

404, Athens surrenders to Sparta.

404-403, Reign of Terror, 30 Tyrants.

399, Socrates trial.

More on Plato's Worldview

review of concept of Divided Line as model for enlightenment

Plato's psychology: Tripartite division of the soul: Rational, Appetitive, Vegetative.

-Need for rational element to control appetite.

-Connects need for harmony of the soul, harmony of the state (Brief mention of the Republic.)

-Harmony of the soul achieved through realization of virtues: Courage, Moderation, Justice, and Wisdom.

Plato and the Body

9/23

Beginning the Symposium

Setting: Drinking Party, Speeches on Love

Phaedrus: Love is a great God. There is One Love. Love motivates the lovers to virtue. No lover wants to look bad in front of their beloved. "In truth, the gods honor virtue most highly when it belongs to Love." 180B

Pausinius: There are two loves: Urania - Heavenly Aphrodite and Pandemos - Common Aphrodite. Love itself is neither good nor bad. Defends Greek practice. Love's character depends on the behavior it gives rise to. Potin of customs about love is separate the "wheat from the chaff," heavenly from common.

Erixymachus: Love is a broader phenomenon and force. Medicine "the science of of the effects of love on the body" Music - science of the effects of love on harmony and rhythm. But not all love is good. Love also at work in destruction.

Aristophanes: Story of first people, challenged the gods, split. Love is the search for your "other half". Interest in your partner not just for sex, but some kind of completion. Need to respect the gods or we'll be split again!

9/28

Beginning Epistemology

Types of Knowledge

Propositional:

Know-how:

Knowledge by acquaintance

Defining Knowledge as "true, justified belief"

Consider all three factors.

Skepticism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

global vs. local skepticism

Epiricism vs. Rationalism

Recall the parabola video, concept of "discovery" in mathematics, also this TED talk:

Garrett Lisi, A Beautiful New Theory of Everything note especially the way he mixes knowledge of particles and mathematics.

Descartes, Meditation 1

Neo's problem (Grau reading)

Brain's in Vats - Putnam's objection

Descartes' Approach in Meditation 1

"But I have sometimes found that these senses played me false, and it is prudent never to trust entirely those who have once deceived us. ...

But surely he's not wrong about the fact that he's sitting there . . .

"But in thinking about it carefully, I recall having often been deceived in sleep by similar illusions, and, reflecting on this circumstance more closely, I see so clearly that there are no conclusive signs by means of which one can distinguish clearly between being awake and being asleep, that I am quite astonished by it; and my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I am asleep now. "

composite things can be deceiving (note argument about painters, imagination), so "This is why perhaps that, from this, we shall not be wrong in concluding that physics, astronomy, medicine, and all the other sciences which depend on the consideration of composite things, are most doubtfuJ and uncertain, but that arithmetic, geometry and the other sciences of this nature, which deal only with very simple and general things, without bothering about their existence or non-existence, contain something certain and indubitable. ... I. For whether I am awake or sleeping, two and three added together always make five..."

It is possible that an all powerful God deceives me about even mathematics.

"This is why I think I shall proceed more prudently if, taking an opposite course, I endeavour to deceive myself, pretending that all these opinions are false and imaginary, until, ... my judgement may no longer be overpowered as hitherto by bad usage and turned from the right path which can lead it to the knowledge of truth.

"I shall suppose, therefore, that there is, not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me.

Descartes, Meditation 2

Archimedian Point

I cannot be decieved into thinking that I am

Clear and Distinct ideas

Wax Example

Significance of Cartesian thinking in context of Enlightenment view of Subject and Object.

Part A: Socrates Questioning of Agathon in Symposium

Is Love love of something?

Does love desire that of which it is the love?

When we desire something, do we possess it? likely vs. necessarily?

IC: If something needs beauty and does not have it, it cannot be beautiful.

Love is not a possession, but the desire of the beloved. Or the desire of the continuation of the love.

philosophia vs. sophia

10/5

Legacy and Critique of Descartes

Cartesian solipsism -- If knowledge is based on "clear and distinct" ideas in a subject's mind, how does this establish a "real" (mind independent) reality?

The Cogito - mere subject of experience or complete intentional structure of the subject (complete with desiring, believing, hoping, thinking, doubting, etc.)

Cultural Importance -- Age of science sometimes called the age of representation. Knowledge is a represenation of reality to a subject. Would another kind of knowing subject create the same sort of knowledge we do?

Empiricism and Rationalism

Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, dates, timeline on Enlightment

Empiricism -- belief that the evidence of our sense is the source of certainty of objective knowledge. Great benefits is the inter-subjective certainty of observation. Problem: What is the relationship between our empirical representation of reality and "mind-independent" reality?

Problem: Establishing the "inferential structure" to get from sense experience to knowledge. Three possibilities:

1. Naive Realism
2. Indirect Realism - primary / secondary qualities (p: e size, shape, molecular texture, and motion S: taste, smell, texture, and felt temperature)
3. Idealism - Is shape really primary (oval appearances of round objects)? Berkeley: Look carefully. All you see are sensory ideas.

Is the primary / secondary qualities distinction a solution to problem of naive realism? Is it a problem for the indirect that perception is no longer a source of certainty?

Problem of Induction

"The second major problem for empiricism stems from the fact that our experiences of the world can only confirm or disconfirm particular facts, but not general and universal claims." R1, p.70

P. l.All loggerhead turtles that have been observed in the past have laid eggs every two years.

P2 2. Nature is uniform; that is, regularities that have occurred in the past will also occur in the future.

C Therefore: All loggerhead turtles (past and future) lay eggs every two years.

principle of the uniformity of nature

Does the principle beg the question? What is the certainty of general laws in nature?

Rationalism

Hard cases: geometry, moral and political truths.

Critiques of the traditional (Plato or Descartes) position from Logical Positivists:

distinction between analytic and synthetic

Positivists: Analytic statements (including axioms of mathematical systems) are trivially true. Not new information about the world (recall Lisi).

Traditional response: There are contentful analytic claims: ex: "Every event has a cause" or "The shortest distance between two points in space is a straight line"

10/7

Diotima's Theory of Love

Note how she's introduced.

Picks up line of questioning from Socrates and Agathon, which was her original question to Socrates as a youth. (Note prophetic reference to Socrates later life later in the speech.)

Scolds Socrates for false dichotomy. Love could be neither ugly nor beautiful. Between mortal and god. Semi-divine force.

Origin of Love from Penia and Poros, description

Love is a lover of wisdom. Love is not just being loved, but being a lover.

What does the lover of beautiful things desire? - to possess the beloved, why?, (note substitution of "good"), to achieve happiness. 205A

Problem of the scope of the word love - like "poesis"

206B: Love is wanting to possess the good forever. ""This, then, is the object of love," she said. "In view of that, how do people pursue it if they are truly in love? What do they do with the eagerness and zeal we call love? What is the real purpose of love? Can you say?"

The purpose of love is to give birth in beauty, whether in body or soul. Note the kind of immortality we can have -- to participate in an ongoing process. (examples: education, accumulation of wealth and culture, philantrophy)

207E: interesting view of person through life span. Always changing. Body and soul. Studying is the answer! (208A) motivated by desire to be remembered. immortality of a sort.

Destiny of those pregnant in soul -- the Scala Amoris! 210B and following. "So when someone rises by these stages, through loving boys correctly, and begins to see this beauty, he has almost grasped his goal. This is what it is to go aright, or be lead by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful. " 211B

"But how would it be, in our view," she said, "if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form?"

Alcibiades' Entrance

Who was Alcibiades?

After much banter, Alcibiades is talked into giving an ecomium to Socrates (note the substitution for Love).

Describes Socrates as a Silenus statue.

216C: "My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I'm doing nothing about my way of life, though I have already agreed with him that I should. "

story of failed seduction.

famous turn down lines: 218E

10/12

Comments on Locke and Hospers Readings

• A few keys passages in Locke
• Reminder of the problem of induction.

Some Background to Hellenistic Philosophy

Hellenism Dates and Map

399-323 Dispersion of "Post-Socratic Schools" - Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Aristotelian, ... etc.

323 Death of Alexander - Division into Ptolemaic Empires

General Theses about the period:

Many of the post Socratic schools continue to make use of philosophical theories from earlier Greek thought, but focus on how to live well.

While the Roman Empire remains powerful during this time and engages in many wars of conquest and expansion, Romans admired Greek Philosophy and generally considered it superior to Roman thought at this time. (They do not approve of Greek pederasty.) Even much later, we find Roman statesmen such as Cicero taking leaves of absence to spend time with specific Greek philosophers. This was a time when philosophers were seen as sources of practical advice about life.

Epicurus

341-270 bc

Letter to Menoeceus:

• Gods -- Should we be afraid of the gods?

• Death -- Should we fear death?

• Desire -- What approach should we take to desire? (note connection with Symposium) natural/groundless, necessary/unnecessary

• Pleasure -- the "alpha and omega" of a happy life.

Distinction between kinetic and katastematic pleasures.

How much kinetic pleasure would a good Epicurean pursue? Virtue and the "measure of pleasure" -- Friendship and soiciability.

Bloom and Barrett on "Persons and Bodies"

Bloom

-evidence from early chilhood and attention studies of the "duality of experience".

-Story of Brown Mouse

Barret, Ch.1

-reflective and non-reflective beliefs

-mental tools -- distinguish agents from objects

-operating on both RB and NRB levels.

10/14

Additional Thoughts on Epicurus

Tranquility vs. Quietism

Asceticism and the heightening of pleasure through mindfulness and savoring.

Introduction to Personal Identity

• sameness makers -
• change of identity: qualitative vs. numerical. (116 food for thought)

Major Theories of Self

• Illusion
• Substance: Body
• Substance: Soul
• Psychic Continuity

Tracking problems with each. What do we want a philosophical theory of identity to do?

initial group work on identity: Is our identity constructed by the mind (implication of Bloom, et. al.) or based on some deeper facts about the continuity or permanence or some reality (body, soul, memory)? What role might all of these candidates play?

10/28

No Self: Buddhism

[There are two parts to this class. First, to see and evaluate (following Siderits) Buddhist arguments for rejecting the idea of the self. Then we'll look at two contemporary psychological theories of the self - general development psych view of the self and theory of multiple personalities. We're interested in comparisons with Buddhism as well as just building our best philosophical theory of personal identity.]

Siderits reconstruction of Buddhist position on no-self

Key points:

1. Buddhist claims there is no self because: 1. self is impermanent and 2. we do not have complete control of a self.

2. Support from analysis of the Five Skandhas (lit. "bundles")

• Rupa: anything corporeal or physical;
• Feeling: sensations of pleasure, pain and indifference; (only, other emotions under volition)
• Perception: those mental events whereby one grasps the sensible characteristics of a perceptible object; e.g., the seeing of a patch of blue color, the hearing of the sound of thunder;
• Volition: the mental forces responsible for bodily and mental activity, for example, hunger, attentiveness, and
• Consciousness: the awareness of physical and mental states. (Siderits 35-36)

Exhaustiveness Claim

• There is no more to the person than the five skandhas (the exhaustiveness claim).

Maybe the "I" is an executive function

problems with this view.

An entity cannot operate on itself (the anti-reflexivity principle).

Could just be shifting coalition. (sounds like Bloom?)

Support for this view: Questions of King Milinda - nominalism -- words as "convenient designators" vonentional vs. ultimate truths.

Summary of Siderits view: "We are now in a position to return to the dispute over the exhaustiveness claim and the Buddha's two arguments for non-self. Both arguments relied on there being no more to the person than the five skandhas. The opponent objected to the argument from control on the grounds that our ability to exercise some degree of control over all the skandhas shows that there must be more to us than the five skandhas. The response was that there could be control over all the skandhas if it were a shifting coalition of skandhas that performed the executive function. But the opponent challenged this response on the grounds that there would then be many distinct I's, not the one we have in mind when we say that I can dislike and seek to change all the skandhas. We can now see how the Buddhist will respond. They will say that ultimately there is neither one controller nor many, but conventionally it is one and the same person who exercises control over first one skandha and then another. This is so because the controller is a conceptual fiction. It is usefiil for a causal series of skandhas to think of itself as a person, as something that exercises some control over its constituents. Because it is useful, it is conventionally true. This is how we have learned to think of ourselves. But because this person, this controller, is a conceptual fiction, it is not ultimately true that there is one thing exercising control over different skandhas at different times. Nor is it ultimately true that it is different controllers exercising control over them. The ultimate truth is just that there are psychophysical elements in causal interaction. This is the reality that makes it usefiil for us to think of Ives as persons who exercise control. Our sense of being something that exists over and above the skandhas is an illusion. But it is a usefiil one. " 64

Lots of Selves: Cont. Psych

"I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another."

-modular view of mind.

-Fodor: "If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me!"

-"The multiplicity of selves becomes more intuitive as the time span increases. Social psychologists have found certain differences in how we think of ourselves versus how we think of other people—for instance, we tend to attribute our own bad behavior to unfortunate circumstances, and the bad behavior of others to their nature. But these biases diminish when we think of distant past selves or distant ftiture selves; we see such selves the way we see other people."

-dissociative-idnetity disorder - Sybil '73 and '76. therapists suit - 120 personalities, including a duck.

-fiction and self - openness to more selves. -imaginary friends.

-getting strategic with your bad selves. self-binding.

-"The theory of multiple selves offers a different perspective. If struggles over happiness involve clashes between distinct internal selves, we can no longer be so sure that our conflicting judgments over time reflect irrationality or error. There is no inconsistency between someone's anxiously hiking through the Amazon wishing she were home in a warm bath and, weeks later, feeling good about being the sort of adventurous soul who goes into the rain forest. In an important sense, the person in the Amazon is not the same person as the one back home safely recalling the experience, just as the person who honestly believes that his children are the great joy in his life might not be the same person who finds them terribly annoying when he's actually with them. "

-libertarian paternalism