Introduction to Philosophy Lecture #1: Introduction

the way I understand this course is as a general introduction to philosophical issues I'll be talking about historical figures but mainly what I want to do is to introduce you to the issue so if you look through the syllabus you'll see that each week's topic this one's introduction that each week's topic will be some general area or issue with in something called philosophy now you've taken this philosophy course you had other options I mean you could have taken other things I don't think there's anybody let me just make sure that that's right is there anybody in the room who for some reason or other is specifically required to take this particular course as far as I know your requirements are to take something or other and there's about four selections and so what guides your selection is sometimes what's available sometimes it's what's available at a particular time but I hope that at least in some of your cases you had sufficient choices that at least part of your decision was based on some degree of interest in the course and that wouldn't be your fault if that weren't true sometimes it's just because the choices aren't there but I hope that some of you had some thought this might be a neat experience as these things go but what I need to know now from you and I can't know in advance is well what did you think this experience would be I mean so the question is what's philosophy as far as you know I mean the word does appear in in normal English Luth usage it's not like some of the names of courses you know that have such technical names that you'd never hear them in common language philosophy that's a word that comes up but what is it that you guess you're going to be getting here in taking this course yeah so philosophy is different points of view and that's correct I mean as as you'll see in the quarter will certainly be exposed to lots of different people's points of view but you get different points of view in other areas of inquiry what makes Sen akane philosophical I mean let's say somebody is a pretty philosophical person what does that mean well let's say somebody refers to one's philosophy of life what's that different points of view about life I guess one thing but let me offer you some options I can find the right implement here the general rubric of philosophy we've got such things as philosophy of life but there's also such things as and you'll see this if you ever look in a and an RIT course book philosophy of science and there's political and social philosophy and you get philosophy of religion the traditional disciplines within philosophy have sometimes just those kinds of mysterious names that I was saying philosophies not like but sometimes even in course books even at RIT you'll see reference to award metaphysics that's a philosophy course epistemology ethics well another key one I mean this could go on and on and on as a matter of fact once I start writing philosophy of this and philosophy of that I mean there's just about no subject no discipline no area of inquiry at all that you couldn't put in there in the blank philosophy of physics philosophy of psychology philosophy of social sciences philosophy of social work that's a course that's offered here in RIT something supposed to differentiate these particular core like a philosophy of physics course this is going to be a course in physics what do you what might it be about and how can the same word I mean I'm asking a philosophical question right here at the beginning well how can this one word work in such various contexts how can you have a philosophy of physics philosophy of life how can X be philosophical discipline how can logic be a philosophical discipline yeah philosophy is thought so if that were correct then these courses teach thought about these different subjects whereas within the different subjects they don't think about them at all now that can't be quite right so maybe sharpen it up all right well maybe it's deeper maybe it's not but let me let me first of all hasten to add something that's important some people and it's usually the people that teach in the philosophy department at university some people have PhDs in philosophy right but other people like the folks that teach in the chemistry department have their PhDs in chemistry and there are people with PhDs in psychology and PhDs in engineering all these different subjects people can get PhDs now what does PhD stand for I don't know it's a doctorate but what does PhD stand for what's the foot ph.d is doctor it stands for nope it stands for Doctor of Philosophy so we've gotten more trouble here every single discipline the most advanced degree you can get although there's some degrees that don't have doctorates I'm just about to say something incorrect I was going to say in every single discipline most advanced degree you can get is the Doctor of Philosophy that's not true in law and that's not true in medicine and law you get an MD not a PhD I mean I'm starting medicine in law you get an L LD but how can how can all these different disciplines I mean what can the meaning of the word philosophy be so that it can be extended to these cases any further suggestions way in the back Theory theory is often important in philosophy as is the critique of theory but theory is important in physics as well so we're still trying to sharpen it we're right in the right ballpark here but we're trying to sharpen down what a philosophical person might be there and then back to here well based on fact maybe just opinion okay so your suggestion is that in the particular Sciences say like in chemistry in a particular disciplines they're enterprises based on fact whereas in philosophy in the discipline philosophy the opinions of the practitioners are based on opinion only and not on fact not on fact opinion as opposed to fact they may be that picks up on what in the back of the room was referred to as theory I mean maybe this word opinion is something like what you suggested well that's not right either and I've got something that I may repeat to you again but I mean I you you may be able to help me out on a particularly perplexing problem that I've got you've all heard the expression I repeated this in other countries and in other languages and apparently the same expression has has duplicate images in in many many different cultures in many many different languages but that but the expression I'm thinking of is this it says well that's very good in theory but it doesn't work at all in practice I mean you've heard that expression right now maybe you can help me understand how it is that something can be good in theory if it doesn't work in fact I mean it isn't really good in theory if it doesn't work in practice is it I mean what theories are for is ultimately to guide practice so if it doesn't work in practice then you'd scrap that theory and you go back to the drawing board and find out some other theory that does and opinions aren't particularly valuable if they conflict with facts but you may be on to something that is is characteristic of philosophy and all of these different guises when you try to you know begin to point to some differentiation between theory in fact between opinion in fact you're not you're not far from the mark but what philosophers do and what people do when they're being philosophy the philosophical isn't something that is supposed to be opposed to the facts or different from the facts and before I make the further step I did promise there's a couple of people who had some thoughts here what was your no thought and discussion about the origin using the importance of the subject I'm sorry say it more slowly I could I can't I'm going to what part of what I have to do is to try to repeat what you say because I don't know that the mics are going to get what your responses and so I got to get on a discussion about the use the origin and the employers subject okay so is it alright a philosophical discussion of physics for example would be a discussion about the use the origin and the importance of the subject for example is that what you what you're saying very interesting suggestion and it's included that's in there but I and did you have another ok but let me just you know instead of all this rhetoric and you're asking you to tell me what I'm supposed to be saying I mean I've now figured it out thanks to you but let me suggest to you that it's where facts are not so clear that things start getting philosophical it's it's not that philosophers don't want facts they'd love to have them I mean anytime I mean matter fact II it seems to me the enterprise of philosophical thinking whether it's done by a person called a philosopher or whether it's done by you in your day to day lives or whether it's done by physicists and chemists and their professions wherever it's done it seems to me excuse me that the the philosophical Enterprise is undertaken where questions are tricky where questions aren't so clear where facts are not readily available every philosopher wants his opinion his theory to be true to the facts and indeed a lot of philosophical effort maybe more than 50% of it the majority of philosophical undertaking is done not in the presentation of some positive theory but in the criticism of somebody else's theory and how does that criticism go the criticism goes that theories not to the facts or is not reasonable to hold so a lot of philosophical effort isn't just you know like construction work in trying to build some grand theory of something a lot of its demolition work trying to show that somebody else's theory or maybe my own previous theory really doesn't work as well as I thought or they thought it did so let me define philosophy first and foremost I will pick a new piece of paper since they seem to have used that one up just for our purposes and you'll find that people disagree about this this is one of those philosophical questions where facts are hard to come by but philosophy is the study the examination of questions issues that don't presently underline that lend themselves - clear-cut Solutions the study of questions that don't presently lend themselves to clear-cut solutions and I've underlined the word presently because the hope is precisely to give some clear-cut solution to a problem now how does that let's go back there that is and I'll put that thing back up there so you can look at it but now that I've got that on the board look here again and remember that there's three dots down at the end this is a never-ending list I think I can zoom back the whole thing in there and I've just given you some examples of different issues that are treated in philosophy courses but but at the state-of-the-art of every discipline and I keep using physics example particles I'm very interested in the sciences and a hijra philosophy of science course but at the very state-of-the-art in physics for example the practitioners often will be in disagreement about some particular issue sometimes it's a theoretical issue for 30 years and more the last 30 years of Einstein's life anyway Einstein was in a huge dispute theoretical dispute with Niels Bohr about the nature of quantum mechanics which is one of the most exciting in the advanced areas of modern physics but they were talking about exactly how one was supposed to interpret quantum mechanics and they had huge differences on the subject which I won't go into now they thought of those differences and they were right they thought of those differences as philosophical differences because the facts weren't there I mean if the facts were there that could make it very clear which of them was right they wouldn't had that argument it would have said ah okay they would have you know gone to the experimental data use the experimental data and if there were no room for the room for philosophical disagreement they would have resolved that dispute but as long as the experimental data was not there that could sufficiently clear up the question it continued to be a philosophical question and interestingly enough partially because they're from Europe where the division among the disciplines is not such a big deal they all their lives as far as I know both of them thought of themselves as natural philosophers and that's the that's the old word that was used before physicists physicists it's a word that's coined in English it has comparable values and other languages and it is a modern phenomenon that any of the disciplines are distinct I mean all the disciplines used to just be the pursuit of wisdom in a particular area everybody used to be a philosopher is that the name Adam Smith ring a bell who's Adam Smith it just rings a bell saying when know who Adam Smith is in what field is Adam Smith make economy economy economics he's often thought of being the father of modern economic theory economics as a discipline different didn't really differentiate itself from philosophy until late but when Adam Smith was working he was officially the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh I believe in Scotland and when Isaac Newton did his work whose Isaac Newton got know everything physics right so what Isaac Newton did his work and he's one of the founders of modern physics in the 17th century we needed his work he was the chair of natural philosophy at I believe Cambridge now where they were chairs of this and that is not so important when I find emphasizes they made their groundbreaking contributions to their disciplines as as far as they were concerned philosophers what made those things groundbreaking contributions well it's just this questions that before their time had been like this were because of their work made a little bit more clear-cut you can think of the study of motion for example as a good example Galileo is the person who using geometric methods came up with later became the equations of motion that Newton used in his groundbreaking work but before Galileo before Galileo figured out for example that the the most effective way to understand motion was in terms of how much distance is covered per unit time before he figured out that that would be a very very useful way to look at motion there were all kinds of other philosophical views of how one should regard motion Aristotle for example a person you're going to read next week who is a student of plato's Aristotle thought that motion was best understood as things moving toward their natural place so that for example this pen when I drop it has made great progress toward its natural place now it did get stopped here by the surface of the floor but if I were to remove that well the pen would be able to make further progress toward its natural place and all motions should be understood in this way comfort the pen now that was one theory it was the dominant theory for thousand years and more 1500 years but there were other philosophical theories of motion when someone Galileo in particular came up with a way of portraying motion that then lent itself to a clearer presentation of what people were trying to get at in studying motion then more and more people adopted that way of looking at things and the study of motion became less and less at least for those people less and less a philosophical problem more a clear-cut problem which now could accept practitioners who would just study that thing and and learn all the right ways of doing it they wouldn't have to debate from the ground floor every 20 seconds or just exactly what's the right way of studying motion they could all say Galileo's ways it and master it right and then they could that allows progress to be made once people have figured out what the right approach to a problem is or what the clearest propose to a problem is then they are in a in a good position to begin to make some more progress they don't have to debate the foundations of discipline over and over again so philosophy wherever you look at it is is the examination the study of questions that don't lend themselves to the clear answers so whether you're at the at the state of the art in some very advanced discipline like one of the sciences or whether we're talking about the philosophy of life how lot one to live one's life the common feature in those two kinds of questions is that there's no real clear-cut answers I mean there's no there's no rocky can turn over and find that the answer is under there there's no experiment that can you that you could do that can give you a decisive answer to the question or if you're asking ethical questions what should a person do in a situation like that ethical questions our philosophical questions just because those questions don't lend themselves to clear-cut answers you might like them too we might like to have lists of rules just give me the list of rules I'll follow and then I'll be ethically okay but you know lists of rules never work situations just are too complex for that you always have to ask yourself is this the right thing to do this rule conflicts with that rule how am I supposed to make a decision between these two damn rules so any area where the answers aren't clear-cut that's as far as I'm concerned that's the best definition of philosophical that you ever going to come come by and one upshot of that is this that people with PhDs in philosophy in particular aren't thereby really the experts in philosophy it'll depend on the question it depends on the area who the best people to ask would be for any philosophical question questions like the ones that Niels Bohr and and the Albert Einstein were debating for 30 years only best resolve by physicists or people who at least have studied the relevant discipline and people who have questions about how they should live their lives are themselves probably in as good a position as anyone to uncover the answers to those questions they don't need turn to professional philosophers in the same way for ethical question just because philosophers teach ethics courses doesn't mean that they're any better at resolving ethical questions in their lives than anyone else is it just maybe they've studied ethical theories more and they've studied perhaps how complicated it can be to bring ethical theories into practice those are the sorts of things that you know a professional in ethics might have a handle on and I'd have to say although I no longer am in a position to to to make a the strongest case for this since I'm an atheist but I have to say that in areas of philosophy of religion people who are professionals in religion whether they're philosophers of religion or theologians this is my view on a tricky philosophical question but it seems to me that they're not necessarily the best people to turn to either these these seem to me to be the same sorts of questions as these other ones are there is no way to find a clear-cut solution to the problems and so one has to rely on what sources as one can find to decide what one is going to believe all right any questions about that cuz so far all I wanted to do is to define philosophy and one important consequence that I haven't written down I'm not going to write down but I want you to remember this one important consequence is that who the experts are on philosophical questions or that's a that's something that's going to vary from question to question and in lots of areas the answer might be there's no experts on that question one the best example I can think of is how should one live one's life I mean who is the expert on that what is the right relationship between the individual and society how much should one's own these are all philosophical questions how much should one's own desires interests predilections define one's life to what extent on the other hand must one should one take it to consideration the needs and desires and interests of others and then which others I mean how broad a base of others do we have to take into consideration and figuring on how to define our lives these are all philosophical questions and I'd say that they're pretty close to the how should one live one's life kind of question I don't know who's going to be an expert on these there's lots of people who have great ideas on the subject lots of different opinions but I don't see any buddy that I would sort of pinpoint as being an expert on the subject but the in areas of physics there are tricky questions and there's some people whose answers I would respect in other people's answers I wouldn't have so much respectful because they hadn't really studied the subject so there may be experts in some philosophical areas and there and there may not be experts in some others and where those experts are will vary from question to question okay so that's that's that's issue number one and what that also suggests is and I will do this up here too now that if I had to I'm just this isn't an exhaustive list either I'm just going to put an arrow to the left and to the right of this graphic to indicate that I don't mean this to list you know everything in the area just these are three examples these are three disciplines that are sometimes thought to be quite distinct I mean maybe especially religion in science these these are supposed to be very very distinct disciplines but I I suggest to you that all three of these things and I put these arrows on the right on the left indicate that there might be lots of other things that you could put on this list but all three of these things are originally motivated in human affairs by attempts to grapple with tough questions sometimes I put them in this arrangement this is supposed to be indicating no particular order here philosophy religion science sometimes you'll get people saying well religion comes first that's really the old way of trying to solve tricky human problems about what's the nature of the world what's the nature of the human condition people will say all right religion came first then along comes philosophy you know thousands of years later and then in the modern world we've got science I don't think that makes any sense really and but you'll see some people portraying the situation and that kind of chronological order I don't think that's correct I think all three of these areas and as I say there may be many others all three of these areas all of them are perennial attempts that go back all three of them as far as you have you know written evidence and I think will continue on into the indefinite future all three of them are involve efforts on the part of people to grapple with tough questions they often offer different strategies for doing that different strategies for grappling with questions but all three are motivated by the same basic desire is to try and figure out the answers to those things some questions lend themselves to scientific treatment some questions don't same with the other disciplines I think you'll get there's no reason even to divide them and separate them out in that way I mentioned to you already that I myself am an atheist this is going to become important because we're going to talk about philosophy of religion in a couple weeks but and I'm not certainly not going to be presenting to you my particular beliefs but you should know what they are you will hear people say that there's a tremendous conflict between religion inside your people you'll hear people on both sides of the conflict say that you learn people who have no interest in science at all and people who have no interest in religion at all saying that from time to time but I don't think that that's a necessary truth as far as I know for example lots of people who are very religious find scientific confirmations for their religious beliefs and there are many people at the very cutting edge of the sciences who are extremely religious particular religious doctrines made part from conflict with particular scientific doctrines but there's no need for a conflict between science and religion and there's certainly no need for a conflict in any of these three areas one may take as one's motivation for trying to understand the universe as closely and as precisely as one can one's own all of nature I mean one's desire to figure out what God's handiwork really is I mean that might be one's motive for studying science so there's no need for these things to conflict where the dividing lines are is not so clear as I've said at the cutting edge of science and I think even the basis of religion are deep philosophical questions so I when I write things like this the second point in this first introductory discussion the second point is that I don't really know that those things can be divided in any clear-cut way I mean philosophical issues I mean this much is clear philosophical issues I've said are ones that are not quite so clear cut as other issues so within science for example there will be lots of issues that are clear-cut like what's the value of this variable what's the equation for that but if there are other questions that are more philosophical like sometimes it might it come and not just might sometimes it comes to the attention of physicists that equations that they've been using for years may not be the very most accurate and best ones so they have to go out and look for alternatives and different people might have different ideas for a long time than what the arguments among scientists well I like this procedure no no I like this procedure and those are the philosophical differences so within science you'll find both questions that are clear-cut and questions that are not so clear-cut but generally what I'm trying to say in the second point is that these are not necessarily in conflict philosophy religion science there will be some points of difference in procedure there will be some points of difference in the mode of training in the several areas but there will also be perhaps some commonalities all of them I think derived from a single human motivation as to try to understand things try to understand things in the world to try to understand things about themselves to try to understand their relationships with other people and it's these efforts to understand that lead lead to these undertakings would get these fancy names questions comments anything that I've yes serve along the line then that being separate I noticed a lot in reading played a mixed philosophy religion you constantly bring up Oh God yes God how they feel about ya that's almost I mean it I was I was about to say that's almost inevitable one way of understanding the whole idea of God is just as the ultimate answer the ultimate explanation I think at least this must much can be said that for those who believe in God there is something of that role that God plays I mean I should tell you the other story I don't speak out of complete ignorance about this I used to be a Baptist youth fellowship leader some millions of years ago no longer M they don't want a theists being but I mean I've had I mean I I when I was in my teens anyway there is evidence I don't know what I forgotten how old I was but somewhere in my teens still early teens probably I wrote an essay in which it's obvious if you read this thing it's obvious that I take the idea the one I now have the idea that there's no God that idea to me back then was just so ludicrous it made no sense at all now interestingly I can't quite place myself in that person anymore but I do remember lots of things about about belief and belief in God among other things has this aspect I don't know how central it is but it seemed to me in my case anyway to have had this aspect that it helped provide answers it helped you place yourself in the world it made sense of things in looking at different religions in other cultures I think it you can you could you can see that very clearly that in those other cultures those other religions there's lots of things where you might not attribute a divine intervention but you can see what they're up to it's often it's where they don't understand where something lacks a clear-cut answer they often will say well that's one of the that's one of the aspects of divinity in trying to handle diverse arrays of just complex and confusing facts sometimes the idea of a God will will serve to bind everything all together but that's also what theories do isn't it that's what theories are supposed to do when we have a bunch of complex facts sometimes a scientific theory or a philosophical theory will be brought forward and I hope to bring these things together to show you how these things relate for example in the Newtonian move from earlier physics we had Galileo I've mentioned Galileo as having figured out what the laws of motion were for objects like that you know flying around on the surface of the earth the Abba what the laws of motion were for projectiles fired out of cannons for masses dropped off the Leaning Tower of Pisa for things set that in motion down inclined planes Galileo figured out accurate laws of motion that at least within the limits that were of importance to them were determined for example what the future position of an object would be if it starts out here if it's a let go with this initial velocity of it's under these forces he was able to compute that Johannes Kepler on the other hand was able to figure out what the what the real laws of motion were of the planets as they orbited the Sun not moving objects on the earth but the planetary objects and one of Newton's great contributions was to show that he could cast the laws of motion in such a way that both these different very different areas of motion could come under the same theory and then to just put a loop on this connection between references to God and references to science Newtonian physics then for the next couple hundred years became I mean I don't know that anyone actually used this expression but it came to be understood by lots of the physicists who are studying it as an examination of how God's laws worked I mean god had been you know the author of the motions of the planets God is the author of the forces in the universe that's a long-standing idea now we're beginning to figure out what the different laws of motion are but that doesn't undermine the idea that God's in charge that just says ah these are the laws that God set up this is how God does it how that's cool this is how God's clockwork works and the whole universe was understood by Newtonian ZUP until the beginning of the century anyway was understood the whole universe was a giant clockwork and God was the designer will return to that theme later on part of our to study the philosophy of religion but all this is is mixed up together and what I want to leave you with is just to remind you this isn't just an historical anomaly this isn't just an historical fact about what people used to think to this day I mean as people study the origins of the universe according to contemporary theory the the the best modern theories the most well supported modern theories are ones that refer to a big bang indeed a big bang and then a constantly expanding universe there's all kinds of alternative theories that have kind of fallen by the wayside right now so contemporary physicists figure there was a big bang there was a singularity and that's a very complex fact - there's a big bang and the entire universe all of matter energy and in addition this is what's really weird and complicated all of space and time were created by that Big Bang but that doesn't stop people from asking the question well why the Big Bang and for some that's a religious question so it's not I mean modern progress in science even modern evolutionary theory has not stopped people even people who believe in these modern theories has not stopped them from continuing deaths and religious question and so the parallel that you find in even modern writers and physics Albert Einstein among them God does not play dice was one of Einstein's favorite remarks in his arguments with Niels Bohr about the nature of quantum mechanics and that what that symbolized through him was that we cannot be left with a physics that's indeterminate as quantum mechanics seems to leave physics now again I don't mean to try to teach you quantum mechanics here in this in this course but the arguments to this day among state-of-the-art scientists or sometimes couched at least in this religious vocabulary and it means something to them they're not just joking around the universe what I sign can best be understood is saying the universe just wouldn't make sense if this was all that could be said about it Bohr and the universe of course must make sense God does it throw dice it makes sense to describe those differences as philosophical difference just because the questions aren't easy to resolve but it doesn't have to be done way up there it's you know in people's normal lives we have to try and figure out the answers to questions that aren't easy to resolve a typical questions is questions about what's best for us which you might or might not think of as ethical questions just trying to hear what's the what's in my best interest that's not a question that you know you just again you can't turn over a rock someplace and find out the answer to that now this may be a little bit of an exaggeration but I think given the character given the nature of the human being we're just set up so that we can't avoid these kinds of questions that I'm talking about is philosophical questions I mean we're not you know wired in nearly the kind of automatic way that many other animal species are we've got a gather information consider all kinds of consequences and make decisions about what to do rationally that's the word that's used we use reason and we have to make estimates of what's the best course of action in the light of incomplete information I sometimes said that people need to do philosophy if you understand this this particular interpretation of what philosophy is people need to do philosophy as much as they need to breathe again that's a little bit of an exaggeration perhaps but what I mean by that is given the kind of creature we are we can't just rely on hardwiring and we certainly can't rely on just whatever people tell us because they tell us different things and we can't rely on books because the books tell us different things somewhere along the line we've got to make decisions we got to make decisions in light of incomplete evidence and those are just the kinds of problems that I've been calling philosophical especially when they're things like well what you know how should I interpret the way this person is is acting toward me what's in my best interest what's the right thing to do the situation all those questions qualify under my very broad definition is philosophical questions now these sorts of questions arise automatically for every individual and within every society and and can be found in the history of every culture we're stressing these Western figures the Texas classics of Western philosophy and that is a little bit parochial that is it's a little bit too limited it would be nice if we could really examine in you know good comparative detail philosophies from all over the world from all eras but you see the thickness of this book the thickness of that book you know would be quite astonishing I'm sure that it's possible to teach in ten weeks a decent course in world philosophy but I think that would necessarily have to be a bit more historically directed than I want to be what I want to do today though is at least place in context for you the works that you're reading and stuff like Plato the Republic I'm sorry not Republic but you reading the apology and the credo I want to kind of place them in context they occur they were written at a time that sometimes thought of as the birth of Western culture in classical Greece they're the works of Plato are often thought to be some of the first works in philosophy Plato is thought of as the father of Western philosophy a lot of this stuff is a good deal of hype to it my guess is that people have been doing philosophy much much longer than is documented in and a book that begins with Plato but the fact about Plato is and he's the first person for whom we have large and extend extensive library he wrote lots of things which have survived we still have his work people who won't before him are we know something about them I'm going to talk about few of them today we know a little bit about them but their work has not survived at least not in large chunks we've got fragments of their work a paragraph here maybe even a page there a line over here we've got little bits and pieces we have to interpret what it was that they've said we know from some commenters like Aristotle who's a student of Plato's Aristotle actually wrote a good deal about what some of these earlier people thought and so that gives us some clues about what they're like but Plato had at least one important part of his value in the history of Western thought is just that his work survived that even before the the Greeks even before the stuff that we have written down it stands the reason that people were doing philosophy at least if you understand it in this broad way that I've characterized that people are been doing philosophy as long as there have been people so I don't want to make too much of the idea that this is the beginning of Western philosophy but it's the place we can start as we know a little bit about our ignorance pretty much obscures stuff much earlier than this the things that were philosophical topics back then as you can imagine we're from were in much larger numbers and I should say the numbers were larger but some things that we regard as having achieved clear-cut solution had not and but at that time had any kind of clear-cut analysis to give you an idea some of the earliest people we know of in Greece are people who were arguing about metaphysics that's they're arguing about the basic principles of the external reality that we all live in and as you might know historically speaking this is not necessarily a significant ordering but there was there's been a lot of historical work in an area we might think of it's physics it bases itself you know based itself on the idea that there are four essential elements and that's these how they are to be understood with respect to one another whether they are of equal importance in the in the creation of the physical world that's what that's something one of the things that the Greeks are made about and Bailey's who sometimes thought to be the first of these pre-socratic philosophers I'll put this heading up here so you remember that why would then you call pre-socratic philosophers or yes certain before Socrates among the pre-socratic philosophers Staley's is thought to be the first he's at least the first that we have any kind of a clear idea about he said that the water was the most basic element I mean that these weren't equally important that the other three were less important and even perhaps derived from water now families this was just a guy who just an idle speculator he apparently was quite a brilliant astronomical observer it we have good reason to think that he predicted an eclipse in five something BC predicted a solar eclipse and that indicates not just how good he might have been a dystonic but it indicates that what we call science was it in a pretty good state at least the science the astronomical science we have some evidence that in cultures all over the world astronomy was one of the earliest scientists sciences that was ever developed and that it achieves a pretty significant degree of precision at least in being able to observe the regularities of the way that the the planets moved and stars moved and being able to make predictions so sorry it's some of these these areas of inquiry we're really quite well-developed bailey's was very proficient in that discipline he also apparently was a great military adviser but he in his speculations about the nature of reality thought that that water was more important than the others and we can guess what the reasons might be after all their grease is in the area of the world where water is very important there's the seas the rivers but the water interestingly enough is one of the few elements that you could expect Greeks even though they live in a fairly warm climate there's mountains where you can find snow Greeks might have seen and are likely to have seen water in all three of its material states seeing it as a solid as a liquid as a gas that might give some reason to think of it as being more important some other materials but also when you see water either evaporating or in you know even in the morning if you get up and there's a lake and it's sort of a cool day or something like that and you see that the vapor is coming off the lake it might give you the impression that air is being created in this way water at a delta when it comes out of a river I mean if you take a sample of the water you'll find that it's muddy and if you let it stand for a while earth dirt will precipitate out and rest at the bottom that might give you the impression you know the earth is created from water so my guess is that there wasn't just an idle speculation he probably thought he had some reason to think that water was more important than the other elements but let me take another list Bailey's is just the beginning of a lot of this philosophical disagreement about things that we now wouldn't to think of as so philosophical I mean things that are in the areas of the sciences and physics say leaves again thought the water was basic some of his followers argued no no no it's air and they presented good reasons for that Anaximander I mean I think different people in different towns often had different approaches to the physical sciences Anaximander was of the view that none of these four things not earth not air not fire and not water none of them was really the most basic all of them emerged from something yet more primitive that he called the indeterminate there was some sort of like a pure potential that he thought was at the origin of thing and that this pure potential in wood could coalesce through certain kinds of processes into earth air fire and water I mentioned that not just because it's of historical interest but some of these things especially now in the 20th century or some of these ideas about the importance of potential and probability have come back into the discussions of the philosophical discussions interpreting physics especially with the development of quantum mechanics but the pure potential is kind of back on the scene again it's something that at least has some physical importance but Anaximander thought that everything eventually came from the indeterminate and there were a lot of arguments about this and each one of these theorists with their different theories about what the world is made of could really make a plausible case for their theory and among them later on Heraclitus was famous we may have actually heard this particular lime that he was first to honor he said you can't step into the same river twice he thought that the most basic thing about the world was changed not permanence that all things I mean like you could think about the river I mean what is a river well it's not just the water that makes it up because you know from day to day there's different water flowing in that river for month to month there's different water flowing in that river yes it's still the same river so what the river is can't be analyzed is simply whatever it is that makes the river up just then we're going to return to this theme at the end of the quarter in a more interesting form but he in thinking about people biological entities even rocks cliffs began to argue that all of these things are really important that flux change is the real key to understanding the world and the only thing that might be permanent would be the rules or laws that govern change now that's like saying that there's nothing physical in the world that's permanent the only thing that would be permanent of a sort of the natural laws that guide it the laws of physics the laws of nature and that's a that's it became a very influential idea later on but Heraclitus said nothing's permanent everything's changed and then just down the road in another town Parmenides was arguing for cisely the opposite that there was nothing that change was absolutely impossible why well I don't want to make too much of this but I'll see if I can sketch it quickly change is impossible for this reason that the in order for something to change it has to become what it is not but it's impossible for anything to not be it can't become what is what it is not or else it won't be it so for this reason and for more some or subtle reasons and not a great deal more subtle he argued that not only is change impossible that motion is impossible now all there is is well one said Parmenides and here's the student i'm putting over here because he's a student of amenities was the author of a whole bunch of different paradoxes which were supposed to illustrate some of these Parma Nadeem themes he argued that there's no way for example it's a race between a tortoise and a hare there's no way for the tortoise for the hare to catch the tortoise no matter how much faster it was actually achilles I think that he used in this example there's no way for the faster creature to catch the slower one if the slower one were spotted any kind of the advantage for this reason let's say since kilise in none and the tortoise let's say this is the tortoise and give him a head start Achilles is a fair surf guy and this is where they are at t0 the very beginning of the race okay so then bang a gun goes off and they begin their race so Achilles being very very quick soon gets to to this point here I better call this a s 0 and T 0 because then that becomes a 1 right that's where Achilles gets in a certain finite time we don't know how fast unless we're told exactly how fast the killings runs but in that particular time the tortoise of course has gone some finite distance to here ok all right so then in the next little bit of time Achilles we don't know how fast this is either because again we don't know what exactly a killing speed is but Achilles gets to that point but in the mean time I mean because they're both at least moving somewhat the tortoise has gotten to some point here alright then we keep repeating this process but every time Achilles moves to where the tortoise has been and he can do that as fast as you please the tortoise because the tortoise is at least moving at some finite speed so have gotten a little bit further and while the distances between them will comes become smaller and smaller and smaller xeno argued achilles can never catch the tortoise now we just you know watch these races you say well our let's just set it up but Achilles in The Tortoise side-by-side didn't watch and soon Achilles goes on past Xena knows that but he has two options you can either say that's an illusion we are we are under the under the reason shows us reason shows us that Achilles can't pinch the tortoise so that must be an illusion or else we're we're not we've got some peculiar ideas about motion because there's what the question would be what's wrong with this analysis I mean you could analyze it another way you can say all right let's say in the time it takes the tortoise to move one foot you know Achilles will move so many more feet and that way you could analyze this problem so plainly Achilles can not only catch the overtake pass and you know just stop the tortoises horses race is concerned but that's not that xenos is what's wrong with this analysis this analysis seems to make no mistakes it's not just that you can give me another it's not good enough for you just to give me another analysis which can show that Achilles can pass the tortoise unless there's an error in this analysis this analysis shows that it's impossible so at the very least what Zeno's paradoxes and there's a whole bunch of them at the very least what zero-star tires did is to show that there's complexities in the idea of motion and the idea of change perhaps but especially the idea of motion that at that time and perhaps even to the present day have not been fully analyzed and not been fully people still argue about these paradoxes by the way I mean no one thinks that there are few people think that motion is impossible but these paradoxes continue to be very interesting intellectual objects because you see whoa what's wrong with it something's wrong with it but what's wrong with it all right so here we have all these different people arguing all these different things Bailey's saying waters the most basic element in the world and acts annex enemies I think he was I didn't mention him but he's one who said that air was there's the most basic thing in the world other people said the you know other stuff was more basic mentioned the maxim and ER he says no no none of them's most basic Heraclitus says everything's changed there is no permanent harm entities saying everything is permanent there is no change each and every one of these people had powerful arguments that seemed to support their position and this is in the area that we might think of as among the most secure in our present era in the area of study of the physical sciences so along comes for Tigers I'll get to you in a second but along comes I'll put him on a new sheet increase the size of the screen along comes a guy named Protagoras and others who are sometimes called Sophists with the claim that it's all relative you know there isn't any single right answer to these questions like what's the world made of says man vote is the measure of all things of what's right and what's wrong of what's true and what's false there are no correct objective answers to any questions it all depends on your point of view and for many of the Sophists in particular it all depends on your culture now we're used to thinking that there's a fairly widespread belief that that's true about ethics I mean lots of people believe that a lot of people don't believe it but a lot of people in the present era believe the questions about what's right and what's wrong are basically social and cultural questions there are no ultimately correct answers concerning what's ethically right and what's ethical II wrong all you got is different cultures have different attitudes towards this now you can take that basic approach that's relativism that's acting let me take that basic approach and you expand that to include everything then you have Protagoras okay back to you tortoise and the hare he can let the gap between two be reduced well is it not true I'll try - I'll try and do this I'm not altogether sure that I'm competent to do this as well as is or anywhere close to what Zeno would say that I can guess and think is it not true but just rehearse the same thing over is it not true that as Achilles runs from any one of these arbitrary places on the line to the next place with where the tortoise is is it not true that the tortoise will have moved some finite distance beyond during that time no matter how slow you imagine that if motion is continuous no matter how slow you imagine the motion of the tortoise isn't it true Xena would ask that by the time Achilles gets to this old position of the tortoise the tortoise will have moved and isn't that can't you can't you just see things inna would say that in every subsequent iteration of this process the same thing will be true and the distances between them will get smaller and smaller and smaller but there will always be the same story to be told about the next iteration process isn't all that true that I'm getting strong yeah to the point where the distance would get bigger and bigger because I can't do it can't do it I mean I can't get to this book you see because first I'd have to go half the distance and then I have to go half that distance I have to go this is another one half that distance and you know that's an infinite process and people can't do infinite things do but just get the buck you want to let's just grab that book catch that tortoise or that hair I mean I understand I mean I don't I'm not disagreeing with you in substance but he wants to know not don't he isn't his thing is not you can't have an argument that's different from mine it's what's wrong in this argument so it feels like he he takes into account speed at first but then he just totally just he no no he can't catch up to him he can get to that he could since he's moving or actually this is a problem you know she knows one way of understanding Zeno and the whole Parma Indian effort is to show is the produce some sort of proof that the whole idea of motion is incoherent that it leads to paradoxes and that's one way of interpreting not that an end and that would that's actually maybe a little bit book I mean he could even if he if that's the way to understand the Zeno that he'd say well are you could produce an argument that shows that Achilles can pass the tortoise I could produce an argument that shows that Achilles can't pass the tortoise and unless you see something wrong in my reasoning some detail of my reasoning that's incorrect this shows that our whole understanding of motion is incoherent this deserves an incoherence here let me go on though back you had yeah we're gonna wind up dwelling too much on Z no but he is interesting so let's do a little loan so what he's saying is Achilles starts behind the tortoise Tauruses up here in first something please Joubert all right brick puzzle they set up here bang all right race but but you're right tortoise is spotted certain distance so bang the race is on says all right now we know that Achilles is going to get up to that position but by the time he gets there the tortoise will have moved beyond right okay just and then there's another hand yeah the problem I think was there wasn't really a concept of certainly wasn't it that's well that's a problem in its own right though about the limit I mean as in Newtonian physics and as in the calculus that's a problem for some of the same more or less intuitive like I should say common sensical reasons and maybe maybe you understand the limited in the way that's crystal clear to you but I think if you were to talk to Zeno about it he you know like let's say we had Newton and Zeno together I think xenos approach might be something like this you say alright now tell me again about the idea of the infant s infinitesimal because this is discussion about continuity and things like that now what is the infinitesimal again what is the size of this thing or has no sign but you put a bunch of these together and it gets make a line well not exactly how about instantaneous velocity what is that again well that's distance elapsed per unit time where both are reduced - not zero because you can't divide by zero but to the limit all right well what is that again was one when there's no okay when there's effectively no time or although there's no time and no distances elapsed well right but it's hard to make to make a physical interpretation of either the infinitesimal or to make an interpretation of any of the things of the concepts that are used with such brilliant effect in the calculus and its interpretation of physics there there are some kind of counterintuitive problems there it's hard to make what you might call philosophical sense it's hard to make sense out of these conceptions even though when used they produce good results and when Newton produced the calculus and another fellow Leibniz produced it as well so independently at about the same time there was there were problems in explaining the the cognitive significance of some of these mathematical entities here is a comparable one in contemporary physics that we talk about the BIGBANG BIGBANG theory and yet if I'm not wrong about this the the BIGBANG really can't be interpreted in the way that it usually is in the popular sensor by those of us who weren't physicists it cannot be interpreted as an event in time because it's neither in time nor in it's not any place and it's not at a time because it's not just matter energy that supposedly is produced in the Big Bang but time space it itself space-time itself is part of what's produced in the Big Bang so it is not itself a moment in time or in space now that doesn't mean that the concept is to be thrown out it means that we don't have a clear cognitive grass of that concept and I think what at the very least what Zeno is trying to argue as regards motion is that there are very serious cognitive problems in understanding motion and they can be exposed through the use of these paradoxes back to you first and then see what I'm doing is using the fluff plazi of mathematics to explain what he's training splint you're just using mathematics I'm using mathematics but the whole idea philosophy how would you how would you explain anything if you didn't use a tool to do it well you know hope would be especially these guys back here the hope would be that your tools with themselves not need this more explanation than the thing you're trying to explain like if you find and say well I'm going to explain motion on the basis of the infinitesimally I mean they're at reaction might be what I mean motion isn't that an emotion is difficult enough and are you going to bring in this more difficult thing to explain I mean that doesn't do any explaining what it does do is it is this calculation that's what the mathematical field plainly does I don't think anyone would deny that but the when you ask yourself this I mean there's millions of philosophical questions you can ask about math and it's applications and about science but one of the things that you might ask is well what's going on here when I'm using the infinitesimal what is the infant festival there are now philosophers of mathematics and they are all of them you know like state-of-the-art mathematicians themselves you know or not does people sit on the side but there are people among mathematicians who take this position that the whole idea of infinity and the infinitesimal is in the end a bad idea just because it is so unwieldy and if they can if they could I don't think they can but if they could found mathematics on a basis that didn't require the notion of infinity they'd be very very happy just because this is not a very clear notion but if you figure once again if you go back and think that philosophy one is is the domain of problems that don't have very clear-cut answers and it then as a corollary you understand the philosophical effort to be trying to give clear answers to those questions then you can see why something like the notion of the infinitesimal wouldn't be you know wouldn't immediately lend itself to that kind of enterprise they're trying to get clarity here and the infinitesimally D brings a measure to unclarity but at least somebody like Zeno he would want to know well is how can we understand the line is being divided into an infinite number of infinitesimally I mean how do you how does how does something get from one of those internet vessels to the next so well really it's a continuity because well then it's not the visible is it it's like a number of infinitesimal things that you say is it is it atomized or is it a continuity and those are interesting philosophical questions about the line the race track along which they're running but Protagoras this is this is going to be a key element later on it's not important to the apology but when we get to the me know I'll want to refer to not only Protagoras has claimed that man is the measure of all things which is a very plausible one but to another contrary claim that arose right around the same time by a group of people called the pythagoreans now I'm not going to I'm going to put forth act pythagoreans a group name rather than a single individuals name because while there is an individual here his name is Pythagoras nonetheless this is a kind of almost a religious cult the pythagoreans and it's not entirely clear you know which person associated with that cult is responsible for which of the things that we know came out of it what is the most well-known product of the pythagoreans folks the Pythagorean theorem which says what yes that's what they all say where I ask them that I'll put it this way C squared equals a squared plus B squared that is the modern way to formulate the Pythagorean theorem but to formulate it in this way requires the work of a much later philosopher mathematician named Descartes who we'll get to later in another connection but Descartes is pretty much the inventor of a mathematical technique which allows you to express geometric truths in algebraic form when you see things with these letters C squared formulas like this that's called algebraic form but the Greeks of course didn't have what what his company called analytic geometry they couldn't express the truth that way so what they did I'm going to cross it that's true that is the modern expression of the Pythagorean theorem but what they learned is that for every right triangle there's the right angle and the hypotenuse is the name they gave to the side of the triangle opposite the right angle for every right angle not the most accurate of drawings for every right angle the square on the hypotenuse see that square is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides and what that mitten is geometrically is that the area of this square call it C is equal to the area of this square plus the area of this square now I'm just calling on those things for your convenience and if you look at it it comes to the same thing because the area of this is going to be equal to this multiplied by itself this line hypotenuse and similarly for the other two squares but the way they had this to prove this was by geometric geometric constructive methods they had the show that if you flop this Square over to here the little odd then you get this and then that line I mean they had to by geometric methods show through various comparisons of figures and flopping these things around you'll see some of that done in the Meno strangely but what they were they had to prove it by construction not by formula and they were indeed able to prove that for all right triangles the square of the hypotenuse will be equal to sum of the squares on the other two sides they also learned such things as that when musical instruments a lyre or something like a guitar but the musical instruments are where you can find the harmonics on a single string are at whole-number intervals along that stone and they found lots of other things I need to discover all the mathematical laws of nature that we know of course but they discover enough so as to put them in an incredible degree of awe about the perfection of mathematics why well it was against the background of this whole history here I mean this whole history leading up to Protagoras seems to yield the conclusion that there isn't any objective truth man is the measure of all things the pythagoreans I mean they didn't invent the the things like the Pythagorean theorem had been known and many other geometric truth had been known for generations by Egyptians by other people then on all around the Mediterranean but just as sort of engineering rules of thumb practical rules nothing that could be proven with 100% certainty but the pythagoreans specialized in was finding ways of demonstrating beyond all possible doubt that these things were true what they discovered was that there was at least one area of thought namely mathematics in particular geometry there was at least one area of thought where what the thakura said appears to be false man is not the measure of all things because here we have mathematics where two people may start out disagreeing but if they fairly appraise the situation and if they understand the steps of the proof no matter what they start out thinking at the end they'll have they'll be forced or less cognitively forced to say oh yeah I guess that's true I mean that's the the the beauty of mathematics pure mathematics anyway is that in it there are proofs but in a world where everything seemed to be completely up in the air and relative eyes and each different person along this in your neighborhood seemed to have a different physical theory a different ethical theory and at least every different culture seemed to have a whole different approach in the world this was a remarkable a remarkable discovery that some things are not just a matter of opinion things approvable man is not the measure of all things there are some truths that are objective so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that they wound up taking mathematics to be all it took to be not almost to be an element of the divine they came to worship mathematics and that accounts for the cult-like behavior of the pythagoreans because they really were religious about their math other any comments or questions about any of the stuff the one thing I wanted to clarify because it might be it might strike you as odd is that Plato is the writer of all of the all of these dialogues Socrates as far as anybody knows never wrote anything at all and we'll return to that later I'm sure Socrates is this fellow that hangs out in the in the market at Athens and talks to people and obviously gets in trouble because of what he's doing but Plato is more or less a disciple of Socrates he's somebody who's very young by the time of Socrates ends his career and it's not even obvious that Socrates and Plato knew one another very well but Plato admires Socrates and then subsequently in Plato's own career he makes Socrates the hero of almost everything he writes he's the hero so curiously enough even in the apology where maybe Socrates doesn't come off as glowingly as you might expect I believe Plato's trying to place him in the best possible light so Plato is trying to portray Socrates in a positive way and in the apology we get Socrates's words in the credo we get Socrates talking to other people but keep in the back of your mind everything you read was written by another person Plato and as much as Plato admired Socrates they're different people now it's different generations even and Plato has his own ideas about what's correct and what's incorrect on these different issues so we're getting a portrayal of Socrates by another person a follower someone who subsequently became one of the greatest philosophers that's ever lived as far as other people's opinions are concerned while I don't to make too much of the analogy there are interesting comparisons to be made between the story of Socrates and his followers and mainly the one follower Plato on the one hand and the story of Christ and his followers both of these two figures very important in the history of Western culture both of these two figures were martyred were executed for very different reasons but they were both executed neither of them so far as we know ever wrote anything themselves they just spoke to other people and all that we know about either of these two figures is what other folks write about them okay that's enough for today what I want to do next time is to talk about the apology we'll begin there and move into the Credo both of these appear in a world that comes not too long after the developments I've been describing today you you

Channel: Jack Sanders

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Length: 87min 10sec (5230 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 17 2014