Philosophy for Beginners

when I was still in high school I decided I wanted to learn about philosophy and I did what I think a lot of people would think is natural I went to a bookstore and then I just found some books that I wanted to read of course that meant that when I came home I had two books and it was the birth of tragedy by Frederick n and introduction to metaphysics by Martin heiger if you know anything about philosophy I think you know that that was probably not the ideal way to start I didn't have any sense of like what basic terms meant I just knew that philosophy sounded like something that was interesting and something I wanted to spend some time on but I was going in totally blind so if you're in a position where you want to start reading some philosophy but you don't even know what the basic landscape of philosophy is like this is the video for you this is my sort of beginner's guide to philosophy this is not a list of recommended readings I've done that a couple of times I'll link them down below Instead This is a tour through five major areas of philosophy and those areas are logic metaphysics epistemology ethics and political philosophy now if you're someone who would click on a video like this it's because you like to learn things and you probably like to learn things in a free and easy way and I want to take just a moment to tell you about today's sponsor brilliant brilliant is a great way for you to learn about math and computer science you can work on General Science and Engineering skills some of those programming skills you've been wanting to develop or maybe some data analytics and Brilliant sets this up so that you can learn these things in about 15 minutes a day I left Academia after getting my PhD started working at tech companies and one of the things I didn't learn to do when I was working on my philosophy PhD was learn about data analytics or to learn skills like Python and those kind of skills though are incredibly useful if you're trying to Branch out now if you're interested in brilliant they are offering a 20% discount to the first 200 subscribers who use my link that is brilliant.org Jared Henderson that's 20% off for the first 200 subscribers and you get a 30-day free trial with bril so thank you again to brilliant for sponsoring this video now when I talk about philosophy I usually like to start by talking about Logic the study of logic can be broken up really into two major categories the first category is about the art of thinking and about becoming a better thinker one of the best examples of that from the history of philosophy is the 17th century book by Arno and Nicole called logic or the art of thinking this book was actually intended as a kind of manual to help you become a more rational thinker Arno and are trying to help the reader train themselves so that they can have more true beliefs while also avoiding false beliefs and there's a lot of value in what Arno and Nicole are trying to do you could go and try and read that book yourself but I think most of us would probably want a bit more of a modern update and this is really the topic that you would find discussed in textbooks that fall under the heading of critical thinking and if you spent any time on the internet around philosophy or critical thinking then you've probably encountered a couple of the basic concepts like fallacies you might have even even seen a YouTube video where someone tried to give a quick list of 19 fallacies and also accidentally said that Richard Nixon walks on the moon and the comment section let him know that he made a mistake who knew fallacies really simply put are bad patterns of reasoning it's not that every fallacious argument has a wrong or false conclusion it's that the kind of reasoning that's being employed in a fallacious argument is not the kind of reasoning that will reliably take you from truth to truth so here's a quick example this is the fallacy of guilt by association this is probably the internet's favorite fallacy so suppose that we have two friends Arthur and Buster and they've decided to have a debate about vaccines suppose that Arthur holds the belief that vaccines cause autism now Arthur is wrong about this and Buster needs to figure out how he can argue against Arthur and try to convince him one of the ways he could do this is talk about the different studies that show that there really isn't much evidence that supports any kind of causal link between vaccines and autism but sometimes Buster maybe gets a little ahead of himself and he says instead that you shouldn't believe that because crazy and bad people like Alex Jones believe that notice here that even if Buster is correct about vaccines not causing autism he still made a bad argument the truth is that bad people and sometimes even crazy people have true beliefs so just associating a belief with a bad person isn't enough to show that the belief is false the point is pretty simple if you want to figure out if a belief is true or false you need to focus on the relevant kind of evidence and just like the fact that good people believe something doesn't make it true bad people believing something also doesn't make it false so if you understand logic this way I think you can see how it's going to help make you a better thinker you're going to learn about good reasoning whether deductive inductive or abductive and you don't really need to use formal logical Tools in order to learn this stuff it can also go really nicely with some more modern psychology in the last couple of decades psychologists have become very interested in cognitive biases now some of the research on cognitive biases proed to not nearly as robust as we had previously believed particularly the work on implicit bias that really did not hold up to replication but there are still well documented and well supported cognitive biases which are basically these bad heris STS that we tend to naturally do in order to determine if something is true or false learning about cognitive biases is a lot like learning about fallacies the more you learn about them the more you can try and recognize them in your own thinking and the better kind of thinker you're going to become and this is going to help you when you're studying philosophy but it's also really going to help you when you study absolutely anything this is one of the reasons that I bring it up at the beginning of this video and why I think it's an important way to start your philosophical Journey now the second way of understanding logic is as a formal or mathematical system we have a precedent of this in the history of philosophy as well while formal mathematical logic really becomes its own kind of subject in maybe say the 19th century in the Medieval World we had incredibly robust logical analysis and medieval logicians were really worried about the structure of argument in the way that contemporary mathematical logicians are even if you go back to Aristotle we're talking about the form of argument rather than the content of argument which is that first distinction you need if you're going to study formal logic when most philosophers today talk about logic they are talking about formal logic so logic in our second sense and not that first sense in making you a better thinker so the study of formal logic really started to flourish in the 19th and 20th centuries one of the key figures for this is gotb frga frer was the inventor of something called the B Griff shrift this translates to a concept script from German his idea was to create a formal notation which could represent arguments especially the kinds of arguments that you would find in mathematics so logicians would actually translate arguments into this formal representation and then using well-defined rules try to assess whether or not they were valid or invalid it can feel tedious to try to spell out all of these rules but this level of precision is useful for the sort of work that logicians want to do formal logic really originally was supposed to provide a grounding for all of mathematics but this actually proved a little bit difficult due to things like Russell's Paradox and girdle's incompleteness Theorem so Russell's Paradox showed an essential contradiction in fraga's system it actually showed that fra made inconsistent assumptions as he was laying out his entire formal system and then girdle's incompleteness theorem shows that there are some truths of mathematics which cannot be proven but formal logic is not only useful because it could provide a grounding for mathematics it's also useful for our kind of prise modeling of other philosophically interesting Concepts and that's why we have modal Logics temporal Logics epistemic Logics fuzzy Logics and so on some philosophers also spend their time thinking about paradoxes and a paradox is where we get an absurd conclusion from plausibly true pries and reliable inference rules they seem to show us that there's a problem with the way we think about reasoning here's a famous example the Liar's Paradox so consider the sentence this sentence is false now let's ask ourselves an OB question so is that sentence true or false if you say that it's false then the sentence is true because after all it says of itself that it's false and it's false so it's true that's absurd right but if it is true then we get the inverse reasoning since it says of itself that it's false and we've suppos that it's true then it actually describes itself incorrectly and a sentence that describes itself incorrectly is false which again is absurd the liar traps us in a kind of pattern of circular reasoning we can go back back and forth concluding that it's true and then it's false and it's true and then it's false and if you accept some common inference rules like modus ponents you actually get to this principle called explosion the idea behind the principle of explosion is that when you when you've arrived at a contradiction you can actually prove any sentence at all and that obviously is absurd not every sentence is true so paradoxes tell us something important but actually figuring out what they tell us about our language or about our logic is a matter of debate I didn't even bother to count how many different kinds of solutions to the paradoxes there are on offer but I would guess probably in the hundreds at least when it comes to theories when you look at all the variance and subvariant of the solutions so to say that there's any kind of consensus I think would be an overstatement so logicians study good thinking and the laws of logic but metaphysicians study the nature of reality itself metaphysicians debate topics like truth identity endurance necessity contingency the existence of God the relationship between the mental and the physical those are just the topics that I could think of off the top of my head actually for a short video like this we're just going to focus on two of the big issues that we've seen in the history of philosophy and those are the nature of truth and the problem of universals so probably from the very beginning of philosophy philosophers have felt like they had to say something about truth and to tell you what it is but for a very long time they never felt like they had to go into tremendous detail truth was sort of just taken for granted as a kind of obvious or simple concept so they didn't actually tell you us much about the nature of truth there's a quote from Aristotle in the metaphysics where he gives a little definition of truth that actually is pretty straightforward so Aristotle writes to say of what is that it is not or of what is not that it is is false while to say of what it is that it is and of what is not that it is not is true Aristotle seems to have inherited that definition from Plato and basically he's just giving you the conditions under which something is true or false that doesn't actually tell us much about the nature of the property of Truth and eventually philosophers felt like they had to give a theory of Truth and a couple of theories emerged as like the main contenders the correspondence theory of Truth says that a sentence is true when it corresponds to reality this seems to be really similar to what Plato and Aristotle would have said about truth this view is often associated with another view in metaphysics called realism which is the belief that there are mind independent truths so truths that we don't make true with our minds but rather we discover I would say that probably this is the most popular view of Truth most philosophers would defend this view including me by the way I wrote my dissertation on the nature of Truth and I did not start off wanting to defend a correspondence theory I had alternative ideas but by the end I ended up offering a kind of Novel version of a correspondence theory of Truth in my dissertation so I do have some skin in this game the verification theory of Truth says that a sentence is true when it has been verified the verification theory is often associated with anti-realism and according to this view before something has been verified it's neither true nor false this view was actually pretty popular in the 20th century partly due to the influence of a philosopher named Michael dummit but it was never really the dominant view related to the verification theory of Truth is the pragmatist theory of Truth which says that when we say a belief is true what we really saying is that it's useful for achieving our practical ends this this does seem like another anti-realist theory of truth but it has nothing to do with verification in this case and it's more about the utility of certain beliefs this is closely associated with the American pragmatist like CS purse and William James and John Dewey the final prominent theory of truth would be the coherence Theory which says that a sentence is true just when it coheres with some privileged set of beliefs now this view is associated with another metaphysical view called idealism idealism is the view that all of reality fundamentally is mental idealism is closely associated with a lot of different German philosophers probably most famously Kant and Hegel and a coherence theory of Truth has been attributed to Hegel though I have read some scholarly work that disputes whether or not Hegel actually has a coherence theory of truth but there are later idealists like the British idealist FH Bradley who seems to definitely hold a coherence theory of Truth and then you have to mention this one weird view that popped up in the 20th century but has really been prominent in discussions of Truth since then and that's the deflationary theory of Truth this theory of Truth really took off I think with the logical positivist and is associated with a book called language truth and logic by AJ a but has also been defended by philosophers like Paul horwitch and a bunch of others in the 20th century and the deflationist theory of Truth says that truth isn't a property that has a nature they deflate the whole concept and in fact truth is kind of like the word and it plays a logical or functional role in our language but it doesn't pick out anything significant in the world now that's a quick introduction to truth so let's move on really quickly to talk about universals so we can divide the world into two categories individuals and universals we'll actually use some examples to make this a little bit clearer and let's talk about my cats so I have two black cats Carl and bark yes the second one is named bark like the sound a dog makes my wife thought it would be funny so both Carl and bark are individuals so they are discreet and distinct things they exist out in the world we could be more specific and say they are concrete individuals so they're distinct things that we can interact with physically and directly but they also seem to have some things in common namely they're both black and they're both cats so when we say that they're both cats cats what we're doing is classifying Carl and bark we're saying that they both belong to this common class of cats and there are things that are not in the class of cats like this this bottle if you're a certain kind of philosopher you might ask why is that for some philosophers the answer is that Carl and Burke both instantiate a common property which we'll call the universal and that is they they both instantiate or participate in the Universal of cat well let's call it cattiness Carl and bark both instantiate the universal of being a cat and and this bottle doesn't that explains why two of them are cats and one of them isn't the idea that there are these universals is closely associated with Plato who gave his theory of forms so forms are just Plato's word for universals for Plato the forms are Timeless and eternal and unchanging and they live in this kind of other realm we actually call it the platonic realm in philosophy so the platonic forms are actually treated as abstract objects now Aristotle actually agreed that there were universals but he disagreed that they had to exist abstractly instead he thought that they existed in the objects which instantiated them so Plato and Aristotle both agree that there are universals they just disagree about the details of the theory but there are some philosophers who say that there's no such thing as universals or properties and maybe they even go further and say no such thing as abstract objects and we call those philosophers nominalists so some philosophers base their arguments for nominalism based on a principle Simplicity which basically says that we should prefer simpler theories if they do the same kind of explanatory work this is closely associated with a principle of reasoning that we sometimes call aam's razor which is associated with the medieval philosopher William of aam now William of aam was a nominalist but as this article in the Stanford encyclopedia makes clear he does not base his argument on his razor this principle instead William aakam wanted to argue directly against the existence of universals he didn't just think that universals were unnecessary he thought that universals were incoherent eventually aam says that the only sense in which something Universal exists is when there is an act of the mind which thinks of two or more objects and this is roughly what nominalists tend to say about properties and things properties don't exist in the objects or in another realm they only exist in so far as we sort of make them up as we're classifying objects so you can find nominalism throughout the history of philosophy and not just in Western philosophy this is a case where Buddhism is a pretty interesting example a lot of Buddhist philosophers say that everything is temporary and nothing is eternal and if everything is temporary and nothing is eternal then there can't be any kind of universals which exist in some other realm certainly the platonic theory of universals just can't be true because again those are supposed to be timeless and unchanging and eternal if universals are Timeless but everything is temporary then universals just don't exist so let's talk about epistemology which is the study of knowledge comes from this Greek word episteme one of the fundamental questions of epistemology is what is knowledge what is the definition or nature of knowledge and one very old Theory again can be traced back to Plato sometimes we call this Theory the JTB theory of knowledge this Theory says that knowledge is Justified true belief I said this Theory could be Trace back to Plato and that's because it's put forward by one of the characters in his dialogue the Theus many have accepted some version of the JTB Theory but they've typically argued over the nature of justification and then we also find arguments directly against the JTB theory in the 20th century the famous example of this is Edmund gor's paper geder wrote a paper which outlined a series of cases where the JTB Theory would be satisfied but where we wouldn't say that the people in question knew anything and mostly all of cases centered on a kind of epistemic luck they had justification for their beliefs and it was true but the alignment of that justification and the truth it's just really kind of a matter of luck and we say that oh you just got lucky it actually really is about as worthwhile as having a lucky guess and thus we don't want to say that you really know it and so the JTB theory is at best insufficient especially in the englishspeaking world we've come to call these sorts of cases the gettier problem there is one major problem with this and that's that Geer didn't actually invent the problem there seems to be evidence that an Indian philosopher in the 8th Century uh d Atara actually raises similar kinds of problems for roughly this theory of knowledge and there's a similar Point that's raised by the 14th century Italian philosopher Peter of Mana but there is a more fundamental epistemological problem and that's the question of whether or not it's possible to know anything at all some philosophers throughout history have argued the answer is no we call them Skeptics when we call them Skeptics we mean something very different than the modern usage of the term for some reason we've decided to call people Skeptics if they are basically Richard Dawkin style new atheist or something Skeptics in the philosophical tradition are typically significantly more radical philosophical Skeptics tend to deny the possibility of knowledge one problem you face if you claim that knowledge is impossible is that someone can ask the kind of smart Aly question do you know that if you answer yes then you've contradicted your own position because you've said knowledge is impossible but in fact you know something and if you say no then it seems like you've undermined your own position because you've actually said that you don't even believe it this is why Skeptics tend to actually try to hedge their position the ponist school of Greek philosophy we mostly know through the later writer seus empiricus tended to teach their followers to suspend judgment which is a way of saying to train yourself to not believe anything at all there's also a variety of academic skepticism the academics are the followers of Plato in the classical world and we can see a little bit of this skepticism in the writings of Cicero skepticism can be found in the Buddhist tradition and it can be found in the western medieval tradition for instance John dun scotus and William of aam were engaged in a very Lively debate about skepticism and the possibility of knowledge in the modern era though we see a slight turn in skepticism instead of viewing skepticism as a position which can be occupied philosophers started to use skepticism and doubt as a kind of tool in their inquiry the two most famous examples of this would be R deart and David Hume deart uses a method of radical doubt so deart is on a quest for certainty and what he would do is examine all of his beliefs and if he could find any reason to doubt them he would discard his beliefs what he was searching for were those beliefs which he could know with absolute certainty he had this idea that once you had identified those fixed truths then you would be able to build an entire system of knowledge using those truths as a foundation because of this we call dart's epistemological project foundationalism so deart uses methodological skepticism to try to identify those foundations if you know anything about the history philosophy then you might have heard the phrase I think therefore I am this is part of day C's foundationalist project he thinks that that is an inference that he cannot doubt so the existence of his own mind which is a thinking thing proves to be the foundation for dayart dayart would then go on and try to rebuild all of his knowledge so all of these things that he had previously doubted like the reliability of our perceptions or the existence of God he would try to prove using this as a foundation the other famous modern skeptic would be David Hume who used his skepticism in a very different sort of way where deart was a rationalist who believed in the power of human reason to arrive at knowledge David Hume believed that all human knowledge was based in experience when we have an experience this leaves an impression on the mind and and Hume thought that all of our ideas were built out of these simple Impressions and his idea was to use a kind of skeptical methodology to examine our ideas and see if they could have actually been constructed out of Impressions based on experience and if you could not show that such a construction was possible then you had had to actually discard the belief because it was in fact meaningless Hume famously doesn't believe in induction which is the belief that the future will be like the past and that is because he thinks that experience alone cannot prove it he doesn't believe in causation because he thinks we cannot form the complex idea based on our experiences he doesn't even believe in the existence of a stable self from one time to another so humans aart are both using skepticism in their philosophical methodologies but they actually diverge pretty wildly on their conclusions now ethics is the study of right and wrong there are three major schools of Ethics first we have the consequentialist consequentialist believe that you can assess the rightness or wrongness of an action based on the consequences that it produces consequentialists tend to have a theory of value that they add and that allows you to figure out if a consequence is a good consequence or a bad consequence for instance the utilitarians who are closely associated with Jeremy benam and John Stewart Mill or Peter Singer they have a theory of value and namely that's hedonism Hedonism is the belief that all that is good is pleasure and all that is bad is pain when you add Hedonism and consequentialism together you get utilitarianism which is the moral theory that says that you ought to maximize pleasure then we have the deontologist deontologists have a law conception of Ethics instead of talking about the rightness or wrongness of particular actions based on their actual consequences deontologists like to come up with rules for classes of actions the most famous deontologist is probably Emmanuel Kant Kant believed that Memorial law could be deduced from the principles of rationality so all human beings as rational creatures were Bound by the same moral law and in fact the the moral law was knable because we all should have been able to know it in virtue of our own rationality but the third School of Ethics that we will discuss is a little bit different that's virtue ethics instead of thinking about the rightness or wrongness of particular actions virtue ethics tends to start by talking about the question of character or the development of virtue I like to say that virtue ethics really is about how to be a good human being for virtue ethics the rightness or wrongness of actions is actually a secondary question we know that if we become virtuous people will typically do the right thing so we focus on sort of self-development in an ethical manner this is a school of Ethics that was very popular in ancient Greece and in Rome you can also find it across the world especially in the confusion tradition in Chinese philosophy you see an emphasis on the development of virtue the most famous virtue ethicist is probably Aristotle though Aristotle wrote this fantastic book the nicoman ethics in which outlines a whole theory of virtue and also discusses many of the individual virtues like justice and courage and prudence and Temperance and then eventually goes on to apply this like to living the good life the life of contemplation and also discussing what it means to be a good friend in light of virtue Aristotle very famously thinks that vicious people people who lack virtue actually can't be friends but Aristotle's theory of Ethics fell out of favor and I think this is actually part of a larger down fall of Aristotelian thought in the west but in the late 1950s GE ancom published a paper called modern moral philosophy that paper is highly critical of the ethical theories of the day that paper along with works like Alistair McIntyre's after virtue led to a Resurgence of interest in virtue ethics in the academy and you actually see way more working virtue ethicist now it's it's certainly a a really robust field of Ethics in contemporary philosophy and even those who maybe say are consequential want to discuss virtues in some way in their ethical theories but you might have this question in the back of your head when I talk about goodness and Badness and all of these theories which like isn't all of this ethic stuff kind of and if you think the answer to that question is yes then you're probably a moral nihilist now when some people start to doubt ethics they can go in two directions sometimes they become subjectivist they say that ethics is just a matter of subjectivity what's right for you isn't right for me something like this I think this is the wrong path to go down subjectivism is very rarely taken seriously in philosophy I think that it's it's basically a copout and it doesn't actually wrestle with any of the major problems with realism the more radical step is to become a moral nihilist and say that there is no such thing as rightness or wrongness now there are many different strands of moral nihilism one name that gets brought up quite a bit if you talk about nihilism would be Frederick nche but the question of whether or not N is a proper niist is actually quite contested nche was certainly highly critical of conventional morality especially IM morality that was inherited from Christianity which he thought was a worldview that was dead was intellectually bankrupt I'm actually working on a video about n and the death of God and all of this stuff uh so you could look out for that eventually but whether or not N is a nihilist is actually a matter for some debate among Scholars the question is when he says that he wants to move Beyond Good and Evil is he abandoning moral categories or is he abandoning those specific categories that we've inherited from Christianity a more contemporary form of nihilism actually comes from the philosopher JL Macky who wrote this really nice little book called ethics inventing right and wrong at the beginning of that book Macky gives this argument based what he calls on queerness at the time macki meant queerness as strangeness it was a very common term for something that was strange obviously we say the word queer to mean something a little bit different nowadays so we'll say the argument from strangeness just to be clear essentially Macky observes that if moral properties exist they are the kind of properties that sort of lead to objective prescriptions of action but no other properties that we know of actually lead to these kind of objective prescriptions and so in this way they are very strange properties and he says that they are so strange in fact that we would be better off just abandoning them in our ontology and say that there is no such thing as an objective prescription notice what we've done here though we've actually left the realm of Ethics we're no longer talking about whether or not particular actions are right or wrong or whether or not we are good or bad human beings and now we're asking foundational questions about ethics we call this field meta ethics very roughly meta ethics is the field that asks all those meta questions about ethics about the language of Ethics about the epistemology of ethics and about the metaphysics of Ethics so a field that is closely related to ethics is the field of political philosophy well traditionally ethics focuses on individuals political philosophy tries to actually deal with human beings at a larger scale so one of the major issues that we find in political philosophy is the problem of Justice which is closely related to the distribution of wealth some philosophers have held that there is a moral imperative for the state to redistribute wealth to make it at least somewhat more equal and other philosophers have argued that there's actually a moral imperative to not do so because to do so would infringe on certain rights that individuals have so to see the differences in these positions we're going to consider two philosophers really briefly those John rolls and Robert nosic these are both 20th century political philosophers and they're very interesting in part because they were actually both at Harvard's philosophy department at at the same time and they came to such radically different conclusions about what Justice demanded nosic develops his theory of Justice in a book called Anarchy State and Utopia and here nosik is developing a very libertarian view of justice nok's theory is sometimes called the entitlement Theory and for our purposes what's most interesting though is that it's a historical Theory so what it does is says that if we want to figure out if our current state of affairs is just we have to go and Trace back all of the steps in history through which property has been acquired and transferred and when something unjust has happened has it been rectified basically to see if our current situation is just we have to look backward and see how did we get here this is contrasted with r's Theory which he outlines in a theory of Justice R basis is his theory on something called the veil of ignorance now under this thought experiment we imagine a group of people and this group of people are deliberating about what they think a just society would look like but here's the big catch they don't know who they're going to be in that Society so they don't know if they'll be men or women what religion they'll be if they'll be rich or poor how smart they're be or anything like that and R says in that situation what sort of a society would we prefer the result is a society that is very different than nosix so nosic is totally okay with vast amounts of inequality as long as they come about in a just manner RS on the other hand thinks that we're going to have a principle that says that all inequality has to be justifiable to those who are least well off and he thinks that's going to mean we're going to live in a vastly more equal Society if we live in a ORD with these principles nosik really is basing a lot of his stuff on property rights while RS thinks that even though you're going to have a lot of Rights in his Society perhaps even more rights than we currently enjoy property rights are something that could be overridden in the name of Justice another foundational issue in philosophy is democracy many of us take for granted that democracy is a good thing we're happy that we live in Democratic societies and many of our philosophers take for granted that whatever the ideal Society is it's going to be somewhat Democratic but actually in the history hisory of philosophy I think this is a minority position so ancient Greece might have been the place where democracy was born but both Plato and Aristotle were anti-democratic thinkers in Plato's Republic he gives a theory where he prefers the rule by a kind of elite the philosopher Kings they're intellectually gifted and their job is to look after the people of the city and aristot actually classifies different kinds of governments and he classifies some of them as deviant and on that list of deviant governments are democracies the that Plato and Aristotle both had I think is that if you believe in majority rule you're actually allowing for the tyranny of the majority though there is also a kind of aism both to Plato and Aristotle and many other anti-democratic thinkers they just think that the the people in general are not smart enough or capable enough to rule themselves this is also another case where you see some parallels with Chinese philosophy it's taken for granted in a lot of classical Chinese philosophy that there will be a ruling bureaucratic Elite or a king who has the Mandate of Heaven the issue of democracy isn't really even on the table so much so that many classical Chinese thinkers aren't even arguing against democracy directly another sort of critique of democracy that you find comes from the anarchist tradition anarchists historically understood democracy to be a form of majority rule and this was just another form of tyranny for them other anarchists have not been as critical of democracy in fact they've some argued that Democratic states are not Democratic enough and that truly the most Democratic states would be properly Anarchist to understand this you have to go a little bit far into Anarchist Theory and I think that's a little bit too much of a deep dive 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Published: Tue Jan 23 2024