What is Philosophy? - First Lecture of the Semester

today we're going to try to answer the question what is philosophy this is a good topic for the first lecture of this course but i also have another audience in mind i also intend for this video to be shared with the parents i teach these courses here at the university of north carolina at greensboro and at the end of every semester i have a few students who come to me and they say i want to major in philosophy but i don't think my parents are going to like the idea i don't even think they know what philosophy is and i always have to say to them one day i'm planning on making a video version of the introductory lecture where i explain to them what philosophy is so that they realize that their child majoring in philosophy in college is actually maybe a very good idea and now i've finally gotten around to making that video here it is the first thing to do in trying to answer the question what is philosophy is to talk about the word the word philosophy comes from greek it's made up of the words philia which is a greek word for love and sofia which is a greek word for wisdom and so together they mean the love of wisdom but that's useless forget about that that's not gonna help us in figuring out what philosophy is as an academic subject today you should also before we begin forget any associations that you have with the word philosophy people use it in all sorts of weird ways in society we're just talking about the kind of work that you will do in a college level philosophy course and in these courses you are going to try to answer questions like the following does god exist do i have free will and what is free will anyway which actions are morally good and for that matter which actions are morally bad what is the fair way to arrange society finally does my mind continue to exist after my bodily death you might be thinking that these are not only the kinds of questions that come up in a college-level philosophy course but these are also the kinds of questions that seem to occur to other kinds of people these questions occur to children and stoners and they also occur to you know religious leaders let's take these groups in order we'll start with the children questions like these do naturally occur to children and children stop thinking about them but they stop thinking about them not because they've produced well-supported answers but because they get busy with dating and taxes and all the stuff in adult life and they just sort of stop trying to answer these questions what academic philosophers do is they don't stop trying to answer these questions when they get older they keep trying to answer them in serious rigorous ways and that of course is what distinguishes the philosophers from the stoners stoners will talk about questions like these but in a sort of casual fun way when philosophers do it it's less fun it's still a little bit fun but they take it extremely seriously now religious leaders and religious people and religions in general they also take these questions very seriously um and so you might be wondering okay well what distinguishes you know philosophy from religion there are two things the first one is that religion seems to rely to some degree on revelation consider for example this question which actions are morally good religious leaders will say that they have the answer given to them it was revealed to them whereas philosophers academic philosophers they are trying to produce an answer to a question like this they're trying to answer a question like this without just trusting what someone has said even though that thing that that person might have said may have been the right answer right they don't want to just trust what someone said about it they want to come up with an answer to this question produced entirely from you know valid arguments and rational thought of course some religious leaders some religious people are also philosophers right so there are many famous philosophers throughout history and who are alive today who were deeply religious but they wanted to answer at least some of these questions using just rational thought and not also relying on you know revealed truths in texts or whatever even if they think that those texts contain real truths that come from god the second way that religious leaders and religions seem to differ from philosophers and philosophy is that in the case of religion there are restrictions on the answers that you can come to when you're when you're answering these questions the question does god exist you can conclude that god exists you're still a philosopher you conclude that god doesn't exist you're still a philosopher but if you go through all the arguments and you conclude that god doesn't exist then you're not a priest anymore enough with the different groups of people for now so when i was an undergraduate this is all i got i just got a bunch of examples of philosophical questions and i got the assertion that philosophy is the attempt to rigorously seriously answer questions like that but i think we can do better i think we can probably say what all of these questions have in common that makes them philosophical questions first though let's go through some of the wrong answers when i ask a group of students what do they think all of these questions have in common the first answer that i always get is that all of these questions are subjective this isn't a silly answer some matters really are subjective take for example the question are pickles tasty the answer to this question is different for different people the people who like pickles say yes pickles are tasty and the people who don't like pickles say pickles are not tasty and everyone's right matters of taste are subjective but all of these philosophical questions i don't think they are subjective in fact i think none of them are subjective take for example does god exist that's just a question about whether some type of thing in the universe exists or not does bigfoot exist it's not a matter of taste where it changes for different people like bigfoot exists for me but he doesn't exist for you no he's either there or not same thing goes for god and it's worth noting that the mere existence of disagreement doesn't demonstrate subjectivity or whatever one of these things happens after your body ceases to function after your heart stops beating and all the neurons in your brain stop firing either your mind continues to exist somewhere or it doesn't i don't think any of these issues are subjective at least not in the sense that the tastiness of pickles or the tastiness of anything is subjective okay so i'm ready to offer my explanation for what all of these questions have in common but in order to do that i'm going to need some space on the board and so i'm going to erase all of these questions now when we're trying to determine if a question is philosophical or not the first thing we have to do is determine whether it can be answered with observation or experimentation here's a question i'm really going to ask you this question i want you to really answer it chickens do chickens give birth to live young or do they lay eggs the answer is that they lay eggs how do we know that chickens lay eggs i'll tell you we watch the chickens babies don't just fall out it's eggs the eggs fall out first and then they sit on the eggs or something and then the eggs hatch into chicks or whatever so we answered this question a biological question by use of observation if a question can be answered by observation or experimentation then that question is what we call empirical you don't have to remember the word empirical but that's the label anyway and biological questions fall into this category also questions of history questions in physics and chemistry and economics and all sorts of stuff these are empirical questions okay but not all questions are empirical here's an example the number nine is it a prime number you know what a prime number is a prime number is a number that's only evenly divisible by itself and 1. is 9 a prime number no 9 is not a prime number because you can divide 9 by 3 and get 3. but notice that we didn't answer this question by observing the number 9 because we've never observed the number nine this right here folks is not the number nine this is a numeral that represents the number nine here's another numeral this is a roman numeral it comes from southern europe this is a arabic numeral it comes from the middle east these are just shapes these are bits of ink on a piece of glass the number nine whatever it is is some abstraction it's it's not on the board right now these are just numerals they're not actual numbers the numeral here the arabic numeral for nine it can't be divided evenly into three parts how would you divide it that doesn't even make any sense the kind of division we're talking about is not just like chopping something up in space and the kind of thing we're talking about when we talk about the number nine it's not something that you can observe it's not something that you can run an experiment on when we discovered this fact about the number nine that it's not prime and it really is a fact this is a fact folks we didn't discover it by way of observation or experimentation we must have discovered it some other way questions of mathematics like this they're what we call non-empirical and when we have a non-empirical question we can ask a further question about it which is can it be answered by way merely of some proofs or calculations that get run from stipulated definitions or axioms let me try to explain this with another example here's a question and be extremely annoying and persnickety and literal when you answer this question what is this object it's not a triangle that is a bunch of ink on a piece of glass a triangle is a two-dimensional polygon with three sides this is not a two-dimensional thing right this is made up of some ink and the ink is made up of molecules and the molecules although they're really skinny are not completely flat this is not a two-dimensional object this is a three-dimensional object you've never seen a two-dimensional object because two-dimensional objects like triangles don't exist at least triangles don't exist in the world that we live in you've never seen a triangle all you've ever seen are you know drawings of triangles which are three-dimensional things made up out of particles right and you maybe you've seen the corner of a building that's triangular in shape but that's just a building that's not a triangle okay you've got to believe me right you've never seen a triangle right think about everything that you've ever interacted with in your life like look around you wherever you are you're watching this on a screen of some kind the screen is made of glass that's just more molecules like hydrogen and i don't know what it's made out of silicon and whatever those are just atoms they're all three-dimensional they're stretched out they have a height and a width and a depth everything you've ever seen your face your nose has a height and a width and a depth everyone you've ever met every rock you've ever stepped on everything you've ever interacted with is three-dimensional you've never seen a triangle no one's ever discovered a triangle right i don't care what kind of ink you use to draw it all ink is made up out of particles out of molecules or atoms or whatever so ink can never draw or create a true triangle because triangles are just imaginary things they're things that we made up we stipulated that they that they are defined a certain way we just made up the definition stipulated means made up we made up the definition of a triangle we said it was a three-sided enclosed polygon two-dimensional polygon or whatever and then we also stipulated some axioms axioms are just additional stipulated claims in addition to definitions and then when we discovered facts about triangles and just in the same way that we discover facts about the number nine or whatever like the fact that the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees we discovered that fact just by coming up with some made-up definitions for something that we had never observed and we still have never observed a triangle this doesn't mean that math is worthless or anything math is amazing it's just not empirical we stipulated these definitions and then we produced some proofs so we ran some calculations from them when we discovered some things like that the interior angles of a triangle always sum to 180 degrees okay so arithmetic and geometrical questions they're non-empirical you can't answer them by observing or running experiments but you can answer them by doing proofs or calculations based off of stipulated definitions or axioms so we have questions that are empirical they're answered by observing what's going on in the world or by running experiments we have questions that are not empirical but that you can answer them just by running some proofs from some definitions that you just made up and then there are questions that cannot be answered in either way those questions are the philosophical ones or so i'm claiming so that's my answer to the question what is philosophy philosophy is just all the leftover stuff okay so let's test this definition of philosophy we're going to test it by taking one of the questions that we started with and seeing where we put it you know in this diagram what is the fair way to arrange society can a question like this be answered empirically by observing or running experiments no it can't because all we can observe is how societies are in fact arranged but this question is not about that it's not asking you know are there kings and queens or is it a democracy no no this isn't a question about how society is arranged this is a question about how it ought to be arranged this is a question about which way of arranging society is fair or just and you're not going to figure that out by just looking at societies because looking at societies observing them is only ever going to tell you at least directly it's only ever going to tell you how societies are actually arranged but when we're talking about this question we want to know how they should be arranged and also we're not going to answer a question like this with experiments right say that we run some experiments like we put a bunch of people on a deserted island somewhere and we see what happens that will just tell us how their little society becomes arranged how it will be arranged if certain conditions are prevailing or whatever but that's just a different question maybe it's a very interesting question but it's not this one and then also this is not a mathematical question either it's not a question that has to you know do with proofs that are run from stipulated definitions or axioms right society is a real thing it's not like a triangle that we never observed and we just made up a definition for it society is a thing out there and we want to understand it maybe and we want to understand what is just or what is fair about different ways that it could be structured we're not going to answer a question like that by running some calculations with a calculator this is a philosophical question it goes in this category and you might be wondering well how are we going to answer it then the way we're going to answer it is with arguments or rational thought and when i say argument the kind of argument that we are going to engage in in this philosophy course when i say argument i don't just mean like you know two people are arguing with each other by screaming at one another or whatever no no an argument as academic philosophers use the term is a a series of statements that are structured so as to rationally persuade someone that something is true now the fact that philosophers have to answer these questions with nothing other than rational clear thought and argument and that sort of thing that fact is going to have two very significant consequences but i'm not going to tell you what those consequences are first i'm going to deal with some objections that people sometimes have to the very practice of philosophy deal with those objections then we'll get to the consequences the first objection is this anything goes if you don't have observation or experimentation to fall back on and if you don't have sort of like rigorous mathematical proofs to fall back on well then when you're doing philosophy can't anybody just say anything and any answer to any of these questions is just as good as any other answer anything goes right no i don't think anything goes because some arguments are better than other arguments some patterns of reasoning are clear and rigorous and logical and other patterns of reasoning are not throughout the course of the semester we are going to see dozens and dozens of examples of arguments and some of them are just going to be better than others and we're going to be able to break down the ways in which some of them are better than others so it's just not true that when you give up you know empirical observation and when you give up mathematical proof you're left with nothing with which to assess or evaluate the quality of the answers to the questions that you're trying to answer so it's just not true that anything goes okay that was the first objection to the practice of philosophy here's the second objection philosophy doesn't produce anything and so because it doesn't produce anything it's not worth doing well it's not exactly true that philosophy doesn't produce anything it produces clear rational arguments it produces well-supported answers to the kinds of questions that we were talking about earlier that i wrote up as examples on the board right that's what philosophy produces it produces rational well-thought-out well-argued answers to those questions and so then if we want to know whether or not philosophy is worth doing whether it's worthless or not we just have to ask well is that product well-thought-out well-supported answers to those questions is that product worth having i suggest that it definitely is to see this point consider one of the questions that we were talking about earlier does my mind continue to exist after my bodily death is that an important question yes it's i think it's an important question and i think you think it's an important question everybody agrees that at some point your body dies your heart stops beating if your mind your soul or your consciousness or whatever if that continues living somewhere else forever after your body stops functioning and disintegrates into the dirt if that happens well then you are immortal you can't really die in the interesting sense although your body can die but who cares about your body you your memories and your thoughts and your personality all that stuff will keep going if your mind continues to exist after your bodily death that seems to be like one of the most important interesting questions that someone could ask about themselves am i immortal or not do i continue living forever don't you want to know are you immortal if you want to know the answer to that question well then the way to find the answer is to do you know serious logical rational contemplation about it or whatever if an answer like that is worthwhile if it's worth having then philosophy is worth doing because it will get you an answer like that or at least it's the only way to get you an answer like that for that reason it's just false to say that philosophy doesn't produce anything and it just seems to me like it doesn't follow that philosophy is worthless notice something also the question of whether philosophy is worth doing that's also a philosophical question right if we go through this diagram right is this activity worth doing well that's not an empirical question it's a question about what ought to be done right and what ought to be done as we saw before that's not something that you can answer by just observing or running experiments so because it's a normative question about how things should be what you should do what activities are worth doing because the question is like that it's not empirical it's also not mathematical you can't answer it by running some calculations from some stipulated definitions or axioms and so therefore the question of is philosophy worth doing that's also a philosophical question so someone who tries to use this kind of attack against philosophy well they have to be doing philosophy okay now we're ready to talk about the consequences let's keep this moving the first consequence of this definition of philosophy is that the answers to philosophical questions are going to be controversial you can't fall back on you know experiments you can't fall back on mathematical style proofs and so you know it's going to be harder when you have fewer tools with which to answer questions it's just going to be harder to settle on agreed-upon answers this consequence of this definition is actually kind of good for the definition itself you see the definition of philosophy that i'm giving is actually a fairly controversial one that is lots of philosophers are going to disagree with me about the answer to the question what is philosophy but according to this answer the question what is philosophy is itself a philosophical question right we're answering it right now not by way of experiments or observations not by way of some proofs or calculations run from stipulated definitions or axioms no we're answering this question in the sort of standard philosophical way so this answer predicts that it itself will be controversial which it will be the second consequence of this definition of philosophy is that philosophy is hard right you have fewer tools you don't have experiments with which to answer these difficult philosophical questions you don't have mathematical proofs all you have are the sort of ordinary tools that we use in our ordinary lives all you have are words and clear thinking and arguments these are things that everyone uses every day and they're the only things that philosophers have to use in order to answer these very difficult questions and so what happens is you get very good at using those tools here's an analogy say that you want to make some iced tea like instant iced tea from powder or whatever like lipton or i don't know this this glass isn't sponsored by lipton you pour the powder in to a glass and you pour the water in and you mix it up with a spoon or whatever and there you've made some iced tea chemists in a chemistry lab they use similar tools right they'll use a glass container although maybe a slightly fancier one and they'll pour in the ingredients for the solution that they need to produce or whatever although they'll pour them in in a much more precise much more careful way but they're doing basically the same thing and then they'll mix you know all of the stuff together but they'll use a uh you know a specialized tool that's a little bit better than the spoon that you have at home and they will use that tool in a very very careful way and so what chemists will do is they'll get very good at you know mixing stuff together they they acquire skills that's what happens when we do philosophy we're using basically the same tools as everyone else we're using words and we're using thoughts except for we're using them much more carefully and so then when we want to go back to our regular lives and make ice-t or produce an argument in any other context outside of you know the philosophical realm we're just good at it and because we get good at it maybe maybe that's why we do so well on standardized tests we've now come to the part of this lecture where i talk about how well philosophers do on standardized tests let's start by talking about the gmat it's a standardized test that you have to take before going to business school so if you want to go to business school and become rich as a business whatever you've got to take this standardized test here are the average gmat scores broken down by major look at how well the philosophy majors are doing that's like kind of cool and kind of surprising they don't do as well on this test as you know physicists or mathematicians but they do better than chemists or historians or political scientists okay cool fine what about like the lsat the lsat is another standardized test that you have to take before you go to law school it's the law school test philosophy majors do the best and that kind of makes sense right because philosophers are practicing using clear rigorous argument to answer philosophical questions and well lawyers have to use arguments in the courtroom or whatever or in writing you know wills or whatever lawyers do then there's the gre the gre i think this one stands for the graduate requisite exam or record exam or whatever this is the standardized test that you have to take if you want to go to graduate school in some ordinary subject like economics or biology or history or sociology or english or whatever it's just like the sats if there's a math section uh there's a verbal section and there's a writing section and if you take all three of those sections if you average out the scores on all of them and then add them all up you'll get a composite score for the gre and the breakdown by major looks like this look at this this one is crazy right the philosophy majors are doing way way way way better than even english and political science and physics and astronomy like this is impressive stuff folks i know what you're thinking you're thinking i don't care about standardized test scores all i care about is material wealth money that's all i want is money money money how much money am i going to make if i try to answer these deep profound philosophical questions or whatever the answer seems to be like more than other people here's a graph of the mid-career salaries for non-stem majors stem stands for science technology engineering and mathematics philosophers are making more than people who major in business economics or marketing all right cool so maybe you can be rich okay but you might have a question at this point are these the kinds of reasons that i should use in deciding what to measure in in college should i decide my major based on how much money it's going to make me or on how well i'm going to do on some standardized test in a few years from now well that question about why one should study philosophy or not that is itself a philosophical question you're not going to figure out what you ought to do or why you ought to do something from observation or experimentation and you're not going to figure it out by running mathematical proofs from stipulated definitions or axioms if you want to know whether some group of considerations like how much money you're going to make is the right kind of thing to take into account when making a decision like that you're going to have to do philosophy you

Channel: Jeffrey Kaplan

Views: 266,959

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Id: wwT4N_v0-WQ

Length: 29min 27sec (1767 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020