Administration Guide

3. What is this course about?

In this course you are going to explore three of the most interesting philosophical topics:

The problem of knowledge
The nature of the mind and its relation to the body
The conflict between causality and free action

In the "Paper Outlines" to be found in the Philosophy Programme Prospectus and Extramural Handbook, and in section one, the list starts with an additional "problem":

The nature of philosophy and argumentation

Add 1. to the start of the list then.

Philosophy and Argumentation

Be forewarned, however, that we shall not spend as long on the question "What is philosophy, and how do philosophers go about their work?" as we would like and you may have expected. The reason is simple. You will have a much better idea of the nature of philosophy after you have actually done some. And we will be spending the entire semester doing that doing. The urge to ask the "What is...?" question right at the start is almost irresistible, and so is the insistence that if it can’t be properly answered in the first lecture then no will have any idea what they are trying to do in the rest. But this is a philosophical mistake itself. Think of practically any definition of a university subject given in the first week: "What is Art?", "What is English Studies?", "What is History?" , "What is Physics?", "What is Mathematics?", "What is Chemistry?", "What is Biology?". Teachers have to get up there and say something, to keep you coming back the next session. But it’s all a bit of a con job. You will know perfectly well what History is by the end of the semester when you have done some historical studies yourself; you will know only then; and once you have actually done some, the "What is...?" question will no longer seem such an urgent first step. Likewise with every other subject I know of. We’ll wave our arms too. But we will quickly cut to the chase.

Argumentation is part of - maybe the largest part of - a philosopher’s toolkit. So something like the same applies. Question: "What is a wrench?" Best answer: "Here’s one and this is what you can do with it. But if you try to do such and such with it, you’ll break it and I’ll thump you." Question: "What is a deductive argument?" Best answer: "Here’s one and this is what you can do with it; but don’t try to use it for so and so or it will fall apart on you." We can say a teensy bit about a wrench and a deductive argument in advance of getting our hands dirty with them. But they are essentially tools, and all tools you learn to work with only by actually working with them.

Knowledge

Here more can be delimited in advance. At least, a wider variety of questions can be laid out which we will not be quite so evasive answering. Some examples: What is the most useful definition to give of the difficult concept of knowledge? - after all, we all know that good and bad definitions can be given of anything. Which sorts of statements that interest us live up to such a definition, and which don’t, and why? Are there clear foundations to knowledge - propositions we can use as rock-bottom bits and build the rest of what we want to know on top of them? If so, how do we recognise when we have got one of these foundations? - beat our chests, hard? What are the limits of what we can build on them? Or is somehow the whole model of building on foundations the wrong one to use for the things we most want to know about the objective world? If so, what better model should we employ? We will certainly look at these questions carefully.

Minds and Bodies

The question "What are minds as opposed to bodies, or are they just the same thing?", like so much concerning minds and bodies, carries a sting in its tail even in the asking. How can we even wonder whether "two things" are "the same thing" in the first place? - if there were genuinely two things even to talk about they could hardly be just one thing, and if there genuinely were just one thing involved how could we even be speaking of "they" and asking about "two"? Questions about minds and mental states have always posed a number of subtle difficulties. In this course, several quite different theories about what minds "really are" will be on offer. Some of these theories say that when we use mental concepts and words, such as "pain" and "thought", what we are really referring to is a quite separate component of a human being, something completely non-physical, over and above a person’s body - and that only this way can we pay proper importance to such phenomena as consciousness and the fact that we seem to have privileged access to our mental states. The advance of science has made this dualistic view less attractive and a basically unitary view of everything in the universe more compelling. So it is only proper to then turn our hand to examining some theories which argue that everything about what we call "minds" can be explained in purely physical terms, particularly in terms of purely physical outward behaviour or purely in terms of physical brains inside our heads.

Freedom and causality

The rise of a purely physical, naturalistic, world-view has deep and disturbing consequences of its own, however. The physical world is uncontroversially the world of ordinary cause-effect relations: causality is everywhere in it; nothing is exempt from causation. But if that is true of the physical world in general, then it seems it must be equally true of all of our human actions too. They must all be just as subject to causality as rocks falling off cliffs, for they are all just as physical as anything else in the natural world. Where does this leave the idea that we are free to choose what we do, however, and that it is our exercise of this freedom which makes us morally responsible for what we do? Indeed, in a purely causal world is there any room at all for talk of freedom and responsibility? If there isn’t really anything such as freedom, it is startling how much else has to go: praise and blame, guilt and innocence, punishment and reward, good and bad. If there is such a thing, then does this mean our human actions are somehow exempt from causality? Or can the fact of causation of all physical events and the fact of freedom of human action somehow be made compatible with each other? 134.101 looks critically at several alternatives on this issue.

Problems such as these are the meat and potatoes of philosophy. The textbook by Sober takes us through a nice selection of them.

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