Study Guide

Week One: Philosophy and the Craft of Giving Reasons

Materials Assigned for the Week
The Central Point of This Week's Material
Other Concepts and Points you are Expected To Master This Week
Miscellaneous Comments and Clarifications
1. In Defence of Philosophising
2. In Defence of Arguing

I. Materials Assigned for the Week

Reading:

Lecture 1: What is Philosophy?

Exercises:

Review Questions: pg. 8
Problems for Further Thought: pg. 8

II. The Central Point of this Week’s Material

Philosophy is not a mystical or esoteric practice. It is a mundane and down-to-earth craft of learning to think in terms of problems and reasons. Consider such wholesale problems as:

What is Knowledge and what are its limits?
What is the relation between our minds and our bodies?
Are we free beings?

We tighten up these vague worries not by throwing more and more words at them (and especially not longer and longer words)! We start with rough-and-ready views and reasons; we try to improve on them with not-quite-so-rough-and-ready views and reasons; and then we go back and try to improve on those views and reasons still more. Again and again. Learning to do philosophy is very much like learning to write. Deep but inarticulate insight is pretty well useless. Success is steady increase in clarity and cogency.

III. Other Concepts and Arguments You Are Expected to Master This Week

This first week will have less actual-philosophers-at-their-work than the rest of the semester. But there are several preliminary concepts and definitions you should master right at the start in order not to have them slow you down, or trip you up, later down the track.

The difference between a list of examples (e.g. of beautiful things) and a general definition (e.g. of beauty)
The difference between objective and subjective - try this on the notion of truth: is there really anything such as subjective truth, or truth according to me?
The difference between beliefs and facts
The difference between facts and theories
The difference between giving your opinion about something and giving an argument for something - much more on argument in Week Two
The difference between a concept and an argument
The difference between a concept and a truth

IV. Miscellaneous comments and clarifications

IV.A. In defence of philosophising

First a plea for patience however. Most people, inside and outside of university, are confident they know less about Philosophy than they know about almost any other university subject. We all studied History and English and Physics and Biology in high school, and though we might not have the slightest idea what professional workers in those fields are doing today, we all feel we know their general aim well enough. But what is the general aim of philosophy? What do philosophers do crammed in their offices all day? The origin of the word - philos plus sophos - suggests that a philosopher is one who loves wisdom. But doesn’t everybody love wisdom? So what does a philosopher do specifically to manifest his or her love of wisdom? And it is a special love of wisdom that just anyone can cultivate? In university, philosophy is marked off not so much by a subject-matter as by an attitude. Philosophers are interested in tackling conceptual perplexities, whatever the field, and in developing the critical thinking skills necessary to solve them. Both of these, happily, are readily accessible to all.

The description of philosophy I’ve just given, echoing Sober, will probably be news to most of you. This is because most of us have an entirely inappropriate set of expectations about the subject when we begin it. Take for example the notion of "proof" in philosophy. For all of Lectures Two and Three in Sober, philosophers typically never prove anything - at least not in the sense that a mathematician can prove the Pythagorean Theorem (by deducing it from axioms); or an engineer can prove the crushing strength of certain concrete mixes (by standardised tests); or a jury can prove a person guilty of manslaughter (by hearing witnesses). Certainly philosophers never typically agree with each other that a satisfactory proof of some matter has been given in the end (which is the usual result of all these other proofs). So philosophy is not an activity in which one topic is finally dusted off, we lay down tools, and everyone moves on to some new perplexity or conceptual problem. Maybe this happens, very occasionally, in Physics and Chemistry. But it certainly does not happen, ever, in History or Architecture or English. Indeed, it would sound positively ridiculous if it did: "At last, this very day, we have reached the end with building design; now we can all go home." Nor does it happen in philosophy. Yet in philosophy some of you may be distressed at what you might then conclude to be endless lack of progress: "Around and around we go, in a circle, never getting closer to the Final Answer."

Right from the first assignment, however - indeed right from Lecture One if you do the "Review Questions" and "Problems for Further Thought" in the proper spirit - most of you will in fact be practising a much more accurate view of what philosophy is. You will be learning how to assess the merits of opposed arguments. You will be learning what sorts of matters even count in assessing someone’s arguments. You will be learning to say why. These are precisely the skills which it is the task of philosophy to inculcate.

At the end we may still not have reached any Final Answer. Final Answers are pretty rare in philosophy (as in History and English and ...). However, we will certainly be a long way further on than when we started. For one thing, we will understand lots of places where not to look for Final Answers! For another, any reasoning we do on behalf of the opinions we cherish or detest will be (or can be) conducted at a far higher level than you ever dreamed within grasp at the beginning. And not just reasoning about the specific philosophical problems in Sober of course; skill at those rather set pieces immediately becomes skill at reasoning anywhere.

IV.B. In defence of arguing

This is a special plea for the special way in which this course has been constructed. Argument is a useful tool to get under your belt, for all the above reasons. But in this course it is even more central.

134.101 is not particularly a "memorise this fact, and then memorise this new fact" course. Nor is it even a "memorise this sets of concepts or theory, and then memorise this other theory or set of concepts" course. Few philosophy courses are or can be. The special approach of this course is to try to open out some philosophical claim to you, not by simple description of the view or by telling you which people held it, but by displaying what arguments are typically accepted as justifying that claim and which arguments are typically accepted as criticising it. The idea is that once you know on what grounds you are being asked to hold, that’s when you will really grasp what the view actually is which you are being asked to hold. If you like, the boundaries of some view in philosophy is given not by a whole bunch of words which you can throw at it, but by which reasons count for and against it.

Here is an example which will be mostly long words this first week, but will have become perfectly obvious by Week Nine. Here are two extraordinary-sounding claims: "our minds are actually nothing over and above our brains" and "the feeling of being in pain when you bump your funny bone is actually nothing over and above certain nerves firing in certain locations of your brain". The easiest way to understand what such claims really amount to - what branch they are crawling out on - is to understand what considerations such Mind-brain Identity Theory takes to argue in its favour (the advance of science and what is called the "parsimony" argument) and what other considerations Mind-Brain Identity Theory admits work against it. In short, the arguments aren’t there merely to shore up or tear down some philosophical position. They are there to tell us what that specific position actually is! This will be a new idea for most of you. And it will take a while to sink in - indeed, the whole Term and then some.

It is why we turn first to argument as the tools of the trade in Week Two, however. And why the emphasis is so persistent throughout this course on constructing arguments. Without them we not merely can’t justify what we want to say. We don’t even know what it is that we want to say.

Contents
Next Week: Argument