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10 Cards in this Set
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DESCARTES Pluralist- believes in more than just one substance (rationalist btw) (i think therefore i am) or..Dualist- accepts two basic substances: Mind and Body. However he believed there was a third one, God. Except by God, the two main substances cannot be destroyed. The mind body problem: How can substances(things that are independent of each other) interact. i.e. : nail in the foot, pain in the mind. He thought that they combined, but this doesnt entirely answer the mindbody problem. He believed that The mind is unextended (in space) and the body is extended (in space) Two solutions: 1) mind and body are parts of the same substance 2) they just didnt interact Substance = ultimate reality Descartes vs Leibniz vs Spinoza, is about the meaning of the ultimate reality |
LEIBNIZ Also a pluralist, like Descartes, meaning that there are more than just 1 substance (ultimate reality). leibniz states that substances cannot interact. a lot of substances, all created by God, who'm don't interact. These substances are all immaterial, called Monads. |
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DAVID HUME empiricist. Believed that: There is an external world existing independently, and that each person is in contact with the contents of their own mind. He insists on proof. He accepted John Lockes principle that all knowledge comes from experience. Descartes believes that we can know the answers to questions with certainty (necessary truths or, a priori) However, Hume believes that we cannot know the answers to these questions, everything is without justification Hume's Fork, either truth of reason(a priori or theoretical) or Matter of fact (empirical) Hume is a skeptic. We cannot know for sure everything that we thought we knew and there are only Hume's fork as truth finder. and without hume's fork, any belief is without justification. A billiard ball hitting the other: empirical We never see the cause of events, only that two events are regularly found together in constant conjunction. |
JOHN LOCKE ''all knowledge comes from experience.'' Little explanation needed, he as an Empiricist. He believed that, at birth, humans are born ''tabula rasa'' meaning blank tablet, upon which experience writes the general principles of all our knowledge. No idea is innate. difference between rationalists and empircists is that they disagree if questions CAN EVEN BE answered at all. He even said that the self was only the sum of our memories. |
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difference between rationalists and empircists is that they disagree if questions CAN EVEN BE answered at all. Rationalists believe that they can answer things with certainty, as necessary truths. Empricists believe that knowledge is at best highly probable, but not certain. Presumption of knowledge |
The Two World Assumption: How do we know that the representations of the world in our heads correspond to the things in the world. the empricists would say that our organs would be able to trick us. But however reasonable these twostatements may be, together they give rise to an intolerable conclusion: namely, thatwe can never know—or at least we can never be sure that we know—the world at all. What we know are our own opinions, ideas, and experiences; what we cannotknow is whether those opinions, ideas, and experiences match up to the world asit really is. Furthermore, we might raise the question of whether the principleswe believe a priori—our necessary truths—might in fact be true only of our way ofthinking, or true of our language, but not true of the world itself— in other words, not true. These doubts are known as the school of thought of Skepticism |
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SKEPTICISM We can never know anything about the world at all, this is known as skepticism. |
SYNTHETIC A PRIORI TRUTHS: Kant says we use our a priori truths as a sort of filter to our experiences. We cannot know reality in itself, by itself. But we can only know reality in relation to us. Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband. In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience. |
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A POSTERIORI dependent on experience and empricial evidence A PRIORI independent of experience, as with mathematics, deduction from pure reason alone (ontological arguments) |
PRINCIPLE OF UNIVERSAL CAUSALITY that everything that happenshas a cause (sometimes called the principle of universal causality). |
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CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE an imperative simply being an orderor a commandment and categorical meaning “without qualification.” They arecategorical, or without qualification, because they offer no reasons or conditions;they just tell us what it is that we must do or not do. duty defined morality |
SOLIPSISM as the viewthat only one’s own mind exists. |
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JEAN PAUL SARTRE Sartre, who thought that the self is created The self is not simply thinking, nor is it memoryof the past. The self lies always in the future; it is what we aim toward, as wetry to make ourselves into something. But this means that as long as we are alivethere is no self—at least, no fixed and finished self. The self is an open question. Sartre’s words, “No matter what is madeof one, one is always responsible for what one makes of what is made of one.” Transcendence means that the self is defined notby the facts about us but by what we make—and continue to make—of these facts. This denial of responsibility for one’s self Sartrecalled bad faith, includes trying to excuse yourself fromresponsibility for what you are and what you will become by pretending that yourlife has been defined by the facts (by your facticity) instead of recognizing that youThe Self as a Choice206 Chapter 6–Selfcan try to make of those facts what you wish |
THE GOOD WILL The moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is wholly based onthe concept of a “good will.” To have a good will is to act on moral principlesthat are wholly justifiable by what he called practical reason, theresult of which is duty. A good will is not directed by any ulterior motives. |
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soul embodying a rational principle, and the function of the good man is thegood and noble performance of these.— Aristotle, fourth century BCEWe have already mentioned (in our discussion of “The Good Life”) Aristotle’s viewthat happiness (or eudaimonia) is the ultimate good in human life. Aristotle, likeBentham and Mill, thought that what is good and right in human activity are thoseactions that aim at happiness. But Aristotle, unlike Bentham and Mill, did notequate happiness with pleasure; he insisted that the happy life is the life of virtuousaction, filled with pleasure too, admittedly, but it is not the pleasure that makes lifegood. For Aristotle, the aim of happiness would always be the well-being of theentire community. Bentham calculated the greatest good for the greatest numberof people by adding up the individual advantages and disadvantages of an actionor rule. But what this seems to leave out entirely are the intentions and the characterof the actor. Kant, on the other hand, gives generous attention to the intentionsbut little attention to the consequences, and he says little about the community inwhich these actions take place. Aristotle simply assumed that the ultimate advantageof the individual would be identical to the well-being of the community inwhich he or she lived. In fact, if one looks over Aristotle’s list of virtues, it becomesclear that every one of them is aimed at strengthening and protecting the communityas well as adding to the status and happiness of the individual |
EUDAEMONIA: wellbeing-or happiness |
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Carol gilligan: She suggests that women make moraldecisions according to different but equally mature and morally upright reasoning. Rather than thinking of ethics in terms of impersonal, abstract, moral principlesof right and wrong, claimed Gilligan, women tend to think of ethics in termsof personal moral responsibility. Whereas men commonly understood a moraldilemma posed by the experimenter as a problem having a right or wrong answer,women often understood such a dilemma as the result of an interpersonal conflictin need of resolution, not a right-versus-wrong answer. Gilligan hypothesizedthat, in addition to the moral reasoning grounded in abstract principles of rightand wrong described by Kant and Kohlberg, there is also a more “feminine” butequally valid type of moral reasoning that is grounded in maintaining the stabilityof interpersonal relationships |
Utilitarianism The Utility PrincipleAlways act for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. |
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SOFT DETERMINISM 1. Even if we accept the determinist thesis, it can be argued, we can still believein freedom. In fact, we must believe in freedom because we can never knowall the earlier events and conditions that brought about a particular decisionor action, and thus we can never establish that actions are completelydetermined. It may be true that if we knew everything, we could predict aperson’s actions with certainty (or at least, a very high probability). But thisbig if, which is the heart of the determinist thesis, turns out to be unobtainablein practice; so although in theory we can be determinists, in practicewe can continue to believe in free will and hold people responsible for theiractions. 2. Even if we accept the determinist thesis, we can still distinguish betweenthose causes that make a person’s action free and those that make it unfree.There have been a great many suggestions of this kind. Aristotle long agoclaimed that an act would be called free if it was not performed (a) from“external compulsion” (the actor was pushed or forced) or (b) out of ignorance(the actor didn’t know what he or she was doing). Some philosophershave said that an act is free if it is caused by reason; others have saidthat it is free if it is caused by consciousness or by the will. David Hume,who was a soft determinist, believed that we could say that an act was freeif it followed from a person’s “character.” This had the practical advantageof also explaining the purpose of praise and blame—namely, to mold orchange a person’s character such that he or she would in the future tend toperform more desirable actions. This is still determinism, but it is soft inthat it carves out an area that can be called freedom, and thus it allows usto talk meaningfully of our actions both as being completely determinedand as being our own responsibility KANT: Action is a wholly different matterfrom knowledge. Kant said that we adopt two different standpoints towardthe world—one theoretical and the other practical. The main point is this: when we are acting or deciding to act, we must thinkof our own acts or will and decisions as the sufficient explanatory causes of ouractions, and we cannot continue the causal chain backward to consider whetherthose acts of will are themselves caused. When we act, in other words, we cannotthink of ourselves except as acting freely . “And to have to think yourself free is to be free.”) even if determinismis true, we must always view ourselves as agents as necessarily free |
Sartre and freedom Jean-Paul Sartre, a leading proponent of existentialism, defended the Kantianclaim for human freedom as far as it can possibly be defended. In Being andNothingness, Sartre argued that we are always absolutely free. This means, as Kanthad insisted, that insofar as we act (and Sartre said that we are always acting), ourdecisions and our actions cannot be viewed as having any causes whatsoever. WeSoft Determinism: Mill (continued)the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting uponhim, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predictany physical event. . . . [But] this does not conflict in the smallest degreewith what is called our feeling of freedom. . . . Our actions follow from ourcharacters [but] we are exactly as capable of making our own character, ifwe will, as others are of making it for us.The free will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the truthwhich the word “necessity” [“determinism”] puts out of sight, namely thepower of the mind to cooperate in the formation of its own character, hasgiven its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than hasgenerally (I believe) existed in the minds of the [determinists].— From A System of Logic,1843Free Will and Determinism 239must make decisions, and no amount of information and no number of causal circumstancescan ever replace our need to make them. We can of course refuse tomake decisions, acting as if they were made for us. But even in these cases, we aremaking decisions, “choosing not to choose,” in a classic Sartrean phrase. We are“condemned to be free,” he says. Again, desires may enter into consideration, butonly as “consideration.” We can always act against a desire, no matter how strong,if only we are sufficiently decided that we will do so. A starving man may yet refusefood, if, for example, he is taking part in a hunger strike for a political cause towhich he is dedicated. A mother may refuse to save her own life if it would be atthe expense of her children. A student who has resolved to study for tomorrow’stest may miss a favorite television show. Whether trivial or grandiose, our every actis a decision, and our every decision is free. And even if we fail to live up to themor find that we “cannot” make them, we are responsible nevertheless. There is noescape from freedom or from responsibility. Indeed, for Sartre, freedom is alwaysalso an opportunity |
