Intro to Philosophy

1. *Do you agree with David
Hume that to "prefer the
destruction of half the
world to the pricking of my
little finger" would not be
unreasonable ("against
reason")? Why (not)?

2. A Timeline of Western Philosophers
• ··Baruch Spinoza (c. 1632-1677).
• ··Isaac Newton (c. 1643-1727).
• ··Anne Conway (c. 1631-1679).
• ··Pierre Régis.
• ··John Locke (c. 1632-1704). Major ··Empiricist. Political philosopher.
• ··Damaris Masham.
• ··John Toland (c. 1670-1722).
• ··Pierre Bayle (c. 1647-1706). ··Pyrrhonist.
• ··Madeline de Souvré.
1700-1750 CE
• ··Samuel Clarke (c. 1675-1729).
• ··Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (c. 1671-1713).
• ··John Norris (c. 1657-1711). ··Malebranchian.
• ··Gottfried Leibniz (c. 1646-1716). Co-inventor of the ··calculus.
• ··George Berkeley (c. 1685-1753). ··Idealist, ··empiricist.
• ··Catherine Cockburn (c. 1679-1749).
• ··Giambattista Vico (c. 1668-1744).
• ··Bernard Mandeville (c. 1670-1733).
• ··Francis Hutcheson (c. 1694-1746). Proto-··utilitarian.
• ··Joseph Butler (c. 1692-1752).
• ··Christian Wolff (c. 1679-1754). ··Determinist, ··rationalist.
• ··John Gay (philosopher).
• ··David Hume (c. 1711-1776). ··Empiricist, ··skeptic.

3. Rationalism versus Empiricism
The dispute between rationalism and empiricism
concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon
sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge.
Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in
which our concepts and knowledge are gained
independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim
that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our
concepts and knowledge... SEP

4. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). He “demonstrated the
possibility of understanding the world in terms of a few
simple, elegant principles... In many sensitive, inquisitive
personalities, the apparent conflict between science and
religion was becoming unbearable. Newton was one of those
personalities.”

5. 'Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the
most mistaken.'
Born and educated in Edinburgh, Hume wrote
his first great work A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739-40) having moved to Anjou in France.
It set Hume up as an empiricist in the tradition
of Locke and Berkely, but one who was
hugely sceptical about what he, or indeed
anybody, can know.
He continued to outline his ideas in two major works - An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry
Concerning The Principles Of Morals (1751).

6. For Hume almost nothing about existence was demonstrable; just
because the sun had always risen in the morning didn’t mean we
could ‘know’ that it would rise tomorrow.
Furthermore, the idea of the sun that we had in our brain was a long
way removed from the actual sun as it existed. He applied this to
the concept of beauty saying "Beauty in things exists in the mind
which contemplates them".
Although he took scepticism to the extremes, Hume acknowledged
its irrelevance to every day life and was quite capable of applying
his mind to a whole range of practical issues such as economics,
trade and finance.
His Political Discourses of 1752, for example, anticipated the
economics of Adam Smith.

7. Regarding the existence of God, Hume’s position was an incisive
agnosticism but this was enough to have him barred from
professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities.
IOT IEP SEP
Hume was consistently
skeptical to the end...
However, he gained a position as keeper of the Advocates' Library in
Edinburgh and wrote his best-selling History of England (1754-62).
He also became secretary to the British ambassador in Paris and is
reputed to have cut quite a dash in French society.

8. Hume died at approximately four o'clock in the afternoon on
25 August 1776 in Edinburgh. As his death approached,
crowds gathered to see whether or not he would embrace
Christianity in his last moments.
TPM Hume
James Boswell recounts that Hume "said he never had
entertained any belief in Religion since he began to read Locke
and Clarke. . . .
He then said flatly that the Morality of every Religion was
bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said
'that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he
was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very
good men being religious.’"

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Human nature is
inherently good, but corrupted by society and private property.
.. “The ideal of the natural goodness of humanity replaced the
age-old notion of ‘original’ human sin... self-reliance became
the primary civic virtue... education an individual right and
political necessity.”

10. In the latter part of 1765, Hume helped Rousseau to flee
Switzerland and France, where he had been persecuted for
sedition and impiety, for the protection of England. Rousseau,
however, came to believe that Hume was in league with his
enemies and broke off all connection with him. TPM
They were an odd couple, the Enlightenment's two most daring
explorers of the maze of human nature. The friendship, though,
quickly fell apart. Its collapse, as Hume sadly noted, "made [a]
great ... noise all over Europe." Echoes of this "noise" still reach us
today, reminding us of the fragility of reason, even when exercised
by the most lucid minds.

11. "Be a philosopher, but amidst all
your philosophy, be still a man."
-David Hume
“Man is born free but everywhere
he is in chains.”
-Jean Jacques Rousseau

12. Children should be educated "naturally" - allowed to
develop their higher moral natures in their own way, at their
own pace. Do you agree? Is this the way we educate
children already, in the U.S.? What educational reforms
would you favor?

13. David Hume (1711-1776)
Hume was a happy skeptic and an
"unrepentant atheist" who "consoled
himself with long walks, drinking,
and gambling."
He was not, however, an immoral
man. He simply believed that we
must look to something other than
reason, conceived strictly as an
intellectual faculty, to make sense of
our moral lives.
"If reason cannot guarantee morals, our
human natures nevertheless supply us
with adequate sentiments [and
"common sense," guided by "social
traditions"] to behave rightly toward
one another.

14. David Hume on reason and sentiment... “reason”alone
cannot motivate us to be good. Conscience comes from
feeling.
More on David Hume

15. "We believe in all sorts of laws of nature which we cannot
ourselves understand merely because men whom we
admire and trust vouch for them."
We might do well to follow Hume in preferring to invoke the
idea of constancies and habits, and of constant
conjunctions of events and the feelings or ideas we
habitually conjoin to them. These feelings or ideas, or as
Hume (and Locke) said, these sensations and reflections,
may be constant in our experience, but for all we know they
are also contingent, hence unnecessary.
So we should be ever watchful for evidence
that things aren’t exactly as they had
seemed, and that (to paraphrase Mark
Twain) much that we know just isn’t so.
"New facts burst old rules.”

16. Hume was an empiricist, like John Locke, George Berkeley,
and (later) John Stuart Mill. Empiricists are committed to the
view that our knowledge of things comes to us originally
through our senses.
TPM Mill
Locke was famous for speaking of the tabula rasa or blank
slate, his popular and familiar metaphor suggesting that
newborns enter the world free of preconception and literally
without ideas or beliefs (instincts would be something
different).

17. George Berkeley (1685-1753). Berkeley’s version of
empiricism is surprising, if your notion of an empiricist is of a
hard-nosed and common-sensical inquirer into nature.
Berkeley denied that we even have any reason to assert the
existence of nature, conceived as a mind-independent world
external to our minds and their ideas.
His metaphysical idealism was a direct
consequence of taking Locke’s primary-&-
secondary quality distinction seriously: he
insisted that we know only our ideas.
“Esse ist percipi”
“Everything we experience is in the mind...
to be is to be perceived by somebody... or by
God.
As with Leibniz and his “monads,” or self-
contained conscious beings coordinated by God
to experience something indistinguishable from
what we in fact experience, Berkeley places “God
at the core of his philosophy.”

18. If you could be permanently hooked up to a
machine that would give you the experiences
of having friends, fame, wealth, good looks,
success, or whatever else makes you happy,
would you? Why (not)?
(See Lyle Zynda's comments on Robert Nozick's
thought experiment:
*Zynda, Lyle. “Was Cypher Right? Part II: The Nature of
Reality and Why It Matters.” Taking the Red Pill:
Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix. Ed. Glenn
Yeffeth. Dallas: BenBella Books. 2003. 33-43.
More philosophy in The Matrix...

19. "Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you
any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could
stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were
writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting
book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes
attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life,
preprogramming your life's desires?
Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there;
you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to
have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay
unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will
service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in?
What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the
inside?" Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1971 (43)

20. CYPHER You know, I know that this steak doesn't exist. I know
when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is
juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I've
realized? Pausing, he examines the meat skewered on his fork. He
pops it in, eyes rolling up, savoring the tender beef melting in his
mouth. CYPHER Ignorance is bliss. AGENT SMITH Then we
have a deal? CYPHER I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing!
You understand? And I want to be rich. Someone important. Like
an actor. You can do that, right?
AGENT SMITH Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan. Cypher takes a
deep drink of wine. CYPHER All right. You get my body back in a
power plant, reinsert me into the Matrix and I'll get you what you
want. AGENT SMITH Access codes to Zion. CYPHER I told you, I
don't know them. But I can give you the man who does. AGENT
SMITH Morpheus.

21. Adam Smith (1723-1790), Hume’s
best friend. Father of free enterprise.
Wealth of Nations (1776) the bible of
capitalism. Self-interest in the public
good, but he did not say “greed is
good.”
He “believed that
people are not
essentially selfish but
are essentially social
creatures... a decent
free-enterprise system
would only be possible
in the context of such a
society.”

22. Smith believed that people are NOT essentially selfish or
self-interested but are essentially social creatures who act
out of sympathy and fellow-feeling for the good of society
as a whole. (88) Can capitalism in our time work, then? Or
are we indeed close to socialism, with this view?

23. Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce
may be of greatest value. He generally neither intends to promote
the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.
He intends only his own security, only his own gain. And he is in
this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of
his intention.
By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society
more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
This makes Smith sound as if he thought that the invisible hand
always leads individuals who are pursuing their own interests to
promote the good of society. He did not... Atlantic
“Those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which
might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to
be, restrained by the laws of all governments."