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For two thousand years the systems of Plato and Aristotle, in one form
or another, had dominated virtually all philosophical thinking in the west.
When Christianity came on the scene, most of the early church Fathers
adopted some version of Platonic idealism as the basis for their theology.
This trend culminated in the philosophical and theological system
constructed by St. Augustine (354-430), whose influence remained so
dominant for most of the so-called Dark Ages that Aristotle was virtually
forgotten in Europe. Fortunately, various Arabic scholars kept Aristotle's
writings alive during that period, using them as the basis for constructing
various forms of Islamic philosophy and theology. Eventually, Aristotle's
realism returned to Europe, mainly through the work of St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274), whose massive theological system remains the most
influential source of Catholic theology to this day. By the time Descartes
came on the scene, no significant alternative had been offered to the
idealist (Platonic-Augustinian) and realist (Aristotelian-Thomist) schools.
Was there something wrong with these two systems that hindered other
philosophers from making progress in philosophy?Descartes believed both
traditions suffered from a common flaw. The impasse was created by the
lack of any completely certain truth that
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was really impressed by the apparently high quality of the meals they had
on display. Only when we reached the counter itself did I realize that the
food on display was not food at all, but plastic! My senses had been utterly
fooled by the ingenuity of some marketing agent. And by your laughter I can
tell that many of you have made similar mistakes.
In the first of the six "meditations" described in Meditations on First
Philosophy, Descartes began his quest for certainty by using the virtually
universal experience of being fooled in this way to cast doubt on the
reliability of our senses. If we were fooled in that one instance, how do we
know we have not been fooled more often? Indeed, if any given impression
our senses are now giving to us might be a false impression, then there
seems to be no possibility of discovering anything certain in our senses.
This discredits Aristotelian realism, since it is based on the assumption
that substances, as perceived primarily through our senses, are ultimately
real.
What about our ideas? Perhaps Plato was right after all, and our ideas
are the proper foundation for all knowledge. But Descartes found it just as
easy to cast doubt in this realm as well. Even ideas that seem to us to be
certain, ideas most people would never think of doubting, can be doubted if
we try. For example, there would be many ways of casting doubt on the
spatial and temporal character of our everyday experience. Most of us have
had dreams that violate spatial laws such as gravity (e.g., when we fly in our
dreams) or dreams in which time seems to go slower or faster than when we
are awake. How do we know our everyday experience is not just a dream,
from which we will wake up any minute now? Perhaps there is an evil
demon who is deceiving us all into mistaking this long dream for our real
world. Even if there is no such demon, we have all had the experience of
suddenly realizing that some idea we have held to be true for a long time is
actually false. Any single idea might turn out to be an illusion of this kind, so
there is nothing to prevent all our ideas from being illusory. Hence, Plato's
idealism is of no more use than Aristotle's realism in our search for
something absolutely certain.
How about mathematics? Descartes himself was a mathematician and
certainly believed mathematics to be true. Indeed, many philosophers in his
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Figure III.2:
Descartes' Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem
Descartes' dualism has several important consequences. For one thing, it
replaces Aristotle's definition of the human person as a "rational animal"
with the notion of a mind imbedded in a fleshly machine. In the field of
natural science this had the significant effect of providing scientists with a
world view that enabled them to attain (or at least, to believe they could
attain) a totally objective perspective on the external world, totally
eliminating any influence the observer's own mind might have on what we
come to know. In this sense, Descartes' dualism can be regarded as paving
the way for Newtonian science. The view that the human ego controls the
material world, though now called into question by many modern thinkers
(see e.g., Lecture 18), is what enabled technology to develop so rapidly over
the past three hundred years.
As far as metaphysics is concerned, the most significant consequence
of Descartes' dualism was that it sparked off a new controversy, commonly
known as "the mind-body problem". Descartes' own position seems highly
implausible; but is there any better way to explain the influence the mind
and body appear to have on each other? The debate over the proper answer
to this question began almost immediately, and is, in fact, still alive in some
philosophical circles today. For example, one of the most influential books
written by an analytic philosopher in the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle's
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philosophers refined this idea, arguing that the body (in particular, the
brain) is the primary reality, but it creates or gives birth to the mind. Some
argue that once the mind arises, it has a reality of its own.
I'd like to conclude today's lecture by suggesting one very significant
difference between Descartes' metaphysics and that of Plato and Aristotle.
For Plato and Aristotle, and for most philosophers over the next two
millennia, the answer to the basic question of epistemology ("What can I
know?") was dependent upon a foregoing answer to the basic question of
metaphysics ("What is ultimately real?"). For Descartes, however, the
opposite was true. As we have seen, he began his enquiries by asking what
we can know for certain, and only on the basis of the answer to this question
did he construct his metaphysical dualism.
As we shall see in the following lecture, the next metaphysician whose
ideas we will consider also gave priority to epistemology. Anticipating that
lecture just slightly, we can therefore use the cross as a map of the
relationship between the methods employed by the four metaphysicians
considered here in Part One:
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physics. Although maps like the one above inevitably over-simplify the
complex relationships between such philosophers, they nevertheless can
help us to get a handle on their basic similarities and differences, as well as
suggesting further insights of various sorts. For example, this diagram
suggests that the development of western philosophy can be regarded as a
process of slowly working backwards from, as it were, the highest and most
aloof insights, to the deepest groundings of human reasoning. We shall see
in the next two lectures the extent to which this suggestion gives us an
accurate description of the contribution Kant made to the roots of our
philosophical tree.
8. Philosophy as Transcendental Critique
The last philosopher whose ideas on metaphysics we will consider in
detail here in Part One of this course is a man whose influence on the last
two hundred years of philosophy, both in the west and in the east, can
hardly be underestimated. He is almost universally recognized as being the
greatest philosopher since Aristotle: a thinker whose ideas one must either
accept or refute, but who cannot be ignored. Indeed, some have claimed,
with justification, that philosophy in the past two hundred years has been
like a series of footnotes to this man's writings! Others have observed that
his philosophical system is to the modern world what Aristotle's was for the
Scholastics: a virtual intellectual reference system. (The Scholastics were
medieval theologians who used philosophy to interpret Christianity, even
speculating on issues such as how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
Scholasticism reached its peak in Thomas Aquinas' work, but had far less
influence after Descartes.) Like Aristotle, this giant of the mind wrote on
nearly every philosophical subject and had an immediate and lasting effect
on the way people think-philosophers and non-philosophers. Although
today we will be looking only at those aspects of his philosophy related most
closely to metaphysics, we will return to this thinker on numerous
occasions later in the course.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born into a working class family in the
Prussian port city of Knigsberg (now Kaliningrad). He lived a quiet,
regulated life, never marrying and never traveling more than about thirty
miles from his birthplace during his entire life. Kant is often the subject of
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some rather unfair caricatures, such as that his daily routine was so rigid
that his neighbors found they could set their clocks by his daily comings
and goings! However, I prefer to regard such stories as reflecting the
integrity of a life lived in accordance with one's own ideas. For as we shall
see, Kant's idea of philosophy was that it ought to be a systematic whole,
governed by regular patterns of interrelated ideas. When he died, the
epitaph on his tomb simply said "The Philosopher"-an appropriate title,
considering that the philosophical cycle that began with Socrates reached
its fulfillment, to a large extent, with Kant.
Kant was motivated to conceive a new philosophical method for much
the same reason as Descartes: he asked himself why other sciences have
progressed, but metaphysics has not. Yet his answer to this question not
only ignored the whole mind-body problem, but also called into question
another of Descartes' key contributions: namely, his belief in the absolute
objectivity of the external world. Kant asked a new question: was Descartes
(and most other philosophers) right to assume that the objects we
experience and come to know are things in themselves? The term "thing in
itself" is a technical term he used to talk about the nature of ultimate
reality; it means "the things in the world, considered apart from the
conditions that make it possible to know anything about them." Given this
definition, Kant claimed, things in themselves must be unknowable. In
stark contrast to Descartes, who required his starting point to be an
absolutely certain item of knowledge, Kant posited a philosophical faith in
the reality of unknowable things in themselves as the starting point of his
system. This is just one of many ways Descartes and Kant are diametrically
opposed to each other in their philosophical methods.
Kant called his own way of philosophizing the "Critical" method. The
titles of the three main books wherein he developed his System each begin
with the word "Critique". Each book adopts a different "standpoint"; that is,
it addresses all its questions with a particular end in view. The first
Critique (of Pure Reason), the focus of our attention today, assumes a
theoretical standpoint. This means the answers to all the questions it asks
are concerned with our knowledge. The other Critiques, as we shall see later
on, sometimes answer the same questions in different ways, because they
assume different standpoints. Recognizing the differences between these
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Figure III.6:
Kant's Four Philosophical Questions
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this piece of chalk did not appear to us in space and time, then we could
never perceive it, and that we require a concept ("chalk"), together with
numerous general rules of thinking, in order to gain any knowledge of this
(or any other) perception. Examining such rules of thinking will be one of
our main tasks in Part Two.
Kant's most controversial claim was that these two necessary
conditions for knowledge are impossible to explain unless we regard them
as rooted in the human mind itself. Since philosophers have argued for two
hundred years about whether or not this so-called "Copernican revolution"
in philosophy really makes sense, I'm sure we won't settle this issue here;
but I hope you will think through this question more thoroughly on your
own. In the next lecture, I shall discuss some of the metaphysical
implications of the first Critique and give a brief overview of how Kant has
influenced metaphysics over the past two hundred years. My claim will be
that Kant's position represents a fully matured version of the insights
Socrates presented in the form of a seed.
9. Philosophy after Critique
Kant's epistemological legacy had an almost immediate impact on
virtually every area of philosophical inquiry, bringing to a close what is
often called the "modern era" of western philosophy and giving rise to a long
series of "post-modern" or "post-Critical" philosophies. Before sketching
how Kant influenced subsequent developments in metaphysics, I shall
briefly examine the metaphysical implications Kant himself believed his
epistemology had.
Kant argued that the transcendental conditions of knowledge (i.e.,
space, time, and the categories) establish an absolute boundary line that
enables us to judge what we can and cannot know about what is real. Any
concept that has no intuition corresponding to it, or any intuition that
cannot be conceptualized, can never be used to construct knowledge.
Nevertheless, whenever a person obtains some empirical knowledge, his or
her reason inevitably forms certain "ideas" about things that go beyond the
boundary of what we can know. The most important of these, Kant claimed,
are the metaphysical ideas of "God, freedom, and immortality": reason
impels us to postulate each of these, yet we cannot prove any of them to be
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objects we can know are real. The fact that we are necessarily
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this. For now it will suffice to say that Kant himself believed that
recognizing the limitations of knowledge is very good for metaphysics. As
he confessed in CPR 29: "I have ... found it necessary to deny knowledge, in
order to make room for faith." An honest and courageous recognition of
reason's limits may make philosophy a more difficult and dangerous task,
but as we shall see in Lectures 32 and 33, it is the best (if not the only) way
to preserve the meaningfulness of human life.
We can now summarize the main features of Kant's metaphysics in
terms of the following four fundamental tenets:
1. Ultimate ("transcendent") reality-i.e., reality apart from the limiting
conditions through which we learn about it-is an unknowable "thing in
itself".
2. Empirical reality-i.e., the particular aspects of our knowledge-is
determined by the "appearances" we experience (cf. Aristotle).
3. Transcendental reality-i.e., the general aspects of our knowledge
(especially space and time as "forms of intuition", and twelve categories as
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Opposed to existentialism for much of the twentieth century was analytic philosophy. As we shall see in Lecture 16, Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) were its two major
proponents. Many in this tradition see themselves as following directly in
Kant's footsteps; however, this claim is based on an extremely anti-metaphysical interpretation of Kant as destroying metaphysics without putting
anything better in its place. Fortunately, more and more Anglo-American
philosophers are recognizing that the old dichotomy between existential
and analytic approaches to philosophy is illegitimate-a development I
believe is best described by the single word, "good" (cf. Figure I.2)!
A philosopher who is often regarded as an existentialist even though he
tried to disassociate himself from the movement is Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976). His approach to philosophy, to be touched on briefly in
Lectures 17, 18 and 34, gave rise to one of the most influential developments
in the last half of the twentieth century: hermeneutic philosophy. Lecture
18 will examine in some detail how Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-) developed
a theory of interpretation that remains highly influential to this day. One of
the main reasons for its increasing influence, I believe, is that it puts its
focus elsewhere than on the traditional questions of metaphysics. Indeed,
at its most extreme, hermeneutic philosophy has given rise to a movement
called "deconstructionism", led by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida
(1930-), who believe that not just metaphysics, but philosophy itself has
come to an end. Since we shall be discussing these ideas more thoroughly in
Lectures 18 and 24, there is no need to summarize them here.
If you were to take a course in metaphysics as part of a philosophy
major, your teacher would probably focus on certain basic problems that
tend to occupy the attention of contemporary metaphysicians. These are
typically associated with one of the following four aspects of "reality": (1)
the nature of physical things and our perception of them (e.g., color); (2)
the nature of the mind and the proper identification of mental objects; (3)
the nature of space, time, and relations in space-time (e.g., causality,
necessity, and freedom); and (4) the nature of abstract entities (e.g.,
numbers, possible worlds, and God). Such problems are not new; we have
met most of them in our discussions of classical and modern metaphysics
over the past two weeks, though sometimes under different headings:
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Original URL:
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