Welcome to

Philosophy 2
Hans Sluga Fall 2011

The title of our course is

Individual Morality and Social Justice

Individual morality is the concern of ethics

And social justice is the concern of politics

Our course is occupied then with three topics Philosophy

Ethics
Politics

Each of these three concepts needs our attention. So, we will spend the first three weeks on an initial exploration of them.

After that we will spend five weeks on a more detailed examination of questions of ethics.

And five more weeks on questions of politics.

That leaves us a little time for drawing some broader conclusions.

I begin with the question:

What is philosophy?

There is no simple, straightforward answer to that question.

Philosophy is, in fact, many things. It may concern itself with almost anything. And may do so in a variety of different ways.

There is
Eastern philosophy Idealism Metaphysics Realism Ethics Dualism Logic Monism Hermeneutics Philosophy of history Theory of knowledge Epistemology Materialism Political Philosophy Deconstruction Philosophy of mind Philosophy of religion Philosophy of Language Pluralism Skepticism Platonism Marxism Analytic philosophy

Phenomenology
Social theory

Philosophy of science

Philosophy of art Empiricism Existential philosophy

If we want a comprehensive formula, we can say only:

Philosophy is the attempt to think in the most sustained way about our most fundamental problems.

I want to discuss in this and the next two lectures three different conceptions of philosophy

1. Philosophy as world view.

(This is still the most common view of what philosophy is.)

2. Philosophy as a practice of questioning.

(This will turn out to be for us the decisive conception of philosophy.)

3. Philosophy as science.
(Many philosophers today consider this to be the most compelling conception.)

Each of these conceptions has influenced the way philosophers have thought about ethics and politics.

1. They have sometimes considered matters of ethics and politics in the context of a broad philosophical world view. (Plato, Aristotle)

2. They have sometimes approached such matters in a spirit of radical questioning. (Socrates, Nietzsche)

3. They have occasionally also sought to develop a science of ethics and politics. (Hobbes, Kant)

Today I want to talk about the first of these three conceptions of philosophy.

One of our distinctive human characteristics is that we form comprehensive views of the world around us.

These are transmitted through commonsense beliefs stories, myths poems, images, songs

religious teachings

Philosophy in the Western tradition began with challenging these transmitted accounts.

I will try to illustrate this by reference to three early Greek philosophers: Xenophanes, ca. 570-475 BCE Heraclitus, ca. 540-480 BCE Empedocles, born ca. 484 BCE

Xenophanes is most famous for challenging the assumptions of traditional Greek religion as it was expressed in the poems of Homer and Hesiod.

Greek religion assumed the existence of many gods similar to human beings both in appearance and behavior

Zeus and his family tree

Faced with this kind of belief, Xenophanes asked three basic philosophical questions:

1. What does it mean? 2. Is it true? 3. How is it justified?

These are still for us the most fundamental philosophical questions.

In the course of this semester you should practice to ask them with respect to the readings we will be discussing.

You should also develop the habit to ask these questions of ideas and beliefs you encounter elsewhere in your life.

Xenophanes argued that by making the Gods too human, the Greeks were ascribing to them all kinds of disreputable things

Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all sorts of actions which when done by men are disreputable and deserving of blame.

He argued further that the Greek conception of their gods was unjustifiably anthropomorphic.

If oxen or lions had hands which enabled them to draw and paint pictures as men do, they would portray their gods as having pictures like their own: horses would portray them as horses and oxen as oxen.

Xenophanes, in fact, dismissed the images of the Greek gods as culturally relative.

Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with gray eyes and red hair.

He advanced, instead, a belief in a single god who is abstract in nature, not quasi-human.

God is one, supreme among gods and humans, not at all like mortals in body or mind.

Without effort, he sets everything in motion, by the thought of his mind.

After Xenophanes other philosophers would challenge Greek religion even more radically
by arguing that it is impossible to know whether there are any gods

or even by denying the existence of god(s) altogether.

Heraclitus laid out a wholly new world view. The world is for him like a fire, constantly changing, dominated by opposition and strife.

This universe has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been and will be an ever-living fire, lighting up regularly and extinguishing regularly.

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
You cannot step into the same river twice, for ever new water flows towards you and away from you and you yourself are never the same.

Conflict is the father and king of all; some he has shown forth as gods and others as men, some he has made slaves and others free.

Homer was wrong in saying: I wish strife would disappear amongst gods and men. For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.

Empedocles somewhat later proposes an essentially materialist world view.

There are, according to him four elements: fire air, water, and earth. These combine and separate in regular cycles according to two great opposing forces: strife and love.

These two forces, Strife and Love, existed in the past and will exist in the future. Now one prevails, now the other, each in its appointed turn, as change goes incessantly on its course.

These alone truly are, but interpenetrating one another they become men and tribes of beasts. At one time they are brought together by Love to form a single order, at another they are carried off in different directions by the repellent force of Strife;

Then in the course of time their enmity is subdued and they all come into harmony once more.

Four concluding thoughts

1. Philosophers in the past have, indeed, sometimes advanced entire world views. 2. They have often proposed these views as critical alternatives to other prevailing views of the world.
3. But the conception of philosophy as world view is only one among several others. 4. For reasons we will explore, philosophers see themselves today not generally in the business of devising world views.