Irza Fidah's Key Ideas from Philosophy
by Peter Cave

The Pre-Socratics are philosophers prior to Socrates. Much of their work is lost but they were highly influential – two notables being Heraclitus and Parmenides.

• Heraclitus announced that you cannot step into the same river twice for waters are always changing. A quick response is: you cannot even step into the same river once.
• Parmenides, in a poem, The Way Truth, argued that all is one and unchanging. It met support via Zeno of Elea’s motion paradoxes: how can you reach that wall? First you need to go half-way, then half of the remainder, then half the new remainder, and so on.

Socrates was an intellectual gadfly, stinging the complacency of the rich and powerful – of those who thought they knew. Found guilty of corrupting the young and of impiety, he was sentenced to death by hemlock, and declined to escape. Most of what we know about him derives from his greatest pupil, Plato.

All subsequent philosophy has been described as a footnote to Plato. Plato looked be- yond this world of ever-changing appearances, to un- changing ‘forms’ or ideas. He suggested recipes for the good life, radical ideas for society – women on a par with men – and offered thoughts on love, desire and mind.

Aristotle, Plato’s greatest pupil, was the first formal logician, engaged in considerable scientific researches, and even taught Alexander who became Alex- ander the Great. In Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, Plato points upwards and Aristotle downwards – for Plato sought reality beyond appearances, arguably with a touch of mysticism, whereas Aristotle was down to earth.

The philosophical perplexity here is how we find room for free will in nature. It takes some credulity to insist that human beings have evolved such that they stand outside the laws of nature, outside the natural world. That insistence would have humans forming, in Spinoza’s mocking terms, ‘a kingdom within a kingdom’. 

Spinoza saw God and Nature as one and the same substance; such heresy, as noted earlier, made him unpopular with Christians and his fellow Jews. According to Spinoza, human beings, as with other creatures – and trees, mountains and, no doubt, marmalade – are solely modifications of ‘God or Nature’, as waves are modifications of the ocean, falling under natural laws, no more able to do otherwise than pebbles in flight.

Existentialism covers a range of philosophers and artists, many of whom were unaware of the term. Philosophers tend to fall under the existentialist label if they focus on the singularity and uniqueness of each human being, rather than searching for common human qualities or ‘the’ way of life. They may stress the anguish, the anxiety, of human existence, through the need to make choices, to treat ourselves as free in the values we espouse.

Morality requires that we perceive ourselves as autonomous agents who can choose to do what we ought to do: ‘ought’ implies ‘can’.

• In fact – and in truth – many of our descriptions carry valuations within.
• Many things that we say about the world have intertwined within both descriptive and evaluative elements – and it is perhaps a mistake to think that those elements can be separated.

Rawls extracts from under the veil a first rabbit: consent to liberty. We should seek equal freedom, autonomy, to run our lives as we want without harming others. That leads to valuing political liberty of thought and expression, free association and, indeed, ownership of personal property.

But behind the veil, our consent to the utilitarian goal, for example, would be irrational for it risks my enduring significant loss, if society’s overall happiness would result. We should, though, see the need for general educational and welfare provisions, and hence for lives being, to some extent, intruded upon to help others – the ill, the poor, the untalented – for we may be amongst those others.

Curiously, people are typically more comfortable with accepting some knowledge of the past than of the future. Perhaps we can see into the past through memory. Because of light’s travelling time, we perceive distant stars as they were millennia ago. Future events, though, do not yet exist – are not now.

We must accept some beliefs as true, in order to assess others. That does not rule out revisiting those accepted beliefs for assessment.

Inductive reasoning relies on nature having certain uniformities across the observed and the unobserved; but what can justify belief in such uniformities? There is sometimes the thought that if the inductive premiss covers numerous observed items, then it is at least likely that all items that are F are G. That thought merits challenge: knowledge of that likelihood would require knowing the total number of F items, observed and unobserved – even throughout the whole universe.

Scientific theories rely in some way on observations. The theories involve universal generalizations, expressions of so-called laws of nature assumed to apply across the universe, be they concerning forces, acceleration and mass, or relationships between pressures and volumes of gases, or boiling points of liquids and efficacy of antibiotics. 

The term ‘theory’ need convey no doubt or speculation. Reflect on the huge successes of numerous scientific theories and applications, from electrical equipment to medical treatments to transportation. How do we account for such seeming scientific knowledge, if induction lacks good justification?

As implied with the swan tale, a hypothesis does not confront the world alone. When some disturbing evidence is encountered, we may cling to the tested hypothesis and revise either auxiliary generalizations assumed true or our beliefs about the initial conditions.

If a theory predicts that the new cosmetic developed will cause cell changes, then if the changes fail to materialize, maybe the theory was mistaken – but maybe the tested skin types were other than thought or the testing apparatus unreliable. Readers may recall physics lessons: if experiments failed to deliver expected results, the experiments (or experimenters) were assumed faulty, not that the relevant scientific theory had been falsified.

Once we gaze at the gap between evidence and what the evidence is for, we may reason that it must be illusory: there can exist nothing on the other side of the evidence. The gap is pure emptiness. All that I have to go on are my own experiences, so how can I judge what, if anything, is beyond them? The sceptical conclusion may be stronger than that question hints.

Pascal argued that it is rational to believe in God. On the one hand, if you do so believe and there is a God, you have the likelihood of eternal bliss; if there is no God, you have wasted a few Sundays through confessions and foregone some small delights. On the other hand, if you are a non-believer and there is a God, then eternal damnation threatens, the possibility of which easily swamps the non-believing pleasures and your religion-free Sundays.

That reasoning is glib, for which God, which rituals, should you support? Even if the reasoning is sound, it does not itself enable you to believe in God – for you cannot just switch on belief. You may, though, seek genuine believers, hoping that their belief is contagious. Despite unworthy initial motives, you may become a genuine believer, passing any divine test for sincere belief.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom and wisdom is meant to be beyond mere cleverness and knowledge; it is meant to open eyes to what is important, to meaning, to values. Now, most academic philosophers these days, in their academic labours, rarely reach or even try to reach such eye-opening understanding; they may even question what constitutes that understanding.