Notes for <Introduction to Philosophy-Week1,Lesson2> @The University of Edinburgh, coursera

Philosophy: How Do We Do It?

The ways to question a philosophical argument

Valid

When the conclusion of an argument follows from its premises, that means, when the conclusion has to be true if the premises are true, then the argument is valid.

We can questions whether the argument is valid by questioning whether or not the truth of the conclusion really follows from the truth of the premises.

Sound

Another way we can criticize the argument is by criticizing the truth of it's premises.

When an argument is valid with true premises, then we see that it's sound.

So we can question this soundness of an argument either by questioning the truth of its premises or by questioning its validity.

In philosophy, often what we're doing is trying to work out the right way of thinking about things with the help of engaging with arguments and positions that other people, other philosophers, have put forward.

‘Vision’

Philosophy needs vision and argument. There is something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains arguments, however good, which were not inspired by some genuine vision. And something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments.

Speculation about how things hand together requires the ability to draw out conceptual distinctions and connections ,and the ability to argue. But speculative views, however interesting or well supported by arguments or insightful, are not all we need. We also need what the philosopher Myles Burnyeat called 'vision' and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our societies.

—— Hilary Putnam

Two aspects of the appeal to the vision that Putnam is making here:

1. We need to keep in mind the big picture when we're putting forward or criticizing philosophical arguments. （e.g. What's useful about the argument about free will is not that it gets us to accept the conclusion that we don't have any. But it really helped focus the question of what it is that we mean when we think that we do have free control over our actions.）
2. When we're engaging with a philosophical argument, we need to do more than just try and identify and assess the premises that it's using, and see if it's a valid argument. We also need to think about the vision, the big picture that inspires that argument. (What's the person who's putting forward the argument really trying to say? What are they really trying to get at? And can we even perhaps do a better job of trying to articulate that and get at what they're trying to say than they can?) Or perhaps thinking about the vision, the big picture, that's behind their argument, can help us in trying to articulate and trying to come to see what it is that we don't like, or that we disagree with.

Is There A 'Right Way' To Think About Things?

How do we know in any given case that there is a right way of thinking about things? Also how do we know that finding the right way of thinking about things is something that we can do by doing philosophy, by constructing and critically evaluating arguments?

Now these are really, really important questions for philosophy, and I don't want to try and answer them now. But I do want to consider what a couple of famous, influential philosophers have said about those questions.

David Hume

David Hume was a famous Edinburgh-based philosopher, and he thought that a skeptical attitude towards philosophy's capacity to find the truth about the world was entirely appropriate.

One way of understanding Hume's reasons for thinking this was that he thought that the most important thing for philosophy was that it stayed true to our experience of the world.

For example, we think that we experience the world in terms of causally connected events, in terms of one thing causing another to happen. But Hume argued that causation was something that we could never really know to be a property of the world in itself, but rather it was something extra that our mind is prone to add to the impressions that we get from the world.

His famous example to illustrate this was of two billiard balls knocking into each other. We are prone to experience the first billiard ball is rolling into the second and causing it to roll off. But Hume suggested that all we really experience is a series of impressions of billiard balls at various times and places. And we never experience anything extra that connects those two billiard balls that we can call causation.

Most famously, and controversially, Hume argued that we weren't entitled, on the basis of our experience, to believe in an omnipotent and omniscient god.

So for Hume, by doing philosophy we can learn all about the various habits that we have of associating of impressions and ideas and the various propensities that we have to draw conclusions about the world on the basis of those impressions. We can never really know whether those habits of association are the right ones, or whether those conclusions that we're drawing are really putting us in touch with the way that the world is.

So this left Hume to conclude that the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy. And meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavors to elude or avoid it.

To sum up, Hume had a very skeptical view about the power of philosophy to put us in touch with facts about the way that the world is.

Immanuel Kant

In Kant's most important book, his critique of pure reason, what he meant was that he thought that prior to reading Hume, he had just assumed that philosophy could put us in touch with facts about how the world was. And, in fact, he thought that all philosophers prior to Hume had just assumed that. But after reading Hume, Kant realized that we couldn't just assume that, we need to prove it, and in the critique of pure reason Kant tried to do that.

He thought that Hume was exactly right and thinking that he'd shown that there are certain ways that we can't just avoid experiencing the world. We have to experience the world as laid out in space as unfolding over time and is containing causally connected events. But where Kant differed from Hume, was that he though that these weren't just facts about the way that our mind worked. He thought that these were also facts about the way that the world had to work. In fact, he thought that these were facts about what it was for there to be a world there at all.

So Kant argued, that if we try and imagine a world that doesn't have these features of space and time and causality then we just have no reason to think of what we're imagining at a world at all. We just can't get a grip on what that would mean, for a world to lack these things.

And so in that way Kant tried to argue that the rules that govern the way that our mind works are also the rules that govern the way the world has to work. And that was how Kant thought that he could respond to Hume's skeptical challenge for philosophy.