A Little History of Philosophy

Nigel Warburton

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A Modern Gadfly , Peter Singer
"You’re in a garden where you know there is a pond. There’s a splash and some shouting. You realize that a young child has fallen in and may be drowning. What do you do? Do you walk by? Even if you’d promised to meet a friend and stopping would make you late, you’d surely treat the child’s life as more impor- tant than being on time. The pond is quite shallow, but very muddy. You’ll ruin your best shoes if you help. But don’t expect other people to understand if you don’t jump in. This is about being human and valuing life. A child’s life is so much more valuable than any pair of shoes, even a very expensive pair. Anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of monster. You’d jump into the water, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. But then you’re also probably rich enough to prevent a child in Africa from dying of hunger or of a curable tropical disease. That probably wouldn’t take much more than the price of the shoes you’d be prepared to ruin by saving the child in the pond."
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The Death of God , Friedrich Nietzsche
‘God is dead’. "These are the most famous words that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote. But how could God die? God is supposed to be immortal. Immortal beings don’t die. They live for ever. In a way, though, that’s the point. That’s why God’s death sounds so odd: it’s meant to. Nietzsche was deliberately playing on the idea that God couldn’t die. He wasn’t literally saying that God had been alive at one time and now wasn’t; rather that belief in God had stopped being reasonable. In his book Joyful Wisdom (1882) Nietzsche put the line ‘God is dead’ in the mouth of a character who holds a lantern and looks everywhere for God, but can’t find him. The villagers think he is crazy."
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Reklam
Fairness through Ignorance , John Rawls
"Perhaps you’re wealthy. Perhaps you’re super-rich. But most of us aren’t, and some people are very poor, so poor that they spend most of their short lives hungry and sick. This doesn’t seem fair or right – and it surely isn’t. If there were true justice in the world no children would starve while others have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. Everyone who is sick would have access to good medical treatment. The poor of Africa wouldn’t be so much worse off than the poor in the USA and Britain. The rich of the West wouldn’t be so many thousand times as rich as those who through no fault of their own were born into disadvantage. Justice is about treating people fairly. There are people around us whose lives are filled with good things, and others who, through no fault of their own, get few choices about how they survive: they can’t choose the job they do, or even the town where they live. Some people who think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the ones who have been particularly lucky; others will spend time thinking about how society could be better organized and perhaps try to change it to make it fairer."
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Can Computers Think? / Alan Turing and John Searle
"You’re sitting in a room. There is a door into the room with a letterbox. Every now and then a piece of card with a squiggle shape drawn on it comes through the door and drops on your doormat. Your task is to look up the squiggle in a book that is on the table in the room. Each squiggle is paired with another symbol in the book. You have to find your squiggle in the book, look at the symbol it is paired with, and then find a bit of card with a symbol that matches it from a pack in the room. You then carefully push that bit of card out through your letterbox. That’s it. You do this for a while and wonder what’s going on."
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"You are out for a walk one day and see a runaway train hurtling down the tracks towards five workers. The driver is uncon- scious, possibly as the result of a heart attack. If nothing is done, all will die. The train will squash them. It’s travelling much too fast for them to get out of the way. There is, however, one hope. There is a fork in the tracks just before the five men, and on the other line there is only one worker. You are close enough to the points to flick the switch and make the train veer away from the five and kill the single worker. Is killing this innocent man the right thing to do? In terms of numbers it clearly is: you save five people by killing just one. That must maximize happi- ness. To most people this seems the right thing to do. In real life it would be very difficult to flick that switch and watch someone die as a result, but it would be even worse to hold back and watch five times as many people die."
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The Perfect Island , Anselm and Aquinas
"We all have an idea of God. We understand what ‘God’ means, whether or not we believe that God actually exists. No doubt you are thinking about your idea of God now. That seems very different from saying that God actually exists. Anselm (c.1033–1109), an Italian priest who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, was unusual in that with his Ontological Argument he claimed to show that, as a matter of logic, the fact that we have an idea of God proves that God actually exists."
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Reklam
The Elephant in the Room , George Berkeley (and John Locke)
"Have you ever wondered if the light really does go off when you shut the fridge door and no one can see it? How could you tell? Perhaps you could rig up a remote camera. But then what happens when you turn the camera off? What about a tree falling in a forest where no one can hear it? Does it really make a noise? How do you know your bedroom continues to exist unobserved when you aren’t in it? Perhaps it vanishes every time you go out. You could ask someone else to check for you. The difficult question is: does it carry on existing when nobody is observing it? It’s not clear how you could answer these ques- tions. Most of us think that objects do continue to exist unob- served because that is the simplest explanation. Most of us too believe that the world we observe is out there somewhere: it doesn’t just exist in our minds."
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Workers of the World Unite , Karl Marx
"In the nineteenth century there were thousands of cotton mills in the north of England. Dark smoke poured from their tall chimneys, polluting the streets and covering everything in soot. Inside men, women and children worked very long hours – often 14-hour days – to keep the spinning machines going. They weren’t quite slaves, but their wages were very low, and the conditions were tough and often dangerous. If they lost concen- tration they could get caught up in the machinery and lose limbs or even be killed. Medical treatment in these circum- stances was basic. They had little choice, though: if they didn’t work they would starve. If they walked away, they might not find another job. People who worked in these conditions didn’t live long, and there were very few moments in their lives they could call their own."
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We Know Nothing , Pyrrho
"No one knows anything – and even that’s not certain. You shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might be mistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted. The best option, then, is to keep an open mind. Don’t commit, and you won’t be disappointed. That was the main teaching of Scepticism, a philosophy that was popular for several hundred years in Ancient Greece and later in Rome. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, the most extreme sceptics avoided holding firm opin- ions on anything whatsoever. The Ancient Greek Pyrrho (c. 365–c. 270 bc) was the most famous and probably the most extreme sceptic of all time. His life was decidedly odd."
Boo!/Hooray! / Alfred Jules Ayer
"Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had a way of knowing when someone was talking nonsense? You’d never need to be fooled again. You could divide everything that you heard or read into statements which made sense and statements which were just nonsense and not worth your time. A.J. Ayer (1910–89) believed he’d discovered one. He called it the Verification Principle."
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Reklam
Bewitched by Language , Ludwig Wittgenstein
"If you found yourself at one of the seminars Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) held in Cambridge in 1940 you would very quickly realize that you were in the presence of someone very unusual. Most people who met him thought he was a genius. Bertrand Russell described him as ‘passionate, profound, intense and domi- nating’. This small Viennese man with bright blue eyes and a deep seriousness about him would pace up and down, asking students questions, or pause lost in thought for minutes at a time. No one dared interrupt. He didn’t lecture from prepared notes, but thought through the issues in front of his audience, using a series of exam- ples to tease out what was at stake. He told his students not to waste their time reading philosophy books; if they took such books seriously, he said, they should throw them across the room and get on with thinking hard about the puzzles they raised."
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Who Is Pulling Our Strings? Augustine
"Augustine (354–430) desperately wanted to know the truth. As a Christian, he believed in God. But his belief left many ques- tions unanswered. What did God want him to do? How should he live? What should he believe? He spent most of his waking life thinking and writing about these questions. The stakes were very high. For people who believe in the possibility of spending eternity in hell, making a philosophical mistake can seem to have terrible consequences. As Augustine saw it, he might end up burning in sulphur for ever if he was wrong. One problem he agonized over was why God allowed evil in the world. The answer he gave is still a popular one with many believers."
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The Garden Path, Epicurus
"Imagine your funeral. What will it be like? Who’ll be there? What will they say? What you are imagining must be from your own perspective. It’s as if you are still there watching events from a particular place, perhaps from above, or from a seat among the mourners. Now, some people do believe that that is a serious possibility, that after death we can survive outside a physical body as a kind of spirit that might even be able to see what’s going on in this world. But for those of us who believe death is final, there is a real problem. Every time we try and imagine not being there we have to do it by imagining that we are there, watching what is happening when we’re not there."
The Consolation of Philosophy , Boethius
"If you were in prison awaiting execution would you spend your last days writing a philosophy book? Boethius did. It turned out to be the most popular book that he wrote."
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So What? C.S. Peirce and William James
"A squirrel is clinging tightly to the trunk of a large tree. On the other side of the tree, close up against the trunk is a hunter. Every time the hunter moves to his left, the squirrel moves quickly to its left too, scurrying further round the trunk, hanging on with its claws. The hunter keeps trying to find the squirrel, but it manages to keep just out of his sight. This goes on for hours, and the hunter never gets a glimpse of the squirrel. Would it be true to say that the hunter is circling the squirrel? Think about it. Does the hunter actually circle his prey?"
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