A Little History of Philosophy

Could You Be Dreaming? René Descartes

"You hear the alarm, turn it off, crawl out of bed, get dressed, have breakfast, get ready for the day. But then something unex- pected happens: you wake up and realize that it was all just a dream. In your dream you were awake and getting on with life, but in reality you were still curled up under the duvet snoring away. If you’ve had one of these experiences you’ll know what I mean. They’re usually called ‘false awakenings’ and they can be very convincing. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) had one and it set him thinking. How could he be sure that he wasn’t dreaming?"

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Pierre Luiggie Coellina

Place Your Bets Blaise, Pascal

"If you toss a coin it can come up heads or tails. There is a 50/50 chance of either, unless the coin has a bias. So it doesn’t really matter which side you bet on as it is just as likely each time you toss the coin that heads will come up as tails. If you aren’t sure whether or not God exists, what should you do? Is it like tossing a coin? Should you gamble on God not existing, and live your life as you please? Or would it be more rational to act as if God does exist, even if the odds on this being true are very long? Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who did believe in God, thought hard about this question."

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Reklam

Pierre Luiggie Coellina

The Lens Grinder , Baruch Spinoza

"Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outside the world, perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was unusual in thinking that God is the world. He wrote about ‘God or Nature’, to make this point – meaning that the two words refer to the same thing. God and nature are two ways of describing a single thing. God is nature and nature is God. This is a form of pantheism – the belief that God is every- thing. It was a radical idea that got him into quite a lot of trouble."

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The Prince and the Cobbler , John Locke and Thomas Reid

"What were you like as a baby? If you have one, look at a photo- graph taken at the time. What do you see? Was that really you? You probably look quite different now. Can you remember what it was like being a baby? Most of us can’t. We all change over time. We grow, develop, mature, decline, forget things. Most of us get wrinklier, eventually our hair turns white or falls out, we change our views, our friends, our dress sense, our priorities. In what sense, then, will you be the same person as that baby when you are old? This question of what makes someone the same person over time is one that vexed the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704)."

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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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Pierre Luiggie Coellina

The Best of All Possible Worlds?

"If you were designing the world would you have done it this way? Probably not. But in the eighteenth century some people argued that theirs was the best of all possible worlds. ‘Whatever is, is right,’ declared the English poet Alexander Pope (1688– 1744). Everything in the world is the way it is for a reason: it’s all God’s work and God is good and all-powerful. So even if things seem to be going badly, they’re not. Disease, floods, earthquakes, forest fires, drought – they’re all just part of God’s plan. Our mistake is to focus close up on individual details rather than the larger picture. If we could stand back and see the universe from where God sits we would recognize the perfec- tion of it, how each piece fits together and everything that seems evil is really part of a much larger plan."

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