Philosophy of Knowledge and Ethics

1
Philosophy of Knowledge and Ethics

• Professor Scott Bowman
• University of South Australia

2
Lecture 1Plato
3
Why philosophy for social workers?

• Knowing Self
• Knowing where you are at
• Who is the real me

4
Easy to get into issues of faith

• Revelation
• Based on what we are told
• Reason
• Based on thinking

5
Socrates
Plato
Parmenides
Heracltis
6
Parmenides 510BC
Presocratic philosopher whose work is best
known to us in fragmentary reports from other
philosophers. Parmenides used sophisticated
logical language in the epic poem (On Nature) to
argue that all of reality is a single, unchanging
substance. Everything is what it iscomplete and
immobileand can never become what it is not.
7
Heraclitus (540-475 B.C.E.)
           Greek philosopher who used paradox
and riddles to argue that the world is constantly
changing in discussions preserved only in
fragmentary reports. Although he identified fire
as the original stuff of the universe,
Heraclitus supposed that its changeable nature
results in the formation of all of the
traditional opposites.
8
Socrates
9
(No Transcript)
10
Socrates

• Told by Delfic Auricle that he was the wisest man
  in Athens
• Knew that he knew nothing
• What is justice dont know
• What is the meaning of life dont know
• Soapists at the time said they did know

11
Socrates

• Socratic ignorance
• Ignorance a good state
• Acknowledge ignorance

12
Plato

• Follower of Socrates (Gadfly)
• Wrote down conversations of Socrates
• Wrote the Platic Dialogues
• Conversations that Socrates had

13
Dialectics
Synthesis
Opposite view - Antithesis
A view a thesis
14
Synthesis

• Brings truthfulness
• Brings us closer to the truth
• The Synthesis becomes the next thesis

15
Plato
16
Plato, one of the most famous philosophers of
ancient Greece, was the first to use the term
philosophy, which means love of knowledge. Born
around 428 BC, Plato investigated a wide range of
topics. Chief among his ideas was the theory of
forms, which proposed that objects in the
physical world merely resemble perfect forms in
the ideal world, and that only these perfect
forms can be the object of true knowledge. The
goal of the philosopher, according to Plato, is
to know the perfect forms and to instruct others
in that knowledge.
17
Plato
Appearance and reality
18
Plato

• Appearance of reality
• Smile on child's face
• World of apperences with reality shining through

19
Plato

• Two worlds
• Appearance and reality
• Transcendent world - reality

20
Earlier Philophers

• Protagerous
• What you believe is true or false is true or
  false
• Goodness is there such a thing that is
  independent of you
• Protagerous was a relativelist or subjectivist

21
Plato

• True is present in all
• All need to be involved in dialectic to get to
  truth.

22
(No Transcript)
23
Plato

• Socartes

24
(No Transcript)
25
What problems did Plato identify in the thinking
of his fellow Philosophers and what was his
solution to those problems.
26
Reason Understanding Knowledge Takes place in
the MIND
THE THING ITSELF
Also the experience of THINGS
27
Protagoras (480?-411?BC), Greek philosopher, born
in Abdera, Thrace. About 445BC he went to Athens,
where he became a friend of the statesman
Pericles and won great fame as a teacher and
philosopher. Protagoras was the first thinker to
call himself a Sophist and to teach for pay. His
chief works, of which only a few fragments have
survived, were entitled Truth and On the Gods.
The basis of his speculation was the doctrine
that nothing is absolutely good or bad, true or
false, and that each individual is therefore his
or her own final authority this belief is summed
up in his saying Man is the measure of all
things.
28
All things in the world flow. They are in the
process of becoming something else.
29
Man is the Measure of all things
The implications of this statement is that TRUTH
and MORALITY are only a matter of opinion
All things in the material world flow Nothing
is perfect
30
THE WORLD OF THE SENSES IS ALWAYS CHANGING
ALWAYS GROWING OR DISINTEGRATING OR DEPENDENT
ON PERCEPTION AND TIME THE WORLD OF TRUTH SHOULD
BE UNCHANGING FUNDAMENTAL REALITY -- "THE REALLY
REAL" SHOULD BE
31
PLATOS SOLUTION
There is a transcendent and objective world
beyond the scope of the sensory world
The world of BEING
32
(No Transcript)
33
The Matrix
34
THE WORLD OF BEING IS GRASPED DIRECTLY BY THE
MIND
THE THING ITSELF
The world of Becoming
35
The problem of the gap between the content of
perception and the thing itself
36
Rationalism (Latin ratio,reason), in
philosophy, a system of thought that emphasizes
the role of reason in obtaining knowledge, in
contrast to empiricism, which emphasizes the role
of experience, especially sense perception. René
Descartes. Descartes believed that geometry
represented the ideal for all sciences and
philosophy. He held that by means of reason
alone, certain universal, self-evident truths
could be discovered, from which the remaining
content of philosophy and the sciences could be
deductively derived. He assumed that these
self-evident truths were innate, not derived from
sense experience.
37
Rationalism in ethics is the claim that certain
primary moral ideas are innate in humankind and
that such first moral principles are self-evident
to the rational faculty.
38
(No Transcript)
39
A student of ancient Greek philosopher Plato,
Aristotle shared his teachers reverence for
human knowledge but revised many of Platos ideas
by emphasizing methods rooted in observation and
experience. Aristotle surveyed and systematized
nearly all the extant branches of knowledge and
provided the first ordered accounts of biology,
psychology, physics, and literary theory. In
addition, Aristotle invented the field known as
formal logic, pioneered zoology, and addressed
virtually every major philosophical problem known
during his time. Known to medieval intellectuals
as simply the Philosopher, Aristotle is
possibly the greatest thinker in Western history,
and historically, perhaps the single greatest
influence on Western intellectual development.
40
Empiricism, in philosophy, a doctrine that
affirms that all knowledge is based on
experience, and denies the possibility of
spontaneous ideas or a priori thought. Until the
20th century the term empiricism was applied to
the view held chiefly by the English philosophers
of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Of these
the English philosopher John Locke was the first
to give it systematic expression. The philosophy
opposed to empiricism is rationalism, represented
by such thinkers as the French philosopher René
Descartes.Rationalists assert that the mind is
capable of recognizing reality by means of the
reason, a faculty that exists independent of
experience.
41
Although we accept that moral decisions will
always be affected by the situation and the
context we affirm that there are some things
that are RIGHT because they are RIGHT and
others acts that are WRONG because they are
WRONG and that every sane and normal person
knows this!
There are no objective
moral truths. The ground upon which moral
decisions may be made must be discovered
within the subjective processes of the
individual-in-society!
THE GREAT ETHICAL DIVIDE
42
The Rationalist discourse we hold these truths
to be self evident and the Empiricist
discourse truth is discovered in experience