PHILOSOPHY An introduction

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PHILOSOPHYAn introduction
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LECTURES

• I. What is in a Word?
• II. Virtues and Principles.
• III. Mind and Body.
• IV. Politics in a Globalizing World.
• V. Science and Society.
• VI. The Value of Beauty.

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I. WHAT IS IN A WORD?
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• KNOWLEDGE AND DESIRE
• What do philosophers do?
• 2. THREE PARADIGMS
• How did the activities of philosophers change?
• 3. LANGUAGE AS A PRISON AND MEANS OF LIBERATION
• Why are philosophers freedom fighters?

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1. KNOWLEDGE AND DESIRE
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BEYOND INSTRUMENTALISM

• Philosophy gt love of wisdom (philo love sophia
  wisdom).
• Philosophers have an erotic and not an
  instrumental relation to knowledge.
• Instrumental gt knowledge as means to attain a
  goal.
• Two objectives
• 1. Knowledge.
• 2. Enlightenment.

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ENLIGHTENMENT

• Enlightenment is man's emergence from his
  self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the
  inability to use one's own understanding without
  the guidance of another. This immaturity is
  self-incurred if its cause is not lack of
  understanding, but lack of resolution and courage
  to use it without the guidance of another. The
  motto of enlightenment is therefore Sapere aude!
  Have courage to use your own understanding!
• Immanuel Kant, 1784

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WHAT IT IS NOT

• Philosophers dont try
• - to answer eternal questions
• - to deliver empirical knowledge.
• Philosophers have
• - a historical interest
• - a systematic interest.

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PHILOSOPHICAL SUBDISCIPLINES

• Ethics.
• Philosophy of Art.
• Philosophy of Mind.
• Philosphy of Religion.
• Political Philosophy.
• Philosophy of Law.
• Philosophy of Science.
• Social Philosophy.
• Philosophical Anthropology.
• Philosophy of Language.

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WHAT PHILOSOPHERS DO

• CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS gt the core business of
  philosophy.
• Since Socrates philosophers try to figure out
  what a specific concept means.
• Although conceptual analysis belongs since the
  beginning to the core business of philosophy,
  philosophers only think seriously about the
  medium of their concern since the last century.

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LANGUAGE AS MEDIUM AND OBJECT

• Philosophers saw words generally as spectacles we
  look through, not at.
• Nowadays philosophers see language not only as a
  medium, but as a main object of research gt
  linguistic turn in philosophy.
• Philosophers question the meaning of concepts.

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2. THREE PARADIGMS
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• THE TRIANGEL OF MEANING
• MENTAL ACTIVITIES
• LANGUAGE REALITY
• Example Amsterdam is the capital of the
  Netherlands

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THREE PARADIGMS IN PHILOSOPHY

• 1. THE ONTOLOGICAL PARADIGM gt REALITY
• 2. THE MENTALISTIC PARADIGM gt MENTAL ACTIVITIES
• 3. THE PRAGMATIC PARADIGM gt LANGUAGE

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PLATO (427-347) ARISTOTLE (384-323)

• Founding fathers of the ontological paradigm
• Ontological paradigm gt the study of all that
  there is.
• Plato gt the world of ideas is real.
• Aristotle gt the real is what we can see.

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DESCARTES (1596-1650)

• Founding father of the mentalistic paradigm.
• Mentalistic paradigm gt the study of the way we
  think (quest for certainty).
• I think therefore I am

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LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951)

• Main works
• Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921)
• Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953)

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CONFUSION

• Language is often the source of confusion and
  misunderstanding
• Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
  of our intelligence by means of language
  (Wittgenstein)
• Philosophy is therefore a kind of therapy

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PHILOSOPHY AS THERAPY

• Tractatus gt philosophy ought to be scientific gt
  Philosophy concerns itself with logical forms,
  with the a priori.
• Untersuchungen gt philosophy is the study of
  language games.

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SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

• Wittgenstein couples semantics (the study of the
  meaning of linguistic signs) and pragmatics (the
  study of the use of linguistic signs).
• The meaning of a word is related to its use.
• Therefore we should study different language
  games The term language-game is meant to bring
  into prominence the fact that the speaking of
  language is part of an activity, or of a form of
  life

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LANGUAGE-GAMES AND FORMS OF LIFE

• Wittgenstein studies language-games.
• The study of language-games and thus forms of
  life is helpful to criticize Augustines
  conception of language.

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AN OVERVIEW OF THE THREE PARADIGMS
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3. LANGUAGE AS A PRISON AND MEANS OF LIBERATION
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THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE

• Triggered by the Renaissance and the colonisation
  of the world.
• Phonology gt language as a system of sounds.
• Morphology gt the form of the language.
• Syntaxis gt the order of linguistic elements to a
  whole.
• Semantics gt the study of the meaning of words and
  other linguistic elements.
• Pragmatics gt the study of the use of linguistic
  elements.

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PHILOSOPHY AND LINGUISTICS

• Linguistics gt the empirical study of language.
• Philosophy gt critical reconstruction of the
  presuppostions of language.
• Linguistic turn in philosophy gt language becomes
  the tool to solve philosophical problems.
• Formal language gt mathematical logic as a tool to
  clarify philosophical problems.
• Ordinary language gt the study of the ordinary
  language as a tool to clarify philosophical
  problems.

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SOME ISSUES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

• Language and power gt rhetoric.
• The relation between the intension and extension
  of linguistic sighns gt the planet Venus as
  evening star and morning star.
• The relation between optical sensations and what
  they signify gt aspect-blindness.
• The possibility of private language.
• The possibility to liberate oneself from the
  prison we call language.

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RHETORIC

• Rhetoric refers to the power of language to move
  mens mind and influence their actions.
• A language is fundamentally metaphorical in
  nature (Lakoff Johnson).

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ARGUMENT IS WAR

• Your claims are indefensible.
• He attacked every weak point in my argument.
• His criticisms were right on target.
• I demolished his argument.
• Ive never won an argument with him.
• You disagree? Okay, shoot!
• If you use that strategy, hell wipe you out.
• He shot down all of my arguments.

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GOTTLOB FREGE (1848-1925)

• Main works
• 1. Begriffschrift (1879)
• 2. Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884)

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INTENSION AND EXTENSION

• Sinn/intension/sense gt the content which is
  expressed by linguistic signs.
• Bedeutung/extension/reference gt the objects to
  which the linguistic signs refer to.
• The concepts evening star and morning star
  have the same Bedeutung/extension/reference
  (the planet Venus), but a different
  Sinn/intension/sense.

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WHAT DO YOU SEE?

• TWO ANSWERS
• 1. I see that gt a description.
• 2. I see it as gt a resemblance.

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ASPECT-SEEING

• The figure can be seen under more than one
  aspect as a duck and as a rabbit.
• We see always the same line gt the picture and the
  visual impression didnt change.

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BLINDNESS

• ASPECT-BLINDNESS
• - is not insensibility to optical impressions.
• - is the inability to understand optical
  impressions gt loss of associations between
  optical sensations and what they signify.

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THE MOTIVE TO DISCUSS THE IDEA OF A PRIVATE
LANGUAGE

• Private language is a new notion.
• What is the motive to introduce this notion?
• A not articulated reliance on the possibility of
  a private language is arguably essential to
  mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind and
  metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the
  representational theory of mind which became
  prominent in cognitive science.

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AUGUSTINES CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

• Every single word has a meaning.
• All the words are names, i.e. they stand for
  objects.
• The meaning of a word is the object for that it
  stood.
• The connection between words (names) and their
  meanings (objects) is the outcome of a ostensive
  definition that triggers a mental association
  between word and object.
• Sentences are connections of names.

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CONSEQUENCES OF THE AUGUSTINES CONCEPTION OF
LANGUAGE

• The only function of language is to represent
  reality words refer and sentences describe.
• Because a child thinks it can make an association
  between a word and an object this implies that
  it must have already a private language to
  understand the public language.

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PRIVATE LANGUAGE

• Is not a personal code.
• Is not a language of one person.
• The individual words of his language are to
  refer to what can only be known to the person
  speaking to his immediate private sensations
  PI 243.
• One can follow a rule privately.
• A language conceived as necessarily
  comprehensible only to its single orginator
  because the things define its vocabulary are
  necessarily inaccesible to others.

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TWO ARGUMENTS AGAINST A PRIVATE LANGUAGE

• Ostensive definitions dont make sense see also
  PI 30 gt there is no possibility for corrections,
  questions and answers to exclude
  misunderstanding.
• We need criteria to talk about the rightness of
  an action gt a public control is not possible.

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S

• Let us imagine the following case. I want to
  keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain
  sensation. I will remark first of all that a
  definition of the sign cannot be formulated But
  still I can give myself a kind of ostensive
  definition. How? Can I point tot the sensation?
  Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write
  the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate
  my attention on the sensation and so as it were,
  point to it inwardly. But what is this ceremony
  for? For that is all it seems to be! A definition
  surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.
  Well that is done precisely by the concentrating
  of my attention for in this way I impress on
  myself the connexion between the sign and the
  sensation. But I impress it on myselfcan only
  mean this process brings it about that I
  remember the connexion right in the future. But
  in the present case I have no criterion of
  correctness. One would like to say whatever is
  going to seem right to me is right. And that only
  means that here we cant talk about right PI
  258

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LIBERATION FROM THE PRISON

• Language as a prison gt we are socialized with
  specific language-games (aspect-blindness).
• Language as a means of liberation gt we can learn
  new language games gt worlddisclosure.

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WORLD DISCLOSURE

• Language as a means of world disclosure creating
  new horizons.
• Methods of creating new horizons
• 1. Deconstruct and reconstruct.
• 2. Re-order things.
• 3. Add or exclude.
• 4. Using new metaphors.