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CHAPTER 3: Reality and Being

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CHAPTER 3: REALITY AND BEING INTRODUCTION Metaphysics is the attempt to answer the question: What is real? You might think that reality just consists in physical objects. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: CHAPTER 3: Reality and Being


1
CHAPTER 3 Reality and Being
2
Introduction
  • Metaphysics is the attempt to answer the
    question What is real?
  • You might think that reality just consists in
    physical objects. But what do we say about
    goodness, justice, or God? Or economic forces?

3
Metaphysics so what?
  • Identifying what is real is important.
  • If we say that something is real, then we are
    saying that it has importance, actuality, and
    power.

4
The Search for Reality
  • Perhaps we can never say what reality is, as the
    question might be meaningless.
  • If so, perhaps we cannot say with certainty which
    aspects of the universe around us are real.

5
3.2 Reality Material or Nonmaterial?
  • Materialism Reality as Matter
  • Materialism is the view that matter is the
    ultimate constituent of reality.
  • Both eastern and Western philosophers have
    accepted this view.

6
Eastern Materialism The Charvaka Philosophers of
India.
  • These philosophers ridiculed the spiritualism of
    their countryman, and were referred to as
    Lokyata, which means those who go the worldly
    way.
  • Believed that since all we know is what we
    perceive through our senses, and what we perceive
    is material, then all that we can know is
    material.

7
Western Materialism.
  • Democritus believed that reality could be
    explained in terms of matter, with the smallest
    pieces being atoms.
  • People lost interest in Democritean materialism
    as they were more interested in working out how
    to lead a good and happy life. But a growing
    interest in the scientific method in the
    seventeenth century led people back to being
    interested in materialism.
  • Hobbes, for example, thought that our mental
    states were states of our material brains.

8
Objections to Materialism
  • The basic objection to materialism lies in
  • its difficulty in accounting for human
    consciousness.
  • Consciousness is always intensional and it is
    subjective. It also has no apparent location,
    mass, or volume.
  • So, if materialism is to be acceptable it must
    reduce consciousness to physical states. But it
    seems that consciousness has features that cannot
    be reduced.

9
Objections to Materialism
  • In addition to this, it seems that the elementary
    particles from which the universe is composed are
    not matter as traditionally conceived, but more
    like energy, or fields, or probability waves.
  • To some extent materialists have adjusted to
    these findings by revising what they conceive of
    as matter.

10
Objections to Materialism
  • But Werner Heisenberg in the 1930s held that we
    cannot tell whether a particle has a definite
    location until it interacts with an observer.
  • This seems to show that on its most basic level
    the world is intertwined with the mind.

11
Idealism Reality as Nonmatter
  • Modern atomic theory has pushed some philosophers
    to claim that reality is more than matter.
  • Some philosophers have held that we live in a
    purely nonmaterial world the universe is only
    mind and idea.

12
The Development of Western Idealism
  • Idealism is the view that reality is
  • comprised only of minds and their
  • ideas.
  • This view is as old as the ancient Greek
    Pythagoras, and was formalized by Plato, who held
    that the individual entities that we perceive
    around us are merely shadows of reality.
  • This fit in well with the views of Augustine, who
    held that the only enduring world was the
    spiritual, the world without matter.

13
The Development of Western Idealism
  • But the founder of modern idealism is George
    Berkeley, who claimed that the conscious mind and
    its ideas are the only reality.
  • Berkeley argued that our experience of the
    external world consists of the sensations of our
    senses (e.g. cats, flowers, rocks, houses,). So,
    all that exists are the sensations and the ideas
    that we experience and the minds that experience
    them.

14
Subjective and Objective Idealism
  • Berkeleys views has elements of both.
  • Berkeley held that things are mind-dependent
    this is the subjective element of his view.
  • Berkeley held that not all of the contents of our
    minds are the same some are within our control,
    and some are not. Those that are not are uniform
    and consistent this consistency comes from God,
    for Berkeley.
  • This second aspect of Berkeleys idealism is its
    objective aspect, for now certain parts of
    reality are independent of ones mind.

15
Eastern Idealism
  • Indian philosophy has housed many idealist
    philosophers, such as Vasubandhu, whose views
    were in many ways similar to Berkeleys.
  • Vasubandhu held that we only perceive sensations
    in our minds, and that only minds exist.

16
 Objections to Idealism
  • Do idealists commit the fallacy of
    anthropomorphism, projecting a human faculty onto
    the nonhuman universe?
  • Objections to Subjective Idealism
  • It might be that subjective idealists fail to
    distinguish between my perception of a thing and
    the thing itself.
  • Why should we believe that perceptible things are
    mere collections of perceptible qualities?
  • Why not just distinguish between perceptions and
    their objects?
  • Subjective idealism doesnt really answer the
    question of how things are so much as it
    dissolves it.

17
Objections to Idealism
  • Objections to Objective Idealism
  • Do we need an explanation, such as God, for the
    continuity of (e.g.) the classroom? Also, why
    believe that Gods mind is intelligible to us?
    How can we distinguish between our perceptions
    and Gods perceptions?

18
What do you think?
  • What do you think is real? How do you
    understand this question?
  • Are economic forces real? In what sense?
  • What would it be like to live in an idealist
    universe? Would it be any different from the
    universe you live in now? Could this universe be
    an idealist one?
  • Do you think that idealism gives us a reason to
    believe that God exists? Why, or why not?
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