Philosophy in One Lecture

Daniel Bonevac's lecture sketches philosophy's core concern: the connection between mind and world, covering skepticism, meaning, Plato, Augustine, and Kant.

Key Takeaways

Philosophy at its core concerns the relationship between thought and reality.
Knowledge questions and metaphysics are tightly linked to the problem of how minds grasp the world.
Skepticism arises when we cannot verify that our concepts match reality or each other's.
Many apparent disagreements may be semantic, resting on different definitions.
Historical solutions (Plato, Augustine, Kant) each attempt to secure a link between mind and an objective world.

What the video covers

Opens by asking what philosophy is fundamentally about, framing the field as broadly concerned with the connection between mind and reality.
Identifies core questions: how we know what we know, what we can know, what we ought to do, and what exists (metaphysics).
Uses a drawn illustration of a thinking mind to explain how thoughts have content that must correspond to reality.
Raises skeptical worries about whether we can be sure our thoughts accurately capture the world.
Explores interpersonal skepticism: whether two people's concepts (e.g., of God, right, justice) actually match when they use the same words.
Notes that disputes may be merely semantic, with people agreeing on facts but using terms differently.
Considers temporal skepticism: whether a philosopher like Bertrand Russell used terms consistently across years.
Discusses Plato's Academy, where skepticism spread, and the sophists' relativist response.
Covers Augustine's doctrine of divine illumination as a solution to how we access eternal truths.
Briefly introduces Kant's distinction between noumena (things in themselves) and phenomena (things as they appear to us), and primary versus secondary qualities.

Chapters

What does Bonevac say is the core of philosophy?

He argues that philosophy is broadly about the connection between the mind and the world, including how our thoughts relate to reality. This ties together questions of knowledge, ethics, and metaphysics.

What is the skeptical problem about shared concepts?

Bonevac asks whether two people using the same word, like 'God' or 'triangle,' really have matching concepts. He suggests some disputes may be merely semantic, with agreement on facts hidden by different definitions.

How does Augustine's view address how we know truth?

Augustine's doctrine of illumination holds that God illuminates our minds and reveals part of the divine mind to us. This is presented as a way to explain how we access eternal truths.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

background. This is going to be very, very thumbnail. There's a huge amount of detail, of course, being left out to try to cover thousands of years of philosophy in just a few minutes. But nevertheless, I want to start thinking about what philosophy is really, at its core, all about.

Speaker A

So if you had to put in a nutshell what philosophy is really all about, how would you do that?

Speaker A

What is philosophy? And what would you say are the main problems of philosophy? I'm not talking about the detailed stuff, right? I'm talking about this big picture. In the broadest sense, what's philosophy all about? What do we know?

Speaker A

Ooh, good. What do we know?

Speaker A

What about positivity?

Speaker A

Inquisitivity.

Speaker A

Inquisitivity. Okay, asking deep questions. Some big questions. What else?

Speaker A

How we know what we know.

Speaker A

How we know what we know, good. You guys are very epistemologically oriented, I see. And the theory of knowledge is one of the central questions of philosophy, no doubt about it. What else?

Speaker A

What we ought to do.

Speaker A

Good, what we ought to do. Ethics. We're actually, in this course, going to have very little to say about that. We're going to concentrate on the other parts of philosophy. There's a huge amount that goes on with respect to ethics in the 20th century. And we'll occasionally allude to it, but it's independent enough from some other things that we're not going to spend a huge amount of time on.

Speaker A

Other things that are core questions. Well, here's a very broad way of thinking about it. All of the things we've mentioned, how you know what you can know, how you know what you know, what you ought to do, and you might say the basic question of metaphysics, what there is, is really all about, in some sense, the connection between the mind and the world. It's all about the connection between our thoughts and reality.

Speaker A

And so I'm going to draw you a little picture of that. Let me give you a picture, first of all, of a typical person. I studied drawing and painting for a year to get this good.

Speaker A

There. Okay. Imagine that that's you, right? And now I want to show, I want to blow up what's inside your mind. So let's have this little cartoon bubble. And there's your mind. Okay? Now, suppose you have a thought. I don't know how to draw a thought exactly, but imagine that something like a little electrical charge is in this mind. So we've got this little zap here.

Speaker A

And I don't know. What are you thinking about? Suppose we've got something very simple, like, for example, a triangle. And you're looking at the triangle, saying that's a triangle. So we might think this thought has a content. We can draw it maybe this way: that's a triangle. And now right away we might think, well, what's the connection between that thought and its content and reality, and that actual triangle right now? You might think, well, the thought is supposed to reflect that. But in general, we might think, ah, this is a place where these questions about knowledge become crucial.

Speaker A

How do I know that I'm actually capturing the world accurately? How do I know I'm getting it wrong, that I'm actually having thoughts that either correspond to the world or however you want to think about truth, that somehow succeed in doing what I'm trying to do in thinking?

Speaker A

Now, here is one way of thinking about this problem. We might think, look, there is some property that this has, and am I really capturing that property accurately? It becomes especially problematic if I imagine another person here looking at the triangle. And let's imagine that that person also has a mind and is having a similar thought, and that that thought has a similar sort of content, or at least it looks similar. But now there are a bunch of skeptical questions we can start raising, right? We can worry about the connection between my thought and reality. So that's one kind of skepticism.

Speaker A

But then we can think, well, how do I know that what you're saying about this and what I'm saying about it actually correspond? How do we know that the content of my thought, that that's a triangle, actually matches the content of your thought, that's a triangle? And we might worry about the possibility of communication. Can we really communicate? Are we talking about the same thing?

Speaker A

With something like triangles, this isn't really a crucial problem. We tend to think, look, we can explain in simple geometric terms what a triangle is. But there are lots of concepts where it's not so clear that my concept of it matches your concept. So what are some examples of controversial concepts, concepts where you might think we're talking about something, but it's not at all clear what is actually being discussed and that you have the same idea that I have?

Speaker A

We're going to have a clue to this whenever we start thinking, gosh, maybe our dispute is actually semantic. We really agree about the facts. We're just calling them different things. It's just really in the end coming down to definitions. So where might that happen where you and I are worried that maybe we just have different concepts of this? We attach different meanings to the terms.

Speaker A

God.

Speaker A

Okay, God, right. Somebody's saying, do you believe in God? And suppose somebody's answer is, well, I don't know. I believe that there's a very powerful spiritual force behind the universe, but I don't know whether that's God. I feel very drawn to certain Eastern religions that are all about spirituality, but not really about God per se. Does that person believe in God?

Speaker A

Well, some people might say, yeah, sure. I mean, what do you mean? God is the spiritual power behind the universe. Other people might say, no, that's pretty bad. I don't count that as belief in God.

Speaker A

This might be a place where people really have different concepts of God, and a view like that might be sort of on the borderline. Some views, both parties might agree, yes, definitely people who believe in God. Others, people who definitely don't, but there might be this area where people disagree. And one way of looking at the early Platonic dialogues, by the way, is really like that. You've got all these cases where there's something sort of ambiguous, as in the Euthyphro, where Euthyphro is taking this action against his own father. Is that right or not? Well, you might think, gee, I don't know. We better find out what it is for something to be right. And then the dialogue proceeds to try to sort that out.

Speaker A

There might be cases where everybody agrees that's right, everybody agrees that's wrong, but now maybe we have different concepts of right and wrong, and so these things in a sort of vague borderline are hard to sort out. Anyway, sometimes this can become a real issue, and we can worry about whether your concept of God or the right or the wrong, or justice, or whatever it is, is really the same as mine. And so that's a different kind of interpersonal sort of skepticism.

Speaker A

We're going to look at some other cases of this. For example, suppose this isn't a different person. Suppose it's me at another time. And so do I mean by this term what I meant yesterday, or last year, or 20 years ago? And we can worry about whether that's really right. If you're interpreting a philosopher who writes over many years, you can worry about whether they're really using terms in the same way, whether Bertrand Russell in 1947 is actually using the term the way he used it in 1903, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker A

We used to have a person on the faculty who specialized in Russell's thought. And when he was talking about Russell, which was wonderful, he gave beautiful lectures on Russell, but he would sort of say, okay, this is the view in March 1908. Now by July 1908, he was using these terms in different ways, and so on. And then, of course, there's the Russell 1910. So there were many of these temporal slices of Russell that all had different views. So it could be a sort of dynamic skepticism. Am I using the term in the same way? And we'll see that when we get to Kripke's book on Wittgenstein. But there could also be another interpreta

Speaker A

this action against his own father, And is that right or not? Well, you might think, gee, I don't know. We better find out what it is for something to be right. And then the dialogue proceeds to try to sort that out. There might

Speaker A

be cases where everybody agrees that's right, everybody agrees that's wrong, but now maybe we have different concepts of right and wrong, and so these things in a sort of vague borderline are hard to sort out. Anyway, sometimes this can become a real issue,

Speaker A

and we can worry about whether your concept of God or the right or the wrong, or justice, or whatever it is, is really the same as mine. And so that's a different kind of interpersonal sort of skepticism. We're going to look at some

Speaker A

other cases of this. For example, suppose this isn't a different person. Suppose it's me at another time. And so do I mean by this term what I meant yesterday, or last year, or 20 years ago? And we can worry about whether that's

Speaker A

really right. If you're interpreting a philosopher, writes over many years. You can worry about whether they're really using terms in the same way, whether Bertrand Russell in 1947 is actually using the term the way he used it, 1903, et cetera, et cetera. We

Speaker A

used to have a person on the faculty who specialized in Russell's thought. And when he was talking about Russell, which was wonderful, he gave beautiful lectures on Russell, but he would sort of say, OK, this is the view in March 1908. Now by

Speaker A

July 1908, he was using these terms in different ways and so on. And then, of course, there's the Russell 1910. So there were many of these temporal slices of Russell that all had different views. So it could be a sort of

Speaker A

dynamic skepticism. Am I using the term in the same way? And we'll see that when we get to Kripke's book on Wittgenstein. But there could also be another interpretation.

Speaker A

Suppose this isn't me at a different time. It's just me in another possible world.

Speaker A

So maybe I would use the term differently if only something were different. If I had, let's say, gone to a different graduate school. Or if I had studied under different teachers. Or if I had just read different things along the way. Or if

Speaker A

I didn't have so many cats. Or whatever it is, it might be that in another nearby possible world, maybe I'd be using the term differently. In any event, Plato introduces a way of trying to solve this problem. Because he's worried about the

Speaker A

possibility of skepticism. And in Greek thought, at the time, there were plenty of skeptics.

Speaker A

There were also the sophists who turned this into an argument for relativism. and said, look, I don't know if you're using triangle the way I'm using it. The most we can say is that's a triangle for me, triangle the way I'm using the

Speaker A

term. Maybe it's not a triangle the way you're using the term. That person does believe in God the way I use the term God, but maybe that person doesn't believe in God the way you use it. So really, in the end, truth is

Speaker A

relative. That was the position of the solvice. So what does Plato do to solve this problem? Forms. Forms, exactly. The idea is, well, yes. Okay, you have a concept, let's say, of triangularity.

Speaker A

And I have a concept of triangularity. Do they match? Well, gosh, we're not sure. But what if there were a form of triangularity? We might say a property of triangularity or a universal corresponding triangularity.

Speaker A

I'm going to draw it in boldface. Boldface triangle. Okay, that's the form. And now the idea is this. My concept is really a concept of that. The meaning of my word triangle and the content of my thought that that's a triangle

Speaker A

is tied to that form. Moreover, that form is what really is exemplified in that object, the triangle. Now, why is that a solution to the problem?

Speaker A

Well, first of all, he can say, let's just look at the problem that's monadic, that concerns me. I'm worried about whether the content of my thought matches reality. relax my thought is tied to the form and the form is precisely what is present

Speaker A

there in reality that thing is participating in the form of triangularity and so is my concept so is my thought the content of my thought is tied to the forms so who I can solve this problem of truth

Speaker A

right but I thought that the triangle is true why because its content pertains to a form that really is exemplified in that object and that gives us a way of thinking about what truth is, it also gives us a way of reassuring ourselves

Speaker A

about knowledge. Because we do have this ability, this power, to relate to the forms. It's not so much that we reach out to the forms. It's rather that the forms have a power to connect to us. Now, how does that solve the

Speaker A

problem with another person, or me at a different time, or me in a different possible world? Answer is that concept, too, is tied into the form of triangularity. And you're having the thought about that particular object. And again, that form

Speaker A

is exemplified in that object. So you and I have thoughts that we could reasonably describe as the same thought because they attach the same form. And that form is really the one present in the object in that triangle. OK,

Speaker A

now, in a way, that's a beautiful solution. And yet it didn't last very long by, well, really, actually, By one generation, Plato's Academy was no longer teaching Plato's. In fact, academic became the term for skeptic. When Augustine writes his work Contra academicos, against the academics, it's a work against skepticism.

Speaker A

And so Plato's Academy within a generation was just filled with skeptics. This solution didn't work, they thought. Now, why not? What's the problem with that sort of solution?

Speaker A

It's kind of like another layer. of the initial problem? Because how could you define the form if you can't define the concept that you're trying to define? Good, good, good. So first of all, you might think, well, I'm still not convinced that you

Speaker A

and I are actually tied into the same form. How are we going to define that? Indeed, that's the problem of these early platonic dialogues. How do you define justice?

Speaker A

How do you define courage? How do you define self-control? How do you define virtue, et cetera, et cetera? All of those things become problems. And so you might think, oh, it's all tied into the same form. But is it real? What if you

Speaker A

and I have different concepts? Then maybe it's not tied to the same form. In fact, now it becomes a problem. How many forms are there? At one stage, Plato worries. Is there a form of mud? And that sounds like a dumb problem to

Speaker A

many people. But you might put it this way. Look, if there's a form for everything I could think of, then actually, this doesn't solve the problem at all. It just duplicates it. Maybe you and I are attached to different forms. And then we've

Speaker A

got the problem of, well, which form is really present in the object? Maybe we don't know. So yes, I think one problem here is, how do we distinguish this form from, we'll say, counterfeit something? We've got this problem of counterfeit forms.

Speaker A

And I shouldn't say counterfeit in the sense that one is, it might be that they're just a bunch of different alternatives. I have this concept, and maybe from my point of view, your concept is really a counterfeit. But of course, you're going to

Speaker A

call mine a counterfeit. So I don't mean to use the term to imply that there's one true thing any more than people use that counterfeit money. In the end, what makes real money different from counterfeit money, which is officially recognized? And so you

Speaker A

might say the problem is precisely that maybe we just have a bunch of different forms here. We're attached to different ones. Now, there's another sort of problem here, I think. Can you see another problem with this sort of solution?

Speaker A

when we get to Kirby that power big problem is going to be critical but there's another problem that historically was even more disturbing yeah we have different ideas of forms as well we have different ideas of forms ah okay yes

Speaker A

one problem is I mean here what does a form have to be like to solve the problem for us first of going as we concrete well it's not concrete in the sense that I can causally you know that I can directly sense it

Speaker A

It's not like I can touch the form of triangularity or that I can kick it around or whatever. But yes, it has to actually have causal power, right? It has to interact causally. I have to be able to know it. And so one

Speaker A

problem is, look, it has to be something that is knowable. Otherwise, I won't be able to. Otherwise, I won't solve the problem of skepticism. But what else? It's got to be outside my mind, right? If it's just inside my mind or dependent on

Speaker A

my mind, then gosh, I've got one, you've got one. We're back to the same skeptical problem. It's got to be something outside my mind, outside your mind. So it's got to be mind independent.

Speaker A

Otherwise, you've got exactly this problem, but we just have different concepts of this. Now, we still might have different concepts of what this is and people did. So there's a problem, well, what the heck are these forms? But also, if you stop and

Speaker A

think about this, you might say, well, OK, wait a minute. They've got to be outside the mind. They've got to causally interact with me. They've got to have some kind of causal power. Since I don't sense them, I see them, Plato says at

Speaker A

one point, with the eye of the mind. But that's really metaphorical. You might think, wait, I don't get it. This thought, in some way, it's not just that the content ties in. Somehow, there has to be some epistemological connection. Somehow,

Speaker A

I have to be able to know the form. But now how is that possible?

Speaker A

What do you mean, eye of the mind, right? Here I've got some sort of, I've got a physical eye, that is seeing that triangle, but now I've got to have, well, I can't put it in the head, this is my physical body, it's

Speaker A

got to be up here in the mind somewhere, so I've got to have this eye of the mind. That's really mysterious. So how can I causally interact with the forms? Now Plato, if you think about it, doesn't really have a good solution to

Speaker A

this problem. He's aware of it. But in the Mino, He ends up saying, well, I guess here's what he really does is resort to a sort of metaphor. He tells you a story. And whenever Plato tells you a story, he's getting to something

Speaker A

very, very deep, but also he has no good solution. So deep question, no answer is really, I think, what those stories and myths and all of that mean. And here's what's happening. He's saying, well, aha, before you were born, your soul

Speaker A

was united. You were living in the realm of the forms and your soul was united with the forms and the forms were pressed upon your soul. But you forgot when you were born. And so now we have to remind you. And in the

Speaker A

Mino, he's talking to the slave about geometry and getting him to prove a theorem.

Speaker A

Say, see, he knows all of this implicitly because the forms were all imprinted on his mind. Now, how's that as a solution? All right, yeah, he's shaking his head, he's laughing. Several of you are going, right. What's wrong with

Speaker A

that as a solution? How do you know what's being learned at this point in time is the same as what was learned a long time ago? Well, how do you know what time? Right. Well, okay, good. Actually, take this memory idea seriously and

Speaker A

think, gee, what I remember about that birthday of mine many years ago, is that the same as what I remembered about it, you know, that day, or the next day rather, or what I remembered about it 10 years after the fact and so

Speaker A

on. You might think actually my memories have changed a bit. Surely a lot of detail has been lost. What was I wearing that day, for example? I probably could remember that for a while afterwards. I certainly don't remember it now.

Speaker A

Are there things I remember better now than I would have 10 years after the event? Probably so, because I've actually had occasion to think more about social choice theory.

Speaker A

So I can probably tell you more now about Alan Gibbard's lecture that day than I could 10 years after the actual event. So yeah, the question of memory, memories change. And so we might think that's not a very secure anchor for this. Can

Speaker A

you see any other problems? Well, if it's the responsibility of somebody who's older, assuming an authoritarian position and teaching someone that forgot before he or she was born, then That brings into play the entire preconceived notion that all forms are the same. It doesn't make sense, because how

Speaker A

can it be the same if you're teaching it to somebody later on in life who is much younger than you are? And therefore, it definitely is connected to the counterfeit form of a form of a form. It leads to a dominance, but a

Speaker A

dominance over what? Oh, all right. Good, good. One of the things that's really disturbing, actually, when you start learning about criminal law is how unreliable eyewitness reports are. ask a bunch of witnesses to an event, what happened? You're going to get very different

Speaker A

reports. When somebody first is exposed to this, they start thinking, wow, people lie all the time. That's true, they do. But it's not just that. People are going to observe different things, they're going to report different things. So, you might worry that, look,

Speaker A

it's like that. You and I might all be remembering the same form, but actually doing it really differently. So, it's not obvious that helps. It might be that after all, we rely on teachers and so on. But that means, what's being conveyed to

Speaker A

one person about this, let's say about justice, is not going to be the same as what's being conveyed to someone else about justice. And how do you explain all that? It's as if different eyewitnesses are repeating their stories to different people and talking

Speaker A

to different reporters, let's say, who have then published very different events of the crime.

Speaker A

And so you might think that actually doesn't give me much of a solution. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was agreeing with you. Okay. Okay, there's one other thing that occurs to me, which is, look, this is really, in a sense, dependent. Just as

Speaker A

my memory of something now, how do you know that? Oh, I remember it. That's only partially an answer, right? Because it's like, ah, I remember it now because I knew it then. So that's how I know it now. But it depends on my

Speaker A

knowing it then. So really, this is, oh, I can know about the forms now because I knew about them then. But you can say, well, how did you know about them then? To tell me some spooky story about your soul before you were

Speaker A

born isn't very much of a solution. And so there's something inadequate about that. He has a different story in the Republic. There it is the light of the good that shines like the sun and illumines the realm of the forms. And at that

Speaker A

point, you might say, oh, OK, I can know about these forms because I can know about that form. Yeah? So Plato's idea, as you're describing it, is that these forms were sort of impressed on the structure of mind before we came into

Speaker A

being? Right. OK. Right, exactly. In the later rationalist tradition, this becomes the view that the forms are a priori, that we have a priori knowledge and we have innate ideas. And so in the end, really, by the time you get to, say, Picard

Speaker A

or Leibniz, these are now viewed as something that can't really be fully mind independent because you don't really know how. But I'll get to that part of the story in a moment. But you're absolutely right. These become the foundation for the doctrine

Speaker A

of innate ideas, for the doctrine of a priori knowledge. And so in some sense, all of the rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Marbranche, et cetera, are all really Platonists in the vital analysis.

Speaker A

They all have a version of this basic Platonic story. But Descartes does complicate it.

Speaker A

And in a way that I'll explain, well, put in, first of all, Plato's Republic account. We've got the form of the good that shines like the sun. And that has the causal power to enable me to see the realm of forms. It's again

Speaker A

metaphorical. It says these forms have causal power because that one does, which is kind of unsatisfying. But also, how does the form of the good do this? That seems mysterious. So what happens in early Christian philosophy, in the early church fathers, in

Speaker A

Augustine, for example, or in Origen, Okay, if the forms are just in this mysterious mind independent realm, the problem is how it's knowable. The form of the good is supposed to have some special power, but who knows how it gets it. However, if it's God, and if the

Speaker A

forms now exist not in some weird alternative realm, but instead in the mind of God, we've got a solution. So, our agenda, Tatius and a few other early church fathers come up with the idea that the forms are really ideas in the mind

Speaker A

of God. And what Plato was talking about with the form of the good, that is really God. Now, how can the form of the good have this power? Mysterious.

Speaker A

How can God do it? God can do anything. Yay. OK. So in Augustine, you get a doctrine of illumination. God is the one who illumines our minds and essentially reveals part of the divine mind to us. And this is an account that has

Speaker A

a huge amount of power in Christian philosophy, also in Jewish philosophy and Islamic philosophy.

Speaker A

It is not the only tradition, but it is a powerful tradition that lasts for more than a thousand years. So it turns out to be a highly stable solution to this problem. And it's overturned utterly by Descartes. Even though in the end

Speaker A

he's a platonist, even though he adopts this idea of the innate ideas, a priori knowledge, and so on, he does something that ruins the Augustinian solution. Now, why? Think about the problem of the evil deceit. What if the

Speaker A

universe is ruled not by a good God, but by an evil deceiver out to trick us? Here's why that's such a devastating problem.

Speaker A

We could think, look, what's happening here is that God is basically illuminating our minds, giving us the concepts we need to understand reality. And he's also structuring reality. So it's really divine power behind these arrows. And to use philo of Alexander, he's saying,

Speaker A

God is stamping the world with the stamp of the forms, which he refers to, by the way, as the Word of God, the logos, is what is sort of the mind of God. And reality is stamped with that stamp. And our minds are

Speaker A

stamped with it, too. We're made in the image of God, and what that means is that our minds are stamped with the logos. Not the full thing. It's not like we can understand everything about reality, but we get sort of the the cheap

Speaker A

knockoff version of them, we get partially stamped anyway. Or maybe we get stamped with a whole stamp, but our matter is kind of crummy. I mean, there's disagreement about exactly what goes wrong. But we have only a partial picture. Nevertheless, that explains what's

Speaker A

going on. In other words, the innate ideas match the underlying structure of reality. So one way to look at it is here's the mind, here's the world, and here is God who is stamping us with exactly the same stamp. Yay. But now here's the force of Descartes' evil deceiver

Speaker A

argument. What if it's not the same stamp? What if God is giving us the wrong innate ideas? Okay? The wrong ideas that come from experience, telephones, chalk, etc. Maybe that's not a big deal. But what if those innate

Speaker A

ideas, the fundamental ones, things like unity, things like necessity, things like Oh gosh, what are other basic concepts in terms of which we build others?

Speaker A

Cause. Good, causation. Others. Math. Good, basic concepts of mathematics, exactly. Basic concepts of ethics, concepts of the good, concepts of the right, the wrong, just, unjust. What if all that is bogus, right? It's an evil deceiver. Kind of like, I don't

Speaker A

know, the teacher comes in and says, gosh, these people, you know, imagine somebody in an elementary school. These kids don't know anything about music. I'm going to teach them all the wrong names for the notes. And so instead of every good boy does

Speaker A

fine or whatever, it's going to be some totally different thing. And they're going to learn all of it wrong. Well, what if God's like that?

Speaker A

What if God did that to our lives? He said, fill us with these ideas, right and wrong, and causation, and unity, and substance, and properties, and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker A

It's all bogus. Now, Descartes reassures you and says, well, no, no, no, it's not. Because I can prove the existence of God, and I can prove that God is good, and blah, blah, blah. But almost nobody buys that Cartesian solution. It seems

Speaker A

like, well, once you've undercut that, I've got no material left. OK, I think, yeah, I am. Maybe I've got that. But how do I get from that to anything else? Descartes' evil deceiver argument really messes up this picture. Now, what do we do once we've messed up that picture?

Speaker A

Well, one way is to say, yeah, what do I have to do here? I'm going to get rid of this part.

Speaker A

Now, by the way, in early modern philosophy, it's not that Descartes, Leibniz, or for that matter, the empiricists for the most part, really are not believers in God anymore.

Speaker A

though Hume is a big question mark. People at the time thought he was an atheist. It's sort of unclear from the dialogues concerning natural religion, I think, what he really thinks. He might be one of those vague people in this sense of thinking,

Speaker A

you know, there's some causal power behind the universe, but who knows? Whatever that is.

Speaker A

Anyway, the idea is to then say, aha, what if we put the forms inside the mind? So now they are innate ideas. These are concepts in the mind.

Speaker A

How does this solve the interpersonal problem? Well, now I have to say there are categories that are basic to being human. And so actually we all share the same ideas. We might construct this or that derivative idea differently, but the basic ideas are

Speaker A

the ones we all share. We all have the same concept of causation, all of the same concept of an object, et cetera. So at least some of these things are core. And in this becomes then the theory of the categories. The categories, these

Speaker A

logical concepts of the understanding are built in a priori, and we all have the same ones. But now, okay, that might explain how I can know about these. They're part of the structure of my mind from the start. It's not a question of

Speaker A

having to relate to a mind-independent realm. I'm just relating to my own mind. And, hey, it's not like you and I are worried that we have different concepts of objects. No, part of the theory is that as human beings we just have these.

Speaker A

To put it in a more modern parlance, they're part of our biological heritage. Okay, evolution has just given us the same concepts. The human mind has a certain kind of structure because the brain has a certain kind of structure. And although there can

Speaker A

be lots of variations in details, the basic structure is there for all of us.

Speaker A

Okay, but now we still have a problem with the object. What about that? And by the way, you might worry that we haven't solved this problem with the interpersonal part. We've just said we all share them. That goes away very quickly. But suppose

Speaker A

we did share them. We still got this problem of the object. So what do we do with it? Well, here's the problem. As long as the object is out there independent of the mind, right, it's sort of like the forms. When the forms

Speaker A

were independent of the mind, you might say, I couldn't explain how they were normal.

Speaker A

So what's Kant's solution? What's the solution of the rationalists in general? Well, get rid of the mind independence. Make the mind change. Yeah, make the mind dependent. And now I can explain how they're knowable. But I've still got this problem

Speaker A

with the stubborn object outside. How do I know that those a priori concepts of the understanding actually match the world? Well, now Kant says, actually, I don't see how to solve that problem if I assume that the difficulty

Speaker A

is there's a world out there and it's my job to understand it. But what if it's not like that? What if I'm constructed? The mind is constructing your world. And so, in short, as long as I think this thing is mind independent,

Speaker A

I can't solve this problem. It's out there. I can't prove that my mind actually matches what's out there. But if it's dependent on the mind, I can.

Speaker A

So the idealist says, aha, make this thing also mind dependent. Now, of course, historically, it doesn't happen that quickly.

Speaker A

I've jumped from Descartes to Kant with no attention to what happened in between. And what does happen in between? Well, a distinction, in a sense, between the object as it appears to me and the object as it really is. So that's a shortcut.

Speaker A

What happens really is something like this. And maybe I'll put it over here. We have this image of the mind here and then really two sort of objects here. One is the object as it is. The thing in itself, Kant refers

Speaker A

to it as, the deon-zik, the noumenon. And even before Kant puts that label on it, it's the way reality really is independently of the mind. So this is mind independent. But now, we also have the way that things appear to us. And so here is, I'll

Speaker A

put it in a sort of shadowy way. There's the appearance, the phenomenon in Kantian terms. And even in Locke, for example, you see a clear distinction between these. We've got this, the thing in itself being the thing that

Speaker A

actually exerts causal power on us. And Locke has a wonderful image here. He says, how is it that I know, for example, about you guys sitting in this classroom?

Speaker A

Answer is light bounces around. And he actually has this wonderful image. bounces off you like a little tennis ball and bounces into my eye. Now, he doesn't have a theory of light, but he's in effect talking about photons, right? And

Speaker A

a photon is like a little tennis ball of light that pops around. And so in short, he has no real account of how it works except that he has the atomic theory of matter. And the atomic theory is what blows up the traditional

Speaker A

picture as much as the Cartesian argument about the evil deceit. Why? because it implies that the world isn't actually as we see it. For example, a piece of chalk. What is it consist in according to physics?

Speaker A

Molecules. Molecules, yeah. Molecules involving calcium and some other things. And is it solid? This thing seems to be solid.

Speaker A

on it, it's not spongy or anything, it seems solid, right? Is it solid according to physics? No, it's actually these tiny little particles zooming around in lots of empty space or at least vibrating in empty space. It seems to be unchanging, but

Speaker A

is it really unchanging? No, right? Things are moving around in it all the time.

Speaker A

It looks like it, gosh, what else? It looks white. Are the molecules white? No.

Speaker A

And so you might think, ooh, in reality, it's quite different from the way it appears. And so in Locke, you have an account of, well, these things have secondary qualities. These things have colors, for example. And those are really creations

Speaker A

of the mind. So you already have this picture of the mind as creating this sort of appearance. And the secondary qualities, like colors, are the things that are constructed by the mind. They're a matter of how this object in itself relates to the

Speaker A

mind. But then the idea is, Look, the things in themselves, they are the things with the primary qualities, things like length and mass and the other qualities that would be assigned to them by physics. And so in Descartes, he said,

Speaker A

well, these are the mathematical properties of things. These are the other things. Whether something is red or blue or white, that's a question of how our minds are constructing it. But whether something has a mass of, let's say, 15 grams, that's something that

Speaker A

actually is a primary quality of the thing. And then you get Barclay and Hume actually attacking that distinction saying, what do you mean? How do you know these are in the things themselves? But as soon as you say that, and indeed in

Speaker A

Kant, the things in themselves are now these mysterious things. These all are things, well, gosh, being mind independent, how do we know them? And in a way, that's the Barclay, Hume, Kant line. Once again, we've got the same problem. They're mind independent. But

Speaker A

if they're mind independent, how do we know what they are? How do we distinguish the primary qualities from the secondary qualities? This is supposed to be the actual substance, but what's the content of that idea of substance? And they argue there really isn't

Speaker A

one. Even Locke admits substance in the end is something I know not what. So, once we get rid of this, and Kant doesn't get rid of it by the way. He keeps them around, but he can't talk about them. So, can Kant actually

Speaker A

say there are noumena, there are things in themselves? No, existence is a category, and the categories apply only to the phenomenon. So here's the broad picture. These things are known for them because they are mind-dependent.

Speaker A

I'm constructing them so I can know them. But these things are independent of the mind, so I can't know them. So here's roughly the picture that emerges from Kant.

Speaker A

You and I have a mind that's sort of like a projector. And the projector is projecting reality, projecting the objects we see, projecting the colors, the shapes, the sizes, everything. Something presumably is out there that is making us do this, but we can't really say anything about it. And so by the

Speaker A

time you get to Kant, this is really the solution. All these things are now inside the mind. We've got the innate ideas, the categories in here. They're not mind independent. But the world isn't mind independent either. Nothing's left to be mind independent except

Speaker A

the stuff we can't talk about. In the first edition actually Kant has a footnote where he talks about the things in themselves as causing us to have certain sensations, giving rise to things in sensibility. And he cuts it out in the second

Speaker A

edition because he realizes, I can't say there's a causal relation because cause is another one of the categories. So, beginning of the 19th century, Hegel comes along and not only Hegel but a variety of other, Victor, Schelling and so on, they

Speaker A

look at this picture and they say, wait a minute. Well, actually, what do you think of that picture? Imagine that you are a hard-headed philosopher and you've got caught saying, yes, we construct a world. But of course, there really

Speaker A

is a world in itself out there. We can't say anything about it, don't know anything about it, can't even think about it. So, come on, what do you do?

Speaker A

What's your first move? Well, it's not really a solution. I just think that with the whole Descartes thing, it also kind of opens up the problem of how do we know the forms, like that line that you made over there. I think that's

Speaker A

what we need to make clear. OK, good, good, good, good. So we've got this problem of how we know things. Now, here the idea is, look, I can, through reflection, know what's in my own mind. But now I can take your question in

Speaker A

two ways. One is to say, hold on a second. Can I really do that?

Speaker A

How transparent is my mind to myself? Now, after Freud, we're inclined to think not very, even though hardly anybody's a Freudian anymore. Nevertheless, he pointed to the fact that much of what goes on in our minds is unconscious. And so now, do you

Speaker A

know actually what's built into the structure of your mind? I don't know. I'd much rather talk about my knowledge of the chop than my knowledge about my own motivations, let's say. So yeah, you can raise this question. Wait a minute. We'll

Speaker A

call that the problem of transparency. How do I know what's really going on in my own mind? What's going on in my own mind? But let me take your question a different way, too. How do I know what's in your

Speaker A

mind? I mean, Kant says these are part of the basic structure of being human.

Speaker A

So we all share the same logical concepts. We all have the same categories. But how do I know that? Let's go back to this interpersonal problem. How do I know it across time? And so one thing Hegel does is say, well, look, this

Speaker A

is mine, or really, he says, ours. At a time. But somebody else at the same time? Or me at a different time? Us at a different time? Maybe it's a totally different deal. So Hegel is, first of all, a historicist. He says, I don't know that those are universal

Speaker A

in the way Kant thought. Maybe they're not universal. Maybe they change across time. He thinks they change but for rational reasons. By the time you get to Nietzsche, he's saying, what if they change but for utterly irrational reasons? But the idea is, what

Speaker A

if, you know, how do we know these are the same across people? It feels like the same problem we had. Putting them in the mind doesn't solve the problem.

Speaker A

Even if minds are transparent, what if they give you about your mind? Now, there's another thing you might do, which is to say, look, the things in themselves aren't doing it. They're just not playing any role. I can't talk about them. So who

Speaker A

needs them? Suppose I tell you, look, your grade will be determined in part by your performance on the homeworks. In part by attendance. And in part by something. I know not. You say, well, what is that thing? I don't know. I can't tell

Speaker A

you. It's not that I'm hiding. I don't know. None of us can know. None of us can talk about it. But it's there. A, that's creepy, right? But B, you might think, wait a minute, that's not right.

Speaker A

Suppose I said, oh yeah, 50% homeworks, 20% attendance, 30% something I know not what.

Speaker A

You'd be freaking out. You'd be going to the chairman and saying, what's the deal?

Speaker A

And so Hegel, in effect, is saying, what's the deal, Kant? What do you mean there are these mind-independent noumena that are actually in some way driving all of this, though we can't say that because that talk is causal? And so Hegel's the folks.

Speaker A

Get rid of them. You've just got the appearances. Now Hegel says, look, but you think I've gotten rid of the things, I've gotten rid of the world. Relax. These are the things. This is the world. And so for Hegel, look, these are the

Speaker A

things. These are the objects. This is the world. The world is a construction of the mind. As Josiah Royce put it at the beginning of the 20th century, a prominent American philosopher at Harvard, he said, the world is the stuff as ideas.

Speaker A

In the end, the world is nothing but a method of construction. Well, this is the philosophical setting into which analytic philosophy is born.

Speaker A

And this basic picture in Reuss and in, well, the descendants of Hegel is still very much alive. Not so much in, well, to some extent, philosophy departments, much more so in other humanities departments. You'll find people all over the place who believe that everything is a social construction and so on. And

Speaker A

those people in other humanities departments who often talk about theory instead of philosophy, they actually have a version of this sort of view. But analytic philosophy is to some extent born as a rebellion against this. Now at first, well, before we get

Speaker A

into that, we've only got a few minutes left. So let me just ask you for your reaction to that picture. The world is just a mental construction. And do you construct it the same way I do? I don't know. Maybe we have to

Speaker A

be relentless. Or maybe we do it because we share the same language and society and conceptual framework and all that. But do we construct it the same way other people in the world do? Or the way people did 100 years ago? Probably not.

Speaker A

And so on. So, yeah. We have to that one now. Push it one step further. What's disturbing is I automatically thought of, well, what is law? What is law? What is law? Ooh, okay, say more.

Speaker A

Good. Not only what is law, but, I mean, what is the very idea of a beginning, middle, and end? And what is the very idea of choice? What is the very idea of value? How do we know this caused that? And how do

Speaker A

we know this will ever be a causation of A or B? And could this ever result from whatever we constructed? This seemingly patterned, and structured chaos that isn't really chaotic, but yet not really structured at the same time, and that alone is a little bit terrifying. Yeah, okay, good.

Speaker A

It is a little bit terrifying. I mean, it's a little bit like saying, look, reality is like something, let's say, the law. The law changes, right? Something can be legal today and illegal tomorrow, or vice versa. It's also different from society to society.

Speaker A

What's legal in Texas may be different from what's legal in Massachusetts or in India, et cetera. And so, You might think, look, you're saying realities like that? So two problems. One thing, there are things we deeply care about, like what's right and wrong.

Speaker A

And it's sort of disturbing to think that right and wrong go the same way, right? For a bunch of reasons. For one thing, it's strange to think, oh, murder is a terrible crime here, but not there. And under the law, that might be

Speaker A

true. But now you want to say, so it's perfectly moral to kill somebody over there, even though it's not here. That seems wrong. Secondly, you might worry that, look, we've got to have some way of thinking about what the law ought to be.

Speaker A

We have some way of reforming laws. Some laws we think are unjust, but on the basis of what? Right? There's got to be some anger. So that's one thing.

Speaker A

Another thing might be, wait, everything? You mean like the chalk is white or this is one piece of chalk and one plus one is two? That's relative.

Speaker A

That's historically changing. When Socrates said one plus one is two, Or said, the angles of a triangle add up to 180, he meant something different. That's weird. Also, to think what we mean by an object, really that changes? I mean, certain things we

Speaker A

think, like Aquinas' concept, he didn't have that idea of the atomic theory. So maybe in that sense, he had a different concept of an object. But surely, if we were talking to Aquinas and we talked about things, it's not like you said, oh,

Speaker A

I don't know what you mean. It might seem this makes things too fragmented, too much at sea. And indeed, as Nietzsche points out, once he sees this vision, he says, whoa, we've gone to sea. We have no anchor. We have no compass.

Speaker A

We can't tell what's up and down, east and west, north and south. We're in trouble. Now, he thinks that's exciting. So yeah, we're in trouble. But you might think, we're in trouble. There's got to be something wrong here. Yeah? Couldn't

Speaker A

we get rid of a lot of those problems by just removing the historicist part of it? in saying that this structure or whatever of the mind is just that's always how it is, and that's how the world is as well. Oh, OK, good.

Speaker A

We could get rid of one thing by saying, well, Codd is right about there being certain things that are just part of our biological heritage. So that would be one response. Another is to raise a problem. And we're actually out of time, but

Speaker A

I'll just toss it out there for a second. If this picture is right, how is it that you and I and all of us are looking at a piece of chalk right now? It should be a mystery right now. Because after all, your

Speaker A

mind is projecting a world and so is mine. And look, they're all projecting something with a piece of chalk in it. And I think, whoa, dude. It's as if we all came in and said, you know, I had a dream last night of

Speaker A

a cow. You said, I did too. I did too. And it was a white cow. Yeah, it was a white cow. And it gave white milk. And then there was this brown cow that gave chocolate milk. And we said, I had the same

Speaker A

dream. We think, whoa, that's wacky, right? How's that possible? It looks like this leaves us in the same position. How is it possible that we share perceptions, that we share some images of the world? Answer, they come up with in this

Speaker A

tradition, there can be only one mind. If there were two minds or many minds, we'd have that problem. So Royce says there's only one mind. There is the world mind. There's one object in the universe. It's the world mind. You and I are

Speaker A

just ideas. And by then you might think, OK, this is insane. Well, next time, we'll start talking about Fraga's philosophy and see how it is in some ways a reaction against this idealist twist on the philosophical tradition.

Topics:philosophyepistemologyskepticismmetaphysicsPlatoAugustineKantBertrand Russellphilosophy of languageintroduction to philosophy

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