Introduction to Philosophy

Revision as of 11:11, 22 September 2012

Pre Socratics

Democritus, the laughing philopsopher was a pre-socratic who lived in ? He was an atomist someone wo looked for explanations in the natural not supernatural world. He was a pupli of Lupidus. He came up the ideas with 'nothing comes from nothing" Nothing thing comes in to or out of existence. But how do they explain chnage They explained change given that nothing comes into existence by explaining what exists is the void and within that void is aew ndevisibales aset o things form and reform in to different types aggregrates. Therefore, they become a chair or a coat. It is a completely natural explanation not a supernatural one.

Xeno said take a stick and keep chopping it in halves. At a point of time we can no longer cut it in half and eventually it will be a collection of atoms

The laughing philosopher 60 books

Post Socratics

Aristotle was Plato's pupli who was Socrates' pupil. We have nothing from Socrates, most of it comes from Plato. We no longer have to books by Aristotle only lecture notes. Plato and Aristotle had a dispute. Take the color red. We understand it in relation to what we all see to be red - our concept of red. A percept is a cionstituent of perception. A blue chair. You see the percept of the color blue and the object chair but If you think of elephant you are forming a concept or a thought of an elephant. Our ability to think in terms of concepts draws us apart from other animals. We can see world how it is and think about more importantly or how it might be. This is what enables us to be crerative or imaginative.

Plato had a theory of anamnesis. When we see red as a child we are remembering something you saw before birth. He said our soul exists before births and we a rememberance of forms. We had form of good (pure goodness), or the form of Red (pure redness) etc. There are only forms of simple things. Aristotle disagreed. Whats wrong with it is the ontology (the list of things that exist). Plato's theory explodes. We see similarities or commonality between different objects. It's a much simpler as it doesnt require any postulations. (e.g. Occam's Razor. (Always choose the simpler of two theories if both can explain a theory. If redness didnt exist you could not have the concept of it. This favors Aristotle's theory.

The Rationalists and Empiricists

The rationalists (Descartes, Liebinitz and Spinoza believe our concepts are inate while empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume says we are born with blank pallets and our concepts come from experience. Causality or rationality - Hume . If you ratonalist the concept of causation is something you were born with where the empiricists says that causality comes form experience.

Take a billiard ball rolling onto another. You do not experience causality of two hitting balls hitting. All you see is one ball moving and touching another and the other moving. Could you work out that force was involved? Causality requires events and one event to happen before the other. The first event is the cause. Hume says there is necessary connection. Had the first not happened then the second event would not have happened either. There is no world where the second event would have happened unless the first even to happened. In fact you cannot see that it is a theory of causation. It is a postulation, even if it is a correct one. You cannot experience necessary connection. Hume claimed that causation does not exist he says it is in our minds and is the expectation we form from 100 billiard balls hitting each other but we still havent seen causation. Therefore the empiricists seem to have stronger argument unless you are willing to argue against causation.