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📖 The cartoon introduction to philosophy

The Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy
The most entertaining and engaging philosophy class you…
The Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22238405
The Cartoon Introduction to Philosophy

Areas

Philosophers

  • Ancient (700BCE - 500CE)
    • Pre-Socratic
      • Thales (625BCE - 547BCE)
        • Answer questions with natural observations
          • Life is composed of water because water exists in solid, liquid and gas phases
      • Heraclitus (540BCE - 480BCE)
        • Emphasis on change and impermanence
        • “The sun is new every day”. “It’s not possible to step twice into the same river”.
      • Democritus (460BCE - 370BCE)
        • Atom theory of universe
          • Everything is deterministic. If we have enough computing power we can predict future
        • Determinism: all events are determined by past states and law of physics
        • Incompatibilism: free will and determinism are not compatible
          • Deterministic → no free will
    • Socrates 469-339bce Greece
      • “The unexamined life is not worth living”
      • Never wrote any philosophy, known chiefly through the accounts of Plato and Xenophon
      • The Socratic method: one gets to the heart of a matter through a steady stream of pointed questions
        • Believed that he himself had no wisdom. Also questioned Athen’s elites which cost his life
      • Accepts universality condition from Euthyphro
        • Universality condition: ethics applies to everyone equally regardless of gender, creed, or lot in life
        • Debates about whether god defines righteousness
          • Objective morality: acts are inherently right or wrong, independently of god
      • If one had known the good, he would have done the good
    • Plato 428-347bce Greece
      • “Until philosophers are kings, cities will have no rest from their evils” - Republic, 360bce
      • Founded The Academy in 386bce
      • Plato is a nickname meaning broad. Given name is Aristocle
      • Dualism: a person is made of a physical part that can die, and a nonphysical part that can never die
        • Fits perfectly with Christianity’s body and soul
        • we are born with innate ideas given by god
    • Aristotle 384-322bce Greece
      • Deductive logic: conclusions are conclusive when premises are true (vs Inductive logic: premises don’t support conclusion only to some degree)
        • Truth generating: gives new claims from existing ones
        • Truth preserving: if you start with truth, you end up with truth, no matter how many steps
          • This is how math knowledge is extended
      • Catholic’s favorite philosopher
      • On virtue: humans are born with few desires and develop opinions as we grow. Need parents to guide so that they want to take the virtuous paths
  • Medieval 500-1599
    • Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274 Italy
      • Summa theologica, 1264-1274
      • Italian Dominican friar and priest
      • First cause argument: everything is caused by a preceding event, except a “first cause”, which is outside the chain of events
  • Early modern 1600-1800
    • Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679 UK
      • “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” - from Leviathan, 1651
      • Role of social contract: humans are intrinsically selfish. Only a competing self interest like fear of punishment can deter it
    • Rene Descartes 1596-1650 France
      • “Cogito, ergo sum”
      • Wrote Meditations on first philosophy 1641
      • Invented Cartesian coordinate system
      • One of the big 3 rationalists
      • Fundamentalism: beliefs are based on a handful of self evident fundamental beliefs
      • All senses can be doubted, a fundamental truth must be verifiable independent of sensory experiences
        • I exist. (If I doubt that, the existence of a doubter is implied)
      • Agrees with Plato on: Dualism: a person is made of a physical part that can die, and a nonphysical part that can never die and
        • we are born with innate ideas given by god
        • Cartesian interaction: Mind=pilot, body=ship.
          • Criticisms of Cartesian interaction: defies conservation of energy (because mind is nonphysical); brain research shows the mind is deeply rooted in physical brain
    • John Locke 1632-1704 UK
      • “No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience”
        • An essay concerning human understanding, 1689
      • Separation of church and state, theory of private property
      • Empiricism: we are born as blank slates and know the world through our experiences
        • Vs descarte and Plato who think we are born with innate ideas given by god
        • Agrees with Descartes on senses are subjective and can be doubted. Color is a sensory idea. Wavelength of light is a primary quality that is objective
    • Baruch Spinoza 1632-1677 Netherlands
      • “We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal” - Ethics, demonstrated in geometrical order, 1665
      • Pantheistic, excommunicated by Jewish community, worked as lens grinder and died from glass dust damage in lungs
      • One of the big 3 rationalists
      • Rejects Plato’s dualism
      • Monism: only one substance, neither mental nor physical but contains properties of each
        • Physicalism: a form of Monism, mind is also physical, no afterlife
          • Identity theory: all mental processes are merely brain states
            • Neurobiologist Roger Sperry discovers that the right and left brains work independently
    • Gottfried Leibniz 1646-1716 Germany
      • “Nothing can be taught us of which we have not already in our minds the idea” - Discourse on metaphysics 1686
      • One of the big 3 rationalists
      • Agree with Plato and Descartes that mind and body are separate. But not the Mind body interaction aka Cartesian interaction: Mind=pilot, body=ship.
      • Parallelism: no interactions between physical and no physical worlds. They only appear to interact, like two separate clocks
        • Resorted to “god did it” on how the two worlds are synchronized
    • George Berkely 1685-1753 UK
      • Idealism: only minds and ideas exist
        • Opposite of idealism:
          • Materialism: reality is physical
      • Also believed that god is the source of ideas
    • Julien la Mettrie
      • humans are biological machines
    • David Hume 1711-1776 UK
      • Compatibilism: free will is compatible with determinism
        • Free will caused by desire
        • Desired caused by past states and laws of physics
        • Definition of freedom: if I had different desires, then I could have done otherwise
        • Criticisms:
          • In the case of hypnotizing, who’s really in control of the choice?
          • quantum physics: subatomic particles’ actions are not determined by past states and laws of physics
      • Against the design argument on god and the pocket watch analogy
        • natural objects are also imperfect and the imperfection causes suffering. Problem of the evil: you can’t have a perfect deity and all this bad stuff
        • And pocket watch is a product of trial and error over a long period of time
        • Also, if complexity of earth is 1, the creator must have a complexity of 2, then it must be designed by a creator of complexity 3, and so on
    • Immanuel Kant 1724-1804 Germany
      • “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral laws within” - critique of practical reason 1781
      • Punctual walker. Claimed that reading Hume enlightened him from “dogmatic slumber”
      • All temporal expanses are finite (future is finite, past is finite)
        • Contradicted by modern math
      • Deontology/Absolutism: wrong acts (like lying) are alway wrong (regardless of consequence)
    • William Paley 1743-1805 UK
    • Jeremy Bentham 1748-1832 UK
      • “The question is not ‘can they reason’ not ‘can they talk’ but ‘can they suffer’” - the principles of morals and legislation, 1789
      • Founder of modern utilitarianism
      • Consequentialism: an act is right or wrong based on its consequences, not the type of act
        • Calculate the moral requirements for each person to perform the action:
          • Intensity: how strong the pleasure or pain is felt
          • Fecundity: chances of follow up pleasure or pain
          • Duration of pleasure or pain
          • Purity: chance that pleasure will be followed by pain or pain will be followed by pleasure
          • Certainty
          • Propinquity: how close the pleasure or pain is to the act
          • Extent: number of people affected
        • alternatively: Just ask people involved, or votes (but weighted, ie human weighs more than pigs)
        • Criticisms: calculation of outcome is prone to error; might encourage people to justify bad actions in some cases
        • Related:
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          📖 What we owe the future
  • 1800s
    • John Stuart Mill 1806-1873 UK
      • Wrote Utilitarianism 1863
      • Inductive reasoning: generalize from past events to predict future
        • Generates laws, but not truth
        • based on best evidence available, but recognize that we could be wrong (fallibilism)
      • Agrees with Consequentialism: an act is right or wrong based on its consequences, not the type of act but has a easier system for figuring out if end has justified the means:
        • Just ask people involved, or votes (but weighted, ie human weighs more than pigs)
    • Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882 UK
      • “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science”
      • Wrote On the origin of species by means of natural selection 1859
      • Animals and plants adapt to the environment, instead of having some designer to design the environment to fit them.
        • When environments change, creatures die, move, or adapt
        • Human eye developed and changed over millions of years of evolution
    • Thomas Huxley 1825-1895 UK
      • Epiphenomenalism: thing are only happening in physical realm
        • No control over life
        • Mind is just a meaningless byproduct of physical world
    • Friedrich Nietsche 1844-1900 Germany
      • “If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” - beyond good and evil, 1866
      • Youngest professor up to his time (at 24)
      • Mad that his sister changed his work to be nazi friendly
      • Morality is anti-life because humankind doesn’t need to be improved in the first place
        • We shouldn’t deny basic humanity, our instincts and desires
        • Especially against tradition Judeo-Christian moralities
          • Advocates for revaluation of values: new values based on self-affirmation, strength, and creativity
  • 1900s
    • Alan Turing 1921-1954 UK
      • “A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine” - intelligence machine, 1969
      • If a computer passes the Turing test, it should be considered a human
      • Aligns with Julien Offray de La Mettrie: humans are biological machines
    • David Chalmers 1966- Australia
      • “I argue that neuroscience alone isn’t enough to explain consciousness, but I think it will be a major part of an eventual theory”
      • “The conscious mind”, 1996
      • Turing test passing computers are have no consciousness and are mindless, even if they are functionally identical to brains
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