introduction

for almost all of its history ‘philosophy’ had the general meaning of ‘rational enquiry’, though from the beginning of modern times in the renaissance until the nineteenth century it more particularly meant what we now call ‘science’

  • what we now call “philosophy” was marked by labels such as “metaphysics” and “moral philosophy” to distinguish it from what we now call “science”. the word “scientist” was coined in 1833, since which the words “philosophy” and “science” took on their current meanings

  • principal areas of enquiry in contemporary philosophy:

    • epstemology:

      • “theory of knowledge”
      • enquiry into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired
      • distinction between knowledge, belief, and opinion

    • metaphysics:

      • enquiry into the nature of reality and existsnce
      • what exists, and what is its nature?
      • what is existence?
      • what are the most fundamental kinds of being?
      • are there different kinds of existence or existing thing?
      • do abstract entities outside space and time, such as numbers and universals, exist in addition to concrete things in space and time such as trees and stones?
      • do supernatural entities such as gods exist in addition to the natural realm?
      • is reality one thing or many things?
      • if humans are wholly part of the natural causal order of the universe, can there be such a thing as free will?

    • logic:

      • the science of valid and sound reasoning
      • the general instrument of philosophy, as mathematics is in science

    • ethics:

      • (“as a subject in the philosophy curriculum”) enquiry into the concepts and theories of what is good, of right and wrong, of moral choice and action

      the phrase ‘as a subject in the philosophy curriculum’ is employed here because the word ’ethics’ has multiple applications. even when used as the label of an area of philosophy it serves to denote two separable matters: examination of ethical concepts and reasoning – this is more precisely described as ‘metaethics’ – and examination of ’normative’ moralities which seek to tell us how to live and act. normative morality is distinguished from the more theoretical metaethical enquiry by describing normative morality as a ‘first order’ endeavor and metaethics as a ‘second order’ endeavor. by its nature philosophy is a second-order enquiry, so ’ethics’ in the context of philosophical study standardly means metaethics.

      i found this passage to be particularly difficult to understand – according to google, “normative” means: establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard or norm, especially of behavior. summary by chatgpt: metaethics deals with analyzing ethical concepts and reasoning; it is a more theoretical inquiry into the meaning, justification, and origins of moral principles. normative morality involves determining how we should live and act, prescribing moral rules or guidelines

      i also have the unresolved confusion between “morality” and “how we should live” – are they definitively the same? or can they diverge? chatgpt: “some philosophies (like nietzschean existentialism) challenge whether morality is the primary guide to how we should live. they might argue that morality is just one lens, but not the definitive one.”

      but the word ’ethics’ also, though relatedly, denotes the outlook and attitudes of individuals or organizations regarding their values, how they act and how they see themselves. this is a familiar and good use of the term; and – interestingly – reflection on this use shows that the words ’ethics’ and ‘morals’ do not mean the same. this is easier to grasp when we note the etymologies of the terms: ’ethics’ comes from the greek ethos meaning ‘character’, whereas ‘morals’ derives from a coining by cicero from the latin mos, moris which means ‘custom’ and even ’etiquette’. morality, accordingly, is about our actions, duties and obligations, whereas ethics is about ‘what sort of person one is’, and although the two are obviously connected, they are equally obviously distinct.

      in their identification of the locus of value, some metaethical theories focus on the character of the agent , others on the consequances of actions or conformity with duty that matters, it is the narrower focus of morality which is in view.

    • aesthetics

      • enquiry into art and beauty
      • what is art?
      • is beauty an objective property of things natural or man-made, or is it subjective, existing in the eye of the beholder only?
      • can something be aesthetically valuable whether or not it is beautiful and whether or not it is a work of art?
      • are the aesthetic values of natural things (a landscape, a sunset, a face) different from those we attribute to artifacts (a painting, a poem, a piece of music)?

    • philosophy of mind

      • enquiry into the nature of mental phenomena and consciousness

      once an integral part of metaphysics because the latter, in enquiring into the nature of reality, has to consider whether reality is only material, or in addition has non-material aspects such as mind, or perhaps is only mental as the ‘idealist’ philosophers argue. but as consensus has grown around the view that reality is fundamentally and exclusively material, and that mental phenomena are the products of the material activity of the brain, understanding those phenomena and in particular the nature of consciousness has become a topic of intense interest.

    • philosophy of language

      • enquiry into how we attach meaning to sounds and marks in a way that enables communication and embodies thought

      […], indeed perhaps makes thought above a certain rudimentary level possible in the first place.

      this reminds me of saying that it is incredibly conceited to assume that human consciousness is above that of all other animals in a conversation with my brother. does the human language supporting thought above a certain rudimentary level definitively divide us from animals? what if a person lacks the intelligence for this “thought above a certain rudimentary level”?

      chatgpt: “is intelligence a spectrum rather than a human-exclusive trait? and if so, does human language really set us apart, or just push us further along that spectrum?”

      not sure if i would use “spectrum” to describe intelligence, since it could very well be multidimensional

      for good reasons the philosophies of mind and language have become conjoined into a single overall enquiry in more recent academic philosophy, as the titles of books and university courses ubiquitously attest.

      is that what i just did…?

    • political philosophy

      • enquiry into the principles of social and political organization and their justification
      • what is the best way to organize and run a society?
      • what legitimates forms of government?
      • on what grounds do claims to authority in the state or a society reset?
      • what are the advantages and disadvantages of democracy, communism, monarchy and other forms of political arrangement?

    • history of philosophy

      everything in philosophy and the history of philosophy is up for debate. the claim that the whole philosophical tradition is one long conversation would be contested by those who think that we cannot understand the thought of a philosopher of the past without putting him firmly in the context of his times. this is true: but it does not preclude seeing the continuity of his ideas and concerns with our own. our own very often arose either from them, or from the same things that prompted them.

    • philosophical examination of the assumptions, methods, and claims of other fields of enquiry in science and social science

      • “philosophy of science”, “philosophy of history”, “philosophy of psychology”, etc.

      should science be understood in realist or in instrumentalist terms – that is, are the enetities referred to by technical terms in science really existing things, or are they useful constructs that help to organize understanding of the phenomena being studied?

      as regards history: if there is no evidence one way or the other for a claim about something that happened in the past, is the claim nevertheless definitely either true or false, or is it neither?

      history is written in the present on the basis of evidence – diaries, letters, archaeological remains – that has survived into the present (or so we judge): it is partial and fragmentary, and many of the past’s traces are lost; is there therefore such a thing as knowledge of the past at all, or is there only interpretative reconstruction at best – and perhaps, too often, just surmise?

      is not the “present” but a partial interpretation? i am all too familiar with the photos in my own album, as they corroborate my memory nicely, but whenever someone else shows me a photo of myself that ive never seen, it feels foreign to the “present” that i lived through myself

philosophy before plato

[…], the emperor theodosius i decreed by the edict of thessalonica that christianity was to be the official religion of the empire, outlawing others. the change brought rapid results. from the fourth century of the common era […] onwards a vast amount of the literature and material culture of antiquity was lost, a great deal of it purposefully destroyed. christian zealots smashed statues and temples, defaced paintings and burned ‘pagan’ books, in an orgy of effacement of previous culture that lasted for several centuries.

it is hard to comprehend, still less to forgive, the immense loss of literature, philosophy, history and general culture this represented.

christianity congratulates itself on the fact that the preservation of fragments of classical literature which managed to scrape through this period of appalling destruction was the achievement of monks, in later centuries, copying some of the manuscripts that survived; and although this was a merely partial, belated and inadequate response to the wanton zealotry of the earlier faithful, one must be grateful even for that.

it seems the author holds christianity in considerable contempt… but also i sense that this book will be a tough read since i know jackshit about history

there are two kinds of sources for our knowledge of [the presocratic philosophers]: fragments, which are quotations from them in the writings of later commentators, and testimonia, which are reports, paraphrases or summaries given by later writers. the scholarly task of identifying and collating this evidence is known as ‘doxography’.

in the early third century ce bishop hippolytus of rome wrote a refutation of all heresies arguing that christian heresies arose from greek philosophy, in the process quoting extensively from the greek philosophical tradition in order to refute it, thus paradoxically preserving the views he sought to demolish

how ironic

a very important doxographical source, […], is the writings of simplicius in the sixth century ce. […] he quotes a number of the more important presocratics, in some cases thus serving as the only source of information we have about their views. significantly, he says that his reason for quoting so extensively from one of them, namely parmenides, giving more of the text than was necessary for his argument, was that copies of parmenides’ work were extremely rare and difficult to find, so he felt the need to preserve some of it.

dayum the foresight

  • neither the fragments nor the testimonia are to be treated as completely reliable due to the writers’ own agendas, language, interpretation, context, and relation to other fragments