This Document Contains Chapters 6 to 8 CHAPTER 6: THE RISE OF MODERN METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY Main Points 1. Historical developments after the Renaissance, especially the growth of science, led to the shaping of metaphysics and epistemology, including the commonsense view of today that reality has a dual nature of physical objects and mind. 2. Important (and conflicting) metaphysical perspectives: dualism (what exists is either physical or mental, or, in the case of human beings, some combination of both); materialism or physicalism (only the physical exists); idealism (only the mental or spiritual exists); and “alternative views”: a “neither-nor” view (what exists is ultimately neither mental nor physical); a “both-and” view, often called double aspect theory (what exists is ultimately both mental and physical—the mental and physical are just different ways of looking at the same things, which in themselves are neutral between the two categories). 3. Though dualism continues to command the assent of common sense, increasingly a scientific understanding of the world has brought materialism into prominence. Along with idealism and alternative views, the outcome of the competition will have profound implications for how the following three questions are answered: Does an immaterial God exist? Do humans have free will? Is there life after death? Descartes and Dualism 4. René Descartes began modern philosophy and in metaphysics employed skepticism to arrive (he thought) at truth and knowledge. If anything is beyond doubt, it can provide a criterion of truth and knowledge. 5. Skepticism as the key to certainty. Two famous conjectures he employed were the dream conjecture and the evil demon conjecture. 6. He could doubt at first everything except the truth expressed in “cogito, ergo sum.” 7. The “clear and distinct” litmus test. From cogito, ergo sum Descartes worked his way to the clear and distinct criterion of truth: anything that was as clear and distinct as his own existence would pass the litmus test and would also have to be certain. This doubting methodology was like geometry, using as an axiom “I think, therefore I am” to prove true what at first only seemed true. 8. Using the “clear and distinct” criterion, Descartes found that he had a certain knowledge of God’s existence and, from knowledge that God would not deceive him, Descartes concluded that he also had certain knowledge that there existed a world of objects outside his mind. 9. The essential attribute of material substance is extension (occupancy of space); the essential attribute of mind is thought. Mind and matter are totally independent of each other. 10. Difficulties in dualism include reconciling the belief that material things are completely subject to physical laws with the belief that the immaterial mind can move one’s body. 11. Some of Descartes’ followers proposed parallelism as a possible solution to the problem of how an immaterial mind can interact with a material body. The mental and physical involve two parallel series of events that coincide, so that it only appears that my act of willing my hand to move is causing my physical hand to move. God is the divine coordinator. (A variant called occasionalism suggests that when I will my hand to move, that is the occasion God causes my hand to move.) 12. Descartes took an epistemological detour in trying to discover metaphysical truth about what is through epistemological inquiry about what can be known. Hobbes and Materialism 13. Thomas Hobbes in his natural philosophy thought that all that exists is bodies in motion, this being true not only of what ordinarily is viewed as physical bodies but also of mind and emotion. 14. That is, all mental phenomena derive from perception, that is, “sense.” Thus, Hobbes espoused materialism. 15. Perception. All mental phenomena are derived from perception, which is itself nothing but “matter in motion.” Motions outside us cause motions within us. Hobbes tried to establish that every aspect of human psychology, including memory and imagination, thought, reasoning, and decision making, are all a product of perception. 16. The theory that all is matter in motion expresses in a rudimentary way the view held by many contemporary philosophers and brain scientists that every mental activity is a brain process of some kind. The Alternative Views of Conway, Spinoza, and Leibniz 17. The Metaphysics of Anne Conway. A forerunner of Leibniz’s monadology, Lady Conway’s view was that all things are reducible to a single substance that is itself irreducible but that there is a continuum between material and mental substances so that all created substances are both mental and physical to some degree or other. 18. All “Creatures” (i.e., created substances) are dependent on God’s decision to create them. All such creatures have an individual essence and an essence common to all. The latter came to be known as de re modality—meaning that a property (in this case, the property of being both mental and physical) must be a property of anything that is created by God. Everything (other than God) is a substance and must of necessity exist as partly physical and partly mental. 19. Conway’s God is nonmaterial, nonphysical, all-perfect, and exists outside the dimension of time. God is the eternal creator; the universe has always existed because God has always existed and he has always been creating. Past and future are all God’s present. 20. Conway’s book, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, begins with a series of assumptions (in the same manner as Spinoza’s Ethics and Leibniz’s Monadology) from which are derived various philosophical conclusions. 21. Spinoza. He regarded thought and extension as different attributes of one basic substance equated with God. A living person is not the composite of mind and matter, but rather a “modification” of the one substance. The mind and body are the same thing, conceptualized from different viewpoints. Thus, there is no problem explaining how the mind interacts with the body: they are one and the same thing. 22. Spinoza was a pantheist: God is all. There is no personal immortality after death, and free will is an illusion. 23. Though both Hobbes and Spinoza believed there was only one substance, Hobbes had the problem of explaining away the mental. 24. Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von Leibniz. Leibniz and Newton, independently of each other, developed the calculus. 25. For Leibniz, reality consisted of monads, indivisible units of force or energy or activity. They are entirely nonphysical. 26. His metaphysical system took advantage of certain basic principles. One, the principle of the identity of indiscernables, says that if two beings have exactly the same set of properties, then they are identical with one another; the principle of sufficient reason says that there is a sufficient reason why things are exactly as they are and not otherwise. The Idealism of Locke and Berkeley 27. John Locke and Representative Realism. Locke’s fundamental thesis is that all our ideas come from experience and that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa (blank slate). 28. Nihil in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu (“nothing exists in the mind that was not first in the senses”). 29. Locke’s representative realism—we perceive objects indirectly by our ideas or representations of them—is now thought to be so much common sense. 30. George Berkeley. If representative realism is correct, Berkeley argued, then we cannot know that any of our ideas or perceptions accurately represent the qualities of sensible things because we cannot compare the ideas we have of an object with the object itself. We do not experience the object itself but only our perceptions or ideas of the object. 31. The objects of human knowledge consist of “ideas” (1) conveyed to the mind by the senses, (2) perceived by the mind when the mind reflects on its own operations, or (3) compounded or divided by the mind with the help of memory or imagination. What exists, therefore, are ideas and the minds that have them. It is contradictory to suppose that material substances exist outside the mind that perceives them. 32. If secondary qualities (e.g., tastes, odors, colors) exist only in the mind, then so do primary qualities (e.g., extension, figure, motion), because they are all relative to the observer. 33. Material things as clusters of ideas. Berkeley’s view is one version of idealism. He maintains that sensible things are not material things that exist outside the mind but are directly perceived clusters of ideas within the mind. 34. Berkeley believed that the perceiving mind of God makes possible the continued existence of sensible things when we are not perceiving them. 35. Berkeley and atheism. Esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”). 36. He believed the greatest virtue of his idealist system was that it alone did not invite skepticism about God. If the existence of sensible objects was undeniable, then the existence of the divine mind, in which sensible objects are sustained, was equally undeniable. 37. God’s existence, thought Berkeley, is shown by the fact that sensible things continue to exist when we do not perceive them; and from the fact that we do not ourselves cause our ideas of sensible things. 38. Commonsense objections that Berkeley’s idealism renders the physical world intangible or imaginary are based on a misunderstanding of Berkeley. Boxes The Scientific Revolution (Copernicus ushers in a new era of discovery and a new worldview) Chronology of Postmedieval History (From the Renaissance to the Age of Technology) Profile: René Descartes (He founded analytic geometry and did work in optics) Descartes’s Conjectures (Descartes’s two skeptical conjectures explained) Oliva Sabuco de Nantes and the Body–Soul Connection (The connection between body and soul occurs throughout the brain) Profile: Anne Finch, The Viscountess Conway (She grew up knowing some of the most influential English intellectuals of her time) Profile: Benedictus de Spinoza (A gentle man, he was widely misunderstood) Newtonians, Metaphysicians, and Émilie du Châtelet (The conflict between Newtonian empirical science and speculative metaphysics) Profile: George Berkeley (He had an enthusiasm for tar water) Rationalism and Empiricism (An important box on the difference between the two) Mind-Body Theories (Summarizing the views of Descartes, Hobbes, Berkeley, and Spinoza in a simple chart) Readings 6.1 René Descartes, from Meditations on First Philosophy The excerpt contains both of Descartes’s skeptical conjectures and his explanation that he is a thinking thing—a mind—a thing that is one and indivisible but is intermingled with something entirely different, a body—something that is divisible and has parts. 6.2 Benedictus de Spinoza, from Ethics The excerpt demonstrates Spinoza’s use of his “geometric method” in which metaphysical certainties (“propositions”) are deduced from a group of “definitions” and self-evident “axioms.” 6.3 George Berkeley, from Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley notes that the objects of human knowledge are ideas and that these ideas can only exist in the mind that perceives them. He then observes that there is a contradiction in the view that sensible objects exist outside the mind. He goes on to argue that all the qualities we experience when we experience a sensible object (not just the so-called secondary qualities) are ideas that exist in the mind and that the existence of things outside the mind cannot be proven by reason; in fact, Berkeley argues, it is impossible even to conceive of a sensible thing existing outside the mind. Lecture and Discussion Ideas Related to Selected Questions 5. “Material things, including one’s own body, are completely subject to physical laws.” “The immaterial mind can move one’s body.” Are these two claims incompatible? Explain. It’s dead certain that your class will accept both these ideas. They really should be aware of the problems. Can the body be subject to physical laws while being moved by something that is nonphysical? Perhaps, but there is this difficulty: if a nonphysical something moves the body but only in such a way that the body is always subject to physical laws, then the nonphysical something seems eliminable by Ockham’s razor. A car analogy may be useful: when you depress the gas pedal the pistons move faster and the crankshaft rotates faster and the wheels turn faster, and it all happens in accordance with the principles of internal combustion engine mechanics. Maybe something nonphysical causes the pistons to move faster and the crankshaft and wheels to turn faster when the gas pedal is depressed, but why suppose this? Further, if the immaterial mind’s moving the body entails that a person could have acted differently in the same circumstances, there is this difficulty: if the person could have acted differently in the same circumstances, then his or her body could have moved differently in the same circumstances. But if a physical thing could have moved differently in the same circumstances, it is not governed by physical laws. Various suggestions have been made as to how a nonphysical mind might interact with a body that (presumably) nevertheless is completely subject to physical laws, and one of them might be discussed. One suggestion came from John Eccles (with Karl Popper), The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer International, 1977). Eccles theorized, in effect, that the mind (not his word) may affect the patterns of discharge of neuron populations in the brain. The trouble with this is that nothing that happens in the brain seems to require the nonphysical mind as its explanation, and it does not seem possible either to confirm or to disconfirm Eccles’s theory. The theory, in short, seems gratuitous. One of us discussed this elsewhere, briefly: see Brooke Noel Moore, The Philosophical Possibilities Beyond Death (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1981). Other Lecture and Discussion Ideas Do we have knowledge of external objects? Explain. Rather than provide a general answer to this question, we want to focus on a subsidiary question: Could the universe exist even in the absence of thought about it? We hear a lot these days to the effect that contemporary astrophysics lends support to idealism through something called the anthropic principle. We cannot help you very much with this principle, but we would like to make you aware of it, in case you are not. There are evidently at least two versions of this principle, a weak version and a strong version. A weak version, as set forth by Brandon Carter, is that a complete account of the universe must explain the fact that the universe contains observers. A stronger version is that the universe must have such properties as to admit observers to exist in it at some stage in its development. This is sometimes expressed by saying that the constants and laws of nature must be such that life can exist. A very strong version of the principle, associated with the physicist J. A. Wheeler, is to the effect that the production of observers at some stage in the universe is essential to bringing it into being. Proponents of this very strong version, if we understand them correctly, theorize that the universe acquires reality back to its beginning in the Big Bang only when after eons it brings about observership. The theory is illustrated by the “double-slit” experiment, in which the experimenter decides, after a photon has passed through a screen with two slits, whether it will pass through both slits or only one. The experimenter makes this decision by opening or closing a venetian blind beyond the screen after the photon has already passed through the screen but before it reaches the blind. If he opens the blind, he records through which slit the photon passes; whereas if he closes it and uses it for a photographic plate, the interference pattern reveals that the photon went through both slits. In the first instance the photon behaves as a particle, and in the second its behavior is wavelike. Similarly, it is theorized, the reality of the universe in the Big Bang and since is dependent on the occurrence of observers now. We do not really feel competent to comment on the experiment or on its application to the very strong anthropic principle. [If you want to pursue the subject, see John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). We also like John Leslie’s book, Universes, (New York: Routledge, 1989, Chapter 6).] This much at least can be said: the first two versions stated above certainly are not equivalent to idealism. The third version also is not equivalent to idealism, though it certainly assigns an importance to observation that exceeds that suggested by common sense; and in any case it seems to be pretty speculative at this point. Psychokinesis is the mental power by which psychics claim to make changes in the external physical world—to bend spoons, to cause balls to roll, and so on. Is there any difference between using your mind to bend a spoon and using your mind to bend your arm? Explain. (This question might also be discussed in connection with Chapter 17.) We think there is no difference, and we think that our students should recognize this, because it will help them appreciate that ordinary, everyday mind–body interaction is a pretty mysterious business, if you think the mind is nonmaterial. (You may disagree with us on these points.) It only seems as if there is a difference because there is direct physiological linkage between a psychic’s arm and brain, whereas (assuming that there is psychokinesis) any balls the psychic causes to roll or spoons he or she causes to bend through “psychokinesis” are not linked with his or her brain. So psychics seem to be much “closer” to their arms than to the balls and spoons they manipulate through psychokinesis. Of course, if the mind is the brain, then the psychic’s arm, unlike the balls and spoons, really is linked to his or her mind. But if the mind is nonphysical, then the psychic’s arm is no closer to his or her mind than are the spoons and balls. If the mind is nonphysical, then the mind’s moving an arm (or causing brain neurons to fire) is no more mysterious than psychokinesis. In fact, it is psychokinesis. And that means that any skepticism someone has about psychokinesis should be equally felt relative to the idea that the nonmaterial mind causes the limbs to move. It’s too bad you can’t move a ball with psychokinesis to add a little color to the discussion (if you can, we’d like to hear from you). What you can do is point out that, if you were to give a demonstration of psychokinesis, everyone in the class would suspect a trick. So shouldn’t they respond with the same skepticism when you claim that you used your immaterial mind to raise your arm? Philosophers’ Principal Works Oliva Sabuco de Nantes (1562–?) New Philosophy of Human Nature (1587) René Descartes (1596–1650) Discourse on Method (1637) Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Principles of Philosophy (1644) Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) De Cive (1642) De Corpore Politico (1650) Leviathan (1651) The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656) De Corpore (1665) Behemoth (1682) Anne Finch, The Viscountess Conway (1631–1679) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1671–1674? 1677–1679?) Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) Ethics (probably finished 1665; published 1677) John Locke (1632–1704) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Two Treatises of Government (1690) George Berkeley (1685–1753) Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) Gottfried Wilhelm, Baron von Leibniz (1646–1716) The Theodicy (1710) Monadology (1714) Émilie du Châtelet (1707–1749) Institutions de Physique (1740) CHAPTER 7: THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES Main Points David Hume 1. Hume believed that knowledge is limited to what is experienced; that is, sensory impressions. Though he displays total skepticism in some passages, in most he appears to be a modified skeptic who focuses on the nature of the self, causality, induction, God, and the external world. 2. Hume’s epistemology rested on four assumptions: (1) Every claim that something exists is a factual claim. (2) Factual claims can be established only by observation or by causal inference from what is observed. (3) Thought, knowledge, belief, conception, judgment consist in having ideas, (4) all of which are copies of impressions of sense or of inner feelings. 3. The quarter experiment. “The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions.” Hume held, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, that we may observe a conjunction or relation of cause and effect only between different perceptions and can never observe it between perceptions and objects. Therefore, from the existence of perceptions, we can never form any conclusion concerning the existence of objects. 4. Hume on the self. We have no experience of the self or mind, supposedly an unchanging nonmaterial substance within us. 5. Hume on cause and effect. We have no experience of a cause actually producing an effect; and even after we observe a frequent and constant conjunction between a cause and its effect, there is no rational justification for supposing that that conjunction will repeat itself in the future. 6. Hume: All reasoning based on present and past experience rests on the unprovable assumption that the future will resemble the past: all inferences from experience are only suppositions. This leads to total skepticism. But even the total skeptic will have his doubts! Immanuel Kant 7. Kant believed that knowledge that was certain does exist and tried to show how this could be possible given Hume’s arguments that indicate the opposite. 8. The ordering principles of the mind. Kant’s theory is sometimes known as the Copernican revolution in philosophy; it meant that the fundamental properties or characteristics of objects in the world outside the mind are due to our minds, not to the objects themselves. 9. For sensations to qualify as experience, they must be subject to spatial-temporal shaping (the perceiving part of the mind must perceive them as objects existing outside us in space and time) and they must also be conceptualized—brought under concepts. 10. Further, to qualify as experience, sensory stimulation must be connected together or unified in a single, connected consciousness. Kant said his theory explained how it can be known that no one will ever experience uncaused change: to qualify as experience in the first place, a change must be subject to causation (that is, the mind “imposes” causation on experienced change). 11. Kant: All knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge is derived from experience. Hume believed that knowledge came from experience alone. 12. Things-in-themselves. But we cannot say that things as they are in themselves, as they are independently of experience, must also conform to the principles and rules “imposed” by the mind. We can only know “phenomena” or experienceable objects. We cannot know “noumena” (things that exist outside experience). Skepticism is unavoidable as to the thing-in-itself (das Ding-an-sich). 13. Relative to the world of experience, Kant was not a skeptic. Relative to things-in-themselves, he was. The Nineteenth Century 14. Response to Kant’s epistemology was absolute idealism, the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Whatever is, they said, is knowable; therefore thought doesn’t merely categorize reality, its categories are reality. There cannot be unknowable things in themselves, for everything is the product of the knowing mind. 15. Hegel, the most important of the German idealists, believed that the categories of thought are the categories of being. He held that the cosmos and its history are the concrete expression of infinite or absolute thought. 16. Main themes of Hegel. (1) What is most real (the Absolute) is thought thinking of itself; (2) the objective world is an unfolding or expression of infinite thought; (3) reality is an integrated whole in which each proposition (each state of affairs) is logically connected with all the rest; (4) the Absolute (the sum total of reality) is a system of conceptual triads (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). 17. Nature and Idea, as thesis and antithesis, have their synthesis in what Hegel called Spirit (“thought knowing itself both as thought and as object”). The philosophy of Spirit has three main subdivisions: subjective spirit (thesis, the realm of the human mind), objective spirit (antithesis, the mind in external manifestations in social institutions), and Absolute Spirit (synthesis). 18. Hegel’s all-inclusive system represents the towering summit of metaphysical speculation. Arthur Schopenhauer 19. Schopenhauer famously attacked Hegel’s exuberant rationalism. Schopenhauer regarded all phenomena as the objectification of the will. Will-in-itself is the originating source of everything that happens and is not determined by anything else. Blind and purposeless, will-in-itself manifests itself in the constant striving of human beings. The world is in disarray because persons are witless lackeys of this errant, cosmic will. 20. Peace can be achieved only by escaping the tyranny of the will, by moving beyond knowledge of one’s own will to objectivity and understanding of will-in-itself, in which state the world of phenomena becomes a kind of nothingness. This detached state of ecstasy and rapture could be glimpsed through art, music, and aesthetic experience. 21. Schopenhauer’s views influenced the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Boxes Profile: David Hume (A philosopher who seems to have achieved ataraxia, unperturbedness) Profile: Immanuel Kant (Though he hardly ever left his birthplace, his ideas traveled far) Profile: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (He was called “the old man” while still a university student) Ludwig van Beethoven (The link between the Classical and Romantic Eras) Readings 7.1 David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Argues that the contents of the mind fall into two and only two categories: higher thoughts or ideas, and “impressions” (the material given by our senses and experience). The difference between ideas and impressions is solely that thoughts and ideas are less vivid or forceful than sensory impressions. All the creative power of the mind amounts to is nothing more than the power to compound and transpose the material given by the senses and experience. 7.2 Immanuel Kant, from Critique of Pure Reason Kant’s metaphysical exposition of the concept of time with his conclusion that “Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever.” This means that time is not derived from sensory impressions or what Kant calls “intuitions.” Hume is wrong in his argument that all concepts are derived from sensory “impressions.” 7.3 Georg Hegel, from The Philosophy of History Hegel asserts that everything is a construct of Reason. No argument is presented in this passage, but it is a nice, clear statement of the basic Hegelian thesis. 7.4 Arthur Schopenhauer, from The World As Will and Representation Schopenhauer’s case for idealism and argument against the notion that the world can be explained most fundamentally in terms of matter or intellect. He concludes that “the world, as we know it, exists only for our knowledge, and consequently in the representation alone, and not once again outside that representation.” Lecture and Discussion Ideas Related to Selected Questions 1. Do you ever experience anything other than your own perceptions? Explain. As related to this question, we should not forget Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism,” which appears in the second (B) edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (B 274). According to Kant, the Refutation proves that “we have experience of outer things” and shows that “inner experience in general is possible only through outer experience in general.” Our students have responded quite favorably to discussions of Kant’s Refutation. The Refutation contains more than one line of argument, but the main one is to the effect that your consciousness of your own existence as in time presupposes perception of “something permanent” (i.e., something more permanent than individual perceptions themselves) and that this perception of a permanent is possible only through actual things outside you (and not just mere ideas of such things). Here is a paraphrase of Kant’s thinking that has worked well for us in introductory classes. It will reflect the influence of Strawson, Bennett, Wilkerson, Gram, Paton, and others. 1. I am aware of my experience as in time, as a succession of momentary items that are related temporally to one another. 2. Awareness of my experiences as in time presupposes something permanent, a system of reidentifiable things that last longer than my momentary experiences. (Here see Kant’s “first analogy of experience.”) 3. The “something permanent” cannot be something within my experiences, because they are all momentary items, the temporal relationships among which are apprehended only by reference to something beyond themselves. 4. So the permanent (which must be perceived for me to be aware of the temporality of my experiences) is possible only through the existence of things outside me, and not through the mere idea of things outside me. 5. So awareness of my own existence as determined in time is possible only through the existence of things outside me (and hence in space). In other words, awareness of the succession of my ideas is possible only through the existence of permanent things (reidentifiable particulars) that I perceive outside me. The argument is very slippery, and it goes without saying that many remain unconvinced. 8. Do infants have experience? Or do they just have sensations? Do cats? Fish? Explain. Not all of our students say that infants alone on the list qualify as at some stage or another having experience. The operative word here, of course, is “experience,” and the question is just simply a device to get students to think about some of the necessary ingredients of experience. They aren’t likely to have done so ever before. Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason is largely just a large-scale (and brilliant) analysis of the concept of experience, would say that several conditions must be met before a mere sentience shades up into experience. These alleged conditions might profitably be discussed with a class of beginning students. If they don’t get anything else from the discussion, they are likely to get an appreciation of the insight of Kant and of philosophers in general. Among the Kantian conditions, we think there are two that are especially fruitful to discuss in an introductory course: 1. Experience requires that the data of sensation be recognized; that is, that particular things be categorized as being such-and-such kind of thing. A mere stream of awarenesses or sensory particulars does not qualify as experience without this recognition. 2. Experience also requires potential self-ascription of sensation, awareness of the data of sensation as belonging to a subject that has the awareness. Kant, of course, maintained that experience requires other things, notably that the particulars of sensation be perceived as in space and time and be apprehended in terms of his list of categories; and he also argued that you cannot have experience unless there actually exists an external world. The validity of these ideas has been challenged, of course. Introductory classes might not be prepared to evaluate them critically, though they certainly can understand them. While we’re on the subject of experience, it might be of interest to pose the following question to your students. Some of our comments below anticipate the discussion in Chapter 9 on the philosophy of mind. Can two different people ever have the identical experience? That is, can the experience of one person ever simultaneously be the experience of another person? Why or why not? Here is Juan and there is Juanita. Juan and Juanita both experienced Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. So they both had the same experience. That is to say, they both had qualitatively identical experiences. But they did not, and could not, have numerically identical experiences. Juan’s experience counts as one experience and Juanita’s experience counts as one experience, and one and one make two experiences. When it comes to counting the experiences of different people, we abide by the rule that numerically the selfsame experience cannot be had by two or more people. The materialist won’t allow violation of this rule and admit that two people could have the same experience because, since an experience happens at some place and time, two people, being physical things, cannot simultaneously occupy exactly the same space. The nonmaterialist who believes that mind–body dependency entails that the body cannot have experience except through the body’s sensory apparatus won’t allow violation of the rule for the same reason. The nonmaterialist who believes that disembodied minds/persons are possible won’t allow violation of the rule even though this type of nonphysicalist apparently is not required to think of an experience as happening at a place. Such a nonmaterialist won’t allow violation of the rule because if two minds/persons could have the same experience, then it would not be clear how minds/persons could be individuated: what would be the difference between a single mind/person that had one experience and two minds/ persons that had shared an experience? Some (admittedly farfetched) counterexamples to the rule (the selfsame experience cannot be had by two or more people) that a beginning philosophy class might find interesting to consider are these: 1. Suppose Juan and Juanita communicate through ESP: Juan is able to “read Juanita’s mind.” Assuming that he can, when he does, is it a case of two people having the selfsame experience? 2. Suppose Juan’s body has been replicated through a Star Trek procedure. If the replication is faithful, then everything Juan remembers (prior to the replication), Juan-replica will also remember. So, if Juan remembers Barack Obama’s re-election, so will Juan- replica. Is this a case of two persons having the selfsame experience, in this case a memory? 3. Suppose Juan and Juanita do not each have a brain. Instead, thanks to Star Trek technology, they share a common brain that is housed in a lab somewhere and to which they are connected by synthetic nerve tissue, analogously to computer terminals connected to a central processing unit and active memory. Couldn’t Juan and Juanita have the selfsame experiences? 4. Suppose Juan and Juanita are the Jekyll and Hyde personalities manifested by the same individual. Multiple personalities are often thought of as separate persons. Couldn’t the selfsame experience be the experience of Juan and then later, when Juanita took over, the experience of Juanita? Our view is that none of these truly are counterexamples to the rule that two people cannot have numerically the selfsame experience. Maybe you won’t agree. Philosophers’ Principal Works David Hume (1711–1776) A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Critique of Judgment (1790) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) System of Transcendental Idealism (1807) The Philosophy of Art (1845) Of Human Freedom (trans. 1936) The Ages of the World (trans. 1942) Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1798) Critique of All Revelation (1792) The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806) The Science of Knowledge (trans. 1868) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831) Phenomenology of Mind (1807) Science of Logic (1812–1816) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) Philosophy of Right (1821) Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) The World as Will and Representation (1818) The Basis of Morality (1841) “The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (trans. 1888) Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) The Future of an Illusion (1927) Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939) CHAPTER 8: THE CONTINENTAL TRADITION Main Points 1. Much of what happened in Western philosophy after Hegel was in response to Hegel. Analytic philosophy became the predominant tradition in England and eventually the United States (where pragmatism also developed). What is called Continental philosophy developed on the European continent. 2. Continental philosophy includes existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and critical theory. The most influential schools, existentialism and phenomenology, are covered in this chapter. Existentialism 3. Some of the main themes in existentialism are: (1) Traditional and academic philosophy is sterile and remote from real life. (2) Philosophy must focus on the individual in his or her confrontation with the world. (3) The world is irrational, beyond total comprehension or accurate philosophical conceptualization. (4) The world is absurd: there is no explanation why it is the way it is. (5) Senselessness, triviality, separation, and so on, pervade human existence, causing anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and despair. (6) One faces the necessity of choosing how to live within this absurd and irrational world. This is the existential predicament. 4. Arthur Schopenhauer (covered in Chapter 7), Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche are important forerunners of existentialism. They held that philosophical systems that seek to make everything seem rational fail because not everything is. Such systems are futile attempts to overcome pessimism and despair. 5. Kierkegaard opposed the Hegelian view of the world’s utter rationality. 6. Philosophy must speak to anguished existence in an irrational world, and Kierkegaard viewed with disdain philosophy’s concern with ideal truths and abstract metaphysics. The earth is a place of suffering, fear, and dread. The central philosophical problem is sickness-unto-death; only subjective commitment to God can grant relief. 7. Nietzsche, who read Schopenhauer, further developed this critique of rationalist idealism. 8. Nietzsche disagreed with Schopenhauer as to the nature of the cosmic will; for Nietzsche, the world is driven and determined by the will-to-power. 9. Nietzsche: People have become enslaved by a slave morality that rejects life, celebrates mediocrity, and renders people cowardly, reactionary, and lacking in purpose. 10. Only the rare and isolated individual, the Superman or Übermensch (one who embraces the will-to-power and overthrows the submissive “slave” mentality), can escape the triviality of society. 11. Nietzsche: We have no access to absolute truths such as Plato’s Forms or Kant’s a priori principles of knowing. His philosophy was antimetaphysical. 12. But he did subscribe to one metaphysical concept, the “eternal recurrence of the same” (the theory that what happens recurs, exactly the same, again and again). The Übermensch affirms and celebrates life with no regrets; he would relish the idea that his life would recur eternally. 13. The concern for the situation of the individual person, denial of the rationality of the world, awareness of the vacuousness and triviality of human existence, and the attempts to find the answer to despair spread into arts, literature, and culture generally (as found, for instance, in art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and in the writing of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett), and persist in philosophy. 14. Psychoanalysis. Developed by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis taught that one behaves as one does not because one makes rational decisions but because one is subject to unconscious drives that acquire their shape during childhood. Influenced by Schopenhauer, Freud thought that the real source of our behavior is the id (Latin for “it”), the raging sea of hidden drives, irrational impulses, forbidden desires, and animal instincts. 15. For Freud, like Nietzsche, God is an illusion. Freud theorized that the truth of one’s being is withheld via denial, repression, and projection; in place of reality comes a fantasy universe of wishful thinking that punishes us mercilessly through the superego (a combination of conscience and social pressure). 16. According to Freud, psychoanalysis can help a patient discover the causes of anguish and anxiety in a slow process of learning about the source of one’s deepest fears, desires, and conflicts. The process is difficult and open-ended and can lead to a deepening of one’s understanding and existence. 17. Carl Gustav Jung developed an analysis of patients based on the notion of archetypes. 18. Alfred Adler analyzed patients on the theory that actions are motivated by one’s perception of one’s defects and are attempts to compensate for them. 19. Theories of psychoanalysis influenced later Continental philosophy in suggesting that absolute truth, honesty, and happiness are illusory and unattainable ideals that, in fact, make life difficult. The psychoanalysts also emphasized praxis, the application of theory to real, concrete cases, which was also emphasized in subsequent Continental philosophy. 20. Psychoanalysis understood human life as an organic process from birth to death in which early life determines adulthood. The novelist Marcel Proust wrote about the importance of remembering past events and relationships (even if they are painful) as part of becoming fully alive. Two Existentialists 21. Existentialism as a philosophical movement was something of a direct response to social ills; Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote drama, novels, and political tracts, as well as philosophical works. 22. Albert Camus. We mask despair in an absurd world with false optimism and self-deception. We are strangers to ourselves. 23. The world defeats our most fundamental needs. When we see this, the basic question is, Is there any reason not to commit suicide? Yet suicide is an unacceptable acquiescence. Only by struggling against the absurdity of life is it possible to give life meaning and value. The fate of Sisyphus illustrates life. 24. Camus increasingly focused his concern on the inhumanity and cruelty of the world. The individual must spend life fighting the “plague” of injustice and violence through measured and nonfanatical revolt. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus was agnostic. Sartre was atheistic. 26. Sartre: Man is abandoned; that is, God does not exist. 27. Implications of abandonment: (1) There is no common human nature or essence; existence precedes essence; you are what you make of yourself. (2) There is no ultimate reason why things are the way they are and not some other way. (3) Because there is no divine plan there is no determinism: human beings are condemned to be free. (4) There is no objective standard of values. 28. Hence, we are responsible for what we are and must choose our own values. And in doing so we choose for all. 29. We experience our responsibility in anguish or hide from it in bad faith. Only through acceptance of our responsibility and in choosing a fundamental project for our lives may we live in authenticity. 30. Sartre and Kant on Ethics. Sartre believed that, when a person determines something to be right for himself or herself, that person is also determining it to be good for all. This is reminiscent of Immanuel Kant’s famous categorical imperative (according to which you must only act in such a way that the principle on which you act could be a universal law). But, unlike Kant, Sartre maintained there was no a priori moral law. 31. You Are What You Do. Persons create themselves through their choices. The choices that count are those that issue forth in actions. There is no hidden or “true self” behind those deeds. Phenomenology 32. Phenomenology interests itself in the essential structures found within the stream of conscious experience (the stream of phenomena) as these structures manifest themselves independently of the assumptions and presuppositions of science. 33. Attention is focused on the world-in-experience, of which we can have knowledge that is certain. The world beyond experience (the “real” world assumed by natural science) is a world in which much is uncertain or doubtful. 34. Edmund Husserl, the first great phenomenologist, proposed to establish a new foundation for human knowing: a universal phenomenology of consciousness, whose purpose is to investigate phenomena while “bracketing” assumptions and presuppositions about the world (the phenomenological reduction), so as to reveal what is certain in consciousness. 35. The purpose of transcendental phenomenology was to investigate phenomena without making any assumptions about the world. 36. Husserl: Philosophy must return to “the things themselves,” the objects disclosed in conscious experience by phenomenological analysis. 37. Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger the truth of things lies not in phenomena but in Being itself. Being itself has been reduced to a world of objects (i.e., it has been forgotten). 38. Heidegger: We are basically ignorant about the thing that matters most: the true nature of Being. Awareness of the priority of Being would require a new beginning for philosophy and for Western civilization. 39. In his first major work, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger still sought true knowledge in a priori structures found in the human mind. But later, after his “turning about,” he sought a direct approach to Being itself. 40. It is with respect to his earlier work that Heidegger is called an existentialist. But despite the superficial resemblance, Heidegger and Sartre are philosophically quite different. For Heidegger, Being is the basic principle of philosophy and is absolutely necessary; for Sartre, individual existence was of paramount importance and because of the nonexistence of God, nothing about Being is necessary. 41. There Heidegger was concerned with Sinn (sense or meaning), the absence of which was the problem of human existence. Basic concepts: “thrown into the world,” head breaking, beings-in-the-world, everydayness, chatter, beings-unto-death, and project. 42. The cultural and intellectual poverty of the twentieth century is the result of the assumption that man is the measure of all things; an assumption, entrenched in Western civilization since Plato, that was found in its fullest flower in Nietzsche. 43. The later Heidegger: We must endeavor to catch a glimpse of Being as it shows itself and not impose our thought on it. What is required is a new kind of thinking, such as already occurs in the best poetry. Through this new kind of thinking we may rediscover Being itself. 44. Later in his life Heidegger grew interested in Eastern philosophy, especially that of Lao Tzu. 45. Emmanuel Levinas: Introduced phenomenology into France. His central areas of concern were Talmudic commentaries and ethics (in the broad sense of awareness of how humans exist in the world). 46. Levinas: Philosophy is rooted in otherness (alterity): other people, time, language, existence itself are experienced as other; God exists as Absolute Otherness. 47. For Levinas, Heidegger’s ontology (the study of Being) was a mistaken in its attempt to reduce the Other to a mere object for consciousness; the Other exists prior to ontology. 48. The Other is encountered in the human face and solicits us to posit ourselves for this Other. It opens us up to the transcendent, to the Absolutely Other, to God and His Law. 49. Ethics is prior to ontology, and the Good is prior to the true: The responsibility of thinking is always in response to an unfulfilled and ultimately unfulfillable obligation to the Other. Our primary responsibility is for the Other (ultimately, God or the Most High), an obligation to the infinite. In meeting the Other we find our own meaning, the “answer” that we are. This forgetting of self leads to real communication and justice. 50. Levinas influenced Sartre and Derrida. An Era of Suspicion 51. Diverse Continental philosophers have been suspicious about Western metaphysical systems which they claim lead to the manipulation of nature or set up a certain cultural perspective as absolute truth. 52. Jürgen Habermas: “Positivistic science” defines the “objective” experimental method as the criterion of truth. When its methods are applied to human beings, people are treated as objects; but what is needed is a method that would treat human beings as the subjects they are. Such a science Habermas called historical/hermeneutic because it explores the “practical” interest each of us has in understanding others. 53. Hermeneutics deals with principles of interpretation. 54. Aside from being unable to produce “practical understanding” of our intersubjective worlds, positivistic science is also inadequate in providing what Habermas calls “emancipatory knowledge.” This is the concern of critical theory: making explicit the controlling ideology of a political or social order. 55. For Habermas, knowledge of the ideologies that shape our communication can be liberating as we reflect on the most deeply held assumptions of our society. Truly nonideological, rational communication is the “ideal speech situation” presupposed, Habermas says, in every discourse. 56. Michel Foucault, in his “archaeological” period, claimed to have found a series of discontinuous “created realities” or “epistemes” that serve each historical era as the ground of what is true and what is false. Yet because the charting of the various epistemes seemed itself to assume a kind of objectivity on the part of the researcher, Foucault abandoned archaeology in favor of genealogy. 57. For Foucault (taking up the work Nietzsche had earlier begun), genealogy committed the observer to no universal theory of reality; the emphasis in genealogy was not knowledge, but power. In his later work Foucault traced the development of various forms of power manipulation within society as he examined prisons, insane asylums, and hospitals. He found each institution perpetuating its work in part by redefining its mission. Though doctors no longer see themselves as casting out evil spirits, surgeons (by redefining disease) have maintained the “priesthood” of the medical profession. 58. Structuralism versus Deconstruction. Structuralism is a methodology that seeks to find the underlying rules and conventions governing large social systems such as language or cultural mythology. 59. Ferdinand de Saussure: Linguistics is the study of signs, defined as a combination of the signifier (the physical thing that signifies) and the signified (that which is signified). The meaning of signs in a sentence depends not only on the order of the signs but on the contrast of each sign with other signs in the language that are not present. 60. Claude Lévi-Strauss adapted Saussure’s methods and applied them to ethnographic research to find the underlying structures of thought in the myths of nonindustrial societies. 61. The analysis of sign systems of various types, from advertising slogans to animal communication, is called semiotics. 62. Jacques Derrida broke with French structuralism (which was concerned with the “deep structures” of language common to all speakers) by announcing that no definitive meaning of a text could ever be established. Derrida’s “deconstructive method” showed what he called the “free play of signifiers.” By this he means the writer of a word “privileges” that word for a moment; this “privileging” becomes the medium for the play of the signifier (différence) rather than any background of a fixed linguistic system (which Derrida says does not exist). 63. Criticism of Lévi-Strauss: Derrida believed Lévi-Strauss failed to see history as a gradually evolving process; Derrida also believed that there is no basis for making myths into a fixed, coherent system, so the philosopher cannot be an “engineer” who finds unifying elements within myths. Myths have no authors and no single source and cannot give rise to scientific knowledge. 64. Play, for Derrida a positive element, is seen by Lévi-Strauss as a disruptive force. 65. Derrida: Used his deconstructive method to attack Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Husserl attempted to ground human knowing on a universal phenomenology of consciousness, which would provide certainty of knowledge, but Derrida criticized this as being logocentric (based on a nostalgia for an original state of full being or presence which is now lost). 66. For Husserl, truths of consciousness can be directly intuited; for Derrida, there is only mediated, representational knowledge which is dependent on linguistic structures. Truth does not take place prior to language but rather depends on language and on temporality for its very existence. Husserl’s philosophy leaves out and cannot deal with human finitude and with historical change. 67. For Derrida, only through the playful use of language will the interaction between the presence and absence of things, as well as between their certainty and uncertainty, enter consciousness. Thinking and language can never be closed systems of absolutely certain, transcendental concepts. 68. Derrida is suspicious of any claim to final interpretation. He is a kind of contemporary Socrates, forcing a recognition that most claims of absolute knowledge are full of contradictions. 69. Gilles Deleuze: A post-modern figure who put “multiplicity” (rather than identity or oneness) at the center of his diverse writings. 70. Rather than turn things into “ones,” discrete entities considered in abstraction from their relations with other things, Deleuze said philosophy should address multiplicity and difference. 71. Deleuze disagreed with Plato, who said the world of appearances is a mere shadow of the real world, the world of separate and discrete Forms; for Deleuze, the multiplicity of appearances is what is real and the word of perfect, transcendent Forms does not exist. 72. Deleuze: Rather than study things as one might study individual trees, philosophy ought to think of things in terms of rhizomes (plants that grow horizontally rather than vertically and that spread out, growing up and over things and becoming tangled with other rhizomes). For example, there is not one language called English, but a multiplicity of ways of speaking English involving not only rules of grammar but tones of voice and even body language. 73. Alain Badiou. A former student of Deleuze, Badiou accuses Deleuze of monism (“one-ism”), not because he says that “all is one” (which Deleuze does not say) but in his treating the multiple as a “singularity-totality,” a “one-all.” Badiou: Multiplicity is not a single totality. 74. Badiou argues that it is impossible to totalize everything that exists since what exists is “infinitely infinite.” Badiou’s interest in infinity (which mathematicians have been dealing with for over a century in set theory) runs counter to the general focus on finitude in Continental philosophy. Boxes Profile: Søren Kierkegaard (Defined three types of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious) Profile: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (By 1889 he had become irretrievably insane) Literature and Philosophy (Literary approaches that express philosophical viewpoints) Existentialism in European Literature (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Ionesco, Beckett) Profile: Albert Camus (He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957) Life Is Absurd (Explains the existential predicament) Profile: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964) Is Sartre Only for Atheists? (No) Profile: Martin Heidegger (Controversy continues over his membership in the Nazi party) Profile: Jürgen Habermas (Associated with the Frankfurt School) The Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse are associated with this school) Philosophical Anthropology (What is a human being? The answer may not be all that clear) Profile: Michel Foucault (He was a scandal to “polite” French society) Profile: Jacques Derrida (He had wanted to be a soccer player) Profile: Gilles Deleuze (Portrait of an idiosyncratic philosophy) Readings 8.1 Jean-Paul Sartre, from Existentialism and Humanism Sartre explains existentialism and its most important concepts, including anguish and abandonment. 8.2 Albert Camus, from The Myth of Sisyphus How absurd it is that the heart longs for clear understanding, given the irrationality of everything. 8.3 Giovanna Borradori, from Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida A conversation with Habermas on “fundamentalism and terror.” 8.4 Giovanna Borradori, from Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida A conversation with Derrida on “9/11 and global terrorism.” Lecture and Discussion Ideas Two ideas on teaching Continental philosophy Here are two things you might emphasize in a lecture on Continental philosophy. The history of philosophy is sometimes spruced up a bit for beginning students by presenting it as a series of revolutions: Descartes’s rejection of scholasticism; Kant’s Copernican revolution and search for an epistemology that would not fall prey either to the speculative excesses of dogmatic metaphysicians nor to the sand traps in Hume’s skepticism. But not all philosophical developments are revolutionary. The Continental Rationalists continued the work of Descartes; Berkeley and Hume took up where Locke left off; the idealists subjected Kantian themes to further development. Philosophy evolves through continuation and refinement of past philosophies, as well as through rejection of them. And some philosophical developments are just simply innovations that don’t seem to have terribly much to do with what has gone before, though instances of these are somewhat rarer. Zeno’s proofs and Russell’s theory of descriptions are examples of innovations. Hobbes’s contractarianism might be cited as another example. Continuation, revolution, and innovation—these are the three mechanisms by which philosophy generates its complex and unique history. Continental philosophy gives an example of each process, and this is one thing that might be emphasized in a discussion of it, as follows. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were the revolutionaries. They were the strident critics of the pompous optimism of the Hegelian idealism. They laughed at Reason as the supposed governing principle and ineluctable destiny of the world. In rejecting idealism they broke new ground. The existentialists continued the battle against idealism. But they weren’t the first to jump the barricades. So they aren’t really first-generation revolutionaries. The crunching break with tradition was made by their predecessors, and the existentialists tried to salvage something from the wreckage. That the world is irrational, that there is no cosmic plan for the universe and no march toward fulfillment of that plan—for the existentialists this was not a position that needed defending. It was the brutal, undeniable given. It required no argument, though it deserved vivid illustration. That the world is absurd is clear, they said. Now how are we supposed to live, given this, they asked. Phenomenology, by contrast, can be viewed as a philosophical innovation. Yes, Husserl was aware of a crisis within Western civilization. But he found the cause of this crisis to be too little rationality rather than too much. And yes, he was influenced by his predecessors. But the influence of Brentano and Descartes and Kant and Hume—and mathematics—is more marked than is that of the Hegelians. His new approach, the phenomenological method, was essentially a philosophical invention. Critical theory, as exemplified by Habermas, is a continuation of the Marxist tradition, though it is more Marxian than Marxist. The deconstruction of Derrida broke with French structuralism; though billed as something “new,” it seems to have odd affinities with the pragmatic tradition of Rorty (as opening up new possibilities of meaning). Foucault in his genealogy hearkened back to Nietzsche. So, to repeat, you find the three mechanisms of philosophical evolution nicely represented in Continental philosophy. Another aspect of Continental philosophy that ought to be put under the light is its emphasis on the human condition. In contrast with Eastern philosophy, philosophy in the West has tended to concern itself with otherworldly things (though there are some glaringly obvious exceptions to this—the Stoics, Spinoza, political philosophers). German idealism seems to leave the individual all too often the unknowing puppet of cunning absolute reason realizing itself in history, and existentialism’s forerunners can be perceived as reacting to this aspect of idealism. Kierkegaard especially stressed the importance of the subject and the subject’s anguished existence in the world. Likewise, the existentialists recognized the otherworldliness of Western philosophy and its apparent irrelevancy to the human condition and to the truly pressing problems of existence: injustice, alienation, banality, rootlessness, isolation, and lack of communication. Sartre saw the world as without any necessity and emphasized that the individual himself determines his own essential nature through his actions. Camus too, of course, sought to return thinking to an understanding of the human situation. Of course, it is precisely because existentialism speaks to the individual that it tends to be so very much more popular with undergraduates than analysis, which is apt to be perceived as totally irrelevant to anything of importance. Here is a question from a previous edition, which is still worth discussing. Is most human conversation really “chatter”? Is most of your conversation really chatter? People seem to engage in small talk mainly for three reasons: (1) to avoid talking about embarrassing and unpleasant subjects—death, disease, pay cuts, and the like; (2) to dispel nervousness and anxiety: you find a lot of small talk on first dates; and (3) to procrastinate. Engaging in small talk for any of these reasons is perfectly normal and entirely healthy, up to a point. But then some people engage in small talk more than is normal, and some people less. Extremes in either direction can be the reflection of psychological problems. Chatter, however, isn’t exactly the same as small talk. Or rather, it’s small talk that is particularly trivial and tedious. But, to answer the question, human conversation is not mostly chatter. Whenever people really are trying to get something done and communicating with one another is essential to the task at hand, people don’t generally chatter. They also don’t usually chatter when they are seeking information or assistance (or giving them), though in some cases chatter can be the symptom of a deeper-level need. We don’t permit students to waste our time with chatter, and neither do you. Of course, much human conversation is about subjects that don’t have much lasting significance. Yesterday’s football game, for instance, is pretty trivial when measured on some finer scale; yet you do hear people going on about it, even those who are not even remotely affected by its outcome. We confess to being particularly annoyed by discussions of the comings and goings and doings of motion picture stars and other celebrities. Perhaps watching YouTube videos or DVD movies has supplanted chatter as the most popular form of problem avoidance. But chatter seems alive and well Twitter and Facebook. Philosophers’ Principal Works Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Either/Or (1843) Philosophical Fragments (1844) The Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Twilight of the Idols (1888) Ecce Home (1888) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891) Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) The World as Will and Idea (1818) The Basis of Morality (1841) “The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” (trans. 1888) Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Notes from the Underground (1864) Crime and Punishment (1866) The Idiot (1869) The Possessed (1871–1872) The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) War and Peace (1862–1869) Anna Karenina (1873–1876) “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1884) The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) Franz Kafka (1883–1924) Metamorphosis (1915) The Trial (1925) The Castle (1926) Amerika (1927) “The Judgment” (1945) Eugène Ionesco (1912–1994) The Bald Soprano (1950) Rhinoceros (1959) Present Past, Past Present (1968) Le Solitaire (1973) The Hermit (1974) Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Murphy (1938) Molloy (1951) Malone Dies (1951) Waiting for Godot (1952) Endgame (1957) The Lost Ones (1972) Albert Camus (1913–1960) The Stranger (1946) The Plague (1948) The Rebel (1954) The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1961) The First Man (1995) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) The Psychology of Imagination (1940) Being and Nothingness (1943) Existentialism and Humanism (1946) No Exit (1947) Nausea (1949) Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) Logical Investigations (1900) Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931) “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (published in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 1965) Cartesian Meditations (1960) Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Being and Time (1927) What Is Metaphysics? (1929) Letter on Humanism (1949) Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) The End of Philosophy (1956) Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) Time and the Other (1947) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) God, Death and Time (1993) Alterity and Transcendence (1995) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (1996) New Talmudic Readings (1996) Jürgen Habermas (1929– ) Knowledge and Human Interests (1971) Theory and Practice (1973) Legitimation Crisis (1975) Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979) On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988) The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (1989) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990) The Past As Future (1994) Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970) The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (1978) The Use of Pleasure (Vol. II of The History of Sexuality) (1985) The Care of the Self (Vol. III of The History of Sexuality) (1986) Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) Course in General Linguistics (1916) Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) Structural Anthropology (1963) The Savage Mind (1966) The Jealous Potter (1988) Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Of Grammatology (1976) Writing and Difference (1978) Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1989) Acts of Literature (1992) Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994) The Gift of Death (1995) On the Name (1995) Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Félix Guattari) (1977) Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) Difference and Repetition (1968) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) Alain Badiou (1937– ) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999) Ethics: An Essay On the Understanding of Evil (2001) Instructor Manual for Philosophy: The Power of Ideas Brooke Noel Moore, Kenneth Bruder 9780078038358
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