This Document Contains Chapters 9 to 10 CHAPTER 9: THE PRAGMATIC AND ANALYTIC TRADITIONS Main Points 1. On the continent of Europe, the assault on idealism began with the nihilistic attacks of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (nihilism is the rejection of values and beliefs), and the religious anti idealism of Kierkegaard, reaching its summit with the development of existentialism. The philosophical focus in Britain and the United States in the twentieth century was quite different. Pragmatism 2. Twentieth-century philosophy in the United States was shaped by pragmatism (or American pragmatism). 3. Pragmatists rejected the idea that there is fixed, absolute truth; instead, it is relative to a time and place and purpose and is thus ever-changing in light of new data. 4. Peirce: Pragmatism is a rule for determining the meaning of a proposition, that is, the sum of the practical consequences that would result from the proposition’s being true. For Peirce, that meant that most metaphysical concepts were meaningless or absurd. Truth, he said, is the opinion fated to be agreed to by all who investigate. 5. William James: To determine either the meaning or the truth of an idea, one must evaluate its usefulness or workability—its “cash value.” This is a more individualistic understanding of truth than Peirce’s, though James would count as what works for the individual the findings of the community of scientific investigators. 6. James was also famous for the related theory that in some cases it is justifiable to choose or will to hold a belief because of the “vital good” it provides to a person, even if the evidence for and against the belief weighs in equally. If “the hypothesis of God” “works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word,” James said it was “true.” (More on James in part 3 on the philosophy of religion.) 7. John Dewey’s instrumentalism regarded thinking as problem solving rather than truth seeking. Dewey rejected both traditional realism (“the spectator theory of knowledge”) and idealism and regarded abstract speculation about so-called eternal truths as escapism. 8. As a social activist, Dewey had a significant effect on American educational, judicial, and legislative institutions. 9. Though pragmatism has been making a modest comeback in American philosophy departments, it was analytic philosophy, first developed in Britain, that became dominant in the United States. 10. Richard Rorty is suspicious of the traditional claims of philosophy itself to have the methods best suited to finding “truth.” “There is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer than before.” 11. Rorty’s pragmatic definition of truth: whatever “survives all objections within one’s culture.” Standards are relative to one’s culture and such starting points (standards of evidence, reasonableness, knowledge) are contingent. 12. For Rorty, “what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right.” Analytic Philosophy 13. What analysis is. Analysis resolves complex propositions or concepts into simpler ones. 14. A brief overview of analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell, looking for a satisfactory account of numbers and mathematics, abandoned Absolute Idealism and adopted logicism, the thesis that the concepts of mathematics can be defined in terms of concepts of logic and that all mathematical truths can be proved from principles of formal logic. 15. Gottlob Frege had undertaken to establish logicism independently of Russell. Modern symbolic logic is derived from Frege’s “language” of symbols. 16. Russell’s logicism involved the analysis of mathematical propositions; under the influence of colleague G. E. Moore, Russell began to think of the analytic method as promising to deliver the same indisputable results in other areas of philosophy as it did in the philosophy of mathematics. 17. G. E. Moore analyzed some commonsense beliefs about physical objects as well as certain propositions in moral philosophy. 18. Gilbert Ryle: The principal business of philosophy is to use analysis to dissolve traditional philosophical problems. 19. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The goal of analysis is to reduce complex descriptive propositions to their ultimately simple constituent propositions, which consist of “names” in combination, which would represent the ultimate simple constituents of reality. 20. The logical positivists (such as Moritz Schlick and his Vienna Circle): Philosophy is not a theory but an activity the objective of which is the logical clarification of thought. 21. They proposed a verifiability criterion of meaning, according to which genuine propositions are either tautologies or are empirically verifiable. 22. The positivists regarded the pronouncements of metaphysics and theology as meaningless and held value judgments to be expressions of emotion. 23. The positivists: Philosophy has as its only useful function the analysis of everyday and scientific language; it has no legitimate concern with the world apart from language. 24. Few analytic philosophers today subscribe to the verifiability criterion of meaning or accept the basic views of the logical positivists. 25. Many so-called analytic philosophers today do not regard analysis as the “proper” method of philosophy or think of analysis as one of their principal tasks. Wittgenstein came to repudiate analysis as the proper method of philosophy. 26. It is now widely held that many philosophically interesting claims and expressions cannot intelligibly be regarded as complexes subject to linguistic reduction. 27. W. V. O. Quine: It is questionable whether it is ever possible to say in some absolute sense what the meaning of an expression is. 28. In its broadest sense, a call for “analysis” today is simply a call for clarification. 29. Language and Science. Many analytic philosophers consider philosophy of language to be more fundamental and important than metaphysics or epistemology. (Recall that the positivists rejected metaphysical assertions as meaningless.) 30. There is more to the meaning of a name than the thing it designates. Frege called this additional element the “sense” of the name, and he and Russell said that the sense of a name is given by a “definite description.” 31. Some writers have been concerned with the “pragmatics” or social aspects and uses of language. 32. Logical positivists were especially concerned with the relation of statements about theoretical scientific entities (such as neutrons or protons, which cannot be directly observed) to statements that record one’s observations of, say, trails in a cloud chamber. It seemed to some that statements about protons must logically be equivalent to statements about observations or they would have to be dismissed as meaningless. But this “translatability thesis” turned out to be doubtful, and the question of the relationship between theory and observation is still under discussion. 33. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn was concerned with scientific activity conceived not as the verification of theories but as the solving of puzzles presented within a given scientific “paradigm” or scientific tradition. 34. Experience, language, and the world. Analytic epistemology and metaphysics has broadly focused on the interrelationship of experience, language, and the world and on the nature of mind. 35. Logical atomism (associated with Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein) regarded the world not as an all-encompassing Oneness (as the Hegelians said it was) but as a collection of atomic facts, each logically independent of every other fact and not themselves composed of simpler or more basic facts. 36. Atomists: Because all complex propositions must in principle be resolvable into simpler propositions by analysis, there must be fundamental and absolutely simple propositions that cannot be resolved further and that are logically independent of each other. Corresponding to these “atomic” propositions are the fundamental or atomic facts. 37. Russell changed his mind over his lifetime as to the minimum that must be supposed to exist, but generally he believed that this did not include many of things that “common sense” is inclined to say exist, such as physical objects and atoms and subatomic particles. What we think and say about these can be expressed in propositions that refer only to awareness or sense- data. 38. Russell: What we truly know is sense-data, and what we believe exists, such as physical objects and such scientific entities as atoms and electrons, must be definable in terms of sense-data if those beliefs are to be philosophically secure. 39. Phenomenalism: The notion that propositions about physical and scientific objects are in theory expressible in propositions that refer only to sense-data. 40. Phenomenalism as a rebuttal to skepticism: the theory that propositions that refer to physical objects can be expressed in propositions that make reference only to sense-data which some supposed to be incorrigible (incapable of being false if you believe that they are true). 41. Whether phenomenalism is sound rests on whether our supposed knowledge of an external world can be understood in purely sensory terms, whether “reality” reduces to “appearances.” 42. Why phenomenalism was considered unsound: (1) there is no set of sense-data the having of which logically entails that you are experiencing a given physical object; (2) it is unclear that physical-object propositions that mention specific times and places could have equivalent sense- data propositions; (3) private language is impossible. 43. Philosophers are now questioning whether or not knowledge requires foundations at all. (Foundationalism holds that a belief qualifies as knowledge only if it logically follows from propositions that are incorrigible.) 44. Naturalized epistemology rests on psychology or the processes actually involved in the acquisition and revision of beliefs. 45. Antirepresentationalism. Quine’s naturalized epistemology has become a leading alternative to foundationalism; in metaphysics Quine proposed a non reductionistic alternative to phenomenalism; physical objects are theoretical posits, entities whose existence we in effect hypothesize in order to explain our sensory experience. 46. The Quinean view of objects as theoretical posits is consistent with realism (the thesis that reality consists of physical objects independent of the perceiving and knowing mind) but is also consistent with skepticism (because theoretical posits may not in fact exist). 47. Phenomenalism refutes skepticism only by denying realism (denying that objects are independent of our sense-data). 48. Underlying realism is the notion that true beliefs represent or correspond to reality; according to representationalism, a belief counts as knowledge only if it is a true belief, and a belief is true only if it is an accurate representation of the state of affairs that it is about. 49. The ant representationalism of Richard Rorty and others denies that mind or language contain or are representations of reality. 50. When we describe a belief as true we are simply praising that belief as having been proven relative to our standards of rationality. 51. Rorty’s ant representationalism was anticipated by the pragmatists, especially Dewey. Pragmatic thought has entered analytical philosophy through philosophers such as Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Rorty. 52. Wittgenstein’s turnaround. His philosophy divides into two phases. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein portrays the function of language as that of describing the world and is concerned with making it clear just how language and thought hook onto reality in the first place. 53. The Tractatus, later rejected by Wittgenstein, poses a paradox at the end: it seems impossible to use language to represent how language represents the world. 54. In the later Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein abandons the picture theory of meaning and says instead that meaning is determined by how language is used in a given context or language game. Quine, Davidson, and Kripke 55. Willard Van Orman Quine. In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) Quine challenged two empiricist ideas: (1) the “analytic/synthetic distinction” and (2) “reductionism.” 56. By reductionism Quine meant the view that every meaningful statement “reduces” to the experiences that would confirm or disconfirm it; early twentieth-century empiricists subscribed to the translatability thesis, which said statements about the world can (in theory) be “translated” into statements about immediate sensory experience. Quine’s view was that it is a mistake to suppose that statements taken in isolation can be confirmed or disconfirmed. 57. Quine rejected the empiricist idea that there is a clear boundary between statements that are “synthetic” (for Quine, statements that hold “contingently”) and ones that are “analytic” (statements that hold “come what may”). Since (according to Quine) a person’s knowledge is an interlocking system of beliefs, no statement is true “come what may.” (You could believe that married individuals don’t have spouses if you are willing to believe you had been programmed with false memories about what certain words mean.) 58. Which interlocking system of beliefs (or ontology, dealing with the most basic categories and entities) is the correct one? For Quine ontologies are neither “correct” nor “incorrect”; what counts is the practical or pragmatic results. When it comes to predicting the future, one gets a better result believing in the laws of physics than in the Greek gods. 59. In Word and Object (1960), Quine went further and claimed there is no “fact of the matter” as to what things an ontology even refers to; he wrote that any theory, as well as any language, is subject to indeterminacy of translation, meaning that alternative incompatible translations are equally compatible with the linguistic behavior of adherents or speakers. He also wrote of the inscrutability of reference, meaning that incompatible alternative conceptions of what objects a theory refers to are equally compatible with the totality of physical facts. Quine described himself as an “ontological relativist.” 60. Donald Davidson. Known for devising a theory of meaning for natural language (languages that arise naturally for purposes of human communication, like English or Signed English) based on developments in formal logic (including such things as computer programming languages and symbolic logic). 61. Davidson drew on the earlier work of Polish logician Alfred Tarski, who developed a theory of truth for formal languages, to bridge the gap between developments in formal logic and the concern of philosophers with meaning within natural languages. 62. Saul Kripke. In Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980) Kripke criticized descriptivism, which said the meaning or reference of a proper name is connected to the description of the thing. Shakespeare is connected to a description like “the man who wrote Hamlet.” But Kripke held that the proper name is a rigid designator, which designates the same entity in all possible worlds in which the name has a reference. By contrast, a description like “the man who wrote Hamlet” is not rigid since Shakespeare might not have written Hamlet but would still be Shakespeare. 63. Kripke’s alternative to descriptivism was the causal theory of reference, according to which a person can be designated by causal chains of reference, such as when parents name a child and that name gets told to others. Uses of that name by those in the chain are linked causally and refer to the same person. 64. Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism contradicted the widely held belief of philosophers that necessary truths (statements that could not possibly be false, that are true in all possible worlds) are all a priori truths (statements known to be true independent of experience, like “circles have four sides”). If one learns that the “Morning Star” and the “Evening Star” (both rigid designators) name the very same thing (Venus), the discovery would count as an a posteriori (a statement that is known to be true through experience) discovery of a necessary truth. 65. Kripke’s view has metaphysical implications. For Kripke, essentialism (the idea that things have essential properties, properties they cannot not have) can only be maintained by distinguishing between a priori and necessary truths. This table’s essential property is that it is made out of wood. It couldn’t have been made out of ice since then the table would not be this table, but some other table. The statement that this table, if it exists at all, is not made out of ice is a necessary truth but not an a priori one, since it requires experience to find out that the table is made out of wood. 66. For Kripke, the name of a mental state (such as “depression”) and the name of a brain process (“brain activity X”) designate things with different essential properties; what they name cannot be equated in the first place as the identity theorists had tried to do. Ontology 67. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with what there is. Do physical objects, facts, meanings, numbers, relations (and so on), exist? 68. By the middle of the twentieth century, many analytic philosophers concluded that such questions ought to be left to science, though philosophical analysis could disclose the ontology presupposed by science, mathematics, psychology or common sense. 69. P.F. Strawson and Michael Dummett assigned to metaphysics a Kant-like task, that of revealing the fundamental “structure” of thought about the world. 70. Strawson: All experience requires recognition of reidentifiable particulars (particulars that seem to continue in existence even when they are not observed) as falling under general concepts. (Strawson declined to speculate as to whether there actually is something independent of the mind corresponding to general words or the names of such reidentifiable particulars.) 71. Recent ontological debate has returned to questions about the outside-the-mind status of such entities as selves; universals; “bare particulars” (things considered apart from the properties they exhibit); possible worlds (a concept used in explaining possibility, necessity, and contingency); social constructions (is gender a social construct?); and mereological sums (the whole consisting of all the particulars, such as a car made up of atoms) and constituted objects (for example, a car and its car parts). 72. Meta-Ontology. Can ontological investigation disclose object truth? Ontological realism says yes; ontological anti-realism says no. 73. Anti-realists include “descriptive metaphysicians” like Strawson as well as those who dismiss metaphysical issues as trivial semantical questions. 74. Quantum mechanics allows physical systems to be in bizarre states called superpositions that involve combinations of states that are normally thought to be mutually exclusive. Measurements of such systems always result in determinate outcomes, and the problem of understanding how this happens is the measurement problem. The traditional solution to the measurement problem is the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that the act of measurement causes the system to collapse into one of the mutually exclusive states. The many-worlds interpretation proposes that there is no collapse, and that all branches of the superposition co-exist but are inaccessible to each other. 75. Quantum mechanics seems to be nonlocal, which means that events at a great distance from one another can have instantaneous effects one another. Boxes Profile: John Dewey (He was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union) Profile: Bertrand Russell (Received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950) Profile: Ludwig Wittgenstein (“Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life”) What I Mean by “Blue” (Wittgenstein’s argument against “private languages”) Readings 9.1 A. J. Ayer, from Language, Truth, and Logic Ayer, the most famous British exponent of logical positivism, sets forth and elaborates on the verifiability criterion of meaning. 9.2 Saul Kripke, from Identity and Necessity Here Kripke examines the case of what appears to be the contingent (could have been false) identity of heat with “the motion of molecules.” Instead, he argues, it is “necessary that heat is the motion of molecules” since both “heat” and “the motion of molecules” are rigid designators that refer to the same thing. 9.3 Donald Davidson, from Problems of Objectivity Davidson tries to determine how thought or “propositional attitudes” could be possible in the first place. “We should be astonished,” he writes, “that there is such a thing as thought.” 9.4 Paul A. Boghossian, from “What Is Social Construction?” An argument against the social construction of (scientific) belief. Lecture and Discussion Ideas What is accomplished by the use of philosophical analysis? For one thing, analysis can help us evaluate, say, two competing metaphysical systems. There are no hard rules that we can apply in a mechanical fashion for choosing between alternative metaphysical theories. Among the factors many analytical philosophers say should be considered are these: a. Clarity is important. Some metaphysical theories are pretty vague on important details, and that’s a weakness. Take Hobbes’s materialist metaphysics. Hobbes’s account of sensation is really pretty murky, no? According to Hobbes we experience the world as consisting of objects with certain properties. But what’s really out there, matter in motion, doesn’t really possess those properties we sense, or at least not all of them. Hobbes’s account of how matter is sensed as a group of objects that have properties that matter itself supposedly does not have is sketchy at best. Or take Cartesian dualism: Descartes leaves us with hardly even a vague idea of how mind–body interaction takes place. b. Consistency is a must. If your theory is that you see stars and that they are really, really big things, then your theory is in trouble if you also say that what you see when you see a star is a tiny white dot. c. It is an important shortcoming in a theory if it forces us to make unnecessary assumptions or is unnecessarily complicated or requires us to posit unnecessary entities. Aristotle thought that Plato’s Theory of Forms did all these things. (Of course, proponents and opponents of a theory will invariably disagree as to what really is an unnecessary assumption or posit and what really is unnecessarily complicated.) d. Are there any empirical tests that would tend to confirm or disconfirm the theory? Many analytic philosophers would regard it as a pretty serious weakness in a metaphysical theory if there were no conceivable tests for its correctness. For example, suppose someone proposes that everything is an illusion. How could you test this theory? Granted, some of the logical positivists had it as analytic that no metaphysical theories are testable. But you have to wonder. Hobbes’s materialism, for example, certainly qualifies as a metaphysical theory if anything does, and it generates testable hypotheses. For example, if Hobbes’s materialism is true, then you would expect that signs of mental life would cease if the person’s brain stopped functioning. e. Of course, a theory should not generate predictions that turn out to be false. Epiphenomenalism, the theory that brain-states can affect mind-states but that the reverse does not hold, would lead one to predict that psychosomatic illness would not occur. Yes, epiphenomenalists do have explanations for psychosomatic illness that make the latter jibe with the epiphenomenalism, but the fact that they find it necessary to proffer these explanations shows right there that there are difficulties. f. The more ad hoc patchups a theory requires, the weaker it is. The theory of reincarnation, for instance, requires its proponents to reconcile the idea that we have all lived before with the fact that more humans are alive now than in the past. The proponents also must reconcile the idea that we acquire some or all of our essential traits and characteristics from past lives with what we know about genetics and developmental psychology. That epiphenomenalism has to be patched up to account for apparently psychosomatic illnesses we’ve already mentioned. g. Everything else being equal, if one theory violates principles of common sense in certain respects and the other doesn’t, that would be some reason for favoring the latter. It’s not that common sense must be right, but it probably represents at least some collective wisdom. The burden of proof is on anyone who proposes a theory that runs counter to common sense to show why we should accept it. Again, you cannot just sit down with one theory on the right and another on the left and check off their virtues as you would two automobiles. But being aware of some of the factors that serve to weaken a theory is at least a first step toward finding a theory worth believing in. The paradox of definition Consider a definition of a trombone as a brass wind instrument whose pitch is adjusted by a slide. If this definition—“A trombone is a brass wind instrument whose pitch is adjusted by a slide”—is correct, then it means the same as “A trombone is a trombone.” That is, if the definition is correct, then it is trivial. And if it is not trivial, it is incorrect. The same problem supposedly attends all definitions. A similar difficulty pertains to statements that equate names and might be called “the paradox of identical names”: Take the statement “Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens.” Because the statement is true, it must mean the same as “Mark Twain was Mark Twain.” But, obviously, anyone who states that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens presumably does not think he is stating merely that Mark Twain was Mark Twain. Frege resolved the last problem, that concerning the identity of two different names, by distinguishing between the reference of a name—that’s the person or thing that the name refers to or denotes, in this case the individual who wrote Tom Sawyer—and the “sense” of the name. “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens” thus refer to the same thing, but have a different sense. A similar distinction, one introduced by J. S. Mill, is sometimes used to resolve the paradox of definition. A term such as “trombone” has both a denotation—that’s the objects to which the term is properly applied—and a connotation—that’s the characteristics that anything to which the term properly applies must have. Then the definition “A trombone is a brass wind instrument whose pitch is adjusted by a slide” just gives the connotation of the word “trombone”: it does not set forth a synonym for it. Neither of these responses quite works for resolving what is known as the paradox of analysis, for here the two things “X” and “Y” that are said to mean the same are not names or terms but entire propositions, and a proposition doesn’t really have a denotation, reference, sense, or connotation. Nevertheless, the solutions to the paradox of definition and the paradox of identical names do show that one expression “X” and another expression “Y” can be said to “mean the same” or be “equivalent” even though “Y” cannot be substituted for “X” (or vice versa) in all contexts. But then, that was already clear to common sense, if not to philosophy: Let “X” be “He is dead” and let “Y” be “Er ist tod.” Here “X” and “Y” mean the same, but are not substitutable one for the other in every context. All in all, we almost think it is more difficult to explain the paradox of analysis than to explain ways of resolving it. “If X might exist but we have no reason to suppose that it actually does exist, then as metaphysicians we should not concern ourselves with X.” Is this true? Why or why not? The trouble with this excellent principle that we philosophers all love and cherish is that it can often leave the important work undone. For the important question often is, When is a consideration a legitimate reason? In real cases people will just simply disagree as to whether there are legitimate reasons for supposing that whatever it is exists. Those who believe in ghosts, for example, are apt to think there are good reasons for believing in ghosts and will not think the principle threatens the truth of their belief. Similar remarks can be made about more traditional statements of Ockham’s razor, for example, “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity” (which formulation Ockham himself apparently did not use) and “What is done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more.” Just when are postulated entities unnecessary and assumptions vainly made? Situations do arise in which it is agreed on all hands that an explanation or theory posits entities needlessly or makes unnecessary assumptions, but people who disagree as to whether God or ghosts or space aliens (etc.) are real are also apt to disagree over the necessity of postulating them and of making the associated assumptions. Consider the theist who says that God exists because the universe cannot have caused itself. An agnostic may reply that the theist postulates unnecessary entities, for whether or not we bring God into the picture there is something—either the universe or God—that caused itself. The theist, of course, is likely to think that there are reasons for supposing that the universe cannot cause itself that do not apply to an immateriality. Incidentally, sometimes students seem to fail to distinguish between the principle “If there is no reason to suppose that something exists then don’t say that the thing does” and the principle “If there is no reason to suppose that something exists then the thing doesn’t.” Whenever we employ Ockham’s razor we try to make it clear that our principle is not the second one, because otherwise someone always assumes that it is. How much do you think the metaphors we use influence the way we look at the world? What reasons can you give for your views? One of the tactics Richard Rorty has used in an effort to persuade others to adopt his neopragmatist view is what he calls “re-description.” The idea is to describe something one favors in attractive terms and to describe something one rejects in negative terms. As an example, take Rorty’s insistence on the importance of contingency in human affairs. Things didn’t have to be the way they are. Most would agree, of course, were Rorty referring mainly to the weather or to a political election. But Rorty also means to take in metaphysics and to cast aside the notion developed by the ancients of certain aspects of reality that do not change, including human nature. Rorty has a different view: “Greek descriptions of our situation presuppose that humanity itself has an intrinsic nature— that there is something unchangeable called ‘the human’ which can be contrasted with the rest of the universe. Pragmatism sets that presupposition aside and urges that humanity is an open-ended notion, that the word ‘human’ names a fuzzy but promising project rather than an essence. So, pragmatists transfer to the human future the sense of awe and mystery which the Greeks attached to the non-human; it is transformed into a sense that the humanity of the future will be, although linked with us by a continuous narrative, superior to present-day humanity in as yet barely imaginable ways. It coalesces with the awe we feel before works of imagination, and becomes a sense of awe before humanity’s ability to become what it once merely imagined, before its capacity for self-creation.” Rorty continues: “In the rest of this essay I shall be trying to sketch how things look when described in antiessentialist terms. I hope to show that such terms are more useful than terminologies which presuppose what Dewey called ‘the whole brood and nest of dualisms’ which we inherit from the Greeks.” (From “A World Without Substances or Essences,” published in 1994, contained in Philosophy and Social Hope, 1999.) It might be useful to discuss Rorty’s technique and whether it is an adequate substitute for an argument that the Greeks were wrong in their essentialism. Is Rorty’s view merely wishful thinking? Or is there a genuine basis (historical or philosophical) for his hope in the future of humanity? How persuasive is Rorty’s metaphorical re-description? How persuasive should it be? Philosophers’ Principal Works John Dewey (1859–1952) Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) Human Nature and Conduct (1922) Experience and Nature (1925) The Quest for Certainty (1929) Art as Experience (1934) Freedom and Culture (1939) Problems of Men (1946) C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) “Man’s Glassy Essence” (1892) “Pragmatism” (1905) William James (1842–1910) Principles of Psychology (1890) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897) The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) Pragmatism (1907) A Pluralistic Universe (1909) The Meaning of Truth (1909) Some Problems in Philosophy (1911) Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912) Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) The Principles of Mathematics (1903) Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) Mysticism and Logic (1918) “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918) The Analysis of Mind (1921) The Analysis of Matter (1927) Marriage and Morals (1929) An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (1940) Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits (1948) Why I Am Not a Christian (1957) My Philosophical Development (1959) Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) Begriffsschrift (1879) Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) “Function and Concept” (1891) “Concept and Object” (1892) “Sense and Reference” (1892) G. E. Moore (1873–1958) Principia Ethica (1903) Philosophical Studies (1922) Philosophical Papers (1959) Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) “Systematically Misleading Expressions” (1931) Philosophical Argument (1945) The Concept of Mind (1949) Dilemmas (1954) Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Notebooks (1914–1916) Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (1922) Philosophical Investigations (1953) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) The Blue and Brown Books (1958) Philosophische Bemerkungen (1964) Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918) The Problems of Ethics (1930) A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) Language, Truth and Logic (1936) The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) Thinking and Meaning (1947) The Problem of Knowledge (1956) The Concept of a Person (1963) W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) From a Logical Point of View (1953) Methods of Logic (1959) Word and Object (1960) The Web of Belief (1970) Theories and Things (1981) Quiddities (1987) Richard Rorty (1931–2007) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991) Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991) Achieving Our Country (1998) Truth and Progress (1998) Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) Richard Rorty (1931–2007) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991) Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991) Truth and Progress (1998) Achieving Our Country (1998) Philosophy and Social Home (2000) Donald Davidson (1917–2003) Essays on Actions and Events (1980, 2001) Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (1984, 2001) Problems of Rationality (2004) Truth, Language, and History (Philosophical Essays) (2005) Saul Kripke (1940– ) Naming and Necessity (1972, 1980) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (2007) P. F. Strawson (1919-2006) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959) The Bounds of Sense (1966) Analysis and Metaphysics (1992) Michael Dummett (1925- ) Truth and Other Enigmas (1978) The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991) Thought and Reality (2006) CHAPTER 10: MORAL PHILOSOPHY Main Points 1. Ethics or moral philosophy is the study of moral judgments, which are value judgments about what is virtuous and base, just and unjust, morally right and wrong, morally good and bad or evil, morally proper and improper, and so on. 2. Because many questions can be asked about moral judgments, ethics encompasses many issues. The most important question of ethics, however, is simply, Which moral judgments are correct? Skepticism, Relativism, and Subjectivism 3. Ethical skepticism: The doctrine that moral knowledge is not possible. Note that the claim “there is no right or wrong” is not a skeptical belief; it implies some moral knowledge. 4. Descriptive relativism: Not a doctrine of ethics, it merely says that people in different cultures have different beliefs about what is morally right and wrong; it says nothing about what is morally right and wrong. 5. Cultural relativism: The idea that what a culture believes is morally right or wrong is morally right or wrong for people in that culture. This is a subjectivist ethical philosophy. Note that it would be inconsistent for a cultural relativist to advocate being accepting toward another culture’s practice if his or her own culture thought that practice wrong. 6. Individual relativism: What is right or wrong morally is what each individual believes is right or wrong. This is also a subjectivist ethical philosophy. Egoism 7. Descriptive egoism: The doctrine that in all conscious action the person acting is seeking to promote her or his self-interest above all else. 8. Prescriptive egoism: The doctrine that in all conscious action a person ought to seek her or his self-interest above all else. Hedonism 9. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure. 10. Psychological hedonism: The ultimate object of a person’s desire is always pleasure (a descriptive doctrine). 11. Ethical hedonism: A person ought to seek pleasure over other things (a prescriptive view). 12. Two varieties of ethical hedonism: Egoistic ethical hedonism (one ought to seek his or her own pleasure over other things) and universalistic ethical hedonism (otherwise known as utilitarianism, in which one ought to seek the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people over other things). The Five Main Ethical Frameworks 13. Divine-command ethics: God ordains what one ought to do (examples: Augustine and Aquinas). 14. Consequentialism: One ought to do whatever has the most desirable consequences (Epicureans, stoics, utilitarians). 15. Deontological ethics: One must do one’s moral duty (in at least some cases regardless of consequences) (Kant). 16. Virtue ethics: One ought to do what a virtuous person would do (Plato, Aristotle). 17. Relativism: One ought to do what her or his culture or society thinks one ought to do. (None of the philosophers covered in this chapter are relativists, but many students are.) The Early Greeks 18. Sophists and Socrates: Moral judgments must be supported by reasons. 19. Socrates was also concerned with the meaning of words that signify moral virtues, such as justice, piety, and courage. 20. Socrates: Wrongness of behavior is due to ignorance. 21. Plato. Theory of Forms: At the apex of all Forms is the Form of the Good. Corollary: Because the Forms define true reality, individual things are real only insofar as they partake of the Form of the Good. Additional corollary: Evil is unreal. 22. Plato: Because Forms are apprehended by reason, one should strive for knowledge of the Good and hence be ruled by reason. One ruled by reason exhibits four cardinal virtues— temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice—and has a well-ordered soul; virtue is its own reward. 23. Aesara, the Lucanian. The Greek philosopher Aesara of Lucania taught that all morally significant decisions, whether regarding families or the state, should reflect the appropriate proportions of reason, willpower, and such positive emotions as love. Her analysis of the soul was similar to Plato’s: she said that the human psyche had three parts—the mind, spiritedness, and desire. 24. Aristotle. The first great ethical naturalist, Aristotle held that our highest good—our natural objective—is happiness, which consists in two things: enjoyment and the exercise and development of the capacity to reason. 25. Aristotle: Virtue is the exercise of our capacity to reason, and there are two kinds of virtues: intellectual and moral. 26. Aristotle: Virtue is a matter of habit; a person’s pleasures reveal his moral character. Specific moral virtues (such as courage) are the mean between extremes. 27. Aristotle made the distinction between an instrumental end (an act performed as a means to other ends) and an intrinsic end (an act performed for its own sake). When one comes to understand what the natural function of people is, then one finally knows what is intrinsically the “Good of Man.” 28. Though both Plato and Aristotle were proponents of what is now called virtue ethics, for Plato the Good was a nonnatural Form; for Aristotle, the good (for humans) is what human beings actually seek (happiness, properly understood). For Plato, the moral good transcends nature; for Aristotle the moral good finds its grounding in human nature. Epicureanism and Stoicism 29. The four main schools of philosophy following Aristotle were the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Neoplatonists. 30. Epicureanism and Stoicism were naturalistic ethical theories. 31. Epicureanism. Personal pleasure is the highest good. Epicurus: We ought to seek the pleasant life, which comes with satisfaction of desires that are natural and the satisfaction of which is necessary for a pleasant life. Natural desires that need not be satisfied may be satisfied if doing so does not lead to discomfort or pain. Unnatural/unnecessary desires ought never to be satisfied. 32. The Stoics. The school was founded by Zeno (a different Zeno from the one mentioned in Chapter 2) who met his students on the stoa (Greek for “porch”). 33. Stoicism: We ought to seek the untroubled life, which comes through neutral acceptance of the natural order of things. 34. All that occurs is in accordance with natural law (reason): Whatever happens is the inevitable outcome of the logic of the universe; all that happens has a reason; so whatever happens is for the best. We ought to remain uninvolved emotionally in our fate, and our lives will be untroubled. Epictetus was among the most famous of the Stoics. Christianizing Ethics 35. St. Augustine. Christianized Platonic ethics: God is the source of all that is real and good. 36. Augustine explained evil by adapting the Platonic view: Natural evil is the absence of reality; moral evil is disordered love—turning from God. 37. Augustine: Virtue and sin are conditions of the soul; what matters is not the person’s good deeds but the state of mind (intent) in which the person acts. 38. St. Hildegard of Bingen. This medieval German Benedictine nun said mystical experience provides a form of knowledge unavailable to pure rational introspection. 39. Heloise and Abelard. The ethics of the medieval French philosopher Heloise has two primary components—(a) true love for another, whether platonic or sexual, is completely unselfish and asks nothing (disinterested love) and (b) the morality of the act resides in the intention of the actor (morality of intent). Her love affair with Abelard, her philosophy teacher, was governed, she felt, by these precepts (though it turned out that Abelard’s love for Heloise seemed purely sexual). 40. Abelard: Sin does not consist in acting on evil desires, or even in having them, but in consenting to act on evil desires. 41. St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas adapted Aristotelian thought for Christianity. Goodness for humans is happiness. 42. Aquinas: Natural law is the law of reason, which leads us to our natural end insofar as we follow it. God’s divine law, revealed to us through God’s grace, guides us to happiness everlasting. 43. Aquinas: There are two sets of virtues, the natural virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, and the higher virtues of faith, love, and hope. Hobbes and Hume 44. Hobbes. He espoused a philosophy of relentless materialism. “Good” and “evil” denote only what one desires or detests; a descriptive egoist, Hobbes said persons seek personal survival above all other things. It is an open question whether he was also a prescriptive egoist. 45. Hume. Moral principles, Hume argued, are neither divine edicts nor discoverable by reason. 46. Value judgments are based on emotion, not reason. Hume: Moral and all other value judgments are based on emotion; actions we find morally praiseworthy or blameworthy create within us feelings of pleasure or displeasure, respectively. 47. Benevolence. Judgments of moral approval are expressions of the pleasure that we experience when presented with behavior that reflects a benevolent character. 48. Goodness consists in traits and actions that promote the welfare of people (this idea was appropriated in the nineteenth century by the utilitarians). Hume believed that when someone is morally praised or condemned, it is the person’s character that is being praised or condemned. In this respect, Hume is part of the virtue ethics tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. 49. Hume’s inquiries set the stage for subsequent ethical philosophy. 50. Can there be ethics after Hume? Options for ethics after Hume are four: (1) Despite Hume, ethics might seek to establish that morality can be grounded on reason or on God—Kant’s option. (2) It might try to find objective sources of moral standards other than reason or God—the utilitarians’ option. (3) It might seek to determine how one should act given the absence of objective moral standards—the existentialists’ option. (4) It might abandon the search for moral standards altogether and concentrate on ethical descriptivism—the option of analytic philosophy. Kant 51. Kant held that reason alone can ascertain principles of morality; they cannot be revealed through scientific investigation since scientific inquiry can never reveal to us principles we know hold without exception (as moral principles do). 52. The supreme principle of morality. Kant: A moral rule is universal and absolute. Thus, the supreme prescription of morality is to act in such a way that you could, rationally, will the principle on which you act to be a universal law. 53. And a moral rule may be expressed as a categorical imperative. 54. Why you should do what you should do. You should do what you should do because it is right. The consequences of an act, according to Kant, do not determine whether the act is good; only the intent or “will” with which it is taken does that. 55. Because a moral imperative must hold without exception, it differs from a hypothetical imperative which state, in effect, that one ought to do something if such-and-such an end is desired. 56. Rationality is the source of all value, so the rational will is alone inherently good. 57. Another formulation of the categorical imperative: Treat rational beings (e.g., humans) in every instance as ends and never just as means. 58. Duty-based ethical systems such as Kant’s are known as deontological ethical systems. The Utilitarians 59. A different view was taken by the utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: The rightness of an action or a rule is identical with the happiness it produces as a consequence, with everyone considered. Utilitarians who think that what matters is the happiness produced by an act are act-utilitarians. Utilitarians who think that what matters is the happiness produced by following the rule implied by an act are rule-utilitarians. 60. Bentham. Happiness is pleasure, and positive ethical value-words have meaning only when defined in terms of pleasure. Pleasure can be evaluated only with reference to quantitative criteria. 61. Mill. Some pleasures are better than others; quality, as well as quantity, of pleasure is a factor in moral value. Friedrich Nietzsche 62. Nietzsche took the view that there were basically just two moralities: master morality (the morality of the noble individual) and slave morality (the morality of the masses, epitomized by Christian ethics). Master morality invigorated the race, whereas slave morality was a denial of life. 63. Nietzsche saw his this-worldly philosophy as a celebration of the will to power, which finds its highest expression in the noble individual, the Übermensch or Superman, who has risen beyond the slave categories of “good” and “evil” and who lives by the principle “There is no god or human over me.” 64. Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” The ultimate internal human battle is between two forces, the Apollonian (the force of measure, order, harmony) and the Dionysian (the force of excess, destruction, creative power). Both are necessary if one is to be fully and creatively alive. Nietzsche believed the Dionysian force had been lost almost entirely in slave morality. Boxes The Good Life (The value of philosophy) Plato and Divine-Command Ethics (Is something right because the gods decree it, or do they decree it because it is right?) The Go-for-It Philosophy of Aristippus (Also explains Cyrenaicism) Diogenes the Cynic (Said to have dressed in rags and lived in an empty tub) Profile: St. Hildegard of Bingen (The life of a mystic) The Truth About Heloise and Abelard (The famous love story) Hobbes and the Beggar (Are altruistic acts really egoism in disguise?) Cold-Blooded Murder (The expression supports Hume’s belief that moral judgments are not the offspring of reason) Profile: Jeremy Bentham (His embalmed body and wax head is at the University College, London) Readings 10.1 Plato, from Gorgias Socrates’s answer to Callicles, who claims the best life is the life of following one’s appetites or desires. 10.2 Aristotle, from Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle’s “rough outline” of the good. 10.3 Epicurus, from “Epicurus to Menoeceus” Epicurus’s recommendations for the good life. 10.4 Epictetus, from “The Encheiridion” Several pieces of sage Stoic advice. What happens isn’t under our control, but our attitudes are. 10.5 Immanuel Kant, from Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals This is the passage in which Kant elucidates his famous Categorical Imperative. 10.6 John Stuart Mill, from Utilitarianism Mill’s exposition of the “greatest happiness principle” in terms of the quality of pleasures. 10.7 Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil An effort by Nietzsche toward a “revaluation of values” as he contrasts master morality with slave morality. Lecture and Discussion Ideas Can you control your attitude if you cannot control your fate? The Stoic idea that you can’t control what happens to you so you should accept what happens as for the best is attractive to beginning students. Maybe they should be aware of the difficulties in this idea. If you have no control over what happens to you, then you have no control of your body, because if you have control of your body, you can have at least some effect on what happens to you. If you jump into the ocean after having tied a crankshaft around your ankle, you have a fairly good chance of drowning. So the fundamental problem facing anyone who thinks you cannot control what happens to you but can control your attitude is reconciling a belief in determinism of the body with the belief in freewill of the mind. The two beliefs are not outright contradictories, we suppose. As long as you hold that what happens in the mind is independent of what happens to the body, then you could consistently retain both beliefs. But if what happens to the body affects your thoughts and attitudes, then the total determinism of the body will undermine the freedom of the mind; and if your thoughts and attitudes affect what the body does, then the freedom of the mind will undo the total determinism of the body. Few beginning students, if any, are likely to subscribe to a complete independence of thought and behavior. But if you put the question to them just that way—”How many of you subscribe to a complete independence of thought and behavior?”—what they are most likely to do is fall asleep. One strategy that might work is to begin by asking a simple question: “Can your thoughts and attitudes change without there being some sort of change within your brain?” The answer almost certainly will be “no.” As a next step, point out that, if a change in thoughts requires that there be some sort of change in your brain, then, if you really can control your thoughts, when you do so you will affect what happens to your brain. This means that, if you can control your thoughts, what happens to your body is not completely determined, because your brain is a part of your body. The strategy might awaken slumbering epiphenomenalists (though we doubt it) who will say that the thought changes don’t cause the brain changes. Their argument will be that thought changes may always be accompanied by (the very same) brain changes yet the latter are not caused by the thought changes but by something in the physical world. This argument cannot be refuted as a matter of bad logic. But you can ridicule it. Another strategy would be to run things in reverse and ask whether anyone in the class doubts that there are psychotropic or mood-altering drugs. Assuming that no one disputes the power of certain drugs to affect one’s moods, you might then ask the class to suppose that fate has so arranged things that a Stoic has been injected with such a drug. So much for controlling your attitudes. This strategy too might prompt clever students to indulge in some reverse-epiphenomenalistic (hypophenomenalism, isn’t it called?) maneuvering. Someone might argue that it isn’t the drugs that affect the person’s mood: what has happened is that an attack of weak will in overcoming mood changes has just happened to coincide with the injection of the drug. Rest assured that most students will not find this maneuver very plausible. Do we always act selfishly? Explain. As every philosophy instructor knows, someone in every introductory philosophy class maintains that people always act selfishly, and usually he or she is able to out-argue anyone who has a different opinion. “We always act selfishly,” the person will say. “Even when you help someone else, you’re just doing it because it brings you pleasure.” The traditional rebuttal is to point out that you wouldn’t derive pleasure from helping someone else unless you had the desire to help him or her; that having the desire to help the other person is logically prior to getting pleasure from doing so. The rejoinder to the rebuttal, inevitably, will be “So what? You still did what you did because it satisfied your desires.” The answer to this, of course, is that the desire to help someone else is an unselfish desire, and what is meant by “unselfish act” is precisely an act that is intended to satisfy an unselfish desire. A second traditional strategy is to clarify that those who hold that “we always act selfishly” mean that we always act selfishly when we act voluntarily, involuntary acts being beside the point. This clarification having been made, those who hold that “we always act selfishly” are in a difficult position. They can establish that we always act selfishly only by defining a selfish act as any act that stems from our desires. Unfortunately, this is also the definition of a voluntary act: a voluntary act by definition is one that we do because we want to; that is, one that stems from our desires. Consequently, the position of those who say “we always act selfishly (when we act voluntarily)” is a mere verbal truism, of no more interest than the claim that a father is always a male. Given their definition of a selfish act, “we always act selfishly when we act voluntarily” really means “our acts always stem from our desires when they stem from our desires.” The reason beginning students find it so difficult to overcome the position of someone who says that we always act selfishly is precisely because that person has been allowed quietly to redefine terms in such a way that an opponent, to win, must refute an analytic truth. It is hard to find a better illustration of the importance of clarification of terms than in discussion of the notion that we always act selfishly. Is it true that moral principles hold without exception? Explain. Here we offer some comments regarding how an ethical relativist might respond to this question. Cultural relativism (as we use the expression) is a normative theory that holds that people in different societies ought to subscribe only to the standards of their society. (Descriptive relativism is a nonnormative anthropological or sociological theory, according to which people in different societies subscribe to different moral standards.) Cultural relativists hold, in other words, that your moral judgments are validated or invalidated on the basis of one and only one thing: your society’s moral standards. Several theories that have been called versions of cultural relativism have been proposed in recent years, by Gilbert Harman, David Wong, and others, and there certainly are species of cultural relativism that cannot be summarily dismissed as illogical. Not all these theories preclude cross- cultural evaluation of ethical norms, as does our version of cultural relativism, according to which a society’s standards are the highest court of appeal in ethical matters. See M. Krausz and J. Meiland, Relativism: Cognitive and Moral, and David B. Wong, Moral Relativity. Beginning philosophy students may be counted on to endorse cultural relativism, as we have set it forth, with enthusiasm. And any philosophical theory that beginning students endorse enthusiastically ought to be subjected to vigorous challenge in an introductory philosophy class. The standard procedure for challenging the relativistic views of first-semester philosophy students is to invite them to consider the supposed ethical standards of Nazi Germany and ask whether they believe German citizens really should have subscribed to those standards. We are sorry to report that, for whatever reason, our students have not been moved much by this tactic and are quite prepared to say that German citizens should have done so. They are also quite willing to say that it was not wrong for George Washington to own slaves or for Spartans to abandon deaf babies. Why they are willing to say this we do not know. We only report that it is so. It has been our experience, however, that if young relativists are asked if the followers of Al Qaeda should kill journalists or if Iranian women really should be treated according to the principles of Islamic fundamentalism, they may balk. Again, why they should balk at these examples and not the earlier ones we cannot say. However, to get to the main point, can a cultural relativist say that moral principles hold without exception? To answer this question, a distinction might be made between universal ethical standards and absolute ethical standards. A universal ethical standard is one that all societies do in fact accept. An absolute ethical standard is one that applies to all societies regardless of whether or not they accept it. Our type of cultural relativist will say that there logically could be universal ethical standards, and whether or not there are can only be settled through scientific inquiry. And he or she will also say that if there are, then these also are absolute ethical standards. And finally, he or she will say that, if any ethical standard is absolute, it is only because it is universal. “There cannot be moral values if there is no God.” Critically evaluate this assertion. Once a visiting instructor of philosophy was asked by a student in an introductory class how anything could be right or wrong if there is no God. His answer was Aristotelian and lengthy and lost everyone. We favor the more streamlined Kantian-type response: “Suppose you claim it is all right for a person not to repay his debts. If your claim were true, there wouldn’t be any such thing as a debt. Then what you have maintained is meaningless. Since your claim, if true, is meaningless, your claim is false. Therefore it is not all right for a person not to repay his debts.” (Some instructors may regard this as a sophism.) This question, we wish to note, gives an instructor an excellent opportunity to bring up the old conundrum: Does God command us to do so-and-so because it is right, or is it right to do so-and-so because God commands it? Neither alternative seems to mesh comfortably with Christian beliefs, because the first option seems to place something above God in the ethical chain of command, and the second option seems to make God’s commandment arbitrary. An entire class period can be spent on this conundrum and off-the-cuff student responses to it. Philosophers’ Principal Works Socrates (c. 470–399 B.C.) Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) Republic Theaetetus Symposium Apology Crito Phaedo Aesara of Lucania (c. 350 B.C.) Book on Human Nature Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) Physics Metaphysics On the Soul (De Anima) Nicomachean Ethics Politics The Organon of logical works Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) “To Herodotus” “To Pythocles” “To Menoeceus” “Cardinal Tenets” Aristippus (435–350 B.C.) Zeno (334–262 B.C.) Cicero (106–43 B.C.) On Oratory On Duties On Fate De Re Publica De Legibus Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180) Meditations Epictetus (A.D. 60–117) Discourses Diogenes (fourth century B.C.) Republic Augustine (A.D. 354–430) Confessions De Genesi ad Litteram De Trinitate The City of God Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Scivias Liber Vitae Meritorum De Operatione Dei Heloise (1100–1163) Epistolae Heloissae Problemata Heloissae Peter Abelard (1079–1142) Theologia Christiana Dialectica Historia calamitatum Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) On Being and Essence (1253) Truth (Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate [1256–1259]) Summa Contra Gentiles (1258–1260) On the Power of God (1265) Summa Theologica (1265–1269) In Librum de Causis (1271) 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) 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) Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) A Fragment of Government (1776) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) The Book of Fallacies (1824) Deontology (1834) John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) A System of Logic (1843) On Liberty (1859) Utilitarianism (1863) The Subjection of Women (1869) Autobiography and Literary Essays (1873) Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) The Methods of Ethics (first edition, 1874) Outlines of the History of Ethics (1886) Friedrich Nietzsche (1849–1900) The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Twilight of the Idols (1888) Ecce Homo (1888) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891) Instructor Manual for Philosophy: The Power of Ideas Brooke Noel Moore, Kenneth Bruder 9780078038358
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