Alan asked:

There appears to have been a change in who is attempting to answer the great questions of reality. The ultimate nature of things, how and why we are as we are seem now to be the burning questions of science. Do you think the true heirs of Thales are cosmologists such as the late Carl Sagan and theoretical physicists such as Stephen Hawking, rather than philosophers, or has philosophy re-connected in some way to physics?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Prof Christopher Norris of Cardiff University has written in Philosophy Now Issue 82 in response to Stephen Hawking’s assertion that philosophy is ‘dead’ — because it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in theoretical physics (S Hawking and L Mlodinow The Grand Design: new answers to the ultimate questions of life Bantam Press, 2010).

I am not going to spill more ink on a question which has got academic philosophers all in a flurry and inspired mountains of furious blogging. Hawking is a clever fool — which is not to detract in any way from his achievements. Academic philosophers who have taken up arms in the Lewis Carrollian mock battle for Philosophy seem to me equally fools — myopic sheep, following one another around in circles in the fog, is the image that irresistably comes to mind.

What would Thales and co. have made of all of this? Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes discovered the idea of theory. They invented physics and they also invented philosophy. Giants such as these will never be seen on the Earth again.

I fancy I can hear the divine laughter of the gods.

The gods (whoever you imagine ‘the gods’ to be) always have the last laugh because (as Xenophanes famously observed) they know while men, even giants amongst men, can only believe.

I’m assuming that there is something to ‘know’, something out there, which human beings in our various ways are more or less blindly grasping towards, the answer to ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything’, or whatever. Maybe, the ultimate philosophy is scepticism after all. (I don’t know!)

Which reminds me of the motto I wrote for the PhiloSophos.com web site:

     Philosophy is for everyone and not just philosophers.
     Philosophers should know lots of things besides philosophy.

I didn’t mean to say that ‘any fool can be a philosopher’. What I meant whether you are a physicist, or a physician, or a business person, or an artist, or a politician, or a soldier, or a priest… you need philosophy. Only fools think they can do without philosophy.

But academic philosophers for their part have an obligation — which sadly many have failed to fulfil — to be interested in everything, every aspect of human activity, above all to keep their eyes open.

What would Thales have thought of Sagan and Hawking? He would have been absolutely thrilled at the mind-blowing achievements of modern science. He would have been merely puzzled by the current state of academic philosophy. Yet, one has to remember that just a short while after Thales and the Milesians came the Eleatic Parmenides, whose assertion that the ‘phusikoi’ have only succeeded in describing the world of appearance, while the true reality of ‘It is’ can only be attained through pure logic, would have equally puzzled him.

That should give us pause for thought (and Hawking too). Vision, logic, theory are irreducible component parts of a bigger picture. Human beings are complex and their needs, interests and obsessions are correspondingly complex. Taking the universe to bits and seeing how it ‘works’ is entertaining for a while, but that can’t be all there is. Or god help us (and I speak as an atheist).

If I could travel back in time to meet Thales, I would tell him of the paradox that keeps me awake at night: Life, the Universe presents itself as a puzzle which we would dearly like to solve. Yet the solution, if found, would be the end of everything we hold dear. As in the Leiber and Stoller song:

     Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
     If that’s all… there is.

Roger asked:

I am studying Socrates right now and am having trouble with this question. Could you provide some better insight? ‘What is Socrates’ view of the distinction between applied ethics and ethical theory?’

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

Before we begin you have to separate the two. Namely that the applied ethics belongs to Socrates, and the theoretical ethics to Plato. This is even though Plato puts them in the mouth of Socrates in his dialogues.

Socrates wrote nothing. He was a commonsense man. He was practical and wandered around the streets of Athens asking questions of everyone, and nearly always they had to do with ethics — with the way we live. He would engage people in conversation for the purpose of educating them (often against their will). He was convinced that one could act only on the basis of truth. Socrates was of the view that truth depends on having the right kind of knowledge. To understand this, and to live by it was second nature to him. But he wished also to inspire others to improve their life by adhering to ethical behaviour.

For Socrates this was the same thing as ‘caring for your soul’ and he put a lot of emphasis on this. He said ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’, and this means you are to nurture your soul for the sake of your personal and social life — obviously in this life, not the next.

If you constantly examine who you are as a moral agent, in relations to others, and your life in the community, you are on the right path. This implies that we must build up personal values and social values in an ethical manner. Socrates himself was the best example of this, he lived an ethical life himself, until the end. He even died in ethical manner.

He taught discipline, because this is how we learn and understand our social responsibilities. He also taught virtues, justice, courage, piety and temperance. We know all of this because Xenophon and Plato wrote about it in their dialogues.

So to conclude with answering the first half of your question: For Socrates there was no theory as such: applied ethics is applied by living an ethical life. There is no other meaning to the term.

Whether or not he actually entertained an ethical theory, I doubt very much. He does not seem to have been a theoretical man at all. We have to be discerning on this issue. Reading Plato, you can easily be seduced by his character portrait into believing that everything he says was actually somehow Socrates’ intellectual property. The real point is rather that Socrates in all likelihood was Plato’s energiser, meaning that he recognised in Plato this depth of thought and craving for knowledge and encouraged it. So when Plato begins to write in a theoretical way, you can be sure it’s his philosophy, often not that of Socrates. In fact, even Plato says that Socrates was the ‘authentic’ philosopher, because he did not write, but talked and got at the truth dialectically.

Plato of course recognised that Socrates was mainly concerned with ethics and politics. Now it is very interesting to observe how Plato changes the whole perspective of his political doctrine after Book I. Book I was an early dialogue; and you will have noticed that none of these offer any conclusion or theoretical model. They are all open ended, leaving the interlocutor to learn and think from the question and answer game. And this is exactly how things work in Book I of the Republic.

To give you an example: the question comes up about justice. Several answers are given by different speakers. One said, justice is to pay your debts; another said ‘might is right’. But Socrates had something simpler in mind, e.g. ‘give each man his due’. This means concede what he owns, what is natural to him and what benefits him. But this is where it ends. No answers, just issues for all to think about.

But from Book II onwards, it will seem that Socrates is expounding his ethical and political theory. Certainly no-one other than Socrates has much to say for the rest of the 300-odd pages. This is not how the living Socrates debated!

However, Plato clearly took up what he learnt from Socrates and developed it. But so as to avoid confusion, I’ll keep saying ‘Socrates’ even in cases where I should really say ‘Plato’.

So to go on from that profoundly ethical dilemma posed by politics: Socrates observes the distinction between individual justice and social justice. The difficulty here is that all the virtues intersect with justice. So Socrates arrives at the idea that a state is a little cosmos, and works best with harmony. Where every individual plays his own role.

If everyone does his best without interfering in another doing his best, then the state will function harmoniously.

So justice is done when in social intercourse, people respect others and co-operate with them. This is why selfishness is bad, and why it is unjust. It is why making debts is unjust. It is why ambition can be unjust.

Therefore justice in a state is seeing when all citizens co-operate harmoniously. So that society functions like an organism.

You can see here that a lot of this has practical implications. By the same token, Plato is also beginning to peel off the layers of applied ethics and introducing concepts (theory) that are more suitable for intellectual debate. You can’t always draw a clear boundary line between them. So let us go on for a moment.

The individual is responsible to play his own role ethically. Therefore, in the eyes of Socrates justice is seen as the benefit of each citizen. And this of course implies that all the other virtue flows into this great social virtue which is justice.

Moral truth is personal, because it affects society for good and for ill. Most importantly moral truth is carried into society by every individual. So if a society wishes to be a moral institution, it can only be so if every citizen is aware of and acts on their knowledge of the moral good.

This is how Plato shows Socrates applying ethics in a practical way in his way of life. Whatever theoretical merit there may be, trust Plato to discover and articulate it — without necessarily debating.

So as a hint, I will say the following:

Socrates was the dialectical speaker par excellence. All his interrogations of people on the street, in the gymnasium, on the agora or in the schools of the sophists, had one aim. To make the other fellow think about ‘why is Socrates asking such obvious questions?’ Some would understand, others never did. But the essential point is that Socrates philosophised only in a practical way. And all his teachings are focused in one way or another on applied ethics.

So when you read Plato, this hint will serve you to recognise how much of Plato’s ethical doctrines belong to Socrates and to Plato respectively. Whenever Plato makes Socrates deliver long speeches without the interlocutor getting a chance of responding, you know that Plato has an urge to preach, and that maybe this is not really Socrates!

Consider also, in this context, that Socrates maintained that he did not teach but rather served, like his mother, as a midwife to truth. In other words, he helped others to the truth. He never claimed that he knew the truth.

However, he was quite capable of recognising an untruth when he saw it. E.g.

in one of the dialogues with the famous sophist Protagoras, he exposed the latter as a conventional thinker on ethics. He is famous in history for his slogan that ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ What does this mean? It means that ethics and values are completely relativised. There is no truth as such. Values change from place to place, and all are equally valid in their cultural context.

For Socrates this was a pernicious doctrine. This is because you cannot give a sound reason why you cultivate your values or give a good reason why other people’s values may be bad or even evil.

Let me give you an example of applied ethics vs theoretical ethics. It is a situation where theoretical ethics might condone something which practical ethics finds totally unpalatable.

Throughout Greece, human sacrifices, were abolished after about 800 BC. But in other cultures, they persisted. For a Humanist like Socrates, this was a remnant of primitive evil. You must not respect a cultural value or ethics, if their outcome is evil.

But if you are a theorist (you know how it works) you could possibly find the best of reasons for human sacrifices, cannibalism, even other crimes against humanity.

And so to conclude:

Socrates lived his life ethically, and that was his philosophy. Plato took this example, but many other examples as well, such as the theories already written by other philosophers (Pythagoras, Heraclitus a.o.) to arrive at his own ethics. But these are a doctrine (repeat in capital letters: DOCTRINE). Which means, they are philosophy, theoretical models, recommendations, and powerful reasons.

So Socrates was the one who applied, and Plato was the one who philosophised. Socrates was the debater, Plato the thinker. Socrates ‘applied’ by hoping to persuade person to person; Plato ‘theorised’ and wrote, hoping to persuade readers who can reflect on the subject matter.

Mandy asked:

What is Aristotle’s reason for thinking that the highest good is happiness?

Answer by tony Fahey

Aristotle’s philosophical approach in relation to the above question can be described as teleological. That is, he takes the view that everything in nature, including human beings, moves towards a particular end (telos). For example, the end or telos of the acorn is the mighty oak, the end of the artisan is to achieve the highest degree of excellence in his or her particular field of endeavour, and the end or final cause (the ultimate goal) of human existence is eudaimonia.

Although, as alluded to in the above question, eudaimonia is most commonly translated as ‘happiness’, a more accurate translation is ‘flourishing’. Aristotle believed that the desire to live a fulfilled life is part of what it is to be human. A eudaimon life is a life that is successful. It is important to realize that what Aristotle means by happiness/flourishing has nothing to do with physical pleasure, but is an activity of the mind/soul in accordance with virtue.(NB for the ancient Greeks, soul was a synonym of mind).

It should be noted that, for Aristotle, there are two parts to the mind/soul: the intellectual and the emotional. Correspondingly, there are two types of virtue: intellectual and moral. Moreover, virtue, whether intellectual or moral, is a disposition (a natural inclination) of the mind/soul, which finds its expression in voluntary action -that is, it is consciously chosen. Moral virtue is expressed in the choice of pursuit of a middle course between excessive and deficient emotion, and exaggerated or inadequate action: this is the famous doctrine of the Golden Mean, which holds that each virtue stands somewhere between two opposing vices. Thus, courage or fortitude is a mean between cowardice and rashness; and temperance is the mean between licentiousness or profligacy and insensibility. Justice, or ‘fairness’, the most important virtue of the moral virtues, is also concerned with a mean in the sense that it aims at each person getting neither more nor less than his or her due.

However, it is not like other virtues, flanked by opposing vices since any departure from the just mean, on either side, involves simply injustice. Moral virtue prevents disordered emotion from leading to inappropriate action. What decides, in any situation, what is appropriate action and the correct amount of feeling is the intellectual virtue of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis): this is the virtue of that part of reason that is concerned with action. The virtue of the speculative part of the reaction is learning, or philosophic wisdom (Sophia): this virtue finds its most sublime manifestations in more or less solitary contemplation (theoria). Supreme happiness, according to Aristotle, would consist in a life of philosophical contemplation. However, whilst this would be the ultimate in human fulfillment, it is also a life that is beyond the realization of mere mortals. The best we can aspire to is the kind of happiness that can be found in a life of political activity and public magnificence in accordance with moral values.

Nitram asked:

Hi. I have just stumbled over Philosophy and need to get a couple of book titles to get me started. I know a bit about Plato and his pupil Aristotle… is this a good place to start or should I seek a more modern thinker and if so whom? Thank you.

Answer by Craig Skinner

If you want to start with individual thinkers, Plato and Aristotle are probably better than any individual modern thinker. My advice would be to start with a general survey of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to modern times, and then read either individuals — Plato would be a good start because he is a very good writer as well as a wide-ranging philosopher — or topics, such as free will, proofs of God’s existence, truth, time, space, right and wrong etc.

You ask for a couple of books:

Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (2nd ed 1961) is still a great introduction. Critics say he is opinionated, biased and sometimes quirky. All true. But he was a Nobel-prize winning author, and his writing is clear, witty and entertaining, and he gives a comprehensive history of philosophy from the Greeks to the 20th C. Russell was a mathematician, logician, philosopher, essayist, and social activist who was jailed twice for protest (once against the first world war, and once for CND activities in the 1960s when he was a very old man).

Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have shaped our World View (1991). Tarnas is a Professor of Philosophy and Psychology in California. The book got rave reviews from philosophers, psychologists and theologians. I thought it excellent.

Good luck!

Answer by Tony Fahey

Hi Nitram, whilst there are many excellent modern philosophers (Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Lyotard, Kearney, to name but a few), my own personal advice would be to start with a work that would give you a good overall grasp of the subject, with the emphasis on the history of philosophy. In that regard, as an easy and enjoyable read, one of the books that that proves to be very popular with first year philosophy students is Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World. Bryan Magee’s The Story of Philosophy is also an extremely good introduction to philosophy, and for a more complicated but equally fine read you could try Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.

Mary asked:

Proofs of the existence of God. Identify which of these arguments seems to be the best, and explain why you think so. Complete your response by reflecting on why philosophers have sought for thousands of years to provide such proofs, and whether it is necessary to do so.

Answer by Eric George

First of all let me clarify that the question ‘does God exist?’ is not a scientific one, it is a philosophical/ theological inquiry. Generally speaking, scientific proof, is based upon the repeatability of an experiment in order to validate whether or not the outcome of that certain experiment determines a falsification of something existing or the truth of something existing. In other words, science verifies truth by way of conducting tests which express certain consistencies within a prescribed method of obtaining such truths. So the person who wishes to assert that God does not exist because one cannot scientifically prove God’s existence is using a method of verification which is outside of the actual premise to begin with, since the matter of God’s existence is a philosophical and theological one, it follows therefore that the matter itself must be approached philosophically and theologically as well. The answer must be endeavored within the context of the question.

Philosophers have thought it necessary to provide answers to questions ever since western philosophy itself began with the ancient Greeks. If we treat the matter of the existence of God as another question then of course it is necessary to provide answers as to whether or not you believe God exists or does not exist. The pondering on God’s existence began as philosophy gathered mankind’s thoughts beyond the material world, as to whether nature defines us, society and culture defines us or whether something detached from all that we experience defines us i.e. God. It is necessary to take into consideration I believe since the matter itself has always been within and around the very subject of philosophy, the issue of God has become a tenant of basic common philosophical questions, meaning, purpose, destiny and such. Also, what is meant by ‘God’ — is it the highest good? The unmoved mover? A spiritual entity? The definitions for and what God is, are numerous indeed. I think it safe to say though, that generally within western society a reference to God means the accumulative expression of God put forward by christian theism, and more recently deism (which is a form of theism).

I would not say personally that anything can be proven indefinitely, since to prove something means that it could be no other way, and as such I would not use the term ‘proofs’ to denote mere arguments in favor of theism, the arguments themselves seek to provide evidence for the superiority of theism over atheism in a sort of arms-race to solidify the existence of God as a way of ‘following the evidence’ which somehow concludes that God exists. The arguments for the existence of God or ‘theistic arguments’, can be classically put forward as follows: The cosmological argument (from contingency), the moral argument (on objective moral values), the teleological argument (intelligent design, on fine-tuning), the ontological argument (on the existence of God, his existence to his actuality — the possibility therein), the historicity of christ argument (historical support for the crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection of christ — vindicates the existence of God) and an off-shoot of the cosmological argument coined as the kalaam cosmological argument (beginning to cause correlation, origins of the universe).

All six classical arguments for the existence of God, when studied in depth, are quite logical in the context that their premises are true; and their premises are more plausible in light of the evidence than their negations. However, I have some criticism to put forward. First of all the historicity of christ argument in comparison with the other five arguments, is quite weak since it depends mainly on the synoptic gospels and draws from early commentaries within church tradition. The sources drawn from outside church tradition are very scant; cite Josephus and Tacitus, you would think that more would be written about Jesus Christ of Nazereth, especially by historians who existed during and around that time which are external from church tradition. I feel that the extraordinary claim that the historicity of christ argument is making — in light of affirming the death and bodily resurrection of christ as a true historic event, is so scantly written and recorded about by any sources detached from church tradition that the argument collapses as non opus, even on the premise that the resurrection is some how the best explanation for some established facts such as the ’empty tomb’ and so forth. It seems to me that this argument should not even be apart of the theistic arsenal, it should be left a part, separate as an article of faith rather than an article of argument based upon historicity. Especially since the substance of such historicity cannot be measured to match the historic claim of such an argument.

That being said, there is one argument which seems to me to be very persuasive, I refer to the moral argument and what it is inclusive to. The moral argument for the existence of God simply put, explains that if objective moral values exist then therefore God exists since it would necessitate a mind prior to the Human mind to define moral values which are binding irrespective of ones culture and society, i.e. across the board. It also builds upon this by stating that if God does not exist, then accordingly, objective moral values do not exist and that what we term ‘morality’ is merely synonymous as an invention that we as Humans, have fabricated as time has gone on, as nothing more than a means of regulating our existence to socially survive in somewhat of a convenience. Life and ones actions within life are in essence totally subjective and non-binding, every individual creates their own sense of moral duties — whether this sense is fulfilled in murdering someone or helping someone, it matters not in the end. The moral argument for Gods existence is compelling, since it plays on both the emotional and intellectual scale of the Human mind.

Jeffrey asked:

What if every person sees colors different? like, my yellow is someone else’s green, we would never know! and maybe that’s why people have different favorite colors?

Answer by Craig Skinner

This colours argument is one of a number of ‘conceivability’ arguments intended to refute reductionism, that is to combat the notion that the mental is ultimately explicable by the physical.

So, the story goes, we can conceive of a situation where, on our viewing a ripe tomato, identical electrochemical goings-on occur in my brain and your brain, but the mental outcome is that I experience ‘red’ whereas you experience the sensation I do on viewing the sky on a clear sunny day (of course you call this sensation ‘red’ since we all learn that tomatoes are red, skies blue etc). So, the story continues, the quality of conscious experience doesn’t just depend on physical events in a brain interacting with the body and the world.

Another popular conceivability argument is the zombie one. I can conceive of an atom-for-atom duplicate of myself which has brain events identical with mine but totally lacks any consciousness. So, whatever explains consciousness, it isn’t physical events in a brain.

Descartes started it with his ‘clear and distinct’ conception of the separability of the mind and the body, so, he says, mind and body are separate substances (dualism), mind can exist without body etc.

I find these arguments tedious. I have two criticisms:

(1) Just because something is conceivable doesn’t mean its possible. Right now I can conceive of my cat jumping on the desk and deliberately typing in a sparkling finish to this answer. But it won’t. It can’t. Not in any possible world. It doesn’t have the brainpower. Of course in some possible worlds there will be cat-like creatures that can do this, but they won’t be cats as we understand the term ‘cat’.

(2) Advances in scientific understanding will show such arguments to be nonsense. Here are two examples. (a) I can conceive of a gas in which all the particles move faster and faster but the gas’s temperature doesn’t rise. So, whatever temperature increase is, it’s not necessarily to do with speeding up of particles. Wrong. Increase in temperature just IS speeding up of particles. (b) I can conceive of a world containing tiny, replicating bags of chemicals undergoing complex interactions (let’s call them ‘cells’), but these cells are not alive, just little bags of dead chemicals. So, whatever life is, it’s not explained by complex chemical interactions. Wrong. Life just IS complex interaction of dead chemicals in units drawing energy from the environment, maintaining dynamic stability and replicating.

So, I think the colours argument and the zombie argument will likewise be shown to be nonsensical by advances in cognitive science. In the meantime I find it completely implausible that healthy members of the same species would see colours differently. The onus is on those who think otherwise to come up with evidence for their view. And there is none. Or at least none that I find plausible. You suggest people’s having different favourite colours as evidence. Fair enough. Seeing colours differently is a conceivable explanation. But I don’t think it is the most likely one.

Answer by Helier Robinson

It’s not just colours, it’s all sensations: various degrees of hot and cold, rough and smooth, hard and soft, heavy and light, solid and liquid, loud and quiet, penetrability — to say nothing of tastes and smells — all are private to the person concerned. None can be compared to anyone else’s and so could in principle be different among different people. And then there are other animals: what are cats’ and dogs’ sensations like?

This fundamental privacy of sensations leads to a serious philosophical problem. In philosophy everything known through the senses is called empirical, and the world each of us perceives is their empirical world. An empirical world is a structure of empirical objects, which are structures of sensations. A structure is a set of relations holding sensations and objects together. But relations give trouble also: can we perceive them, or are they all in the mind of the perceiver? How can we perceive them if they do not have any empirical qualities, which is to say that they are not composed of sensations? But if they are all in the mind then they are private, just like sensations, in which case each person’s empirical world is private to them. How can this be reconciled with the common sense view that there is only one empirical world, which is real in the sense of continuing to exist when unperceived? The tendency among philosophers these days is to say that ‘somehow’ we perceive reality by means of sensations; the reality is one and public, the sensations are many and private. But in my (minority) view this is a cop out. Try to see if you can figure it out for yourself.