Manjinder asked:

Who invented philosophers and why?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

This is an old story. No-one knows if it’s true. But it’s one of those stories that seems so true, they should be.

About 2500 years ago there was a man called Pythagoras, who had a private school going in Kroton, which is in Italy. In this school he taught mathematics, music and astronomy. Many of the citizens were worried about this difficult curriculum. Why is this fellow teaching these really hard subjects? And also: how come he is so clever and we are so dull? There was quite a bit of jealousy about, you see. In those days all schools were private, so many ordinary people missed out on going to school.

Now at the same time, there were similar schools all over the Mediterranean teaching similar subjects. Many of the uneducated Greeks were suspicious of them as well. Why? Because they did not teach you religion and what the gods are all about, but the sciences.

So they called those people who taught and studied in those school ‘logographoi’. The word means, in English, ‘people who use their brains and write books’.

And so, back to Pythagoras in Kroton. One day a man came up to him in the market place and asked him: ‘Hey, Pythagoras, is it possible that you are one of these logographoi?’

Pythagoras may have thought to himself, this fellow wants to pick a fight with me. So he just smiled and said instead: ‘I am a friend of wisdom!’

In Greek, friend=philo and wisdom=sophia. So the word he used was ‘Philosopher’.

And from then on, people like him — people who think and teach wisdom — have been called philosophers.

Elizabeth asked:

Is God necessary for objective morality? Is he sufficient?

Answer by Peter Jones

By my calculations God would be neither necessary nor sufficient for this purpose. The ethical schemes of Schopenhauer and the Buddha, for two well-known examples of what you may mean by objective moral schemes, do not depend on God, and would fail if there were a God who could interfere with the operations of Nature. So He is not necessary for such a scheme.

And then, even if God told me that some action was right or wrong why should I believe Him? I might prefer my own ethical scheme. So neither is He sufficient. This is not flippancy or disrespect, it is the logic of the situation. You could try googling ‘Hobbes Leviathan’ for a long discussion.

For an ethical scheme that is truly objective, that can be derived directly from Nature, that would function inevitably according to the way the universe simply is, then try also Lao Tsu. For this view the laws of Heaven and Earth would follow ineluctably from Tao being what it is, and there would be no God to have any choice in the matter.

Ben asked:

The philosopher who best represents the idea that we are a bundle of neurons is probably who?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Some preliminary remarks.

I take it that ‘we’ refers to each of us as an individual.

When I speak of ‘you’ or ‘I’ I could be referring to:

* a human being (member of the species Homo sapiens)

* a self (an inner mental presence which every normal adult human feels she is or has at any waking moment)

* a person (mental entity with psychological connectedness through time; however, the word is also sometimes used as a synonym for ‘self’ or for ‘human being’).

Clearly an adult human being is not a bundle of neurons (nerve cells), but does include exactly that (a brain) as part of itself.

Neither a self nor a person, being a mental entity, is a bundle of neurons either, but it’s widely accepted that they,

* arise from or

* equate to or, at very least,

* require

the activity of a brain.

So, whilst nobody quite says we are bundles of neurons, there are those who say a self is a ‘bundle of perceptions’, and those who say a self is the behaviour of ‘a pack of neurons’.

Hume famously wrote that minds or selves or persons (he used these words loosely and interchangeably) are ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions’ (by ‘perceptions’ he meant what we call ‘experiences’). He could find no evident connexion between successive, fleeting bundles of experience ie no evidence of a persisting ‘self’ (obviously if we say the connexion is that each introspected bundle is mine we beg the question as to a persisting self). This Transience View of mental selves was later held by William James and is popular today, a notable advocate being Galen Strawson, and is a view held by some Buddhists. Others, including other Buddhists, think that such fleeting mental entities don’t deserve the status of ‘selves’ (as compared with the robustly substantial, persisting, traditional ‘soul’) and so think the self is an illusion. I prefer to think of them as virtual selves constructed anew, moment by moment, by a brain.

The late great scientist Francis Crick introduces his popular brain science book The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994) as follows:

”You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells… As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’.’

So Hume, James, Strawson the Younger, Buddha, Crick and Alice in Wonderland are on your case.

Finally, the dualistic view that the ‘self’ is a persisting non-material substance, the ‘res cogitans’ of Descartes, the ‘soul’ of Christianity, distinct from the body, is less popular than it was, especially among philosophers and scientists.

Debra asked:

What is time? Does it exist outside the human experience, and can we prove it exists at all?

Answer by Caterina Pangallo

There is no question that time is not a matter of experience. We don’t possess time sensors. People who are locked into solitary confinement lose all sense of time after a while, especially if they can’t see the light outside. For example, Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo marked the wall with the passing of days for 14 years, so as to keep a hold on the time he was locked up. But he had a little hole in his prison to see the light changing.

So you see that time is our creation. Without light, and its constant rhythmical cycle, there is no time.

Another way we observe time is when things age and decay. But this is not time. It is things changing, and we associate those changes with something moving along which we call time. But of course nothing is moving except the processes which cause those changes.

So time does not exist for any object that does not move. We could not measure time except that we can observe things changing. So all our definitions of time refer to the motions of things and their cycling and their ageing.

Time is for us a way of locating ourselves in a present, and we call what went before ‘the past’ and what may still happen ‘the future’. But strictly speaking this is just a convention. When you think about it, there is never a ‘present’. What you experience now has already gone, at least a split second before you experience it.

You might be interested in how philosophers like Parmenides arrived at their paradoxical notion of a block universe, or how religions teach us that all time is one for God. It is a tacit acknowledgement by us that time is a purely human phenomenon. So the Bible and the Greek philosophers (or some of them) knew this. Parmenides made the correct observation that we humans can only experience phenomena. But the gods in their heavens see everything at once.

The gods don’t experience time because there is no time when you take away the phenomena. This explains why they got bored stiff with their unchanging world and decided, every so often, to transform themselves into creatures and cause problems for us humans. Where else could they find their entertainment?

But we humans have more than enough entertainment, and every civilisation that goes beyond the struggle for survival becomes a kindergarten. Everything we do is play, of course some of it not very pleasant. No wonder the gods are jealous of us. Not because we have time, but because we have feelings, and feelings can’t exist in an eternity without time or space to play.

Marty asked:

Why doesn’t Descartes address the issue of unifying the body and mind?

Answer by Craig Skinner

He does. Only it’s less well-known and less-often emphasized than his separating them as two different substances, res extensa and res cogitans (Cartesian dualism). Having spent so much time and energy arguing that body and mind were distinct and independent substances, he spent much of his final 10 years insisting on their interdependence, which he described as a ‘real substantial union’. Of course he never convincingly explained how the ghost could interact with the machine, as it were, but then nobody else can, one of the flaws of dualism.

In 6th Meditation (1641) he says ‘I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but… I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit’ (here Descartes uses ‘I’ to mean his mind, soul or self).

In Objections against the Meditations and Replies (1641), he says ‘The mind is united in real and substantial manner to the body… if an angel were in a human body it would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which are caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a genuine human being’. It seems to me that here Descartes acknowledges that a human being is a necessarily embodied creature.

However, the difficulty of the dualistic view is to explain how the mind can affect the body, and vice versa. This was not lost on one of Descartes’ most astute correspondents, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, niece of England’s King Charles I. How can a soul, being simply a thinking substance produce voluntary movements of the limbs, she asked, anticipating Ryle’s much later ghost-in-the-machine argument. Descartes had no satisfactory answer but replied (1643) that the mind-body union (human being) is a primitive notion (as with the mind and the body), and later added that the union is known only obscurely by the intellect but clearly by the senses. Here he seems to be saying: forget trying to analyze the union, it is enough that we feel it. We might say that the union has distinctive, irreducible properties in its own right. For example, hunger is not reducible either to making the intellectual judgment ‘I need food’ or to physiological events such as stomach contractions/ falling blood sugar. Thus Descartes says in his Principles of Philosophy (1644):

‘We also experience within ourselves certain other things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone. These arise… from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body. This list includes… appetites… emotions… sensations.’

His last published work ‘Les passions de l’ame’ (Passions of the Soul, 1649) was a study of experiences unique to the mind-body union.

At one stage Descartes suggests the pineal gland as the site of mind-body interaction (falsely believing that this structure does not occur in animals). But this does nothing to explain how the interaction occurs — we are still left with thoughts mysteriously affecting the body’s ‘animal spirits’ and vice versa, or else God mediating all of it so that no genuine interaction is needed.

So you can see that Descartes does more than address the issue, he wrestles with it at length. Unfortunately he tends to be known only for his cogito, dualism and scepticism, and as a great mathematician.

Finally, it’s no walk in the park to explain how the mind affects the body on a monistic view, never mind a dualistic one: the question of how, indeed whether, a thought, feeling or conscious decision can affect a causally closed physical world; and this is intimately related to debates about free will/ determinism and the nature of causation.

A superb, short (57 pages) account of Descartes’ philosophy of mind is ‘The Great Philosophers: Descartes’ by John Cottingham (1997) Phoenix Paperbacks, obtainable for 01 pence plus postage (used copy) from Amazon.

Susie asked:

Hi… I have a reaction paper to make on Ludwig’s ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitched of our intelligence by means of language.’… What does Ludwig really mean by this? I need to expound and react.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

It doesn’t help that you have misquoted Wittgenstein in a nonsensical way. The quotation should be ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.’

The fact is that Wittgenstein said what he meant and he meant what he said so there is no question of what did he really mean. If he had really meant something else he would have said something else.

In this one sentence Wittgenstein is summing up what he sees as the real task of philosophy. When we are thinking philosophically language deceives us, it bewitches our intelligence and this is the thing that we have to battle against. The task of the philosopher is to free himself from thinking philosophically.