Ayotunde asked:

What are the fundamental questions Thales asked?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Goodness me, this is so long ago that even Aristotle had to rely on second-hand reports. His problem is therefore still ours: namely, how much of this is real; how much merely idle gossip?

Judging by a few accounts which add up to a believable portrait, he seems to have been a man with a scientific bend, e.g mathematics, engineering, astronomy. Just as long as you take care not to confuse it with what we call by those names.

And so to his notorious proposition. But you must try to understand the background, otherwise it makes no sense.

In religious mythology, nature is one and continuous. Which means that one could explain the existence of some natural thing by the transformation of another natural thing, e.g. a human being turned into flowers. The Roman poet Ovid wrote a big book on these things, called appropropriately ‘Metamorphoses’.

In addition the Greeks worshipped innumerable forces of nature as gods.

A skeptical person might be induced to question these beliefs. Thales, who apparently travelled widely and must have heard hundreds of such stories in other cultures, probably grew skeptical about their rational basis. And so it might have occurred to him that water, although it bears dozens of different names of gods in different localities, is actually one and the same everywhere. Moreover, it seems to occur everywhere, even in deserts, and it springs out of cracks in mountains too.

So his fundamental question was: Could water be the substance from which everything else is made?

I don’t believe it was a doctrine. In those days thinkers did not write up doctrines; they discussed ideas over a glass of fine wine. He might have challenged like-minded men with his idea. When we hear what Anaximander retorted, it seems very probable that he put it up for others to think about and debate.

They did; and the most astonishing aspect is, that just three generations down the track, the arguments had become so subtle that Demokritos (or Leukippos) framed his idea that atoms are the final building blocks of the cosmos. It was a ‘mere philosophical idea’ then; but at last in 1810, John Dalton discovered empirically that atoms are real things and, as they say, the rest is history!

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Mark asked:

I am having trouble deciphering Aristophanes’ clouds. He seems to be ridiculing Socrates for his radical beliefs, is this true? How far apart are these two men?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

Answering the last part of your question first: They occupied virtually opposite positions in respect of their beliefs about a healthy society. Aristophanes sided with the conservatives; he wanted the old sterling morals of the Persian war generation reinstated, and although nothing much of it survived the explosion of wealth at Athens, plenty of lip service was still paid to it. The playwright evidently believed that the innate character of Athenian society was as good as one might wish, and that the exaggerations of recent times were reversible hiccups which did not impair the overall moral fibre of the state.

Whereas Socrates saw the Athenians succumbing to greed, immodesty, power hunger and political instability. So he made himself a one-man band for reform; but after some time of trying to awaken the citizens to the desperate need for virtues, for examining themselves in light of the good of their soul and their individual responsibility for the collective health of the state, he gave up. They just didn’t want to know. So he turned to the young, who were curious and fascinated by this ugly satyr with the honey tongue of wisdom. Before long, half the adults at Athens were incensed at what they believed to be his mission of undermining their authority over these teenage youths.

This is a nutshell view of what seems to have been going on. Socrates had become a ‘character’ known to everyone, with plenty of gossip flying around, most of it nonsense. None of this serves, however, as an excuse for Aristophanes. He is not ridiculing Socrates, but a straw man. The fact is that the playwright produced a vicious character assassination and put falsehoods on stage full well knowing that ‘public opinion’ about Socrates (i.e. gossip) confused his aims and methods with those of the travelling teachers of rhetoric who were flooding Athens at the time in search of prestige and a quick buck. This is a reference to the so-called ‘sophists’. I can’t enlarge on them here, so look them up. But the point about The Clouds is precisely that Socrates is depicted as someone who worships strange gods and runs a school (called the ‘Thinkery’) where people come to learn how to lie and cheat with conviction, which is indeed what some of the less scrupulous sophists were known for.

At his trial, years later, Socrates would ruefully remind his judges that none of the accusations against him had a foundation in truth; that they were mere echoes of Aristophanes’ play. When you are aware of this long-term outcome, the sardonic humour of the play tends to leave rather a sour taste in one’s mouth. Because this is more than satire; it is a pack of lies dressed up as comedy; and as it happened, lodged in the memory of the Athenians much longer than was good for their rational appreciation of what the trial was all about.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Vygintas asked:

Please email me the answer since I actually want to know this.

I’m working on these answers and I have some, but I want something out of my head to help me out, so it would be fun and great if you could help me out :)

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

This is a great question. I can’t do justice to all of the ideas you canvass but I will try to sketch a general strategy for a philosophical response, as opposed to empty speculation.

Who am I? That’s a good question. How do I know that I am me, myself, rather than some other being who (temporarily or permanently) is deluded or tricked into thinking that they are me? There are hints of Eastern philosophy here (the idea that the ultimate being or godhead forgets what ‘it’ is and pretends to be you, me and all the other people — a favourite theme of Alan Watts).

Let’s try to stay sane and keep our bearings.

First point: it is possible for a human being to be a different person from the one they think they are. For example, in the phenomenon known as amnesia. A related phenomenon is multiple personality disorder. Let’s say I wake up one morning realizing that I am not GK, the moderator for Ask a Philosopher but rather… someone else. Invent any story you like. There is some back story about how this other person, call him KG, went through some kind of trauma or brainwashing process to make him think that he is GK.

In the movie, ‘The Nines’ 2007 (spoiler alert!) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810988/ a race of super-intelligent beings like to play their equivalent of video games, creating whole worlds and civilizations — like the place we know as ‘Earth’. The main character is a super-intelligent alien but doesn’t realize it. He has temporarily allowed himself to forget. He thinks he’s human. He holds the fate of all human beings in his hands (or head). But these other people, how ‘real’ are they? There are different possibilities, depending on exactly how you conceive of the ‘strings’ that control them.

A game is only interesting if you don’t fully know in advance how things will turn out. But who says the game has to be interesting? If I am moving these people around like puppets, then they become, in effect, the ‘limbs’ of my extended body. They are parts of me. Could they still ‘have their own consciousness’? That’s your idea. Well, if I am controlling them completely, then their consciousness must also be part of my consciousness — I must be able to track what they are thinking and feeling at every moment. Their eyes are my eyes, and so on.

So that’s one possibility we want to discount. The creator must exist at some logical distance from its creations, otherwise this is just a story about amnesia or multiple personality disorder.

In Unit 2 of the Pathways Metaphysics Program, I consider the possibility (similar in some respects to the plot of Sophie’s World) that I am a character in a novel in the process of being written who only thinks he is ‘real’. Leaving aside the problem of free will, there is a difficulty in principle about how we can concieve of this ‘reality’ as a target for true or false judgements. Here’s an extract:

If the novel and its author are merely figments of a bad continuing hallucination I am suffering from then, provided that I have not fallen into complete psychotic withdrawal, I am still capable of making judgements about the real world I inhabit. Then my reports of my hallucinations would have exactly the same status as the novelist’s account of her thoughts. The contents of my hallucinations, just like the contents of the novelist’s thoughts, are objective, datable events in the real world.

However, if things really are as we have described, then serious difficulties arise. Say, according to the novel I was drinking beer in the pub with Ian and Dave on [the night I first heard the novelist’s voice in my head]. Later, tossing and turning in my bed, I seem to remember that Sonya was there too. Is that a false belief? The problem is finding a way in which my belief could be corrigible. Suppose the woman’s voice tells me that Sonya wasn’t there: ‘You split up the day before, don’t you remember?’ — I refuse to believe a word of it. She was there, wearing a tartan skirt and the green mohair sweater I bought for her last Christmas. ‘She couldn’t have been wearing that, because she gave it to Oxfam after it shrunk in the wash.’ — Then it was another green mohair sweater. ‘Look, she was at her sister’s twenty-first birthday party. What’s more, you were supposed to go with her!’ — Sonya doesn’t have a sister, she never had a sister. — And so on.

The writer of the novel I am in is trying to tell me ‘what happened’ but what exactly is the basis for the authority of the female voice that I can hear in my head, commenting on all my actions? How can ‘she’ be right and I be wrong? The moral of this is that if you play fast and loose with ‘worlds’ and ‘realities’ in this way, there is a danger of losing the very thing that makes a world a world: the difference between appearance and reality. I call this (with a nudge to Freud) the ‘reality principle’ of metaphysics.

If determinism is true, then in some sense, our naive conception of what our ‘freedom’ consists in is compromised. Arguably, this isn’t fatal for human free will. More serious would by your idea that someone else, an actual individual, a super-intelligent alien or whatever, is making the decisions that I think I am making (at every moment, presumably, if this is going to work). Then they are me. I’ve just forgotten who I really am.

Alternatively, if we start from the inside and consider the existence of an individual allegedly ‘living inside’ a computer program or novel in the process of being written, we have not yet formed a coherent conception of a subject who makes judgements, true or false, or a world which those judgements are about.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html

Darius asked:

How different might the laws of nature have been (in some other logically possible but nomologically impossible world)? Are there any limits?

Answer by Massimo Pigliucci

The question of laws of nature, their ontological status, and their significance for our understanding of the world, is very much an open one. Moreover, it is a question at the fascinating interface among metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science and, of course, natural science itself (particularly fundamental physics, but also chemistry and biology).

To begin with, let us get straight the difference between nomological and logical possibilities. Nomological means ‘relating to or denoting certain principles, such as laws of nature, that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are simply taken as true,’ the word originating from the Greek nomos (law). That standard dictionary definition gets at the heart of the matter by affirming that nomological principles are neither logically necessary nor ‘theoretically explicable.’ Take, for instance, the law of conservation of energy, which states that the total energy of a closed system cannot change over time (i.e., energy can only be transformed, but not created or destroyed). This is not logically necessary in the sense that its violation would not entail any logical contradiction (unlike, say, the idea that I can simultaneously be and not be me — which violates the principle of non contradiction in classical logic). At the same time, we don’t really know why the law of conservation actually applies to the universe as we understand it, i.e., we do not have a theoretical account of it. It is more like a brute empirical fact about nature, or as a theoretical axiom from which other things can be derived.

In a sense, then, logical possibility is about what is possible in principle, while nomological possibility concerns what is actually physically possible, given the laws of the universe as they stand. The first set is, at first glance, much larger than the second one.

But, of course, things are not quite that simple, as physicists have long played with a few ideas that entail the tantalizing prospect of bringing the range of nomological possibilities closer to that of logical ones.

There are at the least three such proposals on the table. One is the so-called many-worlds (or Everett, named after American physicist Hugh Everett III, who first proposed it) ‘interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. This is the idea that the universal wave function is objectively real (and doesn’t ‘collapse,’ contra to other interpretations of quantum mechanics), so that every time that events could take more than one course (say, I may or may not decide to finish writing this essay) the universe literally splits into two, in one version of which course of action A (I finish writing) takes place, while in the other course of action B (I don’t finish) occurs. There’s even a fun app (aptly called ‘Universe Splitter’) which allows you to make random decisions and track the ensuing branching of universes you keep creating while using the app. My understanding, however (and I stand to be corrected by a physicist, if the case may be) is that Everettian quantum mechanics doesn’t fool around with the laws of the universe itself, so that the number of nomological possibilities — while vastly augmented by the splitting procedure — would still be far less than the number of logical possibilities, because each course of action (each split universe) would still be subject to the laws of nature as we understand them.

This limitation, however, does not hold for another bold idea currently entertained by cosmologists: the multiverse. This is the conjecture — as yet with no empirical basis, but compatible with what fundamental physics tells us about the world — that our universe is just one of infinitely many, constantly being created and destroyed in a much larger milieu, i.e., the multiverse. According to some physicists, such as Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, different universes may be characterized by different sets of laws of physics, which means that a much larger number of logical possibilities would become nomologically implemented as well, just not all in the same ‘universe.’

Thirdly, we have theoretical physicist Max Tegmark’s idea of the ‘mathematical universe,’ the contention that the fundamental structure of the universe is (as opposed to simply being described by) mathematics. The building blocks of reality are, according to Tegmark, mathematical structures, not objects or particles. A corollary of this idea is that all possible (i.e., all logically consistent) mathematical structure do exist, in one way (or one universe) or the other, so that logical and nomological sets would coincide.

It is hard to know what to make of this notion (in what sense am I, or my laptop ‘made of’ mathematical structures?), but it is certainly a venerably old one, going back to Pythagoras (in the philosophy of mathematics, Tegmark’s proposal is aptly referred to as Pythagoreanism about mathematical objects).

One more thing to consider within the context of this discussion. So far, I have assumed that the nomological set is defined by fundamental laws, i.e., by laws that apply always and everywhere (at the least in a given universe). But some philosophers of science — chiefly Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking — maintain that there are no such things are universal laws, that all so-called laws of nature are phenomenological, i.e., they are arrived at by approximately applying to real phenomena a set of highly abstract, and quite literally false, idealizations. Consider, for instance, Galileo’s law of inertia, which eventually led to Newton’s first law of motion. Galileo arrived at the formulation of the law by carrying out thought experiments involving idealized frictionless planes, objects that simply do not exist in the real world. His results, however, hold approximately true for real planes and surfaces, and have therefore been generalized from phenomenological (describing a range of phenomena) to fundamental (applying always and everywhere). Cartwright and Hacking, however, invoke basic empiricist principles to deny that leap, suggesting that as far as we know all laws of physics are only approximately and locally valid. If that is the case, then there are no such things as nomological possibilities, strictly speaking.

Prof Massimo Pigliucci Graduate Center & Lehman College City University of New York http://platofootnote.org

Answer by Craig Skinner

I’d say no limits at all.

First, I think all logically possible combinations of variants of laws could have occurred provided we accept that possible universes thereby include those that last less than a second, those where nothing ever happens, those with different dimensions, say 2 or 32, and so forth, most of these universes being lifeless of course.

Secondly, why should logic always apply in a universe? We must include the myriad illogical ones too.

I don’t want to get bogged down in what exactly a law of nature is and how it can be differentiated from an accidental exceptionless regularity. Let us just assume, as does your question, that our world is ordered by laws: some causal (such as what happens when two chemical substances combine); some conservational (energy, charge, momentum, parity); some deterministic, others probabilistic (radioactivity for instance). And let’s include the constants of nature such as the strength of each of the four forces, the quantum of charge, fine structure constant, and speed of light.

Could the suite of laws and constants in our world have been different?

Leibniz certainly thought so. He felt God could have decreed whatever laws he wanted, but in fact chose the suite that gave the best possible world, one that included creatures with free will who could relate (or not, as they chose) to a loving God.

And of course scientists of this era mostly felt they were indeed discovering God’s laws.

Later scientists and philosophers, taking a naturalistic viewpoint, asked whether the laws might have been different. A hundred years ago, many, perhaps most, would have said no, there is only one logically consistent set of laws – we cant yet see this, but when we fully understand all the laws, we will see that no variation is logically possible.

These days, fewer think this. However it has become clear that slight variation from the actual constants and laws would produce worlds where intelligent life is impossible. If gravity were a tiny bit stronger, the universe would have collapsed moments after it started; with gravity a bit weaker no stars or planets would have formed. if the strong nuclear force were weaker, no stable elements could form; if stronger, no carbon or oxygen. And there are many other examples. This is known as the fine-tuning problem – how come the laws are just right for we humans to exist?

No problem for religious people, God made the laws that way. No problem for those accepting of a brute fact, that’s just the way the world is, and if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here (simple anthropic principle).

An alternative favoured by some is that all possible combinations of laws/constants occur in different universes (a multiverse), so that, by chance, a few universes will have the fine tuned laws, and, of course, we live in such a universe.

Kant considered that the laws of nature were part of the forms of our perception and categories of our understanding without which we could have no coherent experience at all i.e. any experienced world necessarily exhibits space, time, causality and other regularities. Exhibits them, that is, in our experience (the world of appearances), we can know nothing of the world as it is in itself according to Kant.

Kant also felt that mathematical truths, although a priori, were not analytic (true by reason of the meaning of the terms) but synthetic. He was thereby obliged to admit that, say, 5+7 might not have been 12. Yet this seems a necessary truth. He solved it nicely by saying that 5+7=12 was necessarily true in any experienced world, such as ours, and could be false only in worlds where there was no experience, so could not be false in any world we found ourselves in. Such worlds would be so disordered and chaotic that ordered entities capable of experience would be out of the question. I rather agree: worlds where logic doesn’t hold might exist, but these worlds couldn’t contain the likes of us.

In short, I think all possible variations of our laws of nature could have been. And for all we know, all are instantiated in some universe or other within a vast, maybe infinite, multiverse.

Finally, if you feel there must be a reason for everything (Principle of Sufficient Reason), and are in a speculative mood, you can ask what metarule decides the choice of laws.

Leibniz favoured Goodness. I’ve rather assumed Fullness (all possibilities occur) or perhaps No Rule (a random selection of all possibilities). It cant be Simplicity because the simplest option would be absolutely nothing rather than anything at all, and that’s not the case.

Then one can ask what higher-level metametarule decides whether Fullness, Goodness or No Rule occurs at the metalevel. Simplicity at the metametalevel would favour No Rule. No Rule would favour Randomness. Fullness would favour all rules. Goodness would favour itself, or maybe this is impossible (violates the Foundation Principle, like a cause causing itself, or God creating himself).

More can be said on this issue of levels and Selectors but I will leave it at that.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Emily asked:

Can a deductively invalid argument have a conclusion that is logically true?

Answer by Craig Skinner

Yes. A logical truth is a tautology, and so, being true full stop, needs no support from argument. Hence it can be the conclusion of any premises at all, or none, and therefore of an invalid argument, of a valid but unsound argument, of a valid and sound argument, or of a silly argument.

An illustration:

1. Invalid argument.

P1 All prime numbers are less than 20
P2 19 is less than 20
C 19 is a prime number

Here the C is logically true, but doesn’t follow from the Ps — it doesn’t follow from P1 that all numbers less than 20 are prime.

2. Valid but unsound argument.

P1 All numbers less than 20 are prime
P2 19 is less than 20
C 19 is a prime number

Now C does follow from the Ps. Argument therefore valid. But unsound because P1 is false

3. Valid, sound argument.

P1 A number divisible only by itself and 1 is a prime number
P2 19 is divisible only by itself and 1
C 19 is a prime number

4. Silly argument.

P1 Grass is blue
P2 Poodles are cats
C 19 is a prime number

Barely an argument, Ps completely irrelevant to C, but so what, C still true

That a logical truth follows from anything is one of the two ‘paradoxes of implication’ in classical logic. The other is that anything follows from a contradiction.

To tidy up the first, some logicians say that the Ps must be relevant to the C (relevantist logic) although it is hard to spell this out rigorously.

To tidy up the second, some logicians accept that there are some true contradictions (paraconsistency) but that this needn’t entail the ‘explosion’ whereby anything and everything follows (dialetheic logic).

These other logics are interesting, but for everyday living and for philosophical argument, classical logic is just fine.

Craig Skinner

Answer by Helier Robinson

In modern symbolic, no. In normal reasoning, yes. In symbolic logic validity is determined by truth-tables: a conditional (If p then q) is invalid only if q, the consequent, is false; if p, the antecedent, is false or if p and q are both true then the conditional is valid. But normal reasoning does not agree with this, so the truth-functional conditional is called material implication, to distinguish it from genuine implication. For example, ‘If roses are red then violets are blue’ is invalid in the sense that the colour of violets has nothing to do with the colour of roses. The definition of validity, other than in material implication, is that the truth of the antecedent necessitates the truth of the conclusion.

The peculiarity of material implication means that a false antecedent validly implies anything you please; or, to emphasise the absurdity of this, it means that from a contradiction you can deduce anything you please.

For example, ‘If circles are square then I am the king of France’ is valid. This flaw carries over into quantificational logic, in which anything said of something that does not exist is true. For example, if no mermaids exist then that validly means that all mermaids are butterflies, and also that no mermaids are butterflies. Most logicians believe that this peculiarity of logic is a genuine feature of logic which was hidden until George Boole invented truth-functional logic and revealed it; and it is something that must be simply avoided when using this logic. Others, myself included, think that this is a fatal flaw in the truth functional approach to logic: validity is not dependent simply on the truth of falsity of the antecedent and consequent, but on a relation of necessity between them. This necessity is grasped by the mind but not present between the words or symbols.

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.

Gennady asked:

How to start studying philosophy? My interest seems to be more in Metaphysics. It would be nice to have a guideline or program to follow. Is college a way to go?

Thank you.

Answer by Helier Robinson

Not many university philosophy departments teach metaphysics these days: analytic philosophy, which repudiates metaphysics, is all the rage. You might try a Jesuit college. Or read about it on your own: start with Russell’s ‘A History of Western Philosophy’ and follow it with Copleston’s ‘A History of Philosophy’. Or, as a last resort, try my ‘Renascent Rationalism’, available from Sharebooks.com. Good luck!

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.

Answer by Peter Jones

How wonderful. Someone who is interested in metaphysics.

I would say no, college is not the way to go. If it is a typical western-style course you will emerge just as confused as your teachers and quite possibly even more so.

My suggestion would be that you devise your own programme and then pursue it while using something like the Pathways Programme to hone your thinking and writing skills, gain an introduction to the literature and get access to good advice and encouragement. Pick a topic or problem that fascinates you then pursue it to the bitter end. On the way you will have to deal with the whole range of metaphysical problems, but you will have a focus for your investigation, and solving one metaphysical problem is solving them all.

If you go to college you will have to do a great deal of work that will not necessarily help you understand anything but has to be done for sake of the exams and shoring up the prevailing paradigm. A modular distance-learning course such as the one Pathways offers is flexible, cheap and convenient and tuition is geared towards you specifically. No student binge-drinking parties, unfortunately, but you’ll cover the ground in a quarter of the time. I say this as an appreciative ex-student and not as a member of staff. If I can be of any further help feel free to track me down.

Peter Jones at philosophos.org

Geoffrey Klempner

As the author of the Pathways Metaphysics Programme I would like to put in a word for the analytic tradition in which I was trained, at London and Oxford Universities.

It is true that what analytic philosophers generally conceive as ‘metaphysics’ is something more modest than great philosophers in the Western or Eastern traditions have regarded as metaphysics. Some regard modesty as a virtue. I regard it as is a reason to be dissatisfied with analytic philosophy but not a reason to shun that tradition. A university degree, together perhaps with some more adventurous reading of your own, would be the best of both worlds.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html