Sisella asked:

Existentialism and Stoicism are two well known philosophies of life. Are there any others you can think of? What makes a philosophy ‘practical’?

Answer by Massimo Pigliucci

Philosophy, as much as it is hard to believe nowadays, very much started out as a practical endeavor. For many of the ancient Greek philosophers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, and a number of others — it simply would not have made much sense to think of philosophy as detached from everyday life. The very word ‘philosophy,’ after all, means love of wisdom, not love of academic discussions that nobody else cares about.

So, aside from Stoicism (which originated in Greece during the Hellenistic period and flourished during the Roman Empire) and Existentialism (a 20th century approach developed especially by French writers like J.P. Sartre, S. de Beauvoir, and A. Camus) a number of practical philosophies have been proposed in both the Western and Eastern traditions. Just to name a few: Cynicism (in the ancient Greek sense, not meaning a club of nasty naysayer), Epicureanism (which, contra popular opinion, it’s not all about seeking carnal pleasures), Buddhism, and Confucianism.

Moreover, these days there is a healthy (I think) blurring of the line separating philosophy and psychology, particularly so-called positive psychology, i.e. the psychology of life’s meaning and affirmation. Consider two well established approaches to psychotherapy: logotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Logotherapy was established by neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who tried to learn from his terrible experience and make it the foundation of a general method of coping with life’s difficulties. Similarly, the related cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on practical ways to analyze one’s faulty thinking about difficult situations in life, attempting to redirect thoughts and emotions through repeated practice. Interestingly, cognitive behavioral and similar type of approaches have been found empirically to be the most effective therapies for actually changing human behavior for the better.

Your question mentions Stoicism, and it is crucial to note that both logotherapy, and especially cognitive behavioral therapy, have been greatly influenced by that ancient practical philosophy. Stoics were concerned with three general areas of inquiry: logic, physics, and ethics. By logic they meant not just the kind of formal logic we study today, but more generally anything to do with reasoned discourse and epistemology (theories of knowledge). Physics for the Stoics included the natural sciences broadly construed, as well as metaphysics. Finally, ethics was concerned with knowledge of what it takes to pursue the good life, what the Greek called eudaimonia.

The important thing to appreciate is that the Stoics saw both physics and logic as directly related to ethics, that is they conceived a coherent philosophical system that made their ethical precepts consistent with what we know about the world (science, metaphysics) and about reason (logic, epistemology). This may explain a recent resurgent interest in Stoicism, with the University of Exeter actually organizing an annual ‘Stoic Week’ at the end of November every year (try it out: it encourages people to live like a Stoic for a few days, logging their experiences on the initiative’s web site, essentially conducting an ongoing social experiment in practical philosophy).

The other thing to note is that for a number of years now some philosophers have taken to develop a practical application usually known as philosophical counseling, often nicknamed ‘therapy for the sane.’ This can be done in a number of ways, and you can find out more through popular books like my colleague Lou Marinoff’s Plato, Not Prozac! Philosophical counselors draw from the vast variety of practical philosophical traditions (including the above mentioned Stoicism, Epicureanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Existentialism) to help people cope more rationally with life’s everyday challenges.

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

Phil asked:

I intend to give myself a systematic classic liberal education for the next 5-10 years. I realize one could spend a lifetime with one philosopher such as Nietzsche, Aristotle, Plato, and many others. Having said that, I want to read the texts of about 25 or so of the greatest political and moral philosophers and determine for myself what they say. I have read many of them for school or pleasure already along with a lot of criticism but I want to start fresh.

The next question is, after reading Plato and analyzing it myself should I start on criticism of him to compare with my analysis or proceed to the next philosopher, who would most likely be Aristotle? Should I include novels and fiction like The Iliad, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, etc? And if I do, should I read them during the period of philosophy in which they were written or just as supplemental not in any particular order? Another idea I am considering is to just start with Homer, work through some histories and then begin Plato and see where that leads? There is just an overwhelming amount of work in the Western Tradition and I need guidance on where to begin and how to proceed.

Answer by Julian Plumley

The first thing is that philosophy isn’t really something you study, it is something you do. Treating it as ‘getting an education,’ especially treating it like learning history, is not a good idea. You risk getting part way into your programme and getting stuck and demotivated. You mention political philosophy. What about this is most interesting to you? What questions do you have, which authors have you always wanted to study? You can read some introductory articles on the subject, for example at the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia site: http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html. But what are you going to do with what you learn? Write a blog, write an essay, maybe contribute to Ask a Philosopher? Without knowing that, it is very hard to keep this effort up.

The second thing is that philosophy is by far the most confusing subject to study. The scope is enormous; there are no signposts. But it is critical for you to get ‘lost’ in philosophy, in order to really learn anything. It is emphatically not a subject where you can proceed from one classic book to another and eat it all up. Just learning what each philosopher said about such-and-such isn’t much use, because it will not be actionable for you. You should keep reading modern criticisms of classical works and up-to-date papers to better understand what you are looking at, and especially to see what questions they ask of the source materials. Follow your nose, browse and dip into things to see if they are useful for you. For sure, quite a lot of what you read will not make sense at first, but it may do later. And you will find your own voice.

My specific advice is that you study for a qualification — one that has exams that test you. (I did the London philosophy BA, International program — but your choice should be guided by your interests.) This is not so much because you will end up with a certificate. There are two more important things that that. Firstly, the curriculum and the reading list will have hopefully been chosen by someone with wide experience of the subject. And secondly, because exams force you to put things together in your mind in a coherent way. They force you to stop being lost and find your own path through the material. Certainly, from my own experience, I don’t think I would have learned much without the discipline of essay-writing and exams.

Lastly, I question the premise of starting with classic texts, such as Plato, in order to understand today’s problems. Yes, they are relevant, but not always in an obvious way. Why not start with modern authors, and recent academic work? For sure, you will find that they refer back to Plato and all the rest. But then you will have some thread to follow when you read them yourself. This is not to say that gaining a broad knowledge of philosophy is not useful, it is. But philosophy is guided firstly by the questions we have now. Good luck!

Julian Plumley graduated with BA (Hons) First Class in Philosophy in 2011 via the University of London International Programme. He is a former student of Dr Geoffrey Klempner.

Maurice asked:

What is love? Have philosophers anything useful to add to Plato’s discussion of this question in the ‘Symposium’?

Answer by Massimo Pigliucci

Philosophers have been discussing the idea of love and its implications for human affairs at least since Plato. Modern philosophers have proposed four different, though perhaps partially overlapping, conceptions of love that are significantly distinct from those of the ancients: (1) love as an emotion, (2) love as a ‘robust concern,’ (3) love as a union, and (4) love as valuing the other.

Let us start with the idea of robust concern. The defining feature of this kind of love is selfless interest in the other’s well-being, for his or her sake and not because we gain anything out of it. In the somewhat dry and formal words of philosopher Gabriele Taylor: ‘If x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics Ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worthwhile to benefit and be with y. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end.’

All right, I promise never to quote a technical paper on the philosophy of love directly again, because this is the sort of thing that gives philosophers a bad reputation. Still, what Taylor is saying is that we don’t love the other (y) because her characteristics (Ψ) benefit us, but because they are worth cherishing in their own right. Although this idea of selfless love has some commonsense appeal, there also seems to be something clearly amiss. As another philosopher, Harry Frankfurt, put it (not a direct quote!), the idea is that robust love is neither a matter of feelings nor a matter of opinions, but a matter of will: we love someone in a robust fashion because she acts in accordance with a set of motives and preferences that we approve of.

A second modern philosophical view to entertain is that of love as valuing the other person. The basic idea is that love means to value someone in himself or herself, and that we do so because of an appraisal that centers on the dignity of that person. If this sounds a bit abstract and detached from the real world, well, it is. But there is an important kernel that philosophers who support the value conception of love are trying to get at: the idea that a love object (a person) cannot simply be swapped for another one with similar characteristics, because this would violate the dignity of both people. Think of the ‘robust concern’ view just discussed: there is nothing in that view that would preclude you from having the same ‘concern’ for (that is, loving) another object with the same characteristics as the one you are loving now. You could therefore swap gods or lovers, or even love many gods and many people at the same time, as long as they share the same set of characteristics (Ψ). Some people might be okay with this, but others feel that real love ought to be more exclusive and less subject to commodification. If you are in the latter group, then the value view of love might fit you well.

The third modern philosophical perspective is of love as a union. This is the idea that what is central to love is two independent individuals forming a third, collective union, a ‘we’ that becomes more important than and transcends each individual ‘I.’ Some philosophers speak of this ‘we’ entity in a clearly metaphorical way, while others seem to give a more serious ontological (pertinent to existence) status to the ensemble, almost as if it really were a new individual in its own right. As with the value view of love, the union conception tries to capture something that most people who have been or are in love can relate to: the creation of a new set of priorities as the couple as a unit becomes more important than the individuals who constitute it. But therein lies a problem as well: human beings are both social and fairly individualistic animals, and one can object that a union view of love puts too much emphasis on the couple at the expense of personal space, rights, and dignity. As we all know, it is precisely this tension between joint and individual needs that often is at the root of relationship problems in real life.

Finally, we turn to the emotional view of love. In philosophy an emotion is a combination of an evaluation of the object of the emotion and a motivational response to that object. For instance, if I’m afraid of you, that means I have evaluated you as somehow dangerous to my health, and it probably also means that I am prepared to take some action against you, either defensive or evasive. Of course, thinking of love as an emotion would hardly be surprising for the non-philosopher, but the question for us here is: What sort of understanding of the phenomenon can be gained this way? And what potential problems arise if we conceptualize love primarily as an emotion?

One thing that philosophers get out of emotional theories of love is being allowed to distinguish loving someone from simply liking someone. If love is a distinct and deeper sort of emotion than the emotions elicited by friendship or admiration, then we begin to see why those other experiences are so clearly not like love. According to several philosophers who support an emotional view of love, what accounts for much of this difference is that we share a unique narrative history with the beloved: regardless of how he or she will change throughout life, we keep accumulating common memories of events and situations that are obviously unrepeatable with anyone else. This, according to such philosophers, also explains why we don’t commonly ‘trade up’ at the first opportunity, why we do not switch partners as soon as we meet someone with even better characteristics (call them ‘ Ψ+’) than the one we are currently engaged with.

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

Taela asked:

We have to write an essay from this scenario:

I’m very confused as to what to write. I have talked about dualism and Descartes idea of a thinking thing, but this is not enough, and I am not sure if I am on the right track.

Answer by Craig Skinner

Descartes wont help much here. But Locke will.

The key text is the famous chapter (27) ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ in Book 2 of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2nd edition 1694). Do read it, at least 27.8 to 27.29, it is one of the most important, influential, and still relevant parts of his philosophy.

Locke is concerned with fair praise/blame, both in this life and at the Last Judgment, what he calls ‘forensic’ issues. Clearly praise/blame can only be fair if the individual getting it is the SAME individual as the one who did the good/bad deeds.

So, what is it that makes me the same individual as yesterday or last year?

Locke distinguishes between being the same Human Being (‘same Man’ as he puts it) and being the same Person.

Being the same Human Being, like being the same plant or animal, is to be the same living, organized body, to be ‘the same continued life communicated to different particles of matter, as they happen successively to be united to that organized living body’ (27.8). In short, I am the same Man as twenty years ago even though none of the atoms constituting me then is part of me now.

Being the same Person is to have continuity of consciousness — one presently remembers one’s past experiences. Locke’s famous definition of ‘Person’ (27.9):

‘A thinking intelligent being, that has reason, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking’

So, Personal identity is not identity of substance (a person could swap her material body, or, Locke feels, her immaterial soul, without loss of identity) No, it is identity (continuity or connectedness) of consciousness.

Of course, being the same Human Being and being the same Person usually go together. But not always, as in your brain-swap scenario, or in Locke’s analogous mind-swap thought experiment. He describes the mind of the Prince entering the body of the sleeping Cobbler (whose own mind departs). The individual who later wakes up is the same Man as was (the Cobbler) but a different Person (the Prince).

So in your scenario, if you think we are essentially Human Beings, Andrea and Beth get brain transplants. If you think we are essentially Persons, Andrea and Beth get body transplants.

Which is the more coherent view, Human Being or Person? You must make up your own mind.

On the Human Being view, YOU were once a zygote, then embryo, foetus, child, adult, and may sadly sustain brain damage and pass into a persistent vegetative state (PVS). If you were to get a brain transplant, you would be the same Man with a new brain, even though this brain thought as it did in the donor, just as a transplanted heart pumps blood as it did in the donor.

On the Person view, YOU were never a zygote or an embryo, nor could you be a human in a PVS, for none of these has consciousness, far less continuity of consciousness, and so can’t be a Person.

I favour the Human Being approach. I think I am essentially an animal, that I AM this individual sitting typing this answer, that I was once an embryo, and that if I enter a PVS it will still be me lying on the bed, and my relatives wont think I no longer exist.

Irrespective of whether we think Person or Human Being best describes our essence, Locke’s memory criterion for Personal Identity has problems.

First, discontinuities in consciousness such as an old man remembering nothing of his boyhood. According to Locke the old man is not the same person as the boy, but he clearly is. On the other hand, is it fair to punish a demented person for something she can’t remember doing?

Secondly, the definition is circular, begging the question. How do you know that the memories you have are genuine rather than false or quasi-memories? To suppose they are YOUR memories presupposes there is a YOU.

Thirdly, uncertainties about preservation of identity in split brain/fission/duplication cases (more thought experiments). We end up with more than one individual psychologically continuous with the original (who is no more). Which of these new individuals IS the original. Of course, on the somatic Human Being view, none of them. And I think this is the right answer. The original is dead but psychological continuity with her is preserved in the new individuals, so that survival (in this way) may be more important to us than identity, as Derek Parfit argues for.

I hope I’ve said enough to get you on the right track.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Gem asked:

What are examples of concepts and words? How do they differ from each other?

Answer by Helier Robinson

I begin by giving you the viewpoint called conceptualism. A concept is a bonding together of an abstract idea and a word. Not to be confused with a bonding of a concrete idea and a word. The concrete is any quality received through the senses, such as sounds, colours, and tactile qualities. The abstract is anything not concrete, such as relations and properties of relations. The imagination is concrete: it operates with concrete images or memories of concrete sensations. Thought is abstract: it operates with abstract ideas. Both imagination and thought are aided, and communicated, by language. So thought may be pure thought (abstract ideas alone) or normal thought (by means of concepts) or nominal thought (by words alone). For example, you might have an abstract idea of triangle, but no word for it; or you might have the concept of triangle — the abstract idea bonded to the word triangle — or you might know the word triangle without knowing what it means.

Conceptualism is one answer to the question of what the meanings of universal words are. Another answer in nominalism, in which it is claimed that there are no such things as abstract ideas: all thought is silent speech, words are the counters of the mind, there is no thought without language.

If you can discover abstract ideas in your mind you will be a conceptualist; if not, you will be a nominalist.

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

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

This looks at first like a trick question. How do you ‘give an example’ of a concept without giving a word? The concept of justice, for example. We have (it is alleged) a concept of justice. And we have a word for it. The word is, ‘justice’. Duh!

And yet we do, in ordinary speech, distinguish between something that is ‘just a word’ and something that is a genuine concept. The word ‘cool’, for example, as used in the statement, ‘I think your hat is cool.’ I don’t mean, ‘I think that your hat would be good for protecting your head from the heat of the sun.’ Is there a concept of ‘cool’? Books could be (and probably have been) written about this.

In his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ at the beginning of the Essay on Human Understanding, Locke talks about the need to be clear about which ‘ideas’ (concepts) our words relate to, and the need for an account of how these ideas arise. Initially, this isn’t a problem of epistemology or metaphysics so much as a problem of communication: establishing some kind of methodology for resolving disputes that arise because of the misuse, or misunderstanding, of words and how they relate to ideas or concepts.

Some words clearly denote entirely different concepts, like the English word ‘bank’ which can refer to the side of a river, or a place which looks after your money. Possibly, there is an etymological link between these two usages (you’d have to look this up). But, at least potentially, when you count concept words and count concepts, you are not necessarily going to get the same number, because the same word can be used for different concepts (i.e. with different ‘meanings’), and the same concept can be referred to by means of different words. (I’ll leave you to think of an example of this.)

So, maybe, this is all the question is really asking: Give examples of how the same word can refer to different concepts, or the same concept can be referred to by means of different words. That’s not a philosophical question, only a linguistic one.

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

Chun asked:

Descartes’ argument for God’s existence in the 5th Meditation.

Lay out the structure of Descartes argument for Gods existence in Meditation 5. What is the crucial premise in the argument, and what evidence does Descartes provide for it? How might we object to the argument.

Answer by Craig Skinner

You refer to Descartes’ version of the Ontological Argument.

The existence of God is crucial to Descartes because in the sustained argument which is the Meditations, God is the bridge from the hyperbolic doubt of the Cogito back to knowledge of the empirical world and the abstract world of logic and mathematics.

On the other hand he seems to think that God’s existence is readily evident to any diligent meditator, and that arguments are just heuristic devices to help the slower meditator to the almost self-evident truth that God’s existence is known by clear and distinct perception.

He doesn’t set out his arguments in formal deductive terms (he antedates predicate logic and was no fan of syllogistic logic), and he uses unfamiliar scholastic terminology.

For all these reasons, the meditator has to do some work to penetrate the arguments.

An Ontological Argument tries to prove God’s existence from the very definition of ‘God’. Originally advanced By Anselm (his definition of God being the ‘greatest conceivable being’), this was declared invalid by Aquinas, and the argument lapsed. Descartes’ use of it surprised his contemporaries.

A fair construction of Descartes’ version is as follows:

P1: I have a clear and distinct idea of a most perfect being.

P2: This idea includes necessary existence.

P3: God’s necessary existence is part of God’s essence.

Conclusion: God exists.

You speak of ‘the’ crucial premise and evidence for it. I think all 3 premises are crucial.

What evidence does he provide for the premises?

P1: he gives no criteria for clear and distinct perception, either here or elsewhere in Meditations when he mentions it. No guide to recognizing slightly unclear or somewhat indistinct ideas which might be unreliable.

P2: no evidence given, but none needed, or indeed possible. We can accept that necessary existence is a feature of the being he has in mind.

P3: here he relies on Aristotelian and Scholastic thinking about essences: all things which come into existence have an essence (roughly a nature), but existence is not part of this essence — these things are contingently not necessarily existing, dependent on an essentially necessary being (God) to bring them into and sustain them in existence. Also in support, Descartes suggests a geometrical analogy, saying existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles make two right angles can be separated from the essence of a triangle.

How might we object to the argument?

We can object to all three premises.

P1: I can deny that I have this idea. In any case, it’s quite common for people to have clear and distinct ideas which turn out to be wrong.

Also,the argument is circular (question-begging): the conclusion that a (non-deceiving) God exists is based on a clear and distinct idea, but the truth of clear and distinct ideas is guaranteed only by the existence of a non-deceiving God.

P2: this is fine if we mean that the conceived being can be thought of AS IF it existed necessarily. It doesn’t mean that any such hypothesized being actually exists, or indeed could possibly exist. To imagine otherwise is to confuse ‘God (necessarily) exists’ (correct, by definition, semantic claim) with the existential claim ‘(Necessarily) God exists’, a simple logical fallacy (changing the scope of the modal operator from de re to de dicto), as Aquinas pointed out. This allows us to ‘prove’ the existence of anything e.g. I have a clear and distinct idea of a necessarily existing perfect pizza, holiday, partner, etc.

P3: Two penetrating objections to the geometrical analogy were made by Gassendi (5th set of Objections to The Meditations).

(a) The comparison is unfair. Like is not compared with like. Essence is (correctly) compared with essence, but then existence is not compared with existence. Rather existence (of God) is compared with property (of a triangle). A fair comparison would not show God necessarily exists any more than that a triangle necessarily exists.

(b) Existence is placed among God’s, but not among the triangle’s perfections. Also existence is not a perfection, it is that without which no perfection (or other attribute) can occur. Here, Gassendi anticipates Kant’s view that existence is not a predicate.

The argument is invalid.

All we can really conclude is that if God exists his existence is necessary, if he doesn’t his existence is impossible, but we don’t know whether God exists or not.

In the Meditations’ dedication (to a Faculty of Theology, he hoped to get the Churchmen on his side) Descartes says that although faith suffices for the faithful, proof is needed by philosophers and for persuasion of infidels. Doubtless he was disappointed by criticism, rather than acclamation, of his arguments by theologians (and others) which he published as Objections and Replies along with the Meditations, and which are as worthy of study as the main text.

You might think the Ontological Argument died the death, but it just wont lie down. We find Plantinga in the 20th century championing the modal version:

P1: If God exists his existence is necessary

P2: If God doesn’t exist his existence is impossible

P3: Hence God’s existence is either necessary or impossible

P4: God’s existence is possible (not impossible)

P5: Hence God’s existence is necessary

Conclusion: God exists

I wont rehash the flaws, but notice the argument just as easily ‘proves’ God’s nonexistence, thus:

P1: If God is nonexistent his nonexistence is necessary

P2: If God isn’t nonexistent his nonexistence is impossible

P3: Hence God’s nonexistence is either necessary or impossible

P4: God’s nonexistence is possible (not impossible)

P5: Hence God’s nonexistence is necessary

Conclusion: God is nonexistent.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org