Christopher asked:

Do you think that there will come a day when philosophy will no longer exist? Many of the questions/ problems that philosophy attempts to answer/ resolve have been asked for centuries and I’m guessing that some of those questions have no real definite answer and have been looked at from every possible side. Also, the world is only so big, therefore, eventually won’t we know everything there is to know about everything? Hypothetical questions may always exist, but how much room is there in that for philosophy?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

No there will never come a day when philosophy no longer exists. There will never be a day when we know everything about everything. The world is very big, much bigger than you seem to think.

Now you say ‘I’m guessing that…’ and this is just the problem. I don’t want to guess, I want to know the truth and if there are no answers to philosophical problems then I want to know precisely why there are no answers to philosophical problems. For some of us guessing just isn’t good enough.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

I remember once hearing from a fellow graduate student while I was at Oxford in the late 70s that David Wiggins (who later went on to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 1993 to 2000) had expressed the view that philosophy was in its last stages, and that in the foreseeable future the rigorous methods of logic would solve all the major problems of philosophy.

There are not a few philosophers around today who believe that proposition. It is at least believable, given that a philosopher as eminent as the young Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus held something like this view — although, arguably, in his case there remained the ‘mystical’, or that concerning which nothing can be said (all that can be said are the ‘propositions of natural science’).

Without doubt, logic has risen to giddying heights since the revolution brought about by Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell. Problems have been solved, or at least rendered with a clarity that previous generations had never dreamed of. But is philosophy nearly over?

I leave aside not altogether dissimilar views expressed by philosophers from the continental tradition. Someone better qualified than I can answer that.

The answer to your question is I don’t know. If philosophy is nearly over, however, then whatever comes next will still have a plate full of unanswered questions. What methods we might use to solve these problems, if they are not the methods of logic, is beyond me. Or maybe ‘logic’ will become something totally different too, something we can barely conceive or imagine at the present time.

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

Jackson asked:

What is Hume’s view on personal identity?

Answer by Craig Skinner

This can be summed up in three short quotes. I will give these, and say a little about each.

1. ‘The essence of the mind…equally unknown to us with that of external bodies’ (‘A Treatise of Human Nature’, 1739, Introduction, para. 8).

2. ‘When I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other….and never can observe anything but the perception’ (Treatise, 1.4.6. para. 3).

3. ‘My hopes vanish when I come to explain the principles that unite our successive perceptions…..all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences’ (Treatise, Appendix, para 20/21).

Two preliminary points. First, Hume uses ‘person’, ‘mind’ and ‘self’ interchangeably. Secondly, by ‘perception’, Hume means what we now call ‘experience’.

Now, to the quotes.

1. Here, Hume expresses his trademark epistemological scepticism. He feels that, speaking philosophically, we know a deal less than we often think we do. For example, as regards the existence of a stand-alone external world as the explanation of our successive sensations, he ‘feigns no hypothesis’, and again, whereas we commonly suppose that we observe a connection between cause and effect, what we actually observe is only regularity or ‘constant conjunction’. In reality, the true basis for our succession of sensations, and the connexion between cause and effect (if any), are unknown to us.

For Hume, the only knowledge we can rely on in philosophy is empirical knowledge, and, for him, this is derived from impression-based ideas. And so, coming to the self, what are the ideas we can rely on ?. The second quote deals with this.

2. On ‘looking inwardly’ I am aware only of a bundle of perceptions (experiences). An accurate view, I feel. It is sometimes called the ‘bundle theory of the self’. But some have gone too far, claiming Hume held there is only a bundle, nothing else, no ‘self’ which unites the bundle. This ‘no ownership’ view, or ‘illusory self’ view (which I think is incoherent) was first misattributed to Hume by his contemporary Thomas Reid, and still runs. To be fair, Hume contributes to this: when considering our everyday natural assumption of an enduring self, he describes this as a ‘fiction’ of the mind. But Hume clearly thought that every experience was experienced ie an experience requires an experiencer or subject of experience. It is just that, on Hume’s view, we have no knowledge of the nature of this subject of experience or self. Clearly, the self might be an enduring entity, the same from day to day, its persistence depending either on a persistent immaterial substance (soul), or on continuity of consciousness/memory (Lockean view). Or the self might be a momentary entity, replaced next instant by a new momentary self, so that I am a series of transient selves, as Buddhism holds. But Hume offers no view on this, holding only that we don’t know.

3. Why do Hume’s ‘hopes vanish’? It is because he can’t, using only his impression-certified notion of legitimate knowledge, assume anything about the self beyond the evident fact of bundles of experience, and the logical fact that an experience entails a subject of experience (but there could. logically, be a separate subject for every single experience, there is no evident connexion between them). This approach, he realizes, is fine for, say, causation: he need assume nothing other than constant conjunction. But as regards the mind, he has throughout his philosophical writings assumed a structure to the mind, continuity of memory for instance which obviously does connect our successive bundles of experience. Who for instance is this ‘I’ of quote 2 which does the entering and stumbling. In short, Hume has gone beyond what his own philosophical lights allow him to do. I feel he may have realized something of the self-referential features and puzzles of self and consciousness.

In conclusion Hume’s view on personal identity is in keeping with his sceptical approach, although he ultimately realizes he has in fact gone further than this strict approach allows, and that indeed he must do so.

Even today, argument rages as to what Hume’s view on personal identity really was. I have mentioned the Reid-inspired ‘no-ownership’ view of self, often attributed (wrongly I believe) to Hume. And there are views other than those I have expressed as to why Hume said his ‘hopes vanish’.

Best read Hume yourself and make up your own mind.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Kirby asked:

What is wrong with this statement:

When PII is re-defined, a major argument for its falseness is that we can conceive of there being two, therefore nonidentical, objects that are qualitatively indiscernible. So spatial and/or temporal dispersal becomes a good argument against redefined PII. But, if we stay with the original definition of PII, the spatial and/or temporal dispersal argument is a major argument in favor of PII. Under the original PII, perceiving two objects in different regions of space is prima facie evidence of nonidentity; if they are in different regions of space at a time, they are not identical.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

The principle in question, for those who are not familiar with this issue is known as the Identity of Indiscernibles. It was one of the major components of Leibniz’s theory of monads, as elaborated in Monadology and other works.

The story goes that Leibniz amused the courtiers at the House of Hanover by challenging them to find two leaves that were identical, thus disproving the principle. You will not be surprised to learn that no-one ever did. The chances of discovering two leaves that appear the same even to the closest examination are very tiny. And yet, provided the courtiers weren’t allowed to use microscopes, just the naked eye, it is perfectly possible that two such leaves could have been found.

Would it have disproved Leibniz’s theory? No. Because difference in spatial position — for example, being held in your left hand and your right hand — would according to Leibniz suffice to establish non-identity. But here’s the finesse; according to Leibniz, there is no such thing as ‘space’ as we understand it. All that exists, in ultimate reality, are ‘subjects’ of varying degrees of consciousness, ‘monads’, each representing a world from a unique point of view. All spatial relations, according to Leibniz reduce to non-spatial properties.

Your intuition, which to many people seems plain common sense, is that space is something real. Two objects, say, two leaves, which are physically identical down to the atomic level can occupy different positions in space. That’s what makes them two and not one. Spatial ‘dispersal’, as you call it, of two otherwise indistinguishable objects is both necessary and sufficient for their non-identity.

However, one consequence of this intuitively attractive view, which perhaps you hadn’t thought of, is that it becomes logically true that two objects, say, two leaves or two pennies, cannot occupy the same space. Well, we know that that’s contrary to the laws of physics. But that wasn’t the question. The Identity of Indiscernibles isn’t a law of physics. It’s meant to be a law of logic, true even in possible worlds where physics is different from what it is in the actual world.

Well, here’s another experiment. I first heard about this in a lecture given many years ago by David Wiggins (author of Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, later expanded to Sameness and Substance). I have two identical pennies, one in each hand. I move them together until they touch, then I press hard and, to my amazement, the pennies start to merge into one another. I pull the pennies apart again. Then I push them into one another, further this time, and pull them apart. After several goes, I have forced the pennies to occupy the same space. I now hold a single ‘penny’ which weighs twice as much as a normal penny. Or do I? When I give the ‘heavy penny’ a sharp tap, in separates into two pennies again. Why isn’t this a case of two identical objects occupying the same space? Remember, that this is a question about logic, not physics!

If you feel the slightest temptation to say that the law that two objects cannot occupy the same space is only a law of physics, not a law of logic, then you have to question the validity of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, re-defined, as suggested, to include spatio-temporal properties.

As a footnote, Wiggins’ own theory of identity as ‘spatio-temporal continuity under a covering sortal concept’ required, he claimed, that we reject the conclusion of the penny thought experiment. As a matter of logic, according to Wiggins, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There are good reasons for a philosopher wanting to hold this, and I appreciate those reasons. But I am not fully convinced.

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

Ez asked:

What is the role of philosophy in the postmodern era?

Answer by Craig Skinner

I am no expert in postmodernism. I will take the relevant thesis to be that progress is a mirage, search for objective truth fruitless, all accounts of reality, including science and philosophy, ‘narratives’ on an equal footing with none in a privileged position, reality constructed by us.

I disagree profoundly with all this, and suspect it will be a passing phase. I certainly hope so.

I side with Aristotle, Thomas Reid, and David Lewis (among many others both ancient and modern) in thinking that there is a mind-independent, structured reality, and we can, and do, know quite a bit about it through our senses and our powers of reason. In short, I am a Realist. Furthermore I think our concepts do not divide reality up arbitrarily, as Nagarjuna has it, with reality existing only conventionally and things having no ultimate existence, being just bits of the flux arbitrarily picked out as meaningful for us. On the contrary, I feel our concepts largely match the real structure of the world, they ‘carve nature at its joints’ as Plato said.

Thus, as regards mind-independent reality, I think electrons, dinosaurs and stars are natural kinds which existed long before we came on the scene. Of course they weren’t named ‘electrons’, ‘dinosaurs’ and ‘stars’ till we appeared, but we simply named natural categories that were already there. As regards carving nature at its joints, our concepts and names are not arbitrary: ‘electrons or trees’ is just not on the same footing as ‘electrons’ or ‘trees’ as a natural kind or category.

So, having stated the framework within which I view the world and philosophy, I can move on to the role of the latter.

Although there is no sharp division between science and philosophy, the latter concerns problems within a larger framework, problems with no agreed method of solution, problems involving conceptual issues.

First, here are two things that won’t happen to philosophy:

1. Swallowed by science (as suggested by Stephen Hawking for instance).

2. Made redundant because all problems solved.

It will become clear as we proceed why I think these won’t happen.

Once upon a time all systematic intellectual inquiry was philosophy. If conceptual clarification and agreement as to systematic methods of dealing with a problem occur, the relevant area of philosophy buds off as a science. First, physics, with Galileo and Newton. More recently, biology after Darwin. And when the latter became a science, all the old wrangles about vitalism and how life could possibly arise from inert matter just evaporated. In my view the same thing is now happening with consciousness studies — wrangles about panpsychism, how consciousness could possibly arise from inert matter, conceivability arguments etc, and all the while cognitive neuroscience is in process of taking it over.

Another area is philosophy of language. After the mixed blessing of the 20th century ‘linguistic turn’ in analytic philosophy, most of semantics and syntax is now studied in the science of linguistics, whilst pragmatics has been absorbed by social science. Finally epistemology is becoming naturalized, and centuries of emphasis on scepticism may thankfully now be over, as well as the fruitless industry of trying to make the Justified-True-Belief notion of knowledge Gettier-proof. Instead we are making progress on how humans actually acquire knowledge, how the brain (‘Plato’s camera’) captures universals, forming maps of reality (conceptual frameworks), indexing and linking them.

All this talk of parts philosophy budding off as separate sciences might tempt us to think that eventually philosophy will disappear. But there are three good reasons to think otherwise:

1. Many of the old problems have not been solved

2. As the sciences develop, and technology advances, new philosophical problems arise.

3. The fact that an area of inquiry is a science doesn’t mean it’s all ‘done and dusted’.

Let us deal briefly with each.

1. Old problems unsolved.

Examples include: time; causation; free will; meaning; truth; the nature of justice, of the good life, of moral values; the a priori (is it even a coherent notion?).

2. Physics has already provided philosophers with relativity and quantum mechanics. and no agreed philosophical account of QM is in sight. It’s unclear whether string theory and loop quantum gravity are science or philosophy. Biology/ medicine has thrown up problems relating

to transplantation, euthanasia, abortion, and genetic engineering for example, indeed whole new fields of bioethics and neuroethics. Other examples include animal ‘rights’ and climate change.

3. A popular view of science is that it deals in facts (‘scientifically proven’, ‘clinically tried and tested’ etc), in certainties. But this is not so. At the limits of all areas of enquiry, philosophical, mathematical/logical, scientific, we encounter uncertainty, incompleteness, ambiguity, paradox, maybe even inconsistency (true contradictions), and these are not just due to our ignorance. Think of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem; Turing’s Halting Problem; Chaitin’s Omega; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; quantum superposition and entanglement; Liar Sentences, Set Paradoxes and Paraconsistent Logic. And more to come I suspect. Enough to keep metaphysicists, ethicists, philosophical logicians, philosophers of science, and social and political philosophers busy for a long time.

Philosophy is becoming more naturalistic. Obsession with scepticism will fade, although the old sceptical puzzles will live on as exercises for the novice. Close links with science, maths, logic and politics will continue, as well as the traditional links with art and literature in the Continental tradition. Common themes in Eastern and in analytic philosophy will be further explored. Philosophy of religion remains vigorous but the emphasis has shifted to empirical study of religious belief/practice as a feature of human nature, rather than exposition of the divine attributes and justifying the ways of God to man.

I have had to be brief since this is an answer to a question, not a treatise, but I hope I have said enough to convince you that philosophy is alive and well in the postmodern era and has a rosy future.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com

Christopher asked:

Do laws really make a difference? Don’t we basically behave the same way regardless? I know laws can make a difference by punishing people who threaten the welfare of society, but do they deter those actions? If not, then could a society ‘work’ if it had no laws?

Answer by Shaun Williamson

This is not a question for philosophy. It is a question for psychology to answer. The proven answer (proven by experiment) is that laws do make a difference. Most people will obey the law as long as other conditions exist. One of these conditions is that they must have a reasonable expectation that the law will be enforced.

I know this from my own experience. In the 1980s when there were few parking wardens in central London it became obvious that some drivers would park anywhere. They parked on the pavements, they parked on yellow lines because they had little expectation that they would be penalised for it.

The situation got so bad in certain areas that vigilante groups of residents started gluing notices over the windscreens of cars that were blocking their pavements.

People are complex and different. There are people who will obey the law just because it is the law (unless they think the law is unjust). There are people who will only obey the law if they have an expectation of being penalised if they break the law. Then there are people who will not obey the law (sociopaths or psychopaths). Then there are the protesters who refuse to obey laws that they think are unjust.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Sam asked:

Lay out the structure of Descartes argument for God’s existence in Meditation 3. 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

Descartes doesn’t set out his arguments explicitly listing premises and conclusions. He antedates predicate logic and was no fan of syllogistic logic. He seems to think that God’s existence is pretty well self-evident, and arguments mere heuristic devices for the more slow-witted meditators.

He may therefore have been disappointed that his arguments were criticised rather than acclaimed by theologians (and others), as detailed in the Objections together with his Replies which Descartes published along with his Meditations.

His Causality Argument in Meditation 3 is a bit different from the Design Argument or the usual Cosmological Arguments; and from the Ontological Argument, his version of which is in Meditation 5. But we need to dip our toe into the waters of scholastic philosophy to grasp it.

A fair reconstruction is:

P1: I have the clear and distinct idea of God (a most perfect being: infinite, eternal, omnipotent, benevolent).

P2: A cause must be at least as great (real) as its effect.

C: This idea of God (P1) can’t be from (imperfect) me (P2). Its cause must be God or (impossibly) greater. So God exists.

The argument is valid. But it is sound only if P1 and P2 are true. Both can be challenged.

You ask what is the crucial premise.

All premises in an argument are crucial in the sense that if any one is false, the argument is unsound. Let’s count P2 as the crucial one because it looks a bit obscure, and was the one more criticized at the time. I will say something about P1 later.

Premise 2:

The relevant discussion is couched in technical scholastic terms. Two types of reality (being) are distinguished regarding ideas. The existence of an idea (its formal reality) and the content of an idea (its objective reality). Here ‘objective’ refers to the object contained in the idea, rather like the modern use of ‘subjective’ – it refers to the tree (say) in my mind, not the tree in the garden. The notion of degrees of reality is the introduced. Ideas all have the same degree of formal reality, all being states of mind, but differ in degrees of objective reality – lowest is a ‘mode’ (a property of a thing eg shape), intermediate is a finite substance, highest is an infinite substance.

P2 therefore expresses the ‘Causal Principle’: the degree of formal reality of the cause must be at least as great as the objective reality of the effect. Hence an idea whose content (objective reality) is infinite (my idea of God) can’t have its cause in a finite being (with less than infinite formal reality) such as me, only in God, so God exists.

What evidence does Descartes provide for P2?

None. It is simply an assertion. Philosophers like to call something a Principle — Principle of Sufficient Reason, Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles, Final Anthropic Principle etc — when they want us to swallow an idea without good argumentative support.

Objections to the argument:

P1 is questionable:

1. Descartes assumes we all have the same (God-given) innate ideas. But I can simply deny having the P1 idea. Gassendi (5th Objections) says our finite minds can’t have an idea of infinity. Descartes replies that we can – it’s our understanding that is limited, not the thing of which we have (limited) understanding. I side with Descartes here. But it doesn’t follow that I have a clear and distinct idea of God. Descartes gives no criteria for, or definition of, clear and distinct ideas, no guidance as to recognition of slightly unclear or somewhat indistinct ideas which are thereby unreliable.

2. The argument from clear and distinct ideas is viciously circular. The conclusion that God exists is based on a clear and distinct idea, but the truth of these ideas is only guaranteed by assuming the existence of God.

P2 is false: two objections (both by Mersenne, 2nd Objections)

1. The idea of God CAN come from me. Having some degree of perfection, I can posit higher and higher degrees of it.

Descartes replies that the idea does in a sense come from me. It is innate, planted by God. We couldn’t form the idea of God if God didn’t exist. But here, Descartes simply repeats the Causal Principle and begs the question.

2. Animals and plants (greater) come from inanimate causes (lesser). Descartes replies that animals lack reason and so have no perfection not found in inanimate matter, or, if they do, it comes from some other source. I find Descartes unpersuasive here, and would generalize Mersenne’s point to say that simple things plus simple rules can yield complexity eg simple initial conditions in the cosmos plus laws of nature allow atoms, compounds, galaxies, life and mind.

To say that finite minds need an infinite cause simply begs the question as to God’s existence.

In short, Descartes’ argument is unsound.

Of course neither Descartes nor anybody else has proved the existence of God. Belief in God is a matter of faith and revelation. If God existed he could show himself unequivocally (alleged revelations to date being highly dubious), but in the absence of this, no proof is possible in my view. Hence those of us unconvinced by revelation and unwilling to make leaps of faith should be, at least, agnostic.

Craig Skinner at PhiloSophos.com