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CHAPTER 1
LECTURE ONE
An Introduction to Philosophic Problems
This is the first in a sequence of three courses that approach the problems of philosophy by way of the original location of the problems. That is to say, in the first course we will consider the problems that have their origin in the subject matter which is usually called natural sciences, in the second the subject matter which is usually called social sciences, and in the third the subject matter which is usually called humanities. I put "usually called" in because I suspect that one of the fundamental philosophic problems of our time must be a reconsideration of what is usually called the liberal arts. All during the Middle Ages they were set up in terms of disciplines, like grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. From the seventeenth century down to the middle of the twentieth century, they've been done in terms of subject matters, like English, French, German, biochemistry, mathematics, and so on. I suspect that today, with alterations that will become apparent as we go along, neither subject matters nor disciplines will be the desirable way to treat the problems.
Let me, therefore, in this first lecture try to describe the purpose as well as the organization of the course. The purpose of the course is to provide an introductory treatment of philosophic problems. It is an extremely difficult thing to do. A normal way in which one examines philosophic problems is to provide the student with the "true" way, which is the way the professor tells us he approaches philosophic problems, and then, by a natural impetus, with all of the ways that are false ways, including, of course, the ways that the great philosophers went through. When I was young and took an introductory course in philosophy, all the errors had been committed by Aristotle; at present, by an odd change, all the errors in philosophy have been committed by Descartes. All of the truths used to have been stated by Plato; all of the truths now have been adumbrated or approached by Hume. Consequently, I shall want to avoid this approach to philosophy. I have a philosophy, it's a good one; when you've reached the graduate stage, you may be able to appreciate it and see that it's the true one and all the other ones are false. [L!] But this is not the way to introduce you to philosophy. Nor is it desirable to take you through the kaleidoscope of the different approaches. They're each awfully good; and just as in the approach above the first thing you would learn would be to refute the philosophers, so in the second approach you'd discover a new truth each successive week, which would be the basis of tension and uncertainty because last week's truth was no longer true, and eventually you wouldn't be quite sure why you were studying philosophy. Then, too, there are problematic approaches which state persistent problems of philosophy. This approach is rather disconcerting because it usually turns out that the persistent problems of philosophy are rather hard to find in any of the great philosophers unless you do a lot of distorting.
Therefore, what we're going to do is something different than this. We'll make certain definite assumptions; most of them I will try to state today and then we'll forget about them. One of the assumptions that we shall make is that even though the way in which philosophy keeps its respectability today is to become as technical as any other subject and, therefore, as uninviting as a good technical subject would be, we will assume that the problems of philosophy all have their origin in other fields or in our experience. If you take any problem — a problem of the natural sciences, of the social sciences, of aesthetic experience, or even a problem that you encounter when you deal with practical life, including your newspaper — and push it far enough, it is a philosophic problem. "Pushing it far enough" means only that you push it to the point at which the regular procedures that you use in its solution no longer hold. Even in the most solid sciences, if a well-established alternative hypothesis is presented, then you're on the edge either, if it turns out to be correct, of a revolution in science or, if it turns out not to be correct, of a principal shake-up. Or, notice that as you go up in any well-organized subject matter, you first learn how to do things — for instance, you learn to add and subtract and to resolve simultaneous equations in mathematics. Then you begin to examine the assumptions in terms of which you do these methods or establish them — you very seldom look at the history; that's quite irrelevant — and when you get around to the assumptions, at the last point you discover that there are alternative assumptions. Therefore, if you can advance far enough, you find that the things you've always done aren't necessarily done this way when you reach a study of the principles of mathematics on philosophical grounds.
I spent the last few weeks in Mexico City, where they were having an international congress of philosophy, and on one occasion a special meeting was called between the delegations from the Soviet Union and the United States. It was done under good circumstances: there weren't any reporters present, all of the reporters were outside; therefore, there was little danger of making a headline, front-page story, which, even if accurate, would still have been inconvenient. [L!] The general idea was to see what we could get going in talking about philosophic problems. For the most part we asked questions, but the Russians also asked questions. Here is one of the questions that was asked. A quotation was read from one of the Soviets' papers given at the conference in which the writer remarked that once a man had mastered the principle of dialectical materialism, he was then free. And since it was like a rhetorical debate, we replied, If the man was now free, why was it that there wasn't more difference of opinion in Soviet philosophy? We thought it would be rather encouraging if occasionally some Soviet philosopher said, "I will demonstrate by the principles of dialectical materialism the existence of God" — or other examples of this sort — if, in general, a word was said for pluralism. Well, the head of the Russian delegation swept that aside with a jest. He said, "What's the advantage of pluralism? If there's one truth, what's the advantage of having other statements that are false? Nobody questions 2 plus 2 equals 4." In the course of the ensuing discussion I tried to make this point, namely, that in terms of the assumptions which you set up, 2 plus 2 do equal 4, but what about the circumstances — and there are many without fanciful elaboration — in which 2 plus 2 do not equal 4? How do they fit in, how do you deal with them, and, in general, how do you raise the question of fundamental differences? We didn't succeed in getting this question discussed. Incidentally, since I am telling this as a Cold War story [L!], I don't want you to take this as necessarily discouraging, because I suspect that if I were sitting on the other side of the table, the prejudices of the Americans would have to be quite as astonishing and part of the problem of discussions which can get going when one deals with issues that can be identified as philosophic problems. It's that identification that I want to deal with now, but I will also be doing it throughout these lectures. Therefore, this is just an initial step.
If it is the case that you can push any problem to the extreme in the variety of ways that I've tried to indicate, where it's merely taken out of the normal context by which you will unreflectively resolve it and your resolution will be accepted, if at that point you are engaged in a philosophic problem, then it's clearly the case that we're involved, all of us, in philosophic problems, examined or unexamined, whenever we deal with scientific questions, with practical questions, with aesthetic questions. The course is organized to run through that sequence, namely, the three kinds of questions, not necessarily assuming that they're the same or different, because in this very statement that I have given we're involved in a philosophic problem: are the problems of science, of social science, and of aesthetics the same or different? Well, there are good philosophic arguments that present the position that they're same. If they are the same, it may be that they're all fundamentally scientific, and so we want to talk about applying scientific methods to resolve them. Or it may be that they're all fundamentally practical; this is the assumption of pragmatism, a form of philosophy, and of many others. Or it may be that they're all fundamentally due to insight, innovation, and originality, the creations of outstanding geniuses. In this sense, the sciences as well as the social sciences are humanistic achievements, achievements of the power of man — the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy of Newton is a great work, it's even in the collection of the great works — and, therefore, the humanistic approach could be fundamental.
You can raise, then, the question, Which is fundamental? Once, instead of lecturing in the first meeting of the course, I opened it as a discussion, and there was an equal case to be made for all three. In other words, at the point you've arrived in your education, you're already making metaphysical assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the nature of principles, the interrelations of all knowledge. There were those in the class who held that science is cumulative, that it gradually moves in on the regions of doubt. Therefore, when the scientific method is applied — and the Romans tried to do it; it was the main idea of Locke to apply the method of Newton to human nature and human knowledge; this has gone on down the line — when the scientific method is applied to all of the subjects, you have a resolution of philosophic problems. You'll probably discover they're no longer philosophical, but they'll still be problems to be solved. Then there was another group in the class that took the position that this was an obviously old-fashioned approach, one based on the supposition that there's a world out there which we discover. Science in the seventeenth century was different from science in the twentieth century: the facts are different, the theories are different, what you can do is different, the climate of opinion which makes the possibility of scientific or technological innovation is different. This occurs to such an extent that in the middle of the nineteenth century several men discovered the principle of evolution. Or take the discovery of differential calculus: two men discovered it simultaneously, and it's hard to tell whether Fermat or Descartes is responsible for seventeenth- century mathematics. Therefore, what you must think of is social circumstances, cultural interrelations; out of this you can get the scientific knowledge. As a matter of fact, our friends the Soviets hold this position. There are two sciences, if they follow Marx: the science of nature and the science of the history of society. And according to Marx, it is the science of the history of society which is prior, in the important sense that until mankind has reached a point in which most of the expropriations are removed, it indulges in ideologies rather than science. It is only when you reach the last point that the science of nature can begin to emerge, and the socialists and the communists dream of this.
Or, finally, there is the obvious possibility in dealing with all of these approaches that it's a mere fiction to talk about an outside world which somehow contains us and that it's a kind of vague generality to talk about the character of ages and of times; rather, what we know, and, therefore, what is, depends on the insights, the innovations, the creations of great minds. Before Galileo, nobody really understood motion in terms of acceleration; in one sense, accelerated motion as an equation that could be written in terms of time and space to deal with problems of gravitation began with Galileo. Likewise, the world was changed with our understanding of the world as a result of the innovation of Newton. The same thing holds for the innovation of Einstein. A year ago the University of Chicago Press published a book by a man named Kuhn about revolutions in science. In it he differentiates between two kinds of scientific change: one is the kind in which new ideas are introduced, and the other is the kind in which, following a paradigm, you proceed to deal with ideas that fit within that paradigm. Newton created a great paradigm; it took a hundred years to fit all of the facts of planetary motion and motion on the earth into the paradigm. Laplace believed it was possible to complete this job; he called his work, in fact, The System of the World. About that point, the paradigm became encrusted, particularly by the introduction of other kinds of dynamics, including hydrodynamics, electrodynamics, and the rest. The discovery of entropy, the discovery of equations in which T does not appear, primarily started on a new paradigm. If you take this approach and use the large sense of "humanistic" that I've spoken of — that is, the humanities are the works of man, the creations of man — then, whether you think of Michelangelo and his creation or Newton and his creation, they are humanistic in the same fundamental sense.
There are a variety of ways in which philosophic problems can be studied on the assumption that I've just stated. I won't trouble you now by telling you what the other varieties are, but as you go along, some of them will become apparent. The way in which we will do it will be to take fundamental concepts that appear in each of the three fields that are taken up in this sequence of courses. For this course, the natural sciences, there will be four concepts: motion, space, time, and cause. I think that if you take these four and think about them a little, you will see that even with the names you're involved in a philosophic problem because, of these four, there's only one which you have directly experienced empirically. If you have never experienced change or motion, you would have no idea of time and you would have no idea of space. Moreover, in the case of cause you have a concept which many recent philosophers have denied holds intelligibility in existence, and there are philosophers of science who question that the concept of cause need even come into the picture. But, then, you can carry it all the way back. Almost at the beginning of the philosophic enterprise there was a philosopher who questioned the reality of motion; his name was Parmenides. He had a long sequence of followers; and one of them, Zeno, wrote a series of paradoxes to indicate what difficulties you get into if you assume motion. And the paradoxes of Zeno have been discussed ever since, including a very ingenious treatment of them by Bertrand Russell in the interests of the philosophy of science, following the history of philosophy in terms of the answers to various considerations of the paradoxes of Zeno. Now, the important thing is not this mere semantic point that each of these four words or terms has many different meanings but, rather, the point that the different meanings have great importance in the development of science. It is not the case that time, space, motion, and cause are entities to be examined in which science has proceeded cumulatively; rather, it is the case that a succession of oppositions among these ideas has led to a series of hypotheses which raised new problems which, in turn, determined the history of science bearing on motion. This latter process, I think, exemplifies my point fully.
Let me give merely one example of the last statement. I think the scientists make use of these alternative approaches much better than the philosophers; the philosophers tend to a kind of natural dogmatism even with their skepticism. A volume in The Library of Living Philosophers was issued a number of years ago on Einstein. You've probably seen the volume; it's an excellent collection of both scientists and philosophers. The scheme of the volume is that the person to whom it is dedicated, in this case Einstein, writes a kind of intellectual autobiography; next a number of his friends, associates, or strangers criticize him or praise him in a series of essays; then, finally, he writes a reply. These essays include a group of men — Bohr, Born, Schrödinger, de Broglie — who had had conversations for a period of some thirty years. In his essay Bohr points out to Einstein, who had laid down the fundamental principles of earlier quantum mechanics, that he and Bohr differed on the nature of the principle of indeterminacy, and this formed one of the basic differences the two men had. One held that it was in the very nature of things and indicated a state of affairs. The other, Einstein, argued that it merely reflected the state of our knowledge: just as in molar dynamics we had uncertainties until we got straightened out, so, too, eventually it would be possible to write a general field equation for the phenomena of quantum mechanics which would remove the indeterminacy. Einstein was convinced of this to the end of his life; Schrödinger for a time was; de Broglie always was. Notice, this is at opposite ends of the spectrum, and for thirty years this discussion went on. Each of the two camps was making contributions to quantum mechanics, yet each could take their position as a hypothesis for further work. They would meet, for instance, after two years when one of them had discovered something — as I say, the essays are full of examples of this — and would say, "Look, this proves my point." Then the other would say, "This is very interesting and, doubtless, true. Let me tell you the way in which it works on my hypothesis, which takes me a step further!" So the two hypotheses could both move on. And the peculiarity of this field is not that Einstein was convinced that he could write this general field equation. Toward the end he was convinced that he had written it, but he thought the establishment, the demonstration, that the equation was one which held was in fact so elaborate that the real difficulty lay here.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "On Knowing — The Natural Sciences"
by .
Copyright © 1994 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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