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Metaphysics
1. The Word ‘Metaphysics’ and the Concept of Metaphysics The word ‘metaphysics’ is notoriously hard to define. Twentieth-century coinages like ‘meta-language’ and ‘metaphilosophy’ encourage the impression that metaphysics is a study that somehow “goes beyond” physics, a study devoted to matters that transcend the mundane concerns of Newton and Einstein and Heisenberg. This impression is mistaken. This is the probable meaning of the title because Metaphysics is about things that do not change. Should we assume that ‘metaphysics’ is a name for that “science” which is the subject-matter of Aristotle's Metaphysics? The subject-matter of metaphysics is “being as such” The subject-matter of metaphysics is the first causes of things The subject-matter of metaphysics is that which does not change Any of these three theses might have been regarded as a defensible statement of the subject-matter of what was called ‘metaphysics’ until the seventeenth century. 2. 2.3 Substance 3. 3.1 Modality 4. 5.
Epistemology
First published Wed Dec 14, 2005 Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? 1. 1.1 Knowledge as Justified True Belief There are various kinds of knowledge: knowing how to do something (for example, how to ride a bicycle), knowing someone in person, and knowing a place or a city. According to TK, knowledge that p is, at least approximately, justified true belief (JTB). Initially, we may say that the role of justification is to ensure that S's belief is not true merely because of luck. 1.2 The Gettier Problem The tripartite analysis of knowledge as JTB has been shown to be incomplete. To state conditions that are jointly sufficient for knowledge, what further element must be added to JTB? Some NTK theorists bypass the justification condition altogether. 2. 2.1 Deontological and Non-Deontological Justification
The Roots of Consciousness: History, The Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment Descartes and Mind-Body Dualism Rene Descartes Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who was certainly not an occult scholar or even a sympathizer, nevertheless attributed all of his philosophic ideas to images that appeared to him either in dreams or when he was in the hypnogogic state just before awakening. (In fact, he had to "prove his visibility" to keep from being associated with the Invisible College. The association of creativity with dreaaming apparently gave rise to public speculation about an actual college, perhaps diabolical, that dreamers visited in their sleep.) Mind body dualism was first formally stated in modern philosophy by Descartes. Leibnitz and Monadology Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Carrying on the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of universal harmony, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who with Isaac Newton was the co-inventor of calculus, developed an elegant grand philosophy based on the concept of an evolving unit of consciousness called the monad. Idealism . .
The Analysis of Knowledge
1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief There are three components to the traditional (“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to this analysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge. The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge:S knows that p iff p is true; S believes that p; S is justified in believing that p. The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified true belief”. Socrates articulates the need for something like a justification condition in Plato's Theaetetus, when he points out that ‘true opinion’ is in general insufficient for knowledge. Before turning to influential twentieth-century arguments against the JTB theory, let us briefly consider the three traditional components of knowledge in turn. 1.1 The Truth Condition Condition (i), the truth condition, is largely uncontroversial. Hazlett (2010) argues that “knows” is not a factive verb, on the basis of the apparent felicity of utterances like: 2. 3. 4. 5.
A priori and a posteriori
The terms a priori ("from the earlier") and a posteriori ("from the later") are used in philosophy (epistemology) to distinguish two types of knowledge, justification, or argument: A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience (for example "All bachelors are unmarried"). Galen Strawson has stated that an a priori argument is one in which "you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don't have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don't have to do any science There are many points of view on these two types of knowledge, and their relationship is one of the oldest problems in modern philosophy. The terms a priori and a posteriori are primarily used as adjectives to modify the noun "knowledge" (for example, "a priori knowledge"). Examples[edit] The intuitive distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (or justification) is best seen in examples. A priori A posteriori History[edit] Notes[edit]
George Berkeley
1. Life and philosophical works Berkeley was born in 1685 near Kilkenny, Ireland. After several years of schooling at Kilkenny College, he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, at age 15. He was made a fellow of Trinity College in 1707 (three years after graduating) and was ordained in the Anglican Church shortly thereafter. Berkeley’s first important published work, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), was an influential contribution to the psychology of vision and also developed doctrines relevant to his idealist project. In 1720, while completing a four-year tour of Europe as tutor to a young man, Berkeley composed De Motu, a tract on the philosophical foundations of mechanics which developed his views on philosophy of science and articulated an instrumentalist approach to Newtonian dynamics. 2. In his two great works of metaphysics, Berkeley defends idealism by attacking the materialist alternative. 2.1 The attack on representationalist materialism 2.1.1 The core argument 3.
Truth
First published Tue Jun 13, 2006; substantive revision Tue Jan 22, 2013 Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth. It would be impossible to survey all there is to say about truth in any coherent way. The problem of truth is in a way easy to state: what truths are, and what (if anything) makes them true. 1. Much of the contemporary literature on truth takes as its starting point some ideas which were prominent in the early part of the 20th century. These theories all attempt to directly answer the nature question: what is the nature of truth? The goal of this section is to characterize the ideas of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatist theories which animate the contemporary debate. 1.1 The correspondence theory
