Introduction to Philosophy Part 4: Mind

Part 4: Mind

Does every event have a cause?

Do human beings possess free will?

Does each person consist of a soul connected to a body?

Are you identical with your body, your mind, or some combination of the two?

If you are a combination, how are the mind and body connected so as to form one person?

What field of philosophy do these questions belong to? 

The Ghost in the Machine
Gilbert Ryle

Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher.

He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers who shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine."
 
Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'." Ryle, having engaged in detailed study of the key works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, himself suggested instead that the book "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."


Ghosts In The Machine, Dr. Lanning, 1:44


Ghosts In The Machines By: Dr Lanning from "I Robot " It was a concept in Gilbert Ryle's book "The Concept of Mind" (1949)

What questions intrigue you from "I Robot"?

https://youtu.be/LnV3HO9EvLM







Ryle's Ghost in the Machine, 7:05

Ryles: What is the ghost in the machine?

What is Cartesian rationalism and how does Ryles differ from Descartes?

What is the category mistake?

What is at least one example?

What are the two fundamental kinds of substance?

Why does Ryle condemn dualism?

How is the argument extended?

What is a fun fact?

https://youtu.be/GCCnCdNNR3g






Materialism is the view that a person is just a body. If the materialist is correct, then how can a person think and feel? Can a mere body do that?

Body and Soul
Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor (November 5, 1919 – October 30, 2003), born in Charlotte, Michigan, was an American philosopher renowned for his dry wit and his contributions to metaphysics. He was also an internationally known beekeeper.


Richard Taylor, 8:21


In this lecture, I cover Richard Taylor's defense of free will. I also touch on the relationship between free will and ethical responsibility.

Richard Taylor:

Why do humans do what they do according to Taylor?

What are the two responses?

What is the big problem?

What is our predicament?

By what does moral responsibility exist?

How does Taylor apply free will?

How do we know free will exists?

Did Taylor prove free will? Why or why not?

https://youtu.be/LqgBaVSwa-M

The Mind–Body Problem
Paul M. Churchland

Paul Churchland (born October 21, 1942) is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty. As of this February 2017, Churchland is recognised as Professor Emeritus at the UCSD, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Moscow State University. Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland, with whom he collaborates, and The New Yorker has reported the similarity of their views, e.g., on the mind-body problem, are such that the two are discussed as if they are one person.


The mind–body problem is the question of how the human mind and body can causally interact. This question arises when mind and body are considered as distinct, based on the premise that the mind and the body are fundamentally different in nature.


The problem was addressed by René Descartes in the 17th century, resulting in Cartesian dualism, and by pre-Aristotelian philosophers, in Avicennian philosophy, and in earlier Asian traditions. A variety of approaches have been proposed. Most are either dualist or monist. Dualism maintains a rigid distinction between the realms of mind and matter. Monism maintains that there is only one unifying reality, substance or essence in terms of which everything can be explained.


Each of these categories contain numerous variants. The two main forms of dualism are substance dualism, which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics, and property dualism, which holds that mental properties involving conscious experience are fundamental properties, alongside the fundamental properties identified by a completed physics. The three main forms of monism are physicalism, which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way; idealism, which holds that only thought truly exists and matter is merely an illusion; and neutral monism, which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them.


Several philosophical perspectives have been developed which reject the mind–body dichotomy. The historical materialism of Karl Marx and subsequent writers, itself a form of physicalism, held that consciousness was engendered by the material contingencies of one's environment. An explicit rejection of the dichotomy is found in French structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy.


The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology, and the neurosciences.


An ancient model of the mind known as the Five-Aggregate Model explains the mind as continuously changing sense impressions and mental phenomena. Considering this model, it is possible to understand that it is the constantly changing sense impressions and mental phenomena (i.e., the mind) that experiences/analyzes all external phenomena in the world as well as all internal phenomena including the body anatomy, the nervous system as well as the organ brain. This conceptualization leads to two levels of analyses: (i) analyses conducted from a third-person perspective on how the brain works, and (ii) analyzing the moment-to-moment manifestation of an individual’s mind-stream (analyses conducted from a first-person perspective). Considering the latter, the manifestation of the mind-stream is described as happening in every person all the time, even in a scientist who analyses various phenomena in the world, including analyzing and hypothesizing about the organ brain.


The Mind Body Problem, 5:25

Paul Churchland: What is the overwhelming factor in the mind-body problem?

What is the one dramatic exception?

What is the large gulf?

What did Orwell contribute to the discussion?

What does the problem lead us to?

Is what is inside actually who we are?

What is the solution?

https://youtu.be/q8uM9_tbfCI





If materialism is correct and a person is identical with a body, can we explain the phenomenon we all experience of being conscious? How can my body be conscious? Is my consciousness like yours? Is ours like that of animals?

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.


Nagel is well known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. Continuing his critique of reductionism, he is the author of Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness.


What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 6:05


"Suppose a caterpillar is locked in a sterile safe by someone unfamiliar with insect metamorphosis, and weeks later the safe is reopened, revealing a butterfly. If the person knows that the safe has been shut the whole time, he has reason to believe that the butterfly is or was once the caterpillar, without having any idea in what sense this might be so... It is conceivable that we are in such a position with regard to physicalism."


https://youtu.be/LTDvoXLX_VE

What can bat behavior reveal about human minds?

What does it mean to say: what is it like?

If foreign intelligence is found will we be able to understand it?

Is physicalism false? Why or why not?

What can lead to understanding?

What does "is" mean?

Dasein:

Dasein is a German word that means "being there" or "presence" (German: da "there"; sein "being"), and is often translated into English with the word "existence". It is a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger, particularly in his magnum opus Being and Time. Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.

The Qualia Problem
Frank Jackson

Frank Cameron Jackson AO (born 1943) is an Australian analytic philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. He was also a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University from 2007 through 2014. His research focuses primarily on philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and meta-ethics.



Frank Jackson - The Knowledge Argument - Mary's Room - Mary the Super-Scientist, 5:18



Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence 'The sky is blue'. [...]

What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?



In other words, Jackson's Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color.

Frank Jackson:

The question that Jackson raises is: once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?



Ontologically, the following argument is contained in the thought experiment:



(P1) Any and every piece of physical knowledge in regards to human color vision has been obtained (by the test subject, Mary) prior to her release from the black-and-white room. She has all the physical knowledge on the subject.



(P2) Upon leaving the room and witnessing color first-hand, she obtains new knowledge.



(C) There was some knowledge about human color vision she did not have prior to her release. Therefore, not all knowledge is physical knowledge.



Most authors who discuss the knowledge argument cite the case of Mary, but Frank Jackson used a further example in his seminal article: the case of a person, Fred, who sees a color unknown to normal human perceivers. We might want to know what color Fred experiences when looking at things that appear to him in that particular way. It seems clear that no amount of knowledge about what happens in his brain and about how color information is processed in his visual system will help us to find an answer to that question. In both cases cited by Jackson, an epistemic subject A appears to have no access to particular items of knowledge about a subject B: A cannot know that B has an experience of a particular quality Q on certain occasions. This particular item of knowledge about B is inaccessible to A because A never had experiences of Q herself. The knowledge argument:



The knowledge argument is that if Mary does learn something new upon experiencing color, then physicalism is false. Specifically, the Knowledge Argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations of mental states.


Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red?

Jackson contends that, yes, she has learned something new, via experience, and hence, physicalism is false. Jackson states:



It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.



It is important to note that in Jackson's article, physicalism refers to the epistemological doctrine that all knowledge is knowledge of physical facts, and not the metaphysical doctrine that all things are physical things.

Based on your understanding is physicalism false?

In philosophy, physicalism is the ontological thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality as opposed to a "two-substance" (dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) view. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.


Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with the success of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law). Common arguments against physicalism include both the philosophical zombie argument and the multiple observers argument, that the existence of a physical being may imply zero or more distinct conscious entities.

https://youtu.be/gZy3Ky9y_fg






A materialist believes that reality consists only of physical objects and their properties. Can materialism, however, account for phenomenal qualities, that is, what it is like to have a certain kind of experience?

Knowing What It’s Like
David Lewis

David Kellogg Lewis (September 28, 1941 – October 14, 2001) was an American philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He made contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of probability, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, and aesthetics. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that (i) possible worlds exist, (ii) every possible world is a concrete entity, (iii) any possible world is causally and spatiotemporally isolated from any other possible world, and (iv) our world is among the possible worlds.



david lewis, on the plurality of worlds 28-09-16, 5:27

<sup>Is everything that exists a part of our world?

Is everything that exists in time a part of our world?</sup>

https://youtu.be/2N5VfbpTljU





Do only living things think? What about a computer? Does it have conscious thoughts?

Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.



Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.



During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section which was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Counterfactual history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.



After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.



Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when by the Labouchere Amendment, "gross indecency" was criminal in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated." Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.



Alan Turing - The Imitation Game - Can Machines Think? 2:17



In this clip from the movie "The Imitation Game", Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) explains about how machines can think. Based on the real life story of Alan Turing , who is credited with cracking the German Enigma code, THE IMITATION GAME portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II. Turing, whose contributions and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives, was the eventual victim of an unenlightened British Establishment, but his work and legacy live on. This video is for educative purposes only. The copyright remains with BlueSkyFilm, Studiocanal, Weinstein and CoPeerRight Agency - Italy.

Do good machines think?

Or, do they think differently?

Do our brains work differently?

What is the imitation game all about?

https://youtu.be/Vs7Lo5MKIws







The Turing test: Can a computer pass for a human? - Alex Gendler, 4:42



What is consciousness? Can an artificial machine really think?

For many, these have been vital considerations for the future of artificial intelligence. But British computer scientist Alan Turing decided to disregard all these questions in favor of a much simpler one:

Can a computer talk like a human?

Alex Gendler describes the Turing test and details some of its surprising results.

What is consciousness?

Is there a core in the mind?

How did Turing ask a simple question?

What is the Turing test?

What game did he propose?

How could a computer be intelligent?

What was the first claim to success?

What was another early script?

What was one weakness of the test?

What are chat bots and how are they used today?

What approach has Clever bot taken?

What does it lack?

Is memory and processing power enough? Why or why not?

https://youtu.be/3wLqsRLvV-c

Do Computers Think?
John Searle

The Chinese Room Experiment - The Hunt for AI - BBC, 3:57

Can a computer really understand a new language? Marcus Du Sautoy tries to find out using the Chinese Room Experiment. Taken from The Hunt for AI.

https://youtu.be/D0MD4sRHj1M

If a computer is following instructions is it thinking?

What is the mind doing while following instructions?

What is the threshold point between following instructions and the mind actually thinking?



John Rogers Searle (born 31 July 1932) is an American philosopher. He is currently Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959.



As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and D Phil, from Oxford University, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be known as the California Supreme Court's "Searle Decision" of 1990, Berkeley changed its rent control policy, leading to large rent increases between 1991 and 1994.



In 2000 Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize. Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence. In 2017, Searle was accused of sexual harassment.



John Searle - What Things Really Exist? 4:35




When you ask what things really exist, and you think deeply about this probe to apprehend what is out there, you see the whole world anew. What are the most general categories to understand the world? Click here to watch more interviews with John Searle http://bit.ly/1GhLZWB Click here to watch more interviews on what really exists http://bit.ly/2mcbbGA Click here to buy episodes or complete seasons of Closer To Truth http://bit.ly/1LUPlQS For all of our video interviews please visit us at www.closertotruth.com

What worlds exist?

What worlds exist according to Searle?

How do mathematically entities exist?

What is the temptation in philosophy?

Do numbers exist?

What is the way out?

How many worlds does Searle have?

https://youtu.be/QAUaP1IcZUc







When Is Artificial Intelligence No Longer Artificial? 3:15



Spike Jonze's movie "Her" deals with a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his intelligent, self-aware computer operating system (Scarlett Johansson).

But what is it that we find so fascinating about artificial intelligence?

Could we ever create completely self-aware artificial intelligence? Maybe we already have!

Do you think it's a good idea for us to give machines intelligence, including self-awareness and consciousness?

What is the spectrum?

How does at least one neuroscientist disagree with Searle?

Is the Internet conscious?

Do you think it's a good idea for us to give machines intelligence?

Why or why not?

https://youtu.be/Lbvj81iu_ig

The Body Problem
Barbara Montero

Associate professor of philosophy at the City University of New York (CUNY), and member of the doctoral faculty of the philosophy program of the Graduate Center since 2004 and a member of the philosophy faculty at the college of Staten Island since 2003. Before coming to the City University of New York, an assistant professor at Georgia State University (2001-2003), and prior to that spent a year as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh (2000-2001). Received a number of national research awards, including two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Research Fellowships, an NEH Summer Stipend, and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Ryskamp Research Fellowship.



BARBARA MONTERO, 3:24



Barbara Montero, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of Staten Island and The CUNY Graduate Center, talks about her work in science studies. For more information about The Mellon Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, see: http://sciencestudies.gc.cuny.edu/.

What does Montero counter?

What types does she show?

What does it mean to be an expert?

Do you agree or disagree with Montero?

Can self-help efforts make you an expert?

What in her background may provide insight into the question?

https://youtu.be/HmSumK8_Lc8

Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes

Cartesian Dualism - Philosophy Tube, 5:05, Total: 8:27



Descartes in his Meditations tries to prove that mind and body are separate and fundamentally different substances, but is he right?

What is the link between Descartes and Keanu Reeves?

What is dualism?

What is res cogitans?

What is Leibniz's Law?

What is the masked man fallacy?

What is another example?

Can a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?

What reasons have meant that Cartesian dualism is not as popular these days?


https://youtu.be/jteIKYWAS4A







Handout Questions: Mind
What questions intrigue you from "I Robot"?
Ryles: What is the ghost in the machine?
What is Cartesian rationalism and how does Ryles differ from Descartes?
What is the category mistake?
What is at least one example?
What are the two fundamental kinds of substance?
Why does Ryle condemn dualism?
How is the argument extended?
What is a fun fact?
Richard Taylor:
Why do humans do what they do according to Taylor?
What are the two responses?
What is the big problem?
What is our predicament?
By what does moral responsibility exist?
How does Taylor apply free will?
How do we know free will exists?
Did Taylor prove free will? Why or why not?
Paul Churchland: What is the overwhelming factor in the mind-body problem?
What is the one dramatic exception?
What is the large gulf?
What did Orwell contribute to the discussion?
What does the problem lead us to?
Is what is inside actually who we are?
What is the solution?
What can bat behavior reveal about human minds?
What does it mean to say: what is it like?
If foreign intelligence is found will we be able to understand it?
Is physicalism false? Why or why not?
What can lead to understanding?
What does "is" mean?
Frank Jackson:
The question that Jackson raises is: once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?
Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red?
Based on your understanding is physicalism false?
David Lewis:
Is everything that exists a part of our world?
Is everything that exists in time a part of our world?
Alan Turing:
Do good machines think?
Or, do they think differently?
Do our brains work differently?
What is the imitation game all about?
Can a computer talk like a human?
Alex Gendler:
What is consciousness?
Is there a core in the mind?
How did Turing ask a simple question?
What is the Turing test?
What game did he propose?
How could a computer be intelligent?
What was the first claim to success?
What was another early script?
What was one weakness of the test?
What are chat bots and how are they used today?
What approach has Clever bot taken?
What does it lack?
Is memory and processing power enough? Why or why not?
If a computer is following instructions is it thinking?
What is the mind doing while following instructions?
What is the threshold point between following instructions and the mind actually thinking?
John Searle:
What worlds exist?
What worlds exist according to Searle?
How do mathematically entities exist?
What is the temptation in philosophy?
Do numbers exist?
What is the way out?
How many worlds does Searle have?
What is the spectrum?
How does at least one neuroscientist disagree with Searle?
Is the Internet conscious?
Do you think it's a good idea for us to give machines intelligence?
Why or why not?
What does Montero counter?
What types does she show?
What does it mean to be an expert?
Do you agree or disagree with Montero?
Can self-help efforts make you an expert?
What in her background may provide insight into the question?
What is the link between Descartes and Keanu Reeves?
What is dualism?
What is res cogitans?
What is Leibniz's Law?
What is the masked man fallacy?
What is another example?
Can a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?
What reasons have meant that Cartesian dualism is not as popular these days?

Introduction to Philosophy Part 6: God

Part 6: God

Does God Exist?
Ernest Nagel

Why God Allows Evil
Richard Swinburne

The Desires of the Heart
Eleonore Stump

Pascal’s Wager
Simon Blackburn

Pascal’s Wager: An Assessment
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

The Problem of Hell
Marilyn McCord Adams

Faith and Reason
Michael Scriven

The Hiddenness of God
Robert McKim

God and Forgiveness
Anne C. Minas

God and Morality
Steven M. Cahn

The Ontological Argument
Anselm and Gaunilo

Summa Theologiae
Thomas Aquinas

Natural Theology
William Paley

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume

The Wager
Blaise Pascal

The Will to Believe
William James

3D Face

3D

HUM 111: Julius Caesar & Illness

Julius Caesar & Illness

Caesar

Learning Innovation

Katrina Stevens

HUM 112: Impressionism, or Why Is Modern Art So Bad?

Why is Modern Art so Bad?  5:49

For two millennia, great artists set the standard for beauty. Now those standards are gone. Modern art is a competition between the ugly and the twisted; the most shocking wins. What happened? How did the beautiful come to be reviled and bad taste come to be celebrated? Renowned artist Robert Florczak explains the history and the mystery behind this change and how it can be stopped and even reversed.

https://youtu.be/lNI07egoefc

College Minecraft

college-students-get-virtual-look-real-world-minecraft

1969 Chevrolet Van

PHI 101: Facebook and Free Will, Philosophy

/facebooks-war-on-free-will

Heritage Guide to the Constitution

heritage.org/constitution

George Orwell Quotes

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” 
-George Orwell 

“Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies.” -George Orwell 

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” -George Orwell 

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” – George Orwell 

George Orwell said, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” 

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
-George Orwell 

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” -George Orwell 

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.” -George Orwell, “1984”

Priest's Revere Homosexual Unions

/father-martin-calls-for-reverence-of-homosexual-unions

Dawkins vs. Science in Islam

Debate

PHI 105: Premise

watch-student-asks-ben-shapiro-why-a-fetus-is-human-life-his-answer-leaves-student-speechless

Introduction to Philosophy, Part 3 Knowledge

Part 3: Knowledge


What is Knowledge? (Philosophical Definitions), 1:59


A description of how philosophers define knowledge, all the way back to Plato, and a basic introduction to the distinction between warrant and justification. This video will help you to understand the basics of epistemology.


https://youtu.be/cxWxGYVVFJ0

Caring and Epistemic Demands
Linda Zagzebski

What Is Knowledge?
A. J. Ayer

Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer, Fellow of the British Academy, 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989), usually cited as A. J. Ayer, was a British philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956).
He was educated at Eton College and Oxford University, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.

During the Second World War Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent.
He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, after which he returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and knighted in 1970.

Logical positivism and logical empiricism, which together formed neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was verificationism, a theory of knowledge which asserted that only statements verifiable through empirical observation are cognitively meaningful. The movement flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in several European centers.

AJ Ayer on Logical Positivism, 1:23


A J Ayer in discussion with Bryan Magee on logical positivism.


https://youtu.be/S1Pj8d9vQ8s





Efforts to convert philosophy to this new "scientific philosophy", shared with empirical sciences' best examples, such as Einstein's general theory of relativity, sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims.

The Berlin Circle and Vienna Circle—groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians in Berlin and Vienna—propounded logical positivism, starting in the late 1920s.

AJ Ayer Summaryy, 3:37


A2 Philosophy project By Ben Gill, Jess Hill and Stef Dickinson-Smith


https://youtu.be/fSleS1g6dsE

Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Edmund L. Gettier

Conditions for Knowledge
Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Philosophical Explanations (1981), which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology. 

Appearance and Reality

Bertrand Russell

What is this object?

Russell on Appearance and Reality, This is not a table (Video Essay), 3:23

An examination of Bertrand Russell's argument that reality is distinct from its appearance. What we see is our mind's interpretation of reality, not reality itself. This is in essence, notes on chapter 1 of Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy"

https://youtu.be/kwwFwgh1BFg

What Can I Know?
D. Z. Phillips

Dewi Zephaniah Phillips (24 November 1934 – 25 July 2006), known as D. Z. Phillips, Dewi Z, or simply DZ, was a leading proponent of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. He had an academic career spanning five decades, and at the time of his death he held the Danforth Chair in Philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University, California, and was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swansea University.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (German: 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953, and has since come to be recognized as one of the most important works of philosophy in the twentieth century. His teacher Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".

Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913. He initially made some donations to artists and writers and then, in a period of severe personal depression after the First World War, he gave away his entire fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Wittgenstein contemplating it too. He left academia several times—serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working as a hospital porter during World War II in London where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed while largely managing to keep secret the fact that he was one of the world's most famous philosophers.He described philosophy as "the only work that gives me real satisfaction".

His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and a later period, articulated in the Philosophical Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world and believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language-game.

Thus, his early work almost entirely contradicted his later work.

The Problem of Induction
Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS 18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism". He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore, and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed, and "welcomed with enthusiasm" world government.He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, he concluded war against Adolf Hitler was a necessary "lesser of two evils". He criticized Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought"

Induction without a Problem
P. F. Strawson

Puzzling Out Knowledge
Susan Haack

Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes

René Descartes (French: "Cartesian"; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Dubbed the father of modern western philosophy, much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–49) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual representatives of the Dutch Golden Age.

Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes's influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, used in the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the scientific revolution.

Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Les passions de l'âme, a treatise on the early modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". His best known philosophical statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discours de la méthode (1637; written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644; written in Latin).^]

Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation.

Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza^[16] and Descartes were all well-versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke

John Locke 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as David Hume, Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception. This is now known as empiricism. An example of Locke's belief in Empiricism can be seen in his quote, "whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire." This shows the ideology of science in his observations in that something must be capable of being tested repeatedly and that nothing is exempt from being disproved. Challenging the work of others, Locke is said to have established the method of introspection, or observing the emotions and behaviours of one’s self.

A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

George Berkeley

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume

Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant