CHAPTER 1

Dangerous Stuff
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are
at risk. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the
manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization.
—EMERSON
/ do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the
peace.
—BARUCH SPINOZA
There are two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the
sword is always beaten by the mind.
—NAPOLEON

For a revolution you need more than economic problems and guns. You need a philosophy.
Wars are founded on a philosophy, or on efforts to destroy one. Communism, capitalism,
fascism, atheism, humanism, Marxism—philosophies all of them. Philosophies give birth to
civilizations. They also end them.
The philosophy department works with high explosives, Van Meter Ames liked to say.
It handles dangerous stuff. This book is an introduction to philosophy. From it you will learn,
among other things, why philosophy, as Ames said, is dynamite.
You will also see that philosophy is foundational to many other disciplines. What
yesterday was called philosophy today is often called psychology or government or physics
or some other subject, or even just plain common sense. Many of the basic concepts you
have come from philosophy, maybe more so than from physics or psychology or biology or
sociology or any other field. Whether it's a concept about the way the world is, or about the
way people are or should be, or about what is and can be known, or about what's right and
wrong and beautiful and ugly - at bottom, it's in large part philosophy. Other fields fill in the
details, but the basic conceptual framework is mostly pure philosophy. Even the Judaeo-
Christian concept of God we are familiar with today owes much to philosophy—as you will
see.
So the questions philosophers raise can strike right at the foundations of what we think
and do and claim to know—and can send tremors through our entire edifice of beliefs.
The power of the subject is surprising when you consider that philosophy has spent most
of its history shrinking. Philosophy once encompassed nearly everything that counted as
human knowledge. Among the ancient Greeks nearly every subject that is currently listed in
college catalogues was or would have been considered philosophy. One by one, these
intellectual enterprises gained sufficient maturity and stature to stand alone as separate
subjects. Mathematics, rhetoric, physics, biology, government, politics, law— all once fell
under the general heading of philosophy.
The word philosophy, as every introductory book on the subject tells us, comes from the
two Greek words philein, which means "to love," and sophia which means "knowledge" or
"wisdom." Because knowledge can be discovered in many fields, the Greeks thought of any
person who sought knowledge in any area as a philosopher.
Consider physics for a moment. One of the first known Greek philosophers, Thales, was
actually doing what we might call "speculative physics" (in contrast to experimental physics)
when he claimed that everything in the natural world was made of water. Two other ancient
Greeks, Leucippus and Democritus, arrived at the conclusion that all matter was made from
tiny particles—atoms— that were similar except for their size and shape, but that accounted
for differences in larger bodies by means of their different arrangements.
Should we think of these early thinkers as physicists or philosophers? The Greeks had
no difficulty answering this question, because they thought of physics as a part of
philosophy. And this view of physics persisted for over two thousand years. The full title of
Isaac Newton's Principles, in which Newton set forth his famous theories of mechanics,
mathematics, and astronomy is Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Physics,
even by the seventeenth century, was still thought of as a variety of philosophy. By the
twentieth century, however, physics had outgrown the nest and, though it still has important
points of contact, is no longer considered a part of philosophy. Similar stories can be told for
each of the disciplines listed a couple of paragraphs back..
If philosophy can no longer claim those subject areas that have grown up and moved
out, what's left for it to claim? As you'll see by the end of this book, the current list of
philosophical subjects is by no means short and discloses the deep and wide concern of
philosophy for some very important questions about the universe, the earth, humankind and
all life, and each of us. Just what is this concern? What is philosophy today?
Mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, economics and political science, and the
full array of existing intellectual disciplines, including theology, leave unanswered in part
some of the most important and fundamental questions a person can ask.
• Is it possible to know anything with absolute certainty?
• Do people really have free will?
• Are some actions really right and others wrong? |
• Does life have a purpose?
• Is a person anything more than a physical body?
• Does the world have to be just the way it is, or could it have
 been different?
• What is art?
• Is there a God?
• What difference does it make if there is or isn't a God?
Perhaps it's possible to go through life and never spend a minute wondering about such
questions. But most of us have at least occasional moments of reflection about one or
another of them. In fact, its really pretty difficult not to think philosophically from time to
time. For one thing, its just plain boring always to be thinking and talking about everyday
affairs and objects—say shopping for instance. (Do you like to shop? Fine. So do we,
sometimes. But do you want to spend all your time thinking and talking about it?) And
what's more, any time we think or talk about a topic long enough, if our thinking or
discussion is the least bit organized, we may well become engaged in philosophy
As an example, let's just take shopping. If, while shopping, you have ever taken a break
for a soft drink or a cup of coffee, some conscientious person may have observed that the
styrofoam cup you are drinking from is manufactured by a process that contributes to the
breakdown of the ozone layer and unnecessarily contributes to a rise in skin cancer. You, in
return, may have said, or at least have thought, that what you as an individual do is not
going to have much of an effect on the styrofoam industry or the fast-food business or the
ozone layer. But by this time you're no longer thinking or talking about a cup of Diet Pepsi;
you're pondering a matter of moral obligation, one of ethical philosophy
Unfortunately, when people get to this point in their thinking or conversation, they often just
stop. They don't know what to think or say next in the matter, Or, to take another example of
philosophy lurking in a situation, if you've seen any of the Star Wars movies, it may have
occurred to you to wonder whether a robot really could feel emotions, as the sweet little guys
in the movies seem to do. Could a robot feel an emotion as we do? Its just a machine—is
there anything about feelings that says they couldn't be experienced by the right kind of
robot? Perhaps your opinion is that robots can't have feelings. Well, why couldn't they? Is it
because robots are not made out of the right kind of stuff, the kind of organic stuff that you
and we are made of? But intelligent beings from other galaxies might also not be made out of
the same kind of stuff as you and we, and could stilt have feelings, we suppose. So why
couldn't robots, if they were sufficiently complex? Is it because robots couldn't have a soul?
Because they couldn't be alive? Well, why couldn't they? What, for that matter, is a soul?
What is it to be alive?
Now, each of the questions posed in the last paragraph is a philosophical question, and
each is the kind of question a thoughtful person might be inclined to ask after seeing the
movie Star Wars—or after listening to some enthusiast make predictions for computers. In
later chapters we'll consider just such questions, for this process of analyzing and trying to
answer such questions is the task of philosophers.
You're wondering, maybe, just what makes these questions—or any other philosophical
question—philosophical? Unfortunately, no very precise definition of "philosophical
question," or of philosophy itself, that is satisfactory to many philosophy teachers has ever
been formulated. True, the definition of philosophy as the love or pursuit of wisdom is
widely circulated, but this is altogether too vague and general to be particularly helpful. Do
you know of any discipline that doesn't pursue wisdom in one way or another?
The problem is that what philosophy is is itself a philosophical issue, and the issue hasn't
yet been settled. Its like asking, What is art? - another philosophical question that has not
been answered to the satisfaction of very many philosophers.
One important feature of philosophical questions is that they can't be answered just by
looking around—that is, by the discovery of some fact or collection of facts. Philosophy, in
other words, is not an empirical science. That part of the wisdom business has now been
turned over to physics, chemistry, and the rest of the sciences. Of course, facts are often
relevant to a philosophical question, but they cannot by themselves provide us with an
answer. What observable "fact" would settle whether or not a robot could feel pain? Clearly,
no fact by itself will do: the problem must be approached in some other way.
Many philosophical questions concern norms: Normative questions ask about the value of
something. The sciences are interested in finding out how-things are, but they cannot tell us
how things ought to be. When we decide that this or that is good or bad, right or wrong,
beautiful or ugly, we are applying ethical or aesthetic norms, which are standards of one kind
or another. How can we establish that doing one thing is morally acceptable whereas doing
something else is morally wrong? Does it just strike us that way? Is it what the majority of
people in one's society thinks that determines the issue? Is some feature of the action right or
wrong, or is it the consequences of the action? What is morally right, anyway? All these are
philosophical questions, and nearly any answer to each is based on a commitment to some
kind of ethical theory or principle. To many people, indeed, philosophy is ethics, and even
though that's not correct - many philosophical questions have nothing to do with ethics—
there's no denying that ethics is important stuff. People may kill you if they think it’s morally
right to do so.
Philosophical Questions
Although philosophical questions crop up in even commonplace
discussions, they arise from the human need to understand the deepest
mysteries of existence. The following important questions are all
philosophical.
What am I? What is the human mind?
Is there a single, first cause of all things?
Is the first cause equivalent to God? Or nature? Or the laws of the universe?
What is life? Does life have meaning?
Would life have meaning without death? Why is there death?
Does the universe have purpose? Is there order in the cosmos independent of what is put
there by the mind?
What is being?
Could reality be different from what we can conceive it to be? What is good and what is evil?
Is anything certain?

Often, too, philosophers ask questions about things that seem so obvious we might not
wonder about them—for example, the nature of change, an issue within that branch of
philosophy known as metaphysics. What is change? Perhaps that seems a strange thing to ask
because in a way we all know what change is. If something changes, it becomes different.
But then—and here's the problem— if we have a different thing after the change, then we are
considering two things, the original thing and the new and different thing. If something
changes, then it is different from the way it was, and if it is different, then is it the same
thing?
Further, if after the change we have a new thing, then were we wrong to speak of the
original thing as changing? Wasn't the original thing in fact replaced rather than changed?
Isn't there only replacement of, rather than change in, things, and so only continuous
replacements, rather than changes, of the universe, of the earth, and of each of us?
Here you may suspect that an easy solution is at hand. When something changes, it need
not become entirely different. It may change only in this or that respect. Or it may retain
many of its original constituents or features. Suppose a thing retains a lot of its original
features or constituents. Then, if only a few other of its features or constituents change, it
will still be the same thing. It will now have some different features or constituents, true,
but it won't be a different thing.
Unfortunately, this solution is not wholly satisfactory, and, in addition, it leads to further
mystery. It is not satisfactory, because some things do change entirely, that is, in all
respects. An old oak, for example, and the tiny seedling from which it grew are the same
tree, yet the old oak is in no respect like the seedling, and none of the molecules that
existed in the seedling needs to be present in the old oak. When he was a child, one of the
authors found an ugly green sluglike little thing that, after a while, became a beautiful
butterfly that in no way resembled the thing it had been originally.
Granted, the oak and the seedling (and the butterfly and the larva) are thought to be
unfoldings of the same genetic pattern: the oak, as Aristotle would say, is the actualization
of the potential in the seedling. But does this thought help us understand how it can be said
of two things that are entirely different, both in features and even in constituents, that they
are one?
 That easy solution mentioned here also leads to a further mystery, for even if it explains
how a thing can change, it leaves us puzzling about how a thing's features may change. If a
thing's changing is to be understood in terms of some of its features becoming different, then
how is a features changing to be understood.
The problem of change leads to other difficult philosophical questions. For example, is the
man who committed a heinous deed, perhaps as a child, the same person as an adult and as
such still to be looked upon with horror or censure? Of course, we think of him as still John
Doe, or whatever his name is. But is this philosophically correct, since the chemical and
physical constituents of the child's body and brain may have been completely replaced by
new material and his mind by new mental elements, whatever the "elements" of the mind
really are? Has the child not indeed been replaced? And if so, can his guilt possibly pertain
to his replacement?
These considerations suggest also that the problem of change, of whether what we call
change is really replacement, is not merely an unimportant ques tion of semantics. For what
is at stake is whether the man did indeed do the awful deed. It’s pretty hard to see how
whether he did or did not is a simple matter of semantics.
Here again you can see why it might be said that philosophy lies right at the foundation of
thought. Practically everything we think—and do—depends on our understanding of what it
is for things to change.
Sometimes philosophical questions come to light when our beliefs seem to conflict with
one another. Lets take a look at a question of this sort, this time considering the matter in a
bit more detail.
We would be willing to wager a rather large sum of money that you believe that people
should be held accountable for what they do voluntarily. If you choose to drink and then you
choose to drive and you end up killing someone, well, you are to blame, because your actions
were voluntary.
We'd bet you would also say that when someone chooses to do something, he or she
chooses it because he or she wants to do it, or at least wants to do it more than he or she
wants not to do it. True, we often choose to do what we think is right even though sometimes
it isn't pleasant to do what is right. But still, when we do this, it is because we want to do
what is right,
We'd bet on something else, too. We'd bet that, after considering the matter, you will
concede that a person is not responsible for having the wants he or she has. You do not
yourself cause or create your wants. You do not yourself deter mine what you like or desire.
We, for example, Moore and Bruder, wanted to write this book, but we didn't cause
ourselves to want to write it. And you - do you like reading this book? If you do, would you
say that you caused yourself to like to read it? Or, if you hate it, would you say that you
made yourself hate it? We'd bet your answer to both questions is "no." Our wants, desires,
preferences, likes, and so on all seem to be something we just have. They are not things we
made ourselves have.
So it seems, then, that our wants are not our doing. And it also seems that we shouldn't be
held responsible for what is not our doing. But it also seems that our wants determine what
we choose to do. So how can we be held responsible for what we choose to do? Does this
make sense? If, in other words, our voluntary acts are the result of what we want to do, but
we can't be held responsible for what we want to do, how can we be held responsible for our
voluntary acts?
"Interesting," you may be thinking, "but unconvincing, because we are responsible for
what we want." After all, we can determine our wants, if we feel like it. Consider, for
instance, someone who doesn't like vegetables. He may decide that it would be nice to like
vegetables, and he may then set about acquiring this new want by telling himself how good
vegetables are, by forcing himself to eat them, or by mixing them with something he does
like, say, jelly. Ultimately he may succeed in acquiring a taste for the straight goods.
Notice, though, when you examine a case like this carefully, it seems that what the person
has done is only this: he has talked to himself about how good vegetables are and has made
himself eat them. But whether or not these actions had the effect he hoped for—namely,
instilling a fondness for vegetables—is something beyond his control. These actions might
have made him positively detest vegetables, too, and if they had, that wouldn't have been his
doing, either.
Or, to take a different example, let's say that Harold likes wine a bit too much and
goes to a psychiatrist hoping that she can rid him of this problem. Suppose, then,
that Harold does what his psychiatrist prescribes, and the therapy is successful: he
no longer craves wine quite as much as he did earlier. But is this Harold's doing?
He followed his psychiatrist’s advice, yes, but whether or not her advice would
actually work is not something Harold can control.
So, when you look closely at cases in which we appear to cause ourselves to
change our wants or desires, what happens is that we do certain things, perhaps
hoping that the result will be an alteration of our likes and preferences. Whether or
not the hoped-for alteration takes place, however, is arguably not our doing.
Let's apply these considerations to a concrete case. Do you smoke? If you do, you
may well regret ever having started. And if you are like most of us, you may be
inclined to suppose that it was your fault that you took up smoking. You may say,
 "I have only myself to blame, after all. No one forced me to keep lighting up those
first times, and I knew very well I might get hooked."
But is this correct? Is it really your fault? Consider, You kept lighting up those first times
because you wanted to, certainly. It's unlikely that it was the flavor or effect of cigarette
smoke that made you keep smoking at first. More likely it was that you wanted to be like
your friends or wanted to have a challenge. In any case, you wanted to smoke more than you
wanted not to smoke, and it was because of this that you kept lighting up. And it was because
you kept lighting up that you are now an addicted smoker, both physically and mentally.
Now since, apparently, it was because of your wants that ultimately you became a smoker,
then, if you aren't responsible for having those wants, it doesn't seem that you are to blame
for having gotten hooked. Are you responsible for having had those wants? Assuming that
you kept smoking because you wanted to be like your friends, did you cause yourself to have
this want? Did you make yourself have a desire to be like your friends? Did you create
within yourself this fondness for being like them?
When the question is posed this way, it doesn't seem completely plausible to suppose that
you did create your wants. You didn't make yourself desire to be like your friends, just as we,
the authors, didn't make ourselves like to write philosophy texts. Having these wants just
happened to us, and wanting to be like your friends just happened to you.
Still, it may occur to you that, when you kept lighting up there at first, you were giving in
to your wants and allowing yourself to be governed by your desire to be like your friends (or
whatever). And therefore you are to blame for having been hooked because it was you who
gave in to your wants.
But notice that even if you did give in to your wants, then you did so because you wanted
to more than you wanted not to. So again we trace your actions back to a set of wants that it
seems implausible to suppose you created.
Perhaps by now it's clear that what's really at stake here is a profoundly important and
basic question: Are we ever really to blame for what we do? This is a philosophical question,
one that comes to light because some of our beliefs seem not to get along so well together.
On one hand, it seems that we are to blame for what we choose to do, but on the other, if
what we choose to do is the result of our wants, and if we aren't to blame for our wants, then
how can we be to blame for what we choose to do?
Let's conclude this discussion by turning to something a bit more important than cigarettes
or wine. Let's talk about one Ted Bundy, who was executed in 1989 in Florida for having
committed several brutal rape-murders. Bundy was not found insane: presumably he knew
the difference between right and wrong, and knew that what he was doing was wrong. Why
did he do what he did? Ultimately, he did what he did because he wanted to do it more than
he wanted not to. His actions resulted from what he wanted to do.
But now, if this wanting to do it more than wanting not to do it is not something Bundy
could be blamed for, then can he really be blamed for what he did? And can he be blamed
for wanting to do it more than wanting not to do it, if we do not create our wants?
The basic issues here—whether we are accountable for what we want and, if we are not,
whether we are accountable for what we do—are not going to be resolved through scientific
research. These are philosophical issues, and they are issues of considerable importance.
Whether we should execute people like Ted Bundy depends on their outcome.
Our purpose here hasn't been to endorse the view that people aren't to
blame for what they do, but to illustrate that important philosophical issues
sometimes arise from problems in common sense. Perhaps, too, these few examples
of philosophical questions will convince you that studying philosophy might be both
interesting and worthwhile. We understand that these few examples are not going to
make the nature of philosophical questions as clear as window glass. But that's what
the rest of the book is for, to give you a reasonable understanding of some of the
central philosophical questions and issues and how they have been treated over the
years.
Philosophy Pies
Now, just how do the various philosophical questions and issues relate to one
another? First, philosophy as an entire subject consists of seven interrelated
branches or fields or main areas. These are:
• Metaphysics, which studies the nature of being. What is being? What are its
fundamental features and properties? These are two basic questions of metaphysics.
• Epistemology, the theory of knowledge. What is knowledge? Is knowledge possible?
These are the basic questions of epistemology.
• Ethics, the philosophical study of moral judgments, which includes, most importantly,
the question: Which moral judgments are correct?
• Social philosophy, the philosophical study of society and its institutions. This branch of
philosophy is concerned especially with determining the features of the ideal or best
society-
• Political philosophy, which focuses on one social institution, the state, and seeks to
 determine its justification and ethically proper organization. Political philosophy is so
closely related to social philosophy that it is common to treat them as a single area,
social-political philosophy.
• Aesthetics, the philosophical study of art and of value judgments about art, and of
beauty in general.
• Logic, the theory of correct reasoning, which seeks to investigate and establish the
criteria of valid inference and demonstration.
So philosophy as a big pie can be cut up in terms of its seven major fields. Needless to
say, this is not a quantitative division of the pie. The pie slices in the diagram are equal in
size, but we are not suggesting that each of the branches of philosophy contains an equal
number of theories or concepts or words. Your library probably has more holdings under
political philosophy than under any of the other areas, and fewest under epistemology or
aesthetics.

The Branches of Philosophy

In terms of historical periods, the same philosophy pie is subdivided into four pieces:
• Ancient philosophy (sixth century B.C. through, approximately, the third century A.D.)
• Medieval philosophy (fourth through sixteenth centuries, approximately)
• Modern (fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, approximately)
• Contemporary (twentieth century)
Thus:
Historical Periods of Philosophy
 The pie can also be divided geographically, Eastern philosophy and
Western philosophy being the main division, with further subdivisions
of the obvious sort—American philosophy, Indian philosophy,
Scandinavian philosophy, Continental philosophy (referring to the
European continent), etc., etc.
In this century, the predominant interests and methods of philosophers
in the West have tended to separate them into two fairly distinct
"traditions."
• Analytic philosophy: Analytic philosophers believe (or are the
intellectual descendents of those who did believe) that the proper
method of philosophy is what is called analysis.
• Continental philosophy: There are several approaches to philoso-
phy that fit under this heading, including principally the following
(here we'll just name these approaches; we'll explain what they are
about in Part 6): existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics,
decon-struction, and critical theory.

Twentieth-Century Traditions

In the twentieth century, as it so happens, generally (and with important exceptions) the
predominant tradition in English-speaking countries is analytic philosophy, and you
sometimes hear the expression Anglo-American philosophy used as a virtual synonym for
analytic philosophy. And generally (and again with important exceptions) the predominant
tradition in continental Europe is, as you would expect, Continental philosophy. As odd as it
sounds, if an American or British philosopher happens to be most concerned with the issues
discussed within Continental philosophy, it is acceptable to refer to the person as a Conti-
nental philosopher even if he or she never set foot on the European continent,
 And by the way, many philosophers would list Marxism along with analytic philosophy
and Continental philosophy as a third "tradition, but we'll treat Marxism as a species of
political philosophy.
As is quite evident, a whole range of classification schemes applies to philosophy. As you
read this book, you should refer back to these various diagrams when you need to get your
bearings.
The benefits of Philosophy The importance of some philosophical questions—like, "Is there
a God who is attentive, caring, and responsive to us?" and "Is abortion morally wrong?"—is
obvious and great. A justification would have to be given for not contemplating them. But,
quite honestly, some philosophical questions are of more or less obscure, and seemingly only
academic or theoretical, consequence. Not everything philosophers consider is dynamite. The
questions posed earlier about robots having feelings would be perceived by many as pretty
academic and theoretical.
But then, every field has its theoretical and nonpractical questions. Why do astronomers
wonder about the distance and recessional velocity of quasars? Why are paleontologists
interested in 135-million-year-old mammalian fossil remains in northern Malawi? Why do
musicologists care whether Bach used parallel fifths? The answer is that some questions are
inherently interesting to those who pose them. An astronomer wonders about a quasar just
because it is there. And some philosophical questions are like that, too: the philosopher
wants to know the answer just simply to know the answer.
But there are side benefits in seeking answers to philosophical questions, even those that
are difficult, abstruse, or seemingly remote from practical concerns. Seeing philosophical
answers usually entails making careful distinctions in thought, words, and argument, and
recognizing subtle distinctions among things and among facts. Philosophical solutions
require logical and critical thinking, discussion, and exposition. So students of philosophy
learn to look carefully for similarities and differences among things. They also develop an
ability to spot logical difficulties in what others write or say and to avoid these pitfalls in
their own thinking. In addition, they learn to recognize and critically assess the important
unstated assumptions people make about the world and themselves and other people and life
in general. These assumptions affect how people perceive the world and what they say and
do, yet for the most part people are not aware of them and are disinclined to consider them at
all critically These abilities are of great value in any field that requires clear thinking.