30-Second Philosophies

Some people conclude that thinking about these questions is a waste of time because agreement will never be reached. But a few people are exhilarated by the process of questioning, thinking about tentative answers, questioning deeper, and so on. Even if we don’t settle many of these questions, the process brings us closer to understanding ourselves

Some people conclude that thinking about these questions is a waste of time because agreement will never be reached. But a few people are exhilarated by the process of questioning, thinking about tentative answers, questioning deeper, and so on. Even if we don’t settle many of these questions, the process brings us closer to understanding ourselves.

Religion addresses many of the same questions, but while philosophy and religion overlap in the questions they address, they can differ in the approach they take to answering

The most general branches of philosophy are ontology (about what there is), epistemology (about how and how much we can know about what there is), and ethics (about what we ought to do about what there is)

A difficulty with Pascal’s argument is that it isn’t so easy simply to decide what to believe and, in particular, to believe in God if one actually thinks that it is very unlikely that God exists. And, even if one could do that, it is not obvious that God (at least, the Christian God) would be inclined to reward a person who came to believe in him on the basis of placing a bet.

Plainly, things are moving, so there must be some first, Unmoved Mover back there that sets the whole chain in motion. This, Aquinas concludes, can only be God.

Immanuel Kant argued that consistency is assured if we follow the categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can, at the same time, wish that it should become a universal law.”

Hobbes argued that without the civilizing effect of society, lives would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, lived in continual fear, and with the danger of violent death. Rousseau, in contrast, was much more optimistic: in a state of nature, human beings are “noble savages,” who live a solitary, peaceful existence, concerned mainly with the satisfaction of their immediate needs.

When we learn the meaning of a word, we learn to associate it with a Mentalese word. Mentalese is itself innate, although the ability to employ a Mentalese term may be triggered by having certain experiences. Fodor goes on to liken both conscious and unconscious mental activities to the operations of a computer. Thinking, perceiving, and the rest involve computations with Mentalese sentences.

Prior to Goodman propounding his riddle, Bertrand Russell had already remarked that reasoning that the future will be like the past can lead one astray. He imagined a chicken who observed the farmer having always in the past selected a chicken other than herself for his dinner. Thus the chicken concluded that in the future the farmer would always select a chicken other than herself for his dinner.