Chapter 3
REALITY AND BEING
What is real?
 Metaphysics attempts to answer the question: What is
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real?
Are spirits real? Is power real? Is justice real?
Is reality more than the material world around us?
Are these questions important? Please look at the story
on pages 134-135. When the person tells someone not to
worry because spirits aren’t real, they are basically saying
not worth paying attention to.
Nozick believes that to say something is real is to say it
has “value, meaning, importance and weight.” What do
you think?
Reality as Matter
 Materialism is the view that matter is the ultimate
constituent of reality.
 St. Augustine did not find it difficult to believe spirits
were real. Does this view make sense in the modern
world? Why or why not?
Eastern Materialism
 The Charvaka Philosophers of India believed that we
should turn away from religion and its delusions.
We should focus on the material world. The
foundation for this is the notion that all we can know
about this world is from our sense perceptions. They
reject inductive and deductive reasoning as
sources of knowledge.
Western Materialism
 Democritus (460-360 BCE) argued that reality could
be explained in terms of matter. He thought the
smallest pieces of matter were atoms. He described
them as solid, indivisible, indestructible, eternal and
uncreated. He thought the soul is made up of atoms.
He equated the soul with reason. What do you think
of this?
 Why did people lose interest in this theory?
Objections to Materialism
 How does consciousness fit into materialism?
Consciousness is intentional and subjective. It also
has no apparent location, mass, or volume.
 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
 At the most basic level, is world intertwined with the
mind?
Idealism
 Is reality more than matter?
 Do we live in a fully non material world? Is the
universe only mind and idea?
 Plato
 Augustine
 Berkeley – subjective idealism; objective idealism
Objections to Idealism
 Do idealists commit the fallacy of
anthropomorphism?
Pragmatism
John Dewey, William James, Jane Addams
What is the purpose of philosophy?
What social forces created philosophy?
Is reality subjective or objective?
Dewey doesn’t want to relegate values to metaphysical
realists. He believes they too often do not take social
conditions seriously enough.
 James argued that “whatever excites and stimulates are
interest is real.”
 “To shut one’s self away from half of the race life is to shut
one’s self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out
but half the humanity to which we have been born heir and to
use but half our faculty,” according to Jane Addams.
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Reality and Logical Positivism
 Logical Positivism focuses on language and meaning.
 Please read the Ayer quote on page 159.
 For many logical positivists, metaphysical
statements about ethics and theology are
meaningless. Emotivism. Do you agree with the
logical positivists on this point? Why or why not?
 What is a criticism of logical positivism? Do you
agree with this criticism. Why or why not?
Antirealism
 Antirealists hold that the worlds or world we inhabit
depends in part on our minds.
 What do you think this means? Why do so many
feminists embrace this view?
 Why are some people critical of this view?
Encountering Reality: Phenomenology and
Existentialism
 Phenomenology is the study of what appears to
consciousness.
 What does Husserl mean when he writes about
‘bracketing’?
 What does Heidegger mean by Dasein?
 Existentialism – we define ourselves through our
commitments.
Is Freedom Real?
Determinism
Libertarianism
Compatabilism
Is time real?
 Augustine: Only the Present Moment is Real
 McTaggert: Subjective Time is Not Real
 Kant: Time is a Mental Construct
 Bergson: Only Subjective Time is real