HZT4U
Unit 5: Modern Philosophy
Introduction
Image: The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor
The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that philosophy needs to start from
experience. What sets philosophy of the late 19th and early 20th century apart from previous
philosophies is that the whole of human understanding was expanding at a tremendous rate and
therefore philosophical thought was blooming with respect to this acquired knowledge. Philosophy of
this time would take on a more psychological aspect.
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Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead was an English philosopher and mathematician, who spent a
great deal of his time working with Bertrand Russell on some of Russell’s most
important works.
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Epistemology
Whitehead rejected materialism as a scheme of scientific through which was
framed for mathematicians by mathematicians and the problem with this is that is has
left no room for notions of value, meaning and purpose within scientific explanations.
While materialism strives for things to be valueless and objective, but
Whitehead notes that in rejecting values in this way, materialism is in itself a value system.
In place of materialism, Whitehead suggests we operate with the concept of organism instead of
substance and events instead of space and time.
Whitehead believed that the view that nature is that which lies behind sense experience and causes sense
experience is flawed, but rather than nature is best understood as nothing more than that which is
observed by perception.
According to Whitehead, Science works best when it looks at the relations between perceptual events and
does away with the outdated notion of matter.
Metaphysics
Whitehead’s process metaphysics is based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity
and that of abstract entity
For Whitehead an actual entity is determinate and completely concrete, about which categorical
statements can be made. Basically it is what we would normally think of as an object.
With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience. This
means that an entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object is really simply composed
of many different occasions of experience.
According to Whitehead, the occasions of experience are of four grades.
o First: Processes in a physical vacuum.
o Second: Involve just inanimate matter.
o Third: Involve living organisms
o Fourth: Involve subjective experiences or judgements
All processes are linked through time and are connected to each other as such. In this way Whitehead
admits the possibility of a deterministic universe, but he believes that free will is inherent in the universe.
According to Whitehead, when an object is perceived as being spatially separated, it is actually causally
separated.
Socio-Political Philosophy
Whitehead noted that social change is driven by either brute senseless force or articulated beliefs. He
believed that change ought to come about through belief, aspirations and ideals, not violence.
In this sense, Whitehead believed that peace was an active state and a preferable one.
Whitehead asserted that education and learning itself was a process and that learning ought to go
through three phases; Romance (the gathering of ideas), Precision (the filtering of ideas) and Fruition (the
utilizing of ideas). This process is also the means by which humans come to understand.
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John Dewey
Even if you have never heard of John Dewey as a philosopher, you have likely
heard of the ‘Dewet Decimal System’, a system he created for the categorizing
of knowledge according to subject.
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Epistemology
- Dewey is known as one of the major founders of pragmatism in
epistemology. He built this idea upon the works of Charles Saunders Peirce.
Dewey noted that the truth can been see as that which works.
Dewey noted that what we call knowledge is a set of beliefs that have proven successful in
action. This is generally done through habitual behaviour.
At first, when our habitual behaviour is interrupted, we will nonetheless attempt to resolve the
situation.
Since the initial action has proven unsuccessful, we then must begin a process of “intellection”
whereby we extract the elements of situation in order to problem solve.
This leads us to constructing hypotheses in order to provide possible answers for why the initial
action was unsuccessful.
Then we evaluate these different hypotheses by looking at the different experiences each
hypothesis might actually produce.
Finally we test or experiment with our hypothesis and either accept or eliminate it. The end
result being a resolution of the problem and the adoption of a new hypothesis that might work.
All we can really come to know is what works and what does not, we cannot claim to know any
sort of metaphysical propositions about what actually is.
Socio-Political Philosophy
- According to Dewey societies, like individuals, are characterized by habitual patterns of action,
but sometimes these patters too will break down and therefore must be repaired by the society
itself going through the same epistemological process noted above.
- Dewey saw educational institutions as social processes, and as such, the school itself is a social
institution through which social reform can and should take place. He believed that teaching
through experience and interaction and that students should take part in their own learning.
Ethics
- Dewey also believed in pragmatism of ethics. That is to say that the good is ultimately what
works for the human good.
- John Dewey is a humanist, which he describes as, "What Humanism means to me is an
expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of
nature are made the willing servants of human good." (What Humanism Means to Me by John
Dewey)
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in Germany, but lived much of his life in England. Perhaps more than
any other philosopher, Karl Marx has changed the course of history with his books The
Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. He was building upon Hegel’s notation of the
dialectic.
Metaphysics
Marx rejected idealism and instead was essentially materialistic and atheistic.
For Marx, the basic condition of humanity was the need to convert raw materials
of the natural world into the good necessary for survival. This essentially means that
mankind is basically designed for production and economics.
Epistemology
For Marx, the mind does not exist as a passive subject in a material world, but rather is actively engaged
with the objects of knowledge and the subject and object of experience are in a continual process of
adaptation.
He believed that we ought to order our experience in practical ways in order to make it useful for our
survival.
Socio-Political Philosophy
He believed that invention and innovation create social structures.
He saw there being a three sided conflict between economic classes. Following Hegel’s ideas of thesis,
and antithesis and synthesis, Marx advocates that the landowners were opposed by the rising middle
class, which created a synthesis, the industrial employers of capitalism. This new thesis of course gives
rise to an antithetical force of the working class.
The synthesis, according to Marx is then an inevitable dialectical outcome of socialism.
He argues for socialism because it is best for what Marx saw as the state of human beings, namely
production.
Marx saw capitalism as both dehumanizing, alienating, exploitative and recurring, cyclical depressions
leading to mass unemployment. (despite this, he noted that it was responsible for certain positive
developments as well.)
Marx saw the synthesis of capitalism and the working class as communism, which in essence means a
society that is classless and stateless, based upon common ownership of the means of production and
free access to articles of consumption. This, Marx believed would end economic exploitation.
Communism is essentially a system that relies on the marginal distribution of funds (taking from the rich
and giving to the poor).
In a communist system, funds are allocated based on need and social relations based on freely associated
individuals, rather than class and people are driven to labour based on their personal desires or the needs
of the state.
Marx believed that freedom can only truly be attained through the elimination of state, social class,
private property and the means of production.
Note: While communism is often associated with socialism, socialism is an intermediary step towards
communism. Socialism is characterized by the concept of social ownership and cooperative management
of the means of production in order to bring about equality among the classes.
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Unit 5: Modern Philosophy
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Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher born in Copenhagen. He is often
cited as the father of existentialism although he himself never actually used
the term. Kierkegaard died at the age of 42.
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Epistemology
- Kierkegaard built upon the works of Descartes and focused on the
individuality rather than looking at the human species as a whole.
- Contrary to the empiricists before him Kierkegaard regarded the
conclusions of the passion as the only reliable ones. He dismissed the
importance of reflection and logical thought and emphasized passion as the
root of knowing.
- Kierkegaard noted that humans are, at every turn faced with the
need to make decisions and thus he concluded that choice is out ultimate starting point,
consistent companion and heaviest burden.
Kierkegaard regarded truth as subjective, not objective. He asserted that his mission was not to
find the truth but to find what is true for him.
According to Kierkegaard, faith knowledge was not only of value, but in fact superior because it
is derived from passion.
Metaphysics
- Kierkegaard said that what we need to do is be clear in our mind what we are to do, not what
we are to know. He asserted that his mission was not to find the truth but to find what is true
for him.
- Kierkegaard concluded that the answer for him was religious belief, which he holds to be known
through passion and not reason. He believed that reason can only undermine faith, not justify
it. Any rationalization for belief in God to him would be inauthentic because it lacks any sort of
leap of faith.
- Kierkegaard stressed the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world, as being
grounded in self-reflection and introspection.
Ethics
- Kierkegaard thought that the divine command of God transcends ethics and thus God is not
necessarily responsible for creating human morality, rather humans must come up with their
own ethics and morality, but any religious person must be prepared that the divine command of
God would take precedence over these ethics or morality.
- According to Kierkegaard believes ethics and faith are separate stages of consciousness.
- The choice to obey God unconditionally belongs to the individual. Either one chooses to live in
faith (the religious stage) or to live ethically (the ethical stage).
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche is perhaps one of the most controversial philosophers in Western
though. Nietzsche’s philosophies have been linked to nihilism and Nazism
(although this link is built upon some speculation).
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Ethics
- Nietzsche saw the human experience as being dominated by “the will to
power” (a term he adopted from Schopenhauer), which is a human’s desire to
dominate and control the external forces acting upon us.
In order to achieve this, the individual is required to be the master of his or her own destiny.
The frustration of this urge is what leads to the existence of various moral systems or religious
institutions, which Nietzsche saw as ways of blinding and subduing the will. He called this
process, the master-slave morality.
Nietzsche saw the will to power as something to be revered and affirmed.
He viewed the domination of the strong as necessary to the evolutionary process. Thus,
through the social application of Darwinian principals (evolution, survival of the fittest) we allow
humans to evolve to what he calls the ubermensch (superman).
He classifies the ubermensch as those who are more complete as human beings, have learned to
sublimate and control their passions and channel their will to power into a creative force.
Metaphysics
- Nietzsche believed that man had evolved and no longer had any use for God and thus concludes
famously that “God is dead.”
- He saw Christianity as the antidote for meaninglessness (because it gave people intrinsic value),
but Nietzsche saw meaninglessness as a natural state of things in that he essentially believed
that metaphysics itself no longer held value.
- Nietzsche saw the world moving towards a complete and total meaninglessness (nihilism),
which must eventually be overcome (by the ubermensch) in order for man to thrive.
- Nietzsche believed in the concept of eternal recurrence, which is a concept which says that the
universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a similar form an infinite number of
times across infinite time or space. He believes this theory to be completely physical or material
in nature.
Epistemology
- As Nietzsche saw it, meaninglessness would eventually lead to the loss of any universal
perspective on things and along with it any coherent sense of objective reality or truth.
- Nietzsche saw knowledge as contingent and conditional. He believed that what we know is
relative to various fluid perspectives or interests. This makes truth relative to a personal
perspective and constantly changing (perspectivism).
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Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher and playwright who
became the spokespersons for the existential movement that
dominated French thought after world war 2. He borrowed
extensively from both Soren Kierkegaard and Marin Heidegger.
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Metaphysics
- Sartre believed that existence precedes essence meaning that
man first exists without purpose or definition and then, as a reaction
to experience defines and creates meaning in his life.
- Sartre believed that since there is no God or designer to give
man purpose, each individual must choose the life that they see as best.
Sartre notes that any belief in God is in itself a personal choice in that it can never be forced
upon a person.
Sartre believed that man is never compelled; only ever faced with a choice at every turn. Even if
one has a gun pointed at his head, the consequences do not exempt one from making a choice.
Sartre assert that we must define our own meaning in life.
As a result of this radical freedom, we are responsible for everything we do, which leads to three
burdens of the human condition:
o Anguish- arising from the awareness of the weight of responsibility we hold because we
choose our own fate.
o Abandonment – knowing that any belief in God is a choice, we find ourselves alone
without help in moral matters.
o Despairs – This arises from the understanding that we must learn to act without hope
and abandon the instinct to trust that things will work out for the best.
To this end Sartre says that we are condemned to be free, but we can be optimistic that the
destiny of man is placed within man himself.
Sartre believed that notions of authenticity and individuality must be earned an not learned.
Epistemology
- Sartre valued emotions as a philosophical way of understanding.
- Sartre believed that we can come to know ourselves (the individual) but cannot truly know any
form of other.
- This makes knowledge itself more about belief and choice than about any understanding of the
world.
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Albert Camus
Albert Camus is a celebrated French-Algerian author, playwright and philosopher. He
was also, for a long time a friend and contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre. His most
famous philosophical work is “The Myth of Sisyphus” which refers to Sisyphus as a
metaphor for human existence. Sisyphus is a figure of Greek legend who deified the
Gods by attempting to imprison death and was sentenced to roll a rock up a hill, only
for it to roll back down, thus never completing his task.
Epistemology
- According to Camus, human existence is absurd because we are consistently trying to make
sense of a senseless world.
- The universe, according to Camus, is ultimately irrational.
Metaphysics
- Sisyphus’ fate, according to Camus, illustrates the futility and hopelessness of labour.
- We, like Sisyphus, live our lives working hard, but accomplishing nothing. In the end all we
create will eventually fall to ruin.
- The condition of man’s existence as absurd is characterized by a conflict between rational man
and an irrational world. This conflict is not able to be resolved and thus we ought not attempt
to resolve it.
- Given the pointlessness of human existence, why not kill oneself? Camus insists that suicide as a
resolution of the absurd would ultimately by a denial of the very condition of man’s existence in
that it is an attempt to resolve the conflict.
- Camus believed that given the absurdity of human existence, we must be aware of our crushing
fate (namely death and pointless existence), but not resign ourselves to accompany our fate.
- For Camus, being aware of one’s life and to the maximum, is living and living to the maximum.
That is to say that in being aware that his labours are pointless, Sisyphus experiences a certain
intellectual victory.
- Camus believed that we ought to think about the absurd and offer our own meaning and in
doing so develop a sense of self.
- For Camus, concepts like cooperation, joint effort and solidarity have meaning though they are
sources of relative meaning, rather than absolute meaning.
Selected Quotations:
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and
simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
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Bertrand Russell
Bertran Russell is well known for his contributions to philosophy and
mathematics and is essentially responsible for formal logic as we know it
today.
Epistemology
- Russell strove for an ideal, singular language that would mirror the
world, such that our knowledge can be reduced to terms of atomic
propositions and their truth-functional compounds.
- Russell espoused and empirical understanding, stating that the most
important requirement for this ideal language is that every meaningful
proposition must refer directly to the objects with which we are acquainted,
or are defined by other terms referring to objects with which we are
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Russell espoused that the world consisted of logically independent facts and that our knowledge
depends on the data acquired through our experience of these facts. To do so, we must break
things down into their simplest components.
Russell believed that the ultimate objective of both science and philosophy was to understand
reality, not simply to make predictions about reality and thus he was a great proponent of the
scientific method.
Metaphysics
- Russell believed that the distinction between the mind and material objects was arbitrary and
instead characterised the stuff of our initial states of perception as events. (Alfred North
Whitehead was a teacher of his)
Ethics
- Russell believed that there was such thing as an objective moral reality but that it can only be
known through intuition, which makes the knowing of them very subjective.
- He did however see great value in ethical discussions in that they lead to one’s subjective ethical
understanding.
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Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss studied sociology and anthropology and developed many
theories about the human mind that would come to be known as postmodernism (or post-structuralism) in philosophy. This branch of philosophy
was particularly concerned with the meta-narratives (stories) that guide
human experience. Levi-Strauss borrowed a great deal from Ferdinand de
Saussure, the linguistic philosopher.
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Epistemology
Levi-Strauss looked at Saussure’s notion of the distinction between the langue (the common
structure of language) and parole (the actual use of language by a speaker) in linguistics.
Levi-Strauss was interested in myth and studied the myths of various cultures, concluding that
the content of the myth could be seen as independent form the structure of the myth and that
myths across cultures, while different in content are very similar in structure.
He noted that myths were not “timeless” but rather were evolving and changing over time.
He believed that in order to know ourselves we need to clear away the inessential details of
mythology and leave the fundamental structures of our relationships exposed.
He believed that myths always went from the awareness of opposing elements to their
resolution and concist of two essential parts, 1) elements that oppose or contradict each other
and 2) elements that mediate, or resolve, those oppositions.
Ethics
- He saw myths as the framework by which human societies encode universal problems for
example, he noted a number of dualities in myth that he saw as a metaphor for the duality
between nature and culture.
- In this duality, man must supress his natural desires in order to conform to rules and thus create
a stable society.
Metaphysics
- He believed that there were certain dualistic elements that were common to the human
experience. Thus he concluded these elements become encoded in mythology as well as
language itself.
- He believed that the western distinction between mind and matter was another version of a
dualistic myth which actually represents an individual in contrast with its environment.
- According to Levi-Strauss what remains when we get down to the level of structure and
relations are merely the actions and words of a physical organism in a physical environment.
- The different variations of the myth come down to different ways sensory organs transmit data
from the environment.
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Mohandas Gandhi, commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi, was a political activist and
leader of the Indian nationalist movement in British-ruled India. His philosophy,
which came to be known as Gandhism, was adopted by such well-known and adept
figures as Martin Luther King Jr..
Epistemology
- Ghandi dedicated his life to what is called Satyagraha (satya meaning ‘what actually is’ and
graham meaning ‘holding firmly to’ in Sanskrit.
- This principal means that truth must be the basis for all politics, notions of purity, facts or
ethics.
- It is important to note the Gandhism emphasizes the search for truth rather than any truth
itself and truth for Gandhi is rooted in ontology (the notion that truth can be derived from ideas
themselves) and internal reflection.
Ethics
- Gandhi was a strong believer in non-violence as a means for social change.
- Gandhi reasoned that to the victims of violence have suffered regardless of the reason for the
violence, thus any justification is disingenuous.
- He reportedly said, “and eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.
- Gandhi believed that in order for love to be purified, it must be free of desires (such as lust);
this led Gandhi to take a vow of celibacy.
- Gandhi believed the people needed to exert mental control over their base desires, which
including fasting. He used fasting (or hunger strikes) to exert political change.
- Gandhi believed that one could find truth through overcoming his own demons, fears, and
insecurities.
Socio-Political Philosophy
- Aside from the socio-political implications of Gandhi’s ethics, he also believed in the importance
of simple living and self-sufficiency (not relying on imports and exports).
- Gandhi believed in a principal called Sarvodaya, which means universal uplift or progress for all.
Basically, this means that things that benefit the poor or disenfranchised are beneficial for
everyone.
- Gandhi believed in basic education for all people, regardless of class.
- Gandhi believed in a political model which was based on the economically self-sufficient
villages.
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Nel Noddings
Nel Noddings is an American feminist philosopher who is best known for her work in
philosophy of education and care and relationship ethics.
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Ethics
Noddings believed that the best approach to ethics is one that acknowledges caring, rooted in
receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness, as a preferable way to measure ones actions.
Noddings says that in order for care to take place, the carer must exhibit engrossment (thinking
about someone in order to understand that person) and motivational displacement (when a
persons behaviour is dictated by the needs or the other person) and the person who is cared
for must respond in some way to the caring.
Noddings distinguishes between natual caring and ethical caring.
Natural Caring is caring for someone because you want to (for example hugging in an act of
love)
Ethical Caring is caring for someone because you must (for example hugging an acquaintance
because they need hugging despite the fact that I would rather escape their pain). Ethical
caring arises out of the belief that caring is the appropriate way to relate to other people.
Noddings believed that evil arises when someone either chooses or is forced to act in a way
that is against a natural call to care (the natural call is said to exist mostly in women). This
diminishes the persons ideal.
A person can be considered evil if they either fail to personally care for someone, or prevents
others from caring, unless that person was unable to do otherwise.
Educational Philosophy
- In regards to education, Noddings saw caring as the relationship between the students and the
teacher.
- Because teachers work closely with students, they will be moved by the students different
needs and interests. This means that the teacher ought to be able to respond to the needs of
students and teachers may need to design a differentiated curriculum.
- This cannot be based on a one-time decision in the best interests but rather in the context of an
on-going interest in the students’ welfare.
- Professionalism in education ought not to be detached and emotionless as has been the case.
- Noddings advocates for whole-child education, which she described in 2005 as follows, “We will
not find the solution to problems of violence, alienation, ignorance, and unhappiness in
increasing our security, imposing more tests, punishing schools for their failure to produce 100
percent proficiency, or demanding that teachers be knowledgeable in the subjects they teach.
Instead, we must allow teachers and students to interact as whole persons, and we must
develop policies that treat the school as a whole community.”
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Jean Baudrillard
Simulacra
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Baudrillard believed that we now live in a world of so much information and interpretation that
it is not a mere simulation of reality, but we actually live in a simulacra (an inferior
representation) of reality.
The Desert of The Real
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Baudrillard recounts an old fable about a king who wanted a map of the kingdom that was the
most accurate map ever. To this end, his map maker mad a map so big that it covered the
entire kingdom because to be perfectly accurate it had to be a 1:1 scale and had to be three
dimensional. Then the people get on the map and after living on the map for many years
someone pulls up the corner and discovers that reality is just a desert now and only the map
remains.
Baudrillard saw this as a metaphor for how in out Simulated reality in which we live the
simulacra has become more real to us than the map. Thus perception becomes more important
than reality and reality is dead.
Hyperreality
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This means that we live in a state of hyperreality where because of our technologically advanced
and post-modern society, we can no longer distinguish between reality and a representation of
reality and thus representations have equal value to reality itself.
Erwin Schrodinger
Schrodinger’s Cat
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Erwin Schrodinger devised the following thought experiment to explain how, in the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, that states that the act of measuring or
observing causes quantum particles to randomly take on one form or another, where previously
they had neither form or both forms.
Schrodinger proposed a hypothetical (we hope) experiment where a cat is placed in a box with a
device that will randomly poison that cat at some time.
Schrodinger holds that until the box is opened, the cat cannot be said to be alive, nor can it be
said to be dead. Thus both possibilities exist in equal probability. It is only upon opening the
box that one reality can truly be said to have taken form.
If the cat survives, the cat remembers only being alive. Similarly it is through the memory only
of the possibility that was actualized was the only possible state of things.