PHIL 1115
What is
Reality?
Lecture 21
M. C. Escher
There are only two places for
things to exist…

In our minds
Or

Outside our minds
Vocabulary…
Internal vs. external world
 Appearance vs. reality
 Subjective vs. Objective


Thinking or perceiving
subject
Objective or Subjective?
George Bush
My impression of
George Bush
 A hot stove
My feeling of pain
 This picture
My perception of
this picture

METAPHYSICS

the branch of
philosophy that
addresses what
is real
ontology: what is
 cosmology:
how
it came into being

Definition:
ANALOGY

using the familiar
or easily
understood to
explain the
unfamiliar or the
inexplicable
CREATION ANALOGIES…
 1.
art or craft
 2. biological creation
 3. submission to the word
(strong man – hero)
Blackfoot
Creation
Myth

Arts and crafts
analogy
Eurynome
and Ophion

The Cosmic Egg

Biological creation
analogy
China:

Pangu
Biological creation…
Creation by Fiat….

Make it so…

Let there be
light…
The Word…
Hesiod
Art:
The Theogony
8th C. BCE
CHAOS
David Madore
The function these myths served
is today divided…

How the world came into being and what it is
physically made of belongs to the scientists

What the world means – why it exists - how it
exists – how it can be apprehended is the
province of philosophers
The Pre-Socratic Materialists…
Their primary questions were:

What is the world made of?
 What does it mean for something to exist?
 What happens to things when they change?
Thales…
Everything
is water…
Archê

Greek term for origin or beginning or
ultimate principle.

The Milesian philosophers looked for a
single material stuff of which the entire
universe is composed.
Parmenides:
“What is, is. What is not, is not.”
 Being is perfect, whole, and cannot change.
 Our senses can only experience becoming
(which is illusory).
 Only being exists, and becoming is not at all.

Parmenides:

True Being is a static, unchanging, eternal and
homogenous sphere.

Reason tells us that motion, change (and the
world of the senses with which we perceive
them) are illusions…
Heraclitus:
“The Logos is
common to all -- but
some act as though
they had a private
understanding”
Heraclitus:
On the process of eternal flux
(panta rei):

"This world, the world of all things, neither any god
nor man made, but it always was, it is, and it will be
an everlasting fire, measures kindling and
measures going out."
Heraclitus:
'You cannot step
twice into the same
river'
(fr. 41)
Ionian conceptions of the ARCHE

Thales
 Anaximander
 Anaximenes
 Heraclitus
Water
Apeiron -the boundless
Air
Fire (change)
(These are materialist views of the world)
Pythagoras (approx 530 BCE)

Developed theories of what constituted a
good life

Taught the doctrine of rebirth or
transmigration of souls

Taught that all things are numbers.
The Later Physicists…

Anaxagoras (500-428 BCE.)

Leucippus (fifth century BCE.)

Democritus (460-370 BCE.)
Anaxagoras (500-428 BCE.)

started from the
Parmenidean account of
'what is'.

postulated a plurality of
independent elements
(which he called 'seeds').
Definition: Monism

The materialist view
that there is ultimately
only one substance,
that all reality is one.
Definition: Pluralism

the materialist belief
that the world is
made of a plurality of
basic elements
The Later Physicists

Leucippus (fifth century BCE.)
Founder of Atomism

Democritus (460-370 BCE.)
Follower of Leucippus

Democritus….
"color exists by convention, sweet by
convention, bitter by convention, in reality
nothing exists but atoms and the void."
earth, air, fire, water
The Pre-Socratic Materialists
(proto-scientists)
Their question:
 What is the unseen reality behind the
world we seem to see and feel and hear?
 Water
 Fire
 Atoms
(Thales)
(Heraclitus)
(Democritus)
Those early Materialists had a
significant influence…
They learned to suspect their senses
 They believed that reason could provide
truer answers than experience
 They nudged philosophy away from
common sense and experience

Modern Metaphysics

Inherited the problems left by the PreSocratics
 What
is the ultimate substance?
 How does it relate to what we see and hear
and touch?

Inherited the method used by the PreSocratics
 Reason
over common sense
 The observant mind rather than the observant
eye

The safest general
characterization of the
European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of
a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
Squares A and B are identical…
Squares A and B are identical…

“At the heart of Plato's philosophy is a
vision of reality that sees the changing
world around us and the things within it
as mere shadows or reflections of a
separate world of independently existing,
eternal, and unchanging entities called
"forms" or "ideas”
Plato’s Theory of Forms …
Arguments for the existence of forms:
 A better demands a best
 The multiplicity of similar objects demands
a perfect model or form
 Our understanding of these forms
demands their existence (e.g. whence do
we know equality?)
Plato, trying to reconcile Heraclitus
and Parmenides, posited a twotiered world…

The world in which we live – constantly
changing – a world of Becoming

The world of Forms -- unchanging -- a
world of Being
THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
Found in Plato’s The Republic
 Explains his ‘two-worlds’ view


moral component -- perhaps inherited from
Socrates -- the purpose of philosophy is to
figure out how to live a good life
…Plato’s Cave…
Nietzsche on the cave…
God is dead:
But considering the state the
Species man is in,
There will perhaps be caves,
For ages yet,
In which his shadow will be shown.
--Nietzsche
Two things the allegory of the cave
tells us…

1. that the world of our direct experience is a shadow
or imitation of the real world
equally important:

2. that the world of our direct experience provides us
with some knowledge of the divine and ultimate
reality – glimpses of perfection
 Philosophy’s
job is to open the eyes
of those prisoners in the cave (who
are all of us) to those two truths…
Behind all we have said so far, lie two very
important assumptions that the early
Materialists first posited:
 The
world is intelligible
 Man can figure it out with his mind
The Observant Mind
rather than the Observant Eye
Galileo Galilei
1564 -1642

Astronomer
and Physicist

I cannot sufficiently admire the eminence
of those men’s wits, that have received
and held it to be true, and with the
sprightliness of their judgments offered
such violence to their senses, as that they
have been able to prefer that which their
reason dictated to them to that which
sensible experiments represented most
manifestly to the contrary.
Galileo Galilei

“the rape of reason on the senses”

From Il saggiotore (The Assayer)

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the
universe, which stands continually open to our
gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless
one first learns to comprehend the language and
read the characters in which it is written. It is
written in the language of mathematics…
Galileo Galilei

I do not feel obliged to believe that the
same god who has endowed us with
sense, reason and intellect has intended
us to forgo their use.
—Galileo

Copyrights 2001-2003 Arnaud Lebègue
Unobservables…

Science’s ‘unobservables” -- gravity,
inertia, force – explained the movement
of the heavenly bodies in a predictable,
measurable way

The Church’s “unobservables” -- God
and the angels – were anything but
predictable or measurable

René Descartes

1596 -1650
The “Thinker” at a university
campus in Kentucky

If you would be a
real seeker after
truth, it is necessary
that at least once in
your life you doubt,
as far as possible,
all things
—Descartes

Descartes has defined
mind as unextended
(not taking up any
space)

And he has defined body
as extended (taking up
space)
And never the twain shall
meet…
SPINOZA

1632 -- 1677
Spinoza, seeing the
problem Descartes
had, redefined
substance to solve it…
Spinoza…

no independent things
 no independent ideas
 no independent people

"Nothing therefore happens
in nature which is contrary
to its universal laws. Nor
does anything happen which
does not agree with those
laws or does not follow from
them.
-- from the TheologicalPolitical Treatise
Spinoza…
Spinoza is a Pantheist – everything
is God, he says…
God is identical to the
universe –
 Cannot have created the
universe  Cannot care about the
universe –


Descartes was a Dualist -- believed in
two substances

Spinoza is a Monist -- believed in one
substance

Leibniz was a Pluralist – believed in an
infinite number of substances
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716)

“…the best of all possible worlds…”

Monads have no
windows

“pre-established
harmony”

In biology: A singlecelled micro-organism,
especially a flagellate
protozoan of the
genus Monas.
Definition: Idealism
The
philosophy that says
that what is real is mind…
(Contrasted to Materialism, which says that
what is real is the material world…)
Bishop George Berkeley

“esse est percipi”
To be is to be perceived
A stone….
Bishop Berkeley:

It is indeed an opinion
strangely prevailing amongst
men, that houses, mountains,
rivers and in a word all sensible
objects have an existence
natural or real, distinct from
their being perceived by the
understanding.
Bishop Berkeley:

Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that
a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take
this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven
and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which
compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any
subsistence without a mind, that their esse (being) is to be
perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are
not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or
that of any other created spirit, they must either have no
existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal
spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the
absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of
them an existence independent of a spirit.

Overheard in 18th
century England:
Did you hear that
George Berkeley
died? His girlfriend
stopped seeing him.
Boswell tells about Sam
Johnson refuting Berkeley:
Epistemology
I
 Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your
bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

II
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."
- Richard Wilbur, 1950
Immanuel Kant 1724 -- 1804

Founder and leader of
the German Idealists

We understand the
world through our
experiences

Our minds constitute
the world (and hence
our experiences)
according to certain a
priori rules
Definition: Teleology

(from Greek telos, “end”;
logos, “reason”),
explanation by reference
to some purpose or end

the study of ends,
purposes, and goals
Georg Hegel
What are we mostly?

Most of us are still Cartesians – whether
we knew it or not

As Christians we speak of the body and
the soul
Behind all we have said today, lie the same
Two very important assumptions that the
Pre-Socratic materialists worked with:
 The
world is intelligible
 Man can figure it out with his
mind
VITA BREVIS
by Piet Hein
A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people to get what there is of it
wrong.