1. PHIL What is Reality?
Lecture 21
M. C. Escher

2. There are only two places for things to exist…
In our minds Or
Outside our minds

3. Vocabulary… Internal vs. external world Appearance vs. reality
Subjective vs. Objective
Thinking or perceiving subject

4. Objective or Subjective?
George Bush
My impression of George Bush
A hot stove
My feeling of pain
This picture
My perception of this picture

5. METAPHYSICS the branch of philosophy that addresses what is real
ontology: what is
cosmology: how it came into being

6. Definition: ANALOGY
using the familiar or easily understood to explain the unfamiliar or the inexplicable

7. CREATION ANALOGIES… 1. art or craft 2. biological creation
3. submission to the word
(strong man – hero)

8. Blackfoot Creation Myth
Arts and crafts analogy

9. Eurynome and Ophion
The Cosmic Egg
Biological creation analogy

10. China: Pangu
Biological creation…

11. Creation by Fiat…. The Word…
Make it so…
Let there be light…

12. Hesiod The Theogony 8th C. BCE Art: CHAOS David Madore

13. 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

14. 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?

15. Thales…
Everything is water…

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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…

19. Heraclitus:
“The Logos is common to all -- but some act as though they had a private understanding”

20. 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."

21. Heraclitus:
'You cannot step twice into the same river' (fr. 41)

22. Ionian conceptions of the ARCHE
Thales Water
Anaximander Apeiron -the boundless
Anaximenes Air
Heraclitus Fire (change)
(These are materialist views of the world)

23. 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.

24. The Later Physicists… Anaxagoras (500-428 BCE.)
Leucippus (fifth century BCE.)
Democritus ( BCE.)

25. Anaxagoras ( BCE.)
started from the Parmenidean account of 'what is'.
postulated a plurality of independent elements (which he called 'seeds').

26. Definition: Monism
The materialist view that there is ultimately only one substance, that all reality is one.

27. Definition: Pluralism
the materialist belief that the world is made of a plurality of basic elements

28. The Later Physicists Leucippus (fifth century BCE.) Founder of Atomism
Democritus ( BCE.)
Follower of Leucippus

29. Democritus….
"color exists by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention, in reality nothing exists but atoms and the void."

30. earth, air, fire, water

31. 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 (Thales)
Fire (Heraclitus)
Atoms (Democritus)

32. 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

33. Modern Metaphysics Inherited the problems left by the Pre-Socratics
What is the ultimate substance?
How does it relate to what we see and hear and touch?
Inherited the method used by the Pre-Socratics
Reason over common sense
The observant mind rather than the observant eye

34. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead

35. Squares A and B are identical…

36. Squares A and B are identical…

37. “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”

38. 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?)

39. Plato, trying to reconcile Heraclitus and Parmenides, posited a two-tiered world…
The world in which we live – constantly changing – a world of Becoming
The world of Forms -- unchanging -- a world of Being

40. 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

41. …Plato’s Cave…

42. 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

43. 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

44. Philosophy’s job is to open the eyes of those prisoners in the cave (who are all of us) to those two truths…

45. The Observant Mind rather than the Observant Eye
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

46. Galileo Galilei
Astronomer and Physicist

47. 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”

48. 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

49. 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

50. Copyrights 2001-2003 Arnaud Lebègue

51. 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

53. René Descartes

54. 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

55. 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…

56. SPINOZA
Spinoza, seeing the problem Descartes had, redefined substance to solve it…

57. Spinoza… no independent things no independent ideas
no independent people

58. Spinoza…
"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 Theological-Political Treatise

59. 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 –

60. 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

61. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
“…the best of all possible worlds…”

62. Monads have no windows
“pre-established harmony”
In biology: A single-celled micro-organism, especially a flagellate protozoan of the genus Monas.

63. 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…)

64. Bishop George Berkeley
“esse est percipi” To be is to be perceived

65. A stone….

66. 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.

67. 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.

68. Overheard in 18th century England:
Did you hear that George Berkeley died? His girlfriend stopped seeing him.

69. 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

70. 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

71. 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

72. 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

73. The world is intelligible Man can figure it out with his mind
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

74. VITA BREVIS by Piet Hein
A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people to get what there is of it
wrong.