CHAPTER TWO THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE Key Terms Mathematical Physics: A unified theory of the universe based upon mathematics.

Method of Inquiry: A method for finding things out and making sure you get them right. Note: the text refers specifically to Descartes principles. Epistemological Skepticism: The doctrine that no adequate justification can be given for any of our beliefs about the world. Cogito Argument: Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am; the proposition I exist, is necessarily true each time I pronounce it. St. Augustine anticipates this argument in City of God. Solipsism: The belief that I am the only person in the universe; an extreme form of epistemological (and metaphysical) skepticism that refuses to acknowledge the existence of anything other than my own mind. This position seems to share certain features with the ethical view known as egoism, not least of which is the appearance of self-contradiction. Law of Contradiction: A statement and its negation cannot both be true. Law of the Excluded Middle: For any statement, either it is true or its negation is true. Tabula Rasa: Blank tablet; a term used by John Locke to summarize his claim that the mind comes into life blank, or empty, and is written on by experience. Idealism: In Berkeleys system, the doctrine holding that the only things that could be known to exist are what is immediately perceived: to wit, ideas. Berkeley acknowledges, however, that by inference we can gather some notion of the subjects of these ideas-spirits (i.e., minds) and God. There are other forms of Idealism, however, particularly the absolute idealism of postKantian German philosophy. For Fichte, and for Hegel after him, Kants distinction between noumena and phenomena was mistaken: such distinctions can only be drawn within consciousness, and thus (especially for Hegel) the object of consciousness, consciousness itself, and self-consciousness apparently reduce to the same thing (the Absolute). Materialism: Simply put, the doctrine holding that physical bodies are the only things that exist. The history of the view admits of rather more complex articulations, however. For Democritus, for example, materialism consisted in viewing as real only what he called atoms, or un-cutables. Aristotle opposed it to the notion of Form, while for Berkeley, it was any view other than his Idealism, or immaterialism. The notion has become wedded to the Mind/Body problem in recent times, and thus to the question of Behaviorism. Faith: Belief without proof. St. Paul defines it as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen There is a minor tradition, exemplified by Hamaan, which
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considers belief in anything which exceeds the strict limits of Humean skepticism to be faith in action; thus, he says, to eat an egg or walk across a room requires faith. Kierkegaard later distinguishes between this purely epistemic kind of belief and faith in the eminent sense or religious faith. Unity of Consciousness: The thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness. Categories: The rules used to hold thoughts together in a single consciousness. The word is close in meaning to the verb to predicate, and, for Aristotle, who first propounded a list of categories, it is precisely what can be predicated of substance that he details. Of primary importance for Aristotle (aside from substance itself) are quantity, quality, and relation, while Kant lists fully twelve different categories (although his scheme is often considered unconvincing). Subjective Knowledge: Knowledge that depends as much on whom we are as it does on what the world is actually like. Kierkegaard, writing as Johannes Climacus, famously declared that truth is subjectivitya startling claim, perhaps best understood along the lines of his oft-stated motto, only the truth that edifies is truth, for you. Key Figures Aquinas, Thomas (1225 to 1274): Scholastic philosopher and theologian. He studied with the Benedictines of Monte Cassino, and at the University of Naples; and, against the wishes of his family, entered the Dominican order of medicant friars (1244). His brothers kidnapped him and kept him captive for over a year. In 1252 he went to Paris, and taught there. His many writings display great intellectual power, and he came to exercise enormous intellectual authority throughout the Church. In his philosophical writings he tried to combine and reconcile Aristotle's scientific rationalism with Christian doctrines of faith and revelation. His best-known works are Summa Contra Gentiles (1259-64) which deals chiefly with the principles of natural religion and his unfinished Summa Theologiae (1266-73) which contains his mature thought and includes the "five ways" or proofs of the existence of God. Aristotle (384 B.C.E. to 322 B.C.E.): Greek philosopher, scientist, and physician, born in Stagira, Macedonia. In 367 he went to Athens, where he was associated with Plato's Academy until Plato's death in 347 B.C.E. In 342 B.C.E. he was invited by Philip of Macedon to educate his son, Alexander. Aristotle's writings represented a large and varied output over virtually every field of knowledge: logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetry, biology, zoology, physics, and psychology. The bulk of the work that survives actually consists of unpublished material in the form of lecture. Arnauld, Antoine (1612 to 1694): French philosopher, lawyer, mathematician, and priest. He was a controversialist, and his activities as head of the Jansenists led to his expulsion from the Sorbonne and persecution. He collaborated with Pascal and Pierre Nicole (1625-95) on the work known as the Port Royal Logic (1662). Perhaps best remembered for his objection to the Meditations (clear and distinct perception establishes Gods existence, but Gods existence is
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necessary to validate clear and distinct perception). Arnauld did not confine his criticism to Descartes; he attacked Malebranches theory of perception, and Liebnizs theory of substance. Berkeley, George (1685 to 1753): Anglican bishop and philosopher, born in Kilkenny, Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, where he remained until 1713. In his most important books he developed his celebrated claim that "to be is to be perceived"that the contents of the material world are "ideas" that only exist when they are perceived by a mind. His remaining work was divided between questions of social reform and of religious reflection. Carroll, Lewis (1832 to 1898): The pen-name of British mathematician Charles Dodgson. He studied at Oxford, took orders in 1861, and became a lecturer in mathematics (1855-81). His nursery tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), quickly became classics. As a mathematician, he wrote an important work on the mathematics of majority rule voting. P.L. Heath, in MacMillans Encyclopedia of Philosophy, gives a remarkably detailedand amusinghistory of philosophical readings of Carrolls works, including Alices discovery of Freges sinn/bedeutung distinction. Descartes, Ren (1596 to 1650): Rationalist philosopher and mathematician born in France. He developed the major features of his philosophy in his most famous work, Meditations on First Philosophy. In this work he argued that God must exist and cannot be a deceiver; therefore, his beliefs based on ordinary sense experience are correct. He also argued that mind and body are distinct substances, believing that this dualism made possible human freedom and immortality. In other work, he virtually founded analytic geometry, and made major contributions to optics. Einstein, Albert (1879 to 1955): Physicist born in Germany. He was an undistinguished student in Germany. He requested Swiss citizenship in 1901 and took a post with the Swiss patent office (1902-5). By the time he received his Ph.D. (1905), he had achieved world fame for his publications on Brownian movement of molecules, his photoelectric theory (for which he won a Nobel Prize) that light and other radiation can behave as both waves and particles, and for his revolutionary special theory of relativity, which displaces Newtons concept of time by restricting unmediated judgments of simultaneity to a local framework. Euclid (? to 250 B.C.E.): Greek mathematician who taught in Alexandria around 300 B.C.E., and who was probably the founder of its mathematical school. His chief existing work is the 13-volume Elements, which became the most widely known mathematical book of Classical antiquity, and is still much used in geometry. The approach and his axioms became known as Euclidean geometry. Euclid, of course, produced his theorems from a small set of axioms, definitions, and postulates; of these, the fifth (or so-called parallel postulate) has proved most controversial. Attempts to prove this obscurely stated postulate as a theorem have historically failed; at the same time, alternate geometries which replace it with alternate postulates, such as Lobachevskis, have arisen which prove to be as consistent as Euclids own, while producing theorems which have opposite truth values when compared outside the systems themselves. Freud, Sigmund (1856 to 1939): Developed psychoanalytic therapy technique, born in Freiburg, Moravia (now Prbor, Czech Republic). He studied medicine at Vienna, and then specialized in neurology, and later in psychopathology. Finding hypnosis inadequate, he used the method of
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"free association," allowing the patient to express thoughts in a state of relaxed consciousness, and interpreting the data of childhood and dream recollections. He became convinced, despite his own puritan sensibilities, of the fact of infantile sexuality, a theory which isolated him from the medical profession. In 1900 he published his major work, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), arguing that dreams are disguised manifestations of repressed sexual wishes (in contrast with the widely-held modern view that dreams are simply a biological manifestation of the random firing of brain neurones during a particular state of consciousness). In 1902, he was appointed to a professorship in Vienna. Out of this grew the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (1908) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910). Gassendi, Pierre (1592 to 1655): Philosopher and scientist, born in France. He was ordained as a priest (1616); he became professor of philosophy at Aix (1617) and professor of mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris (1645). He was a strong advocate of the experimental approach to science, and tried to reconcile an atomic theory of matter (based on the Epicurean model) with Christian doctrine. He is best known for his Objections (1642) to Descartes' Meditations, but he also wrote on others, including Copernicus. Gassendi tried to steer a course between the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne and his modified Epicureanism (the via media). Hobbes, Thomas (1588 to 1679): Political philosopher, born in England, UK. He studied at Oxford, then he traveled widely. After being introduced to Euclidian geometry, he thought to extend its method into an inclusive science of man and society. Worried by the civil disorders of his time, he wrote several works on government, including his masterpiece of political philosophy, Leviathan (1651). He also translated Homer and Thucydides, and wrote a history of the English Civil War. Oddly, Hobbes brags about his timidity in reference to the struggle, claiming to be one of the first to flee England for France. Hume, David (1711 to 1776): Philosopher and historian, born in Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh, and took up law. In his masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he consolidated and extended the empiricist tradition. His views became widely known only when he wrote two volumes of Essays Moral and Political (1741-2). He wrote the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion in the 1750s. His atheism kept him from receiving professorships at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and he became a tutor, secretary, and keeper of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh. Kant, Immanuel (1724 to 1804): Philosopher born in Germany. He became a professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. His main work, now a philosophical classic, is Critique of Pure Reason in which he provided a response to the empiricism of Hume. His views on ethics are set out in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason in which he elaborates on the Categorical Imperative as the supreme principle of morality. Leibniz, Gottfried (1646 to 1716): Philosopher and mathematician, born in Germany. In 1700 he persuaded Frederick I of Prussia to found the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, of which he became the first president. A man of remarkable breadth of knowledge, he made original contributions to optics, mechanics, statistics, logic, and probability theory. He wrote on history, law, and political theory, and his philosophy was the foundation of Rationalism. He was involved in a controversy with Isaac Newton over whether he or Newton was the inventor of
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integral and differential calculus; the Royal Society formally declared for Newton in 1711, but the matter was never really resolved. Locke, John (1632 to 1704): Philosopher, born in England. He studied at Oxford, and in 1667 joined the household of Lord Ashley, later first Earl of Shaftesbury, as his personal physician and adviser in scientific and political matters. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1668. His major philosophical work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), accepted the possibility of rational demonstration of moral principles and the existence of God, but its denial of innate ideas was important in starting the tradition of British Empiricism. Luther, Martin (1483 to 1546): Religious reformer, born in Germany. He spent time in an Augustinian monastery, obtained his degree at Erfurt, and was ordained in 1507. His career as a reformer began after a visit to Rome, where he was angered by the sale of indulgences. In 1517 he drew up 95 theses on indulgences, which he nailed on the church door at Wittenberg. Violent controversy ensued, and he was summoned to Rome to defend his theses, but did not go. He then began to attack the papal system more boldly. An order was issued for the destruction of his books; he was summoned to appear before the Diet at Worms, and was put under the ban of the Empire. Luthers most famous Philosophical view was expressed in his calling Reason the Devils Whore; corrupted by Original Sin, Reason can never lead us to understand our Godrelationship. Newton, Isaac (1642 to 1727): Physicist and mathematician born in England, UK. He studied at Cambridge. He studied the nature of light, concluding that white light is a mixture of colors which can be separated by refraction, and devised the first reflecting telescope. He became professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, where he resumed his work on gravitation, culminating in his work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Newton was unorthodox in denying Trinitarian Christianity; he also devoted considerable effort in alchemical studies, and may in fact have suffered injury due to the chemicals he deployed in alchemical experimentation. Picasso, Pablo (1881 to 1973): Artist, born in Spain. He studied at Barcelona and Madrid, and in 1901 set up a studio in Paris. His blue period consisted of a series of striking studies of the poor in haunting attitudes of despair and gloom, gave way to the brighter pink period with its harlequins, acrobats, and the incidents of circus life. He then turned to brown, and began to work in sculpture. During World War II he was mostly in Paris, and after the liberation joined the communists. Plato (428 B.C.E. to 347 B.C.E.): Greek philosopher, probably born in Athens of a wealthy family. Little is known of his early life, but he was a devoted follower of Socrates. He traveled widely, then he founded his Academy at Athens, where Aristotle was his most famous pupil. He remained there for the rest of his life. His many dialogues are usually divided into three periods. The early dialogues have Socrates as the principal character engaged in ironic and inconclusive interrogations about the definition of different moral virtues. In the middle dialogues, he develops his own positive doctrines, such as the theory of knowledge as recollection, the immortality of the soul, and, most importantly, the theory of forms (or "ideas") which contrasts the temporal, material world of "particulars" (objects merely of perception, opinion, and belief)
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with the timeless, unchanging world of universals or forms (the true objects of knowledge). The Republic also describes Plato's celebrated political utopia, ruled by philosopher-kings. Socrates (469 B.C.E. to 399 B.C.E.): Greek philosopher, born in Athens. Little is known of his early life. According to Plato, he devoted his last 30 years to convincing the Athenians that their opinions about moral matters could not bear the weight of critical examination. His technique, the Socratic Method, was to ask for definitions of such morally significant concepts as piety and justice, and to elicit contradictions from the responses, thus spurring deeper enquiry into the concepts. He was convicted of charges of impiety and corruption of youth by zealous defenders of a restored democracy in Athens. The Principal Philosopher: Descartes The choice of Descartes as the principal philosopher for the chapter on the theory of knowledge was, of course, a natural one. Modern philosophy begins with the Meditations, and every student in an introductory course should at least encounter the famous method of doubt. But there are two problems that have to be dealt with, once that choice has been made. First of all, Descartes is a difficult human being to bring alive in a textbook. He simply cannot compete with Socrates or Kierkegaard for the interest of students, and he does not even have the quirky habits that give Kant a certain character. The second problem is a good deal more serious. In order to impose a modicum of coherence on a discussion of the theory of knowledge beginning with Descartes, I have had to limit myself severely to the century and a half of continental and British philosophy following the Meditations, and to omit both what went before, and what has come after the end of the eighteenth century. So this chapter is really about the continental rationalists and British empiricists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that, the story is a complicated one, and I have been forced to make drastic reductions and simplifications in order to keep the chapter within bounds. I have omitted Berkeley, for example, even though recent research and commentary has revealed him to be perhaps the most sophisticated philosopher of the empiricist school. (Note: the current edition includes a brief side-bar on Berkeley.) And I have not tried to find any short selections from the Critique of Pure Reason with which to capture the essence of Kants philosophy. Rather, I have offered several pages of interpretative summary. A word is in order, too, about the way in which I introduce the students to the subject of epistemology. Those of us who are professional philosophers have become so used to the problems of epistemology that we sometimes forget how very bizarre they appear to the uninitiated. The problem is not that the material is unfamiliar to introductory students. College students are accustomed to walking into lectures and being told things they had never dreamed before. No, the real problem is that we ask questions that sound genuinely batty. Since I believe very strongly that the philosophical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries includes several of the greatest works of philosophy ever written, I am especially eager to avoid turning students off before they have had a chance to become engaged with that literature and its problems. In this chapter, perhaps more than in any other thus far, you may find that you want to supplement what I have written with some discussion of modern developments and reinterpretations of the traditional problems. Obviously, how much you can do of this will depend on how receptive your students are, how able to handle more sophisticated
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argumentation. But my own experience suggests that before moving into those areas, it would be helpful to your students to lead them through the classic confrontation between the empiricists and the rationalists. It may seem old-hat to some of us, but it will be brand-new to your students, and very challenging as well, I hope. (Note: the Ninth edition of the text presents a discussion of some New Turns in Epistemology. The author addresses the theories of coherentism and pragmatism and the place of cognitive science in epistemology, including a presentation of Searles Chinese room argument.) Suggested Lecture Outlines Lecture One: Descartes and the Rationalists I. A. B. Descartes and the Rise of Epistemology Brief review of Descartes life and career. The new science. Descartes dream of a mathematical physics derived a priori from certain premises. Cartesian geometry and the relation between mathematics and physics. The Meditations. Why meditations, rather than a treatise or an essay? Foundationalism and the search for absolutely certain first premises. The priority of epistemology over metaphysics. Compare Aristotle, for whom questions of knowledge are subordinate to questions of being. (This assessment ignores the epistemic aspect of the Organon, obviously.) Rehearsal of the skeptical doubts of Meditations I, leading to the dramatic reversal of Meditations II. Are the skeptical arguments persuasive? Is the dream argument sound? Are analytic propositions really called into question by the evil demon argument? Descartes proof of his own existence. The philosophical significance of choosing subjective consciousness as the starting point. The problems created for subsequent philosophy. The Method of Doubt and Method of Inquiry The method of doubt. What are its presuppositions, what can it accomplish? Epistemological scepticism versus Pyrrhonian scepticism. The difference between the status of mathematical and scientific propositions on the one hand and judgments of experience on the other. The priority of reason over sense as a source of knowledge about the world. The method of inquiry. How does one investigate the world? Clear and distinct ideas what are the criteria of clearness and distinctness? How does Descartes method compare to the method of modern science?

C. D.

II. A.

B.

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III. A.

Leibnizs Contributions to Rationalism The role of formal logic in philosophy. (This is a difficult but important topic, and deserves some extended attentionhence its placement here in a lecture otherwise devoted only to some remarks about Leibniz in relation to Descartes.) Brief introduction to formal argument, valid inferences, the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. The law of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. What do they assert, how are they different from one another? What can we know solely on the basis of these two laws? (Optional: The dream of reducing mathematics to logic and the failure of that dream.) The law of sufficient reason. Leibnizs defense of the law. Can we find a better defense? (Lead in to Humes skeptical attack on causal inference.) (Optional) Reference back to Plato, and another confrontation with the role of reason. The theory of forms as an early attempt to answer Leibnizs questions.

B.

C. D.

Lecture Two: Hume I. A. B. David Humes Skeptical Attack on Causal Inference Humes theory of impressions and ideas. Every simple idea is a copy of a precedent simple impression. The elements of Humes attack on causal inference. Whatever is different is distinguishable. Whatever is distinguishable is separable in thought and imagination. Whatever can be imagined is at least possible. (Notice that Hume does not make the mistake of asserting the reverse. Something might be unimaginable by me even though it is quite possible.) Does Humes skeptical argument cut against Descartes and Leibniz? Against Newton and Galileo? How far can it be extended? The extension of Humes scepticism to induction. Must we simply assume that the future will be like the past? (Optional: Goodmans new problem of induction, the so-called grue/bleen problem.)

C. D.

Lecture Three: Kants Critical Response to Humean Scepticism I. A. B. Review of Situation The deadlock between rationalists and empiricists in the middle of the eighteenth century. Two major controversies: the nature of space, time, and causation, and the source of the representations that yield knowledge (Is it reason or sense perception?). The complexity of the dispute: issues of physics, mathematics, theology, psychology, and epistemology are intertwined.

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II. A. B. C. D.

Kants Central Innovations The reintroduction into philosophy of the old appearance/reality distinction. The decision to give up the claim to transcendent knowledge. What this means for rational theology, traditional metaphysics, and Cartesian rational psychology. The insistence that both reason and sense perceptions are essential for knowledge. The focus on the unity and nature of subjective consciousness. Return to the Second Meditation, and the implications of self-awareness. The problem of synthetic unity. The mind as the source of order and organization in experience. Space and time as forms of the minds apprehension of objects. The categories (substance, cause and effect, etc.) as forms in which the mind thinks objects. The understanding is the law-giver to nature. Kants Mature Critical Teaching The experienced world as the realm of things as they appear. The impossibility of knowing anything about things as they are in themselves. The unity of subjective consciousness, and the synthesizing activity of the self. The world as the product of the activity of the mind. (Optional) The implications for ethical theory. Kants resolution of the conflict between free will and determinism. Limiting knowledge to make room for faith. (For advanced students, some discussion of the Lessing-strife between Jacobi and Mendelssohn might be provocative; an excellent place to look for information about this is F. Beisers The Fate of Reason.) Implications for science and mathematics. The death of rational metaphysics. (Optional: twentieth-century positivism as an outgrowth of the philosophical problems bequeathed by Kant.)

III. A. B. C.

D.

Lecture Four: New Turns in Epistemology I. A. Three Different Epistemological Approaches Coherentism as non-foundationalist, as opposed to Cartesian clear and distinct ideas or Lockes experience as ground for knowledge. The Neurath ship model and the web of belief. (Optional: discuss Wittgensteins riverbed notion of truth (On Certainty): although the banks are stable relative to the river that passes between them, they are subject to fluctuation relative to the surrounding landscape.) Pragmatism old and new. Reformers and Revolutionaries (e.g., Rorty). Cognitive Science and the computer as model. Searles Chinese Room argument that human understanding is not comparable to simple information processing.

B. C.

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Goals for Students and Teacher Primary Goals: 1. To pose as clearly as possible the fundamental problems of the theory of knowledge, among which are: a) What does it mean to know something? b) What are the criteria of certainty in knowledge? c) What are the sources of our knowledge? d) What limits, if any, are there on what the human mind can know? e) Can we know that we know? How? To understand the central strategic device of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century epistemologists, which is to study the organ of knowledge, the mind, rather than the object of knowledge, the world. To define the outlines of the two great schools of thought in classical theory of knowledge, the empiricist and rationalist.

2. 3.

Secondary Goals: 1. 2. 3. 4. To clarify the rather tricky argument by which Descartes proves to himself that he exists. To get some preliminary appreciation of Kants thought. To understand the relationship between epistemological problems and problems in the foundations of mathematics and science. To spark interest in and provide acquaintance with contemporary epistemological views.

Suggested Teaching Techniques 1. It is probably best to begin with Descartes method of doubt, and lead the students through it step by step. Let them offer modern examples of knowledge claims they can be certain of, and try yourself to knock them down. Then go very carefully through the proof of self-existence in the Second Meditation. At this point, the students have had a fair amount of argumentation, and they are ready to come to grips with the philosophical demand for certainty. The treatment of Leibniz is necessarily sketchy, so you ought to concentrate on criteria of certainty and knowledge rather than trying to lay out the whole theory of the monadology. A possible, if somewhat whimsical, introduction to Leibnizs monads could begin with the old Dr. Seuss favorite, Horton Hears a Who. Another useful introductory example might be Pascals remarks on the infinity within and the infinity without (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me, he remarks in the Pensees). In dealing with Humes scepticism, the obvious technique is to use examples drawn from your students science courses. See whether they can tell you what justification there is for the scientific theories they have learned. (Science teachers are sometimes very obscure about this.) Then attack them with Humes skeptical arguments, and see how they stand up. Dont forget to follow up with Goodmans new riddle of induction!

2.

3.

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4.

Given todays students familiarity with computers, the topic of cognitive science seems particularly appropriate as a discussion opener. Ask if any of your students have experience with virtual reality through online gaming or (if you wish to risk it) through chat rooms and the like, and have them describe the experience. Can their on-line partners pass the Turing test?

Contemporary Application: Virtual Reality This is one contemporary application that simply must be taught in conjunction with the video. What makes the topic so remarkable, I think perhaps unique, is that it combines hot, cutting-age technology with really sophisticated analytic philosophy. Hilary Putnam and Daniel Dennett are two of the most respected technical philosophers of the present period, and here they are reprinted side by side with a piece from a popular magazine. As the Putnam and Dennett essays make clear, the really interesting question with regard to virtual reality is simply, what is real? Or, in the form in which it was been asked by the great epistemologists of the classical period, what can I know to be real? Dennetts doubts about the feasibility of the brain-in-a-vat experiment raises a much larger question about the role and appropriateness of thought experiments in Philosophy. We philosophers are forever thinking up weird hard cases in which we imagine time travel, failed transporter experiments that result in two instances of numerically the same person, and so forth. We then proceed to reason at great length about their implications without ever worrying whether such cases are truly logically possible. With a little imagination, you can make a very nice connection between the issues raised here and the dispute between the Kantians and the Utilitarians. From a Utilitarian perspective, virtual sex should be perfectly acceptable, so long as it is genuinely as pleasurable as real sex. But from a Kantian perspective, virtual sex (or virtual anything else) would seem to violate the dignity of the individual. Note: It may be worthwhile revisiting this question after students have tackled the material on virtue ethics in Chapter Five. Would an Aristotelian bring another perspective to this question? (Think particularly of the way Aristotles concept of human nature grounds his views on virtuous behavior.) What about a proponent of Feminist ethics?

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Essay Questions 108. Although Descartes can prove his own existence by reasoning, "The proposition, 'I exist,' is necessarily true each time I pronounce it," he cannot use the same sort of reasoning to prove the existence of anyone else. Explain why this is the case, and what the implications of this fact are. Right before he gives the Cogito Argument, Descartes compares himself to Archimedes, writing that in order to move the world, all that the ancient Greek needed was a sufficiently long lever and that he should have a single "fixed and immovable" place to stand, (p. 53). Why do you think Descartes makes this particular comparison at this point in the Meditations? How apt do you think the comparison? Leibniz famously criticized Descartes's method as amounting to "Take what you need, and do what you should, and you will get what you want." Do you think this criticism is justified? Why or why not? Descartes holds that anything he conceives clearly and distinctly must be true. The inference that 2+3=5 fails to meet this standard of certainty, since Descartes believes he might be deceived by an "evil genius" when he reasons. Yet he seems to think the Cogito Argument is immune to the "evil genius" objection. Was he right? If so, why? Explain why Descartes thinks his thought experiment with the lump of wax shows that the wax is better known through the mind than through the senses. Do you think he establishes his point successfully? If Locke's account of our mental contents is correct, anything we can conceive is either something we've perceived, or something composed of parts of things we've perceived. Does this mean we can never have a completely original idea? Does this mean we can't have an idea of an infinitely powerful God? Explain. Explain why Hume thought causal judgments were unjustified. Do you think he was correct? If Hume was correct, ought we abandon causal reasoning in our everyday life? Explain Kant's response to the Cogito Argument. What role does the notion of the unity of consciousness play in this response? If Kant's claim that we can only know the world as it appears to us (rather than as it really is in itself) turns out to be true, what does that mean the objects of our claims about knowledge are? Can knowledge still be universal? What if we don't all possess the same categories? In the film Blade Runner, (at least) one of the characters is a robot who has been programmed to believe themselves humanthat is, memories of (fictional) past events
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109.

110.

111.

112.

113.

114. 115. 116.

117.

have been instilled in her, and she has photographs of (presumably staged) events which replicate those she remembers. Given the theoretical possibility of this, to what extent is it true that this person thinks? How is her consciousness fundamentally different from our own? How could we be sure that our consciousness is any more authentic than hers? 118. Searles Chinese Room argument relies on the idea that mental states have a meaning or content to them, which simple information-processing cannot capture. (The technical term for this is intentionality.) How do mental states acquire this intentionality, however? Is it contingent (as Searle seems to believe) upon the stuff of which the mind is made, or on some causal connection between things and their symbols (as Fodor, for example, believes)? Or is the connection of some other kind entirely?

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