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PHILOSOPHY
A TEXT WITH READINGS

12th EDITION
Manual Velasquez
Chapter 3: “Reality and Being”
CHAPTER THREE: REALITY AND BEING

Outline of Topics in Chapter 3
• 3.1 What is Real? • 3.6 Encountering
• 3.2 Reality: Material Being: Reality in
or Nonmaterial? Phenomenology and
• 3.3 Reality in Existentialism
Pragmatism • 3.7 Is Freedom Real?
• 3.4 Reality and • 3.8 Is Time Real?
Logical Positivism
• 3.5 Antirealism: The
Heir of Pragmatism
and Idealism
3.1 What is Real?
• What is real?
– A child trembling in the dark from a nightmare may be
fearful because he believes that reality is more than
the hard material objects around him.
– You may defend yourself against these fears by
insisting that such a realm cannot be a part of reality.
• Maybe you think: “Reality consists only of the hard, enduring
objects around you that can be sensed.” What grounds do
you have for this belief?
– Metaphysics is the systematic inquiry into the nature
of reality.

Why Metaphysics?
• Questions about the nature of reality are
puzzling… so why should we engage in such
questioning?
– Metaphysical questions about what reality are among
the most significant questions we can ask because
they are intimately linked to questions about what is
important to us, what we need to pay attention to,
what has significance..
• If ghosts are not real, then ghosts don’t matter. If God is not
real, then God doesn’t matter. If the spiritual realm is not real,
then it is something that can make no difference in our lives.
If only the material exists, then only the material is important.

3.2 Reality: Material or
Nonmaterial?
• There are two overarching metaphysical
theories:
– Materialism: Reality is ultimately made up of matter.
• The chapter focuses on the Charvaka philosophical school of
India, and the western philosopher s Democritus and
Thomas Hobbes
– Idealism: reality is ultimately nonmaterial or mental in
nature.
• The chapter focuses mainly on the theories of Berkeley and
Vasubandhu.

Eastern Materialism:
Charvaka Philosophy
• The “Charvaka” philosophers of India, who
flourished around 600 BCE, ridiculed the
spiritualism of their religious countrymen.
– Charvaka philosophers believed that sense
perception was the only valid source of knowledge.
• Why did they rule out both inductive and deductive reasoning
as sources of knowledge? (150-1)
– If we can know only what we can perceive with our
senses, materialism easily follows.
• How does the Charvaka assumption about knowledge
generates materialism. (151)

Western Materialism:
Democritus
• The Greek philosopher Democritus (460–360
BCE) also believed that reality could be
explained in terms of matter.
– Matter is composed of atoms, which are solid,
indivisible, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated.
– According to Democritus, the universe consisted of
atoms and empty space.
• Even the soul, which he equated with reason, consisted of
atoms.
• An implication of this is that “all things happen by virtue of
necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all
things.” (151)

Western Materialism: Hobbes
• Influenced by the newly emerging science,
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) believed that we
can know nothing about the world other than its
measurable aspects.
– “Of the whole world we may inquire what is its
magnitude, what its duration, and how many there be,
but nothing else.” (152)
• Why does this imply materialism?
– Hobbes believed that even our mental states
(sensations, thoughts, and emotions) are states of our
material brain.

Objections to Materialism
• The fundamental objection to materialism is its
difficulty in accounting for human
consciousness, including activities such as
thinking, wishing, experiencing, hoping,
dreaming, loving, and hating.
– Matter has mass and spatial dimensions, but
consciousness does not.
– Consciousness involves subjectivity, and this cannot
be straightforwardly explained by material entities,
such as brain states.

Moving Beyond
Traditional Materialism
• Recent work in particle physics has challenged the
traditional atomic view of matter.
– Today we know that atoms are made up of electrons,
protons, and neutrons—and these in turn can be
broken down into yet more elementary particles.
– Additionally these elementary bits of stuff are more
like energy, or fields, or, perhaps, probability waves
than traditional atoms.
– Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminancy seems to
undermine any attempt at simply expanding the old
notions of matter to include the new. It may even
imply that mind is intertwined with matter.
Idealism: Reality as Nonmatter
• Idealism is the belief that reality is essentially
composed of minds and their ideas rather than
matter.
– Whether idealists believe that there is a single,
absolute mind or many minds, they invariably
emphasize the mental or spiritual, not the material,
presenting it as the creative force or active agent
behind all things.

Berkeley’s Idealism
• Idealism is anticipated by ancient philosophers
such as Pythagoras, Plato and Augustine who
argued that the spiritual and ideal has
metaphysical primacy.
– Modern idealism really begins with Bishop George
Berkeley (1685-1753), who reacted against
materialist philosophers like Hobbes.
• Berkeley claimed that the conscious mind and its ideas or
perceptions are the only reality. He did not deny the reality of
the world we perceive. He denied only that this world is
external to, and independent of, the mind

Two Kinds of Idealism
• Berkeley’s Idealism really merges two kinds of
idealism: subjective idealism and objective
idealism.
– Subjective idealism says that reality consists of my
mind (and perhaps other human minds) and its ideas.
– Objective idealism says that, in addition, reality
includes a supreme mind that produces an objective
world of ideas that does not depend on my own mind,
although it does depend on a mind—God’s.

Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism
• Berkeley argues that we only know things in the
world -- trees, rocks, houses and cats -- through
perceptions conveyed through our senses.
– When we use our senses, we see light or color; feel
hardness or softness, smoothness or roughness;
smell sweetness or decay.
– We have no other knowledge of things beyond these
perceptions.
• How does Berkeley reason from this to the conclusion that
the things we perceeve have no existence outside our
minds? (158)

An Important Distinction
• Berkeley distinguished between two very
different kinds of ideas in the mind:
– Ideas that are short-lived, changeable, and within my
control.
• For example, I can control how I imagine my ideal beach
vacation spot.
– Ideas that are more orderly orderly, regular, enduring,
and are not within my control.
• For example, the ideas of my backyard garden – which
remain pretty stable and constant. No matter what I think.

Berkeley’s Objective Idealism
• According to Berkeley, the orderly perceptions
derive their uniformity, consistency, and
continuity from the mind of God.
– God produces in our minds the display of orderly
perceptions that we call the external world; it is God
that gives this display its regularity and stability.
• This second stage of Berkeley’s idealism is an objective kind
because it claims that the world of my perceptions does not
depend on my mind, but on something external to my mind,
i.e., on God.
• What are the advantages of objective idealism? (159)

Vasubandhu’s Idealism
• The Indian philosopher Vasubandhu (4th century
CE,) developed a version of idealism similar to
that of Berkeley.
– Vasubandhu argued that we do not directly perceive
objects in the world around us. Instead, when we
think that we are perceiving something, we are
experiencing nothing more than sensations in our
minds.
– He compared this mental reality to a dream, and
argued that through meditation we can “awaken” to
realize its illusory nature.

Objections to
Subjective Idealism
• One problem with subjective idealism is that it
fails to distinguish between my perception of a
thing and the thing that I perceive.
– For example, when I look at the computer screen in
front of me isn’t there a difference between my seeing
the screen and the screen that I see?
• Why can’t subjective idealism make such a distinction?
• What other objections to subjective idealism are there?

Objections to Objective Idealism
• According to Berkeley’s objective idealism, you
perceive your bedroom each day to be more or
less exactly as it was the day before because
some other mind, call it God, perceives it all the
time. Do we really need such an explanation?
• Why won’t a more commonsensically materialistic
explanation account for the composition of the
bedroom and of the things that you pass en route
to it suffice to explain this?
• And should it one day disappear, can’t a common
sense viewpoint explain this as well –e.g., that it
was torn down?
3.3 Reality in Pragmatism
• Pragmatism is a reaction to traditional systems of
philosophy, such as materialism and idealism, and
their seemingly endless debates about the nature
of reality.
– These systems, claim the pragmatists, have erred in
looking for absolutes.
– Rather than look for absolutes, pragmatism counsels
philosophical seekers to examine the consequences of
their beliefs:
• Thus, beliefs about reality are meaningful only to the extent that
they have important consequences.

Pragmatism’s Approach to
Philosophy
• Pragmatists such as Peirce, James and Dewey
don’t accept that philosophy is a self-contained
discipline with its own cluster of problems.
– They understand it to be an instrument used by living
individuals who are wrestling with personal and social
problems and struggling to clarify their standards,
directions, and goals.
• Thus, John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that philosophy
arises out of our “social and emotional” lives to defend
interests and conscious or unconscious human wishes.

The Pragmatic Method
• The notion that the value of philosophy depends
on its problem-solving capacity lie at the heart of
the pragmatic method.
– Ultimately, the test of an idea or ideal is its capacity to
solve the particular problems that it addresses
• Thus, any inferences about the world drawn from
metaphysical inquiries must have premises that refer to facts
in the world and not to human reasoning alone.
• This rules out appealing to assumptions of transcendent
realities, or self-evident values.
• Rather, any judgment must be rooted in experiences that are
meaningful to humans.

Applying the Pragmatic Method
to Metaphysical Inquiry
• When applied to metaphysical questions, the
pragmatic method indicates certain criteria for
determining what’s real.
– According to William James (1842–1910), we
determine whether an object is real by its relation to
“our emotional and active life.”
• “[W]hatever excites and stimulates our interest is real.”
• Because it is possible that different systems of ideas or
objects might excite our interest, he argued, people can
recognize a number of different “sub-universes” or real
worlds

Pluralism
• Some metaphysicians may speak of one world—
for example, the world of “matter” or the world of
“mind”—as having more reality than another.
• However, James interpreted their views as
indicating merely one of many possible worlds
that can be real because of their relation to our
emotional and active lives.
– Thus, given the variability of our interests, desires and
values, there will be multiple realities or sub-
universes.

James’ Sub-universes
1. The world of sense, or of 4 . The world of “idols of the
physical “things.” tribe,” illusions or
2. The world of science, or prejudices common to the
of physical things as the race.
learned conceive them. 5. The various supernatural
3. The world of ideal worlds, and worlds of
relations, or abstract deliberate fable.ers, etc.
truths believed or 6. The various worlds of
believable by all. individual opinion, as
numerous as men are.
7. The worlds of sheer
madness and vagary.
Objections to Pragmatism
• Philosophers have objected to pragmatism on
numerous grounds. Questions raises by
objectors include:
– Does pragmatism have the resources for conceiving
of disinterested intellectual and scientific inquiry?
– When pragmatism emphasizes that multiple realities
exist because of the mind’s capacity to have multiple
interests, does this imply that there is no reality apart
from the mind?
• How might pragmatists answer these questions?

3.4 Reality and
Logical Positivism
• Like pragmatists, logical positivists reject
traditional metaphysics.
– Logical positivists argue that the claims made in
metaphysics are meaningless, although they present
the appearance of being meaningful.
– The chapter looks at two of the most influential logical
positivists, A.J. Ayer (1910–1989) and Rudolph
Carnap (1891–1970)

Ayer’s Criterion
• Ayer bases his claim that metaphysical
statements are forms of “nonsense” on “a
criterion of meaning.
– According to Ayer, a statement is meaningful if and
only if it is either:
1. a “relation of idea”, that is, a tautology (true by definition)
2. a “matter of fact”, that is a empirically verifiable statement
(verifiable in principle by observation).
– Metaphysical statements are neither, and thus are
meaningless.

Two Kinds of Verifiability
• Ayer is careful to distinguish between practical
verifiability and verifiability in principle.
– While some empirical statements such as “HIV
causes AIDS” can be directly and easily verified, other
statements are verifiable only in principle so long as
we are capable of making the requisite observations.
• For example, in 1936 “There are mountains on the far side of
the moon” could only be verified in principle.
• On the other hand, statements like “Only minds
are real” can’t be verified even in principle.
–.

Nonsense is Everywhere
• The logical positivist criterion of meaningfulness
implies not only that metaphysical statements
are meaningless, but also ethical and religious
statements.
– The fact that very few people consider such
statements meaningless raises a question: How can
such statements be rejected as meaningless when so
many people believe that they are filled with
meaning?

Carnap and Non-Literal
Meaning
• Rudolph Carnap answers this question by
conceding that metaphysical, ethical and
religious statements are meaningful, but only in
a non-literal sense.
– Such statements only express emotion.
• As such, they are like the expressions of lyrical
poets who use words to express feelings.
• Metaphysicians—and philosophers in general—
use words to express feelings and not to represent
facts about the world.

Deceptive Lyricism
• Carnap writes that
– “[M]etaphysical statements—like lyrical verses—have
only an expressive function, but no representative
function ... [T]hey assert nothing, they contain neither
knowledge nor error, they lie completely outside the
field of knowledge…”
– On the other hand, “[a] metaphysical statement,
however—as distinguished from a lyrical verse—
seems to have such a content, and by this not only is
the reader deceived, but the metaphysician himself.”
(176)

Objections to Logical Positivism
• Logical positivists make the following argument:
1. All meaningful statements are either tautologies or
empirically verifiable.
2. Metaphysical statements are neither tautologies nor
empirically verifiable.
3. Therefore, metaphysical statements are not
meaningful statements.
• The text raises two objections to this argument –
focused on the first premise. (180) What are
these objections?

3.5 Antirealism: The Heir of
Pragmatism and Idealism
• Some philosophers have embraced traditional
idealism’s rejection of the existence of an
independent external reality, as well as returned
to pragmatism’s view that there are many
“realities.”
– These views are “postmodern” in the sense that they
reject the “modern” belief in a single reality.
– They’ve also been labeled antirealist by many
contemporary philosophers.

Realism
• The opposite of antirealism is realism, which
claims that some realm of objects exists
independently of our language, our thoughts, our
perceptions, and our beliefs—that is,
independent of the mind.
– The realist holds that the features of this world
around us would have been exactly the same as they
are now even if no one had ever existed who could
perceive them, think about them, or describe them
with language.

Arguing for Anti-Realism
• Modern antirealists do not agree with Berkeley
that all we know are our own sensations or ideas.
– They argue, instead, that all we know are our own
linguistic creations. That is, when we think about or
talk about reality, we must use a particular language
or system iof concepts with its own special way of
describing things.
• Different languages describe the same reality in different
ways, and each of these different descriptions describes the
world as having different features.
• So, antirealists conclude, we cannot say that reality has
features that are independent of our language.

Goodman’s Anti-Realism
• Nelson Goodman was one of the first
contemporary philosophers to argue that reality
is a conceptual construct:
– “Now as we thus make constellations by picking out
and putting together certain stars rather than others,
so we make stars by drawing certain boundaries
rather than others. Nothing dictates whether the sky
shall be marked off into constellations or other
objects. We have to make what we find, be it the
Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.”
(Goodman, 183)

Putnam’s Antirealism
• Hilary Putnam is another prominent antirealist.
• Consider, he suggests, objects such as in Figure
3.1.
• Insert figure 3.1 from pg 183

Nonstandard Realities
• Putnam argues that there is no single answer to
the question: How many objects are there in
3.1?
– Our ordinary system of counting would say there are
three objects in Figure 3.1
– However, certain nonstandard systems of counting
would say there are seven objects:
• In addition to the three objects A, B, and C, these
nonstandard systems would “see” the object that consists of
A and B together, the object that consists of B and C
together, the object that consists of A and C together, and
the object that consists of A, B, and C together.

Feminist Antirealism
• The feminist philosopher, Dale Spender,
formulates a feminist version of antirealism.
– He agrees with Goodman that we cannot know
“things as they really are” because the classification
system of the language we use “shapes” the reality
we see.
– Feminists use antirealism to explain why the world
that women ordinarily are forced to accept is sexist,
based on male language and concepts.

Multidimensional Reality
• From the feminist point of view, there are
numerous “truths” available within feminism and
it is falling into male-defined (and false) patterns
to try and insist that only one is correct.
– Accepting the validity of multidimensional reality
predisposes women to accept multiple meanings and
explanations without feeling that something is
fundamentally wrong. . . .
– The concept of multidimensional reality is necessary,
for it allows sufficient flexibility to accommodate the
concept of equality

Objections to Antirealism
• The feminist philosopher, Jean Grimshaw, points
out that if we accept antirealism then women
who do not believe they are being exploited,
oppressed, or dominated, are not, in reality,
being exploited, oppressed, or dominated.
– If women speak and think in a male language that
sees them as inferior, weak, and contemptible, then in
reality they are inferior, weak, and contemptible.

Objections to Antirealism
• John Searle raises a more general
objection:
– “From the fact that the description of any fact
can only be made relative to a set of
categories, it does not follow that the facts
themselves only exist relative to a set of
categories. “ (186)
– How does the text apply Searle’s objection to
Putnam’s interpretation of Figure 3.1?

Realism as a Presupposition
of Communication
• Searle goes on to argue that the very fact of
communication presupposes realism.
– “But what are the conditions of possibility of
communication in a public language? What do I have
to assume when I ask a question or make a claim that
is supposed to be understood by others? At least this
much: if we are using words to talk about something,
in a way that we expect to be understood by others,
then there must be at least the possibility of
something those words can be used to talk about.”
(187)

3.6 Encountering Being: Reality in
Phenomenology and Existentialism
• Both phenomenology and existentialism try to
approach reality from the inside, by focusing on
reality as it is subjectively revealed to our
consciousness in its human condition.
– They disavow theoretical presuppositions and instead
focus on reality as it presents itself to directly, in our
experience.
• The text examines the philosophies of reality of
Husserl, Heidegger and Existentialism.

Husserl’s Phenomenology
• As a method of investigation, phenomenology
means the study of what appears to
consciousness.
– The founder of phenomenology is Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938).
– Husserl argues that we need to approach the study of
reality through our consciousness of reality.
– Husserl believed that could suspend belief in
everything, but you cannot think away consciousness.
• This suggests that the most fundamental reality that is
revealed to us is our consciousness itself.

The Natural Standpoint
• Husserl’s phenomenological method involves
taking a stance, suspending belief in “the natural
standpoint.”
– The natural standpoint is our normal everyday
awareness of the world as “simply there,” whether or
not we pay any special attention to it.
– It is the world of space and time as we experience it,
but not a world of mere, colorless facts.
• “this world is …. a world of values, a world of goods, a
practical world. . . . furnished not only with the qualities that
befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as
beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable…” (192)
–: CHAPTER THREE: REALITY AND BEING

Bracketing
• Husserl asks us to set it aside—to “bracket” or
suspend judgment about—the world “out there,”
and to focus, instead, on the nature of our
consciousness or awareness of that world, that
is, on how that world appears to us within our
consciousness.
– For example, suppose you have a glass in your hand.
• To understand your sensory consciousness of that glass,
you would bracket your belief that it is actually out there in
your hand. This will allow you to attend to the mode
consciousness in which the glass appears to you.

Consciousness and Being
• Husserl argues that bracketing presents
important truths that would otherwise elude us.
• What remains after bracketing is our
consciousness.
– “Consciousness in itself has a being of its own which
in its absolute uniqueness of nature remains
unaffected by the phenomenologic disconnection. It
therefore remains over as a “phenomenological
residue,” as a region of Being which is in principle
unique, and that can become in fact the field of a new
science—the science of Phenomenology.” (193)

Heidegger’s Phenomenology
• Heidegger adapts Husserl’s phenomenological
approach to an investigation of human existence
in the world.
– For the early Heidegger, the nature of reality is
revealed by studying the nature of human being, the
way that humans exist in their ordinary day-to-day
world.
– Heidegger thought that traditional thinking is confused
about being. Being is not an individual thing, an
attribute or quality, but the very “is-ing” of things

Dasein
• Heidegger believed that to understand being, we
have to first understand the human kind of being,
which he called “Dasein,” a German word that
means “being there.”
– Human existence is a “being there” in a world into
which we have been “thrown” by no choice of our own.
– Unlike mere “things,” we can “question” or try to
understand our own being.
• By becoming conscious of our own being, our Dasein, or how
we exist within our world, we may better understand not only
own being, but the being that underlies everything.

The Being of Dasein
• Heidegger’s investigation lead him to the
conclusions that Dasein is essentially finite and
temporal.
– Our being is a temporal process of becoming the
unique person we are through our personal decisions
until our being ends with a death that is possible at
any moment.
• We can also fail to become our real selves by conforming with
the habits and conventions of our society and becoming an
“anonymous one,” an object for the use of others.
• Living “authentically” requires facing our death, and thus living
with angst or anxiety”.
•
Existentialism
• Existentialism shares much with Husserlian and
Heideggerian phenomenology.
– In particular, it arises as a reaction to the idea that an
objective knowledge of the human can be attained by
applying the scientific method to sociology and
psychology.
• Its main concern is the subjectivity of the human individual
and the individual’s responsibility for who he or she is.
– The text focuses mainly on the existentialism of Soren
Kierkegaard(1813–1855) and Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905–1980)

Four Themes in Kierkegaard
• Kierkegaard’s existentialism is preoccuppied
with living an authentic life.
• His writing on the pursuit of authenticity
reverberates with four large themes:
1. The necessity of gaining clarity about how to live.
2. Understanding reality from the subjective perspective
of the self who chooses and acts.
3. The central importance of decision and commitment,
in creating and shaping what we become.
4. Understanding what it means to be a Christian.

Anxiety and The Leap of Faith
• As with Heidegger, Kierkegaard believed that
living an authentic life requires coming to terms
with our anxiety.
– Unlike Heidegger, however, Kierkegaard believed
anxiety is most closely connected with our freedom to
choose.
– This is manifested in the need to make a “leap of
faith” into nothingness when we make significant
choices in the absence of clear knowledge that we
are choosing correctly.

Existing
• For Kierkegaard, to exist, and to become who I
am, are identical.
– In choosing, Kierkegaard claims, “the personality is
consolidated.”
• Through our choices we come to be the person we are. That
is, we come to exist; we become real.
• This will turn out to be a central existentialist
theme: that we make ourselves through our
choices and thereby come to truly exist.

Sartre’s Existentialism
• Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) developed an
atheistic version of existentialism, with a
distinctive metaphysics of free action.
– Sartre metaphysics really starts with the insight that
there is no God to define us.
– Thus, there is no fixed human nature
– So we can be only what we choose to be.
– The “leap of faith,” i.e., the commitment to religious
faith, for Sartre is a refusal of this absolute freedom
and so a non-starter.

Two Kinds of Being
• To explicate the distinctiveness of our freedom,
Sartre develops an account of the nature of free
action based on his phenomenological analysis
of conscious experience.
• His analysis reveals that there are two
fundamentally different kinds of being:
– Being-for-itself, and being-in-itself.

Being-in-itself
• To grasp being-in-itself, we need only look at
any pure object or material thing – such as the
desk or book in front of you.
– Such objects have properties or attributes, an
essence that defines what they are.
• For example, the table weighs 100 pounds, the book has 700
pages, etc.
– It’s pretty clear that the in-itself lacks freedom – it is
what it is, at any given point in time.
– I could look at my life this way too if I viewed myself
as a pure thing.
• By doing this though I’d be ignoringthe for-itself of my
consciousness
Being-For-Itself
• Being-for-itself is nothing until it acts, and then
the reality it becomes is whatever it chooses to
do.
– This is why humans, who as conscious agents, are
being-for-itself, make themselves through their
choices.
• Being-in-itself is not conscious and cannot make itself other
than what it is.
• “As a consciousness, being-for-itself is nothing until, through
its conscious activities, it makes itself be something; on the
other hand, an in-itself cannot choose and so cannot make
itself into anything other than what it already is.” (199)

Responsibility
• Sartre’s view is that as being-for-itself, we are
responsible for what we have become.
– Sartre rejects the notion that one acts as one does
because of the conditions under which one grew up.
• As the for-itself, one is a free consciousness, so what he is is
the result of the free choices he makes.
• As a free consciousness, even a thief could choose to act as
an honest man.
– Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), takes this
philosophy of freedom and applies it to women,
arguing that their femininity need not define them as
an in-itself.

Objections to Existentialism
• The text considers objections to both Husserl
and to Sartre:
– How do critics challenge Husserl’ contention that
“bracketing” is presuppositionless and objective? (202)
– What questions do philosophers raise about Sartre’s
claim that that one cannot be in the mode of being-for-
itself by freely choosing to be committed to
Christianity, or any other form of group membership?
(202)

3.7 Is Freedom Real?
• The murder trials of Leopold and Loeb and
Thomas Koskovich illustrate what is at stake in
the debate over whether freedom is real.
– Some philosophers argue that as the predictable
outcome of the violent life that had preceded it
Koskovich was not free not to act as he did. So he
should not be held morally responsible for his acts.
– On the other hand, other philosophers strongly
disagree holding that Koskovich should be held
morally responsible for what they do.
• No matter how we are brought up, we have the power to
choose what we will do.

Three Responses
• There are three philosophical responses to the
question: Is human freedom real?
– Determinism is the view that human actions are
completely determined by prior events.
– Libertarianism is the position that people have control
over what they do and are free to choose to act other
than the way they do
– Compatibilism is a theory that holds that determinism
is compatible with freedom and responsibility

Determinism
• According to determinism, every event has prior
conditions that cause it.
– Thus, each event is at least theoretically predictable if
we know all its prior conditions and the laws
governing those conditions.
– Human actions are part of this causal chain of nature
and so are also determined.
• While it may seem to us that we are free, in actuality, this
freedom is just a result of our ignorance of the laws that
govern us.
• What is the deductive argument for
determinism? (208)
No Responsibility
• Determinism contradicts the idea that we are
each personally responsible for our actions.
– Freedom is the ability to choose among alternatives.
• Assuming I’m free, I freely decided to read this chapter,
because I could have decided not to read it.
– If someone cannot help but do what they do, then they
are not free to act otherwise. If they lack freedom, in
this sense, then they also lack responsibility.
• We are responsible for an action only if we are in control of
the action or its causes. It’s the events and forces that led us
to act control what we do.

Problems with Determinism
• The implications of determinism are disturbing.
– For example, if it is true, then punishment, at least in
the traditional sense, makes little sense.
– What other implications might determinism have?
• Some philosophers have questioned the
determinist understanding of human action.
– They posit that we are at least sometimes directly
aware that we have control over our actions and so
are morally responsible at that moment for the actions
we choose.

Libertarianism
• Libertarianism stands opposed to determinism,
although libertarians do share an assumption
with determinists.
– They agree with the determinist that determinism
rules out freedom and responsibility.
• That is, they presuppose that if we are truly free when we do
X, then we could also have chosen not to do X.
– However, libertarians reject the determinist’s claim
that all human actions are caused by antecedent
events.

Sartre’s Libertarianism
• Libertarians claim that people do have control
over what they do and are free to choose to act
other than the way they do.
– We are, in Sartre’s view, radically free: Our ability to
conceive of what is not allows us to form plans that are
not determined by the past or the present.
• The y cannot be determined because what is cannot
determine what is not. Being cannot determine nonbeing.
• By this ability to pursue what is not, we make ourselves
whatever we choose to be regardless of the influences of our
environment or our heredity.
• What deductive argument do libertarians make
for their point of view?
Objections to Libertarianism
• Critics have raised numerous objections to
libertarianism.
– Some criticize the libertarians for their use of
indeterminism based on quantum mechanics.
• These arguments leave the future open, but fail to account
for the ability to choose freely.
– Others argue that libertarianism makes human
choices mysterious and unexplainable, while flying in
the face of what we know about human psychology
and the extent to which we are shaped by our pasts.

Compatibilism
• Compatibilists reject the view that determinism
rules out freedom and responsibility.
– They attempt to save freedom by redefining it: To say
that a person is free is to say that the person is not
impeded by external restraints or confinements.
• A person wearing handcuffs or in prison is not free. But a
person who acts based on her own desires or character
move her to do is free.
– On the other hand, compatibilists accept determinism.
• A person’s desires and character are molded by her heredity,

upbringing, and other antecedent causes.

Determinism and Responsibility
• From the Compatibilist standpoint, to say that a
person is responsible for an action is to say that
the action flowed from inside the person, from
what he is.
– So, when a person’s actions are caused by his inner
desires and his character, they flow from the person
and from what he is, making him responsible for
those actions.
• What is the deductive argument for
compatibilism?

Criticisms of Compatibilism
• It’s true that compatibilism appears to wed
freedom and responsibility with determinism.
• However, it leaves the key question
unanswered:
– If we are not free to act against our desires, then isn’t
there still a clear sense in which we are not free?
– Maybe we are “free” in the sense that we are not
chained down and physically restrained from acting.
But aren’t we unfree in the more important sense that
we do not ultimately control what we do?

Kantian Compatibilism
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) tries to avoid this
impasse by offering a different kind of
compatibilism.
– Kant argues that as rational beings we can really take
two points of view on ourselves.
• We can view ourselves as parts of the natural world, and thus
subject to the laws of nature. From this perspective
determinism is true.
• We can also view ourselves belonging to the world
understanding, where we see ourselves as conscious agents,
subject only to moral rules that are based on reason. From
this perspective we are free and responsible.

3.8 Is Time Real?
• Time is a central aspect of our lives.
– It’s a feature of the way we talk about out lives:
• We talk about what happened “yesterday,” what we are
doing “today,” and what we plan to do “tomorrow.”
– It’s also a dimension of our identities:
• To find out who I am, I need to look into my memory of my
past and see what I’ve done and where I’ve been, how I’ve
acted and responded to the needs and demands of others
and to the events of my life
• Yet what is time? And in what sense is it real or
unreal?

Augustine on Time
• Augustine (354-430 CE) argued that only the
present instant of time really exists.
– The past and future are not real. They have only a
shadowy mental existence in our mind.
– Past instants only exist in memory, and future
instants only exist by anticipation.
– Outside the mind, in reality, there exists only the
changing point-like instant of time that makes up the
present.

Two Temporal Perspectives
• Augustine’s theory of time suggests a useful
distinction between time from the point of view of
God and time as we experience it.
– God is outside time. From God’s point of view, time is
like a line of events that lies stretched out before Him.
• Here time is an objective, fixed series of events.
– We experience time quite differently. We are in time
and experience it as a movement along the time-line
of events.
• Here time is subjective duration, the flow from the future,
through the present, and into the past.

McTaggart on Time
• J. M. E. McTaggart (1886–1925) makes a
distinction, similar to Augustine’s, between
objective time and subjective time.
– McTaggert identifies two temporal series:
• Objective time, or the “B series,” is a fixed series of
moments, each one “before” or “after” the others.
• Subjective time, or the “A series,” is a sequence of
flowing moments, each of which changes from
being “future” to “present” to “past.”

What Really is Time?
• According to McTaggart, only the A series is
really time.
– For time requires change, and the events or moments
in objective time—the B series—do not change.
– Time, in the B series, is an unchanging, fixed series
of events frozen onto the line that makes up the
series.

Time is Unreal
• McTaggart argues that the A series is
impossible!
• That’s because in the A series one and the same
moment appears to be sequentially future, present
and past.
• But the future, by definition cannot be present and
past.
• Whatever is impossible cannot exist or be real.
• Reality must be consistent. It cannot contain
impossible elements.
• Therefore , time is unreal.

Kant on Time
• Kant claims that time, along with space, is a
mental grid that we impose on sensations in
order to construct an organized perceptual world.
– “Time is a necessary representation, lying at the
foundation of all our perceptions. With regard to
phenomena in general, we cannot think away time
from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of
and unconnected with time. But we can quite easily
represent to ourselves time empty of any phenomena.
Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all reality
of phenomena possible.” (219)

Bergson on Time
• The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–
1941) turns McTaggart’s analysis on its head.
– He argues that the scientist’s objective time (The B
series) is just a conceptual abstraction, a construct of
the mind.
– Only what we directly experience is real.
• What we directly experience or “intuit” within ourselves is the
flow of time.
• We directly experience ourselves as changing and as flowing
through time.
• Bergson calls this experience the intuition of duration.

The Intuition of Duration
• Bergson argues that the experience of time
cannot be captured neatly in a single image.
– On the one hand, the unrolling of our duration
resembles in some of its aspects the unity of an
advancing movement.
– On the other hand, it seems more like the multiplicity
of expanding states – akin to an elastic band being
stretched.
– “The inner life is all this at once: variety of qualities,
continuity of progress, and unity of direction. It cannot
be represented by images.” (220)

What Do You Think?
• Who is right?
– Is subjective time real, or is only objective
time real?
– Do things end? Do we and our loved ones die
and vanish into nothing? Or is every life and
event really fixed eternally in objective time?
– What are you views about the reality of time?

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