introduction

A Few Preliminaries

People come to philosophy by many different routes.

If, for these or any other reasons, you come to have an interest in philosophy, it is natural to turn to the works of great philosophers. But for most people the content of these works is rather a shock. Instead of offering direct answers to these questions—What is physical real­ity really like? Can we ever be sure we know what other people are thinking? Who am I?—a philosopher is likely to start with questions that seem to him or her more basic than these. .. but which may seem to others far less interesting. Instead of beginning by asking what we can know about other people's thoughts, a philosopher is likely to start by asking what it is to know anything at all—thus begin­ning with epistemology, which is the philosophical examination of the nature of knowledge. Despite the natural disappointment it produces, I think that starting with these fundamental questions makes sense.

Imagine you are lost in a large old city in Africa or Asia or Europe. Every way you turn there is interest and excitement. But you'd like to know where you are. The trouble is that just when you think you have found your way out of one maze of alleys, you are plunged into another. If, in your wanderings, you climb to the top of a tall tower, you can look down over the streets you have been lost in, and suddenly everything begins to make sense. You see where you should have turned one way but went another; you realize that the little shop you walked past, with the cat in the window, was only yards away from the garden in the next street, which you found hours later. And when you get back down into the maze you find your way easily. Now you know your way about.

In this book we shall find ourselves discussing the nature of morality, when we set out to decide whether it is always wrong to kill an innocent person; we shall end up talking about what it is for a theory to be scientific when we started out wondering about the claims of astrologers. And when this happens, I think it will help to bear in mind this image of being lost in an old city. When we move to these abstract questions, apparently remote from the practical concerns we started with, what we are doing is like climbing up that tower. From up there we can see our way around the problems. So that when we get back down into the city, back to the concrete prob­lems that started us out, we should find it easier to get around.

People are normally introduced to philosophy by one of two routes. The first is through reading the more accessible of the great histor­ical texts of philosophy—Plato's dialogues, for example, or Descartes' Meditations. The second is by examining some central philosophical question: “What is knowledge?” say, or “Is morality objective?” In this book I shall be following this second route, but I shall discuss the views of some of the great philosophers on the cen­tral questions on the way.

It is fashionable, at the moment, to stress the way that the central problems of philosophy change over time. People say that no one nowadays can really be concerned with all of the problems that wor­ried Plato. There is some truth in this. There are things in Plato that it is hard to understand or get excited by: much of the theory in the Symposium about the nature of love, for example, is likely to seem to a modern reader hopelessly wrong. Fortunately, however, a good deal more in Plato is extremely interesting and relevant: his Theaetetus, which is a dramatic dialogue about the nature of knowl­edge, remains one of the great classics of philosophy, and I shall dis­cuss it in Chapter 2.

So the reason we philosophers continue to read Plato and many other philosophers between his time and ours is not simple curios­ity about the history of our subject. Rather, we find in the great works of the past clues to a deeper understanding of the philosoph­ical questions that trouble us now. That's why mentioning Plato and Descartes isn't some kind of concession to the proponents of the his­torical route into philosophy. It isn't even just a concession to old habits in the teaching of philosophy. It is simply a reflection of the facts that make the historical route work.

My aim in this book is twofold, then: First, I would like anyone who reads it carefully to be able to go on to read contemporary philosophical discussions. Second, I would like such a reader to be able when he or she comes to read Plato, say, or Descartes, to see why their work remains an enduring contribution to our under­standing of the central problems of philosophy.

You will learn a lot of new words in the course of reading this book. Philosophy, like all scholarly disciplines, has its own technical terms. We use them because technical language allows you to keep track of important distinctions and to speak and write in ways that are somewhat more precise than our everyday talk. The important thing is to grasp the ideas these terms express and the distinctions they make and to see how these distinctions and ideas can be used in arguments that deepen our understanding. And one general rule to keep in mind was set out by the Greek philosopher Aristotle about twenty-five hundred years ago: he insisted that we should adopt the degree of precision appropriate to the subject matter. We could say, more generally, that distinctions are worth making only if they do some work in an argument or help us to see something we wouldn't otherwise see. The technical terms are tools for a purpose, not the point of the exercise. As far as possible, contemporary philosophers actually prefer to use what the English philosopher Bernard Williams once called “moderately plain speech.” So while philoso­phy has a technical vocabulary, doing philosophy means more than knowing and throwing around those special terms.

The book is organized around eight central areas of the subject: mind, knowledge, language, science, morality, politics, law, and metaphysics.

Now I'm going to start straight in with Mind and this may seem surprising. You might have supposed that a good question to answer at the beginning of an introductory philosophy book is: “What is phi­losophy?” But I think that is a mistake, and if we consider the same question about a different subject, I think you will see why.

So consider the question: “What is physics?” If you asked what physics was, you might well get the answer that it is the study of the physical world. In some ways this isn't a very helpful answer. One trouble is that if you take the answer broadly, then biology is a branch of physics: living organisms are part of the physical world. But this just shows that not every part of the physical world gets studied in physics. Which aspects are the physical aspects? Well, if you knew that, and were thus able to rule out biological questions, you would already be well on the way to knowing what physics is.

Nevertheless, there is a reason why most of us don't find this answer just unhelpful. We learned some physics in high school, and so we already have lots of examples of physical experiments and problems to draw on. These examples allow us to understand what is meant by “the physical world”: it consists of those aspects of the world that are like the ones we studied in high school physics. If we tell someone who has never done any physics that physics is the sys­tematic study of the physical world, we should not be surprised if they find our answer rather unhelpful.

There is a lesson here for how we should begin to develop an understanding of what philosophy is.

Before we start I need, finally, to introduce a couple of conventions that I'm going to use. I shall use quotation marks to do two differ­ent jobs. One job—exemplified in the last sentence of the previous paragraph—is to indicate that a word is being used in a nonstandard way. Philosophers call these “scare quotes.” The other job is to allow me to refer to words, sentences and other expressions, as when I say that the word “word” has four letters. The sentence

A: There are nine letters in “most words.”

is true. The sentence

B: There are nine letters in most words.

is false. (“False,” for example, has only five letters!) And I've just exemplified one other convention. When I display a sentence or expression indented on a line by itself, I will not put it in quotes; the fact of displaying it in this way is an alternative convention for allowing me to refer to words and other linguistic expressions. If I put a let­ter at the start of the line, I'll use that letter as the name of the sen­tence later. So here, for example, I can say that A and B have very different meanings. In A, we say, I am mentioning the words “most words.” In B, I am using them. This distinction between use and mention may seem obvious. But sometimes, in a complex argument, we may get into a muddle if we don't keep use and mention distinct. In chapter eight, for example, we'll discuss the existence of num­bers. There it will be important to distinguish between asking whether the numeral (i.e., the word or symbol) “9” exists, and whether 9 itself exists. The answer to the first question is obviously Yes. But the answer to the second question is not nearly so simple.

If I were to follow this convention strictly, then, when I intro­duced a term (as I often will) by saying “I will call something X,” I would have to put the “X” in quotes. But here the boldface type can do the job of the quotes—which is to show that I'm mentioning a term and not using it—so I won't usually bother. The convention is meant to help avoid confusion: it's not an obsession to be pursued for its own sake! (For the record, terms occur in boldface only at the point where I introduce or define them.)

I began this introduction by mentioning various questions that might lead you to philosophy in the first place; but perhaps you have never been bothered by any such questions. That is no reason to think that philosophy is not for you. Many people do, of course, live their lives without ever thinking systematically about philosophy. But I shall be arguing that many problems that trouble us in ordi­nary life—down in the city, rather than up in the tower—can only be answered if we first ask the more fundamental questions that are the hallmark of philosophy. Doing philosophy, then, enlarges your capacity to think about the life you are leading and what matters in it. Socrates famously said that the unexamined life was not worth liv­ing. Philosophy is one way to enrich your ability to examine the assumptions and ambitions that guide your life.