Confucius

Without question, the most famous and influential Chinese philosopher is Confucius, who lived from 551 B.C. to 479 B.C., and shaped social and philosophical thought for several centuries. Typifying non-Western thought, he places less emphasis on logical and mathematical topics and methods; his metaphysical thought is driven more by social and ethical concerns than by rationalist or empiricist considerations. Central in his thought is the Chinese word “Tian” which can be translated variously, but names a Supreme Being in the universe. Jeff Richey writes:

Consistent throughout Confucius’ discourses on Tian is his threefold assumption about this extrahuman, absolute power in the universe: (1) its alignment with moral goodness, (2) its dependence on human agents to actualize its will, and (3) the variable, unpredictable nature of its associations with mortal actors.

It is obvious that this cosmology will have ethical implications:

While Confucius believes that people live their lives within parameters firmly established by Heaven — which, often, for him means both a purposeful Supreme Being as well as ‘nature’ and its fixed cycles and patterns — he argues that men are responsible for their actions and especially for their treatment of others. We can do little or nothing to alter our fated span of existence but we determine what we accomplish and what we are remembered for.

Here begin, then, the famous social directives for which Confucius is known. His moral-political propositions are not the inductive products of experience, but rather rationally founded on his ontology, which in turn, however, may possibly be the product of empirical induction. In any case, however, the basis for his ethics is immediately his theodicy, and at most only mediately any a posteriori considerations.

Just War Theory - Then and Now

A series of debates in the Middle Ages gave rise to what we call “Just War Theory”: an attempt answer the question about when, if ever, a nation is morally justified in engaging in warfare. The debate was between the pacific half of Christianity, which claimed that violence was never permissible, even in defense of self or others, and the moderate half of Christianity, which argued that combat would be morally permissible if it were purely defensive. The debates were not abstract: the pressing politics of the day were shaped by the Islamic invasion of Spain in 711 A.D., of France in 732 A.D., and of southern Italy in the early 800’s. (The Crusades, originally envisioned as a defensive counter-attack against the home base of these Muslim armies, would being around 1095 A.D.)

The debates went into great detail about what might or might not be considered ethical conduct in warlike situations. Jonathan Barnes, at Oxford University, writes that

the question of what part the clergy might play in warfare looms large in medieval discussions; but its interest is purely antiquarian and theological.

The details of what a priest in Europe in the middle ages might be allowed to do in the military could easily appear as an irrelevant discussion to the modern reader, at until Alfred Freddoso writes that

the medievals generally argued that clerics are forbidden to bear arms or to kill even in a just war. Given the powerful pacifist tendencies in current Christian thought, it would hardly be shocking if someone were to ask why these medieval arguments might not apply to all Christians, nonclerics as wells as clerics, with the result that Christian pacifism could be viewed as a natural development of just-war theory. The topic is thus far from antiquarian.

It seems that medieval debates about pacifism and just war theory will always be relevant to this world; wars will always bring cause philosophers to pose these questions.

Different Philosophers, Similar Conclusions

Immanuel Kant and Augustine of Hippo were two very different men. Augustine did his writing around 400 A.D.; Kant published his most famous book in 1761. Augustine was a native of Africa’s north coast on the Mediterranean Sea; Kant lived in Germany’s northern coast on the Baltic Sea. Augustine was born a pagan and became a Christian; Kant was a Christian who became a heterodox theist. Augustine expressed himself in Latin and Greek; Kant wrote in German.

Yet both of them became know for similar philosophical viewpoints. They emphasized the limits of human reason.

It is always a temptation to imagine that any philosophical question can be answered by reason. Rarely does it happen that a philosopher has the humility to write that he has come to the limits of human reason, that it is simply beyond the power of human thought to answer the question at hand.

Those philosophers who succumb to this temptation end up going farther in their conclusion than their logic will actually allow.

Kant and Augustine are among the very few who were cautious and sober enough to draw a limit to the powers which they attribute to the human mind. Their conclusions are perhaps less exciting, less adventurous, and less fun than those philosophical books which venture onto intellectually thinner ice. But their writings seem to have a longer shelf-life than some others.

A few of Kant’s immediate followers went beyond the limits he recommended, making daring statements in their philosophies. While they were interesting and popular for a time, these men, e.g., Mr. Fichte and Mr. Schelling, are now less studied.

Augustine and Kant remain philosophical classics, in part because of their moderation: those who walk on thin ice may get the thrills, but those who stand on the more solid ground generally have longer lives.

When the Effect Comes before the Cause?

In everyday life, we generally think of causes existing before their effects. But as along ago as Aristotle, philosophers who thought carefully discerned various definitions of “cause” - including some causes which come after their effects.

Consider: he got his umbrella because it was going to rain. The rain, which had not yet occurred, caused him to fetch his umbrella.

Or again: you are studying so that you will get a good grade at the end of the semester. Getting a good grade (in Aristotle’s terminology, a “final cause”) at some point in the future causes you to study now.

Other philosophers would argue, however, that it is the current expectation of rain which causes him to get his umbrella, and the current desire for grades which causes you to study. On this reading of the events, then, the causes do not at all lie in the future, but rather in the present.

Here we see yet another counter-intuitive understanding of “cause”: a cause which is simultaneous to its effect. Again violating the everyday understanding of causes as temporally prior to their effects, we see here causes which are logically prior but temporally coextensive to their effects. In Aristotle’s terms, these are often “material” or “formal” causes.

One of the most central of such cases is the question of what keeps objects in existence, or what keeps the universe in existence. Martin Heidegger wrote that one of the core questions of metaphysics and of philosophy is this: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

In this sense, then, when we ask, “what is the cause of the universe?” we are asking not about what came before the universe in time, but rather what is sustaining the existence of the universe over time — what prevents the universe from simply disappearing altogether? This question lies on the boundary between physics and philosophy, and

The English philosopher C.D. Broad once noted that “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.”

Edward Feser (University of California, Santa Barbara) goes on to point out that, in this matter of writing about the cause of the universe,

from Aristotle to Aquinas to Leibniz to the present day, most versions of the First Cause argument have not supposed that the universe had a beginning in time.

So it doesn’t matter, when we are asking about the cause of the universe in this way, whether or not the universe had a specific beginning point in time or not. Even if the universe were to stretch infinitely back into time, that doesn’t change the question about what keeps it in existence. However, if we ask about what Aristotle calls the “efficient cause,” the universe’s beginning in time, or lack thereof, would make a great deal of difference. The efficient cause would be the last event prior to the effect itself which led inexorably to the effect.

As you can see, keeping track of these various notions of “cause” will be a lot of work. To muddy the waters still further, Feser writes about Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, and others, that

their claim is rather that even if the universe were infinitely old, it is still the sort of thing that might in principle not have existed at all. That it does exist therefore requires explanation, and this explanation cannot lie in some other thing that might in principle have failed to exist, since that would just raise the same problem again. Accordingly, the explanation can be found only in something that could not have failed to exist even in principle — something that not only does not have a cause, but couldn’t have had one, precisely because (unlike the universe) it couldn’t in theory have failed to exist in the first place. In short, any contingent reality, like the universe, must depend upon a necessary being.

Even with four — or more — possible definitions of “cause” floating around, physicists and philosophers tend to agree on at least one principle: nothing can cause itself. But even that relatively obvious conclusion requires some complex argumentation, precisely because of the multiple definitions of causation. It needs to be shown true several times, for each of the several definitions:

The reason is that the very idea of something causing itself is self-contradictory: If a thing were to cause itself, it would have to exist prior to itself, in which case it would already exist and not need to be caused. (“Prior” need not entail “earlier in time”; the same incoherence arises even if we think of a cause and its effect as simultaneous, and interpret “prior to” as meaning “more fundamental than.”)

This skills is necessary for every rational thinker: to be good at distinguishing between what is temporally prior and what is logically prior. If we confuse those two, then we will make ourselves look foolish by means of the nonsense we write.

Where Are You, When You’re Not Inside Time?

Different philosophers have assigned different explanations to what it means to be outside of time. Any of these is very difficult to understand, and even more difficult to imagine. In any case, the idea of not being in time is non-intuitive or even counter-intuitive. Immanuel Kant wrote

It is a common expression, used chiefly in pious language, to speak of a person who is dying as going out of time into eternity.

This statement requires us, in turn, to consider the definition of “eternity” — often conceived as endless time. But this common notion of eternity quickly collapses: if you’re leaving time altogether, then you’re not in endless time, you’re in no time at all.

This expression would in fact say nothing if eternity is understood here to mean a time proceeding to infinity; for then the person would indeed never get outside time but would always progress only from one time into another. Thus what must be meant is an end of all time along with the person’s uninterrupted duration; but this duration (considering its existence as a magnitude) must be meant as a magnitude wholly incomparable with time (duratio noumenon), of which we are obviously able to form no concept (except a merely negative one).

Yet another puzzle arises: if the person’s existence “endures” the fact that he left time, how do we define “endure” — which is itself a temporal concept? We want to say that the person continues to exist after leaving time - but “continue” is a chronological notion! How can we say that the person still exists, when “still” makes no sense without reference to time?

Here we have to do (or are playing) merely with ideas created by reason itself, whose objects (if they have any) lie wholly beyond our field of vision; although they are transcendent for speculative cognition, they are not to be taken as empty, but with a practical intent they are made available to us by law-giving reason itself.

Kant reminds us here that in contemplating existence outside of time, we are at the very limit, or perhaps past the limit, of what human reason can grasp. His famous distinction between pure reason and practical reason comes into play here. On the level of pure reason, we can know little or nothing about the process of leaving time, or about exactly what it even means to leave time or be outside of time. On the level of practical reason, however, Kant informs us that we have license to follow the evidence and form hypotheses about this topic, because such working hypotheses are necessary for practical (which Kant often means moral or ethical) decisions.

A slightly different topic is, rather than an individual person leaving time, the notion that time itself ends. Again we are faced with puzzling imaginations of what this might mean. Grappling with this question in an eschatological context, Kant writes that the end of time would mean

that henceforth there shall be no alteration; for if there were still alteration in the world, then time would also exist, because alteration can take place only in time and is not thinkable without presupposing it.

Outside of time, there can be no change, for example, I cannot stand now and sit then, because there is no “now” and no “then” — presumably, I would always be both standing and sitting. Our difficulty, or inability, to even imagine or conceptually frame such things results, Kant would argue, from the fact that our minds are structured around time, or that time is the structure which our minds use to form concepts. If a man were born blind and had never seen colors, it would be difficult for him to imagine blue or green. Our minds must always structure concepts within the framework of time, and so it is difficult for us to create concepts in any other way, or to create any other kind of concept.

Now here is represented an end of all things as objects of sense - of which we cannot form any concept at all, because we will inevitably entangle ourselves in contradictions as soon as we try to take a single step beyond the sensible world into the intelligible.

Kant writes that is perhaps for the purposes of practical hypotheses that the concept of eternity (in the sense of an infinite span of time) is used; clearly, being in eternity and being outside of time are two very different things. Eternity is, however, perhaps somewhat easier to imagine, and forms a ready concept which works as well as “being outside of time” for practical purposes. This may be somewhat like our habit of sloppily blurring the distinction between weight and mass in the butcher shop: I might get a pound of pork, or a half kilogram of pork. A rude violation of physics, but for practical purposes an equivalent measure.

Varieties of Logic

Logic comes in many varieties. Modern logicians have learned to vary the axioms, the definitions, postulates, etc., to create many different formal systems. The same is true of geometry, as we know that there are many types of non-Euclidean geometry generated in this same way - for geometry simply is logic clothed in multidimensional shapes.

There are more sophisticated and subtle ways of forming new logics. Hieronymous Pardus (often called “Pardo”) developed an interesting logic. He came from Spain and did some work in Paris between 1481 and 1502. John Longeway describes Pardo’s logic as

defending a wholistic account of the meaning of propositions rather than building up their meanings out of the independently established meanings of their parts.

Traditionally, we consider a proposition like “the chair has four legs” as having a meaning which is assembled by adding the meanings of individual words like “chair” and “four” and “legs” — but Pardo challenges us to grasp the entire proposition as a unit, as atomic, as simple not complex. Offering, however, a slightly different interpretation of Pardo, Professor Nuchelmans at the University of Leiden put it this way:

the signification of the whole complex was commonly held to be of a compositional nature and to be determined by the signification of its parts. As Pardo put it, only incomplex expressions have been given conventional meanings in a primary and immediate way; a propositional complex, such as Homo est animal, on the other hand, has been destined to signify its meaning only in a mediate, consequential and secondary manner, since its signification can be derived from the significations of the incomplex parts.

Let’s let Pardo speak for himself, then. He wrote:

For the truth of a proposition in which there is distribution is recognized by means of a conjunctive descent; and that of a proposition in which there is a term suppositing determinately is recognized by means of disjunctive descent; and of a term suppositing merely confusedly, by means of the disjunct or conjunct descent. For what else is it for a term to be distributed, but for it to be taken for its significata conjunctively, and for a term to supposit determinately, but for it to be taken for its significata disjunctively, and for a term to supposit merely confusedly, but for it to be taken for its significata disjunctly or conjunctly? Therefore, to explicate the way of taking the term (acceptionem explicare) is to descend. Thus, if descent is negated, nothing reliable remains for the cognition of the truth of a proposition on the basis of supposition.

These are murky waters: the reader is advised to re-read the above paragraphs several times slowly. In any case, there is sufficient evidence to show that Pardo was a powerful and creative thinker, capable of executing sophisticated and intricate maneuvers in the subtle landscape of systematic logic.

Sadly, this era of technical sophistication in logic and mathematics faded away: Longeway writes:

I found the excitement at an end when the Renaissance began.

Popular historians have often painted the Renaissance as a time a great intellectual activity. In reality, the natural and mathematical sciences both languished, and philosophy was reduced to trite slogans, during this era. Investigating logical theory during the Renaissance leaves Longeway with the suspicion

that there is little pioneering work to do. What bothered me was the lack of any real semantic theory in these thinkers. Nuchelmans does what he can by them, but despite every effort at respect, in the end he points out “the general neglect” in Renaissance thought “of those fundamental problems to which late-scholastic philosophers gave pride of place.”

Despite the intellectually vacuous Renaissance which constitutes the gap between them, Medieval and modern symbolic logic share a sophisticated subtlety, and have much to say to each other.

Accident and Essence

In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. Emile Brehier writes:

The sharp distinction between essential and accidental attributes make possible a clear statement of the problem of universals. For universals, whose reality was the subject of speculation, are nothing but the genera and species - for example, “animal” and “man” — which are essential attributes of an individual like Socrates.

This notion was first clearly stated by Aristotle, although it was doubtless present earlier, and it was refined to its most precise and modern form during the Middle Ages. Aristotle dealt with this topic in several of his books, including one called Categories:

the Categories, the study of attributes, cannot refer to things (since res non praedicatur) but only to words as signifiers of things. Hence the solution, imbued with the spirit of Aristotle, of the problem of universals: genus and species exist only by virtue of predicates essential to the individual. “Individuals, species, and genus are one and the same reality (eadem res), and universals are not, as is sometimes stated, something different from universals.”

By the phrase res non praedicatur, we note that things are not predicates, and predicates are not things. If we say that “the car is old,” then “old” is a predicate, and therefore there is no thing which is “oldness” - “old” only exists in old things, but it does not exist by itself.

genus is to species and species is to the individual as matter is to form.

The debates about universals and nominalism become more interesting in special cases, like identity: why am I still me, even though everything about me might change? Also interesting are spiritual cases: how can bread and wine be transformed into body and blood? Such questions are located in a territory which is shared by philosophy and religion. Thinkers who deal with these questions see themselves as both philosophical and religious: Berengar of Tours, for example, agreed

that the Eucharist was a sacrament in the sense in which the word is used by Augustine: a sacred sign that takes us beyond the sensible appearance to an intelligible reality.

The sacraments have been repeatedly analyzed by philosophers, with many different understandings and interpretations of what their true nature is: in any case, they are not merely symbolic in the usual sense. As with physics at the micro and macro levels - subatomic and astro - our intellect with regard to reality

is like our senses in comparison with intelligence or one sense in comparison with another, that is, unable to understand but forced to believe what it does not understand. It would hardly be possible to state in more radical manner the fundamental discontinuity of the mind.

Can we really understand what it means for time to slow down, as general relativity shows? We encounter the limits of human reason in such situations, and our language has developed certain mechanisms for talking about those situations. We risk falling into error if we either take our language in such situations to function as it does in other more normal cases, or if we confuse the ability to talk about these cases with the ability to understand them.

Foundational Principles in Logic

William of Ockham, writing in the early 1300’s, developed a grand logical system, part of the Scholastic foundation laid in the Middle Ages for the later development of modern mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Like all logical systems, Ockham begins with a few relatively simple principles.

John Corcoran, at the State University of New York, writes that one of Ockham’s starting points is an

nominalistic ontology, a key principle of which is that a general term such as ‘animal’ denotes not a universal but rather each and every individual of which the term is truly predicable.

By pointing out that Ockham’s thought is “nominalistic,” we contrast Ockham with, for example, Plato, who thought that universals were independently existing objects. Plato thought that “blue” or “blueness” existed independently of any or all blue objects. Ockham, by contrast, writes that “blue” is merely a property or characteristic of blue objects, and has no being aside from actual blue objects. Ockham has a “lean ontology,” meaning that he believes that fewer things exist than Plato, who has a “rich ontology” - “ontology” being the study of what exists and what does not.

Building upon this first principle, Ockham talks about “supposition”:

According to Ockham’s terminology, a general term supposits for the individuals, if any, of which it is truly predicable.

So, for example, we can correctly substitute “a man” for the proper names John, Robert, and William in any sentences such as: “John eats pizza. Robert rides a bicycle. William reads a book.” This fact emphasizes Ockham’s nominalistic view that general or universal terms (like “man” or “blue”) are linguistic concepts - i.e., it’s all about the words - and not metaphysical concepts - i.e., not about actually existing things called “blueness” or “manhood” - and so the essence of the matter is revealed in the substitution in sentences, which keeps the center of the discussion of universals at the linguistic level, not the ontological level.

Space and Time

The border region between philosophy and physics is a fascinating area which has been inhabited and cultivated by a number of brilliant intellects over the centuries. One feature of the field is that nearly everyone who works in it arrives at the conclusion that one cannot adequately consider the nature of space without meditating on time, and conversely, one can’t really deal with time unless one also deals with space.

Going all the way back to Zeno of Elea, who lived around 450 B.C., and who arguably began modern physics and modern mathematics, we see the inseparability and interplay of space and time.

As Edmund Husserl wrote:

I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed ...

Ignoring Husserl’s comment that the world is “without end,” we see that space and time are unavoidable issues for philosophy, because they present themselves to us directly and in a manner which is prior to our formation of more complex concepts. Concepts about space and time are indeed themselves very complex, but our experience of them prior to the formation of complex concepts about any topic. Husserl also writes:

As it is with the world in its ordered being as a spatial present - the aspect I have so far been considering - so likewise is it with the world in respect to its ordered being in the succession of time. This world now present to me, and in every waking “now” obviously so, has its temporal horizon, infinite in both directions, its known and unknown, its intimately alive and its unalive past and future. Moving freely within the moment of experience which brings what is present into my intuitional grasp, I can follow up these connections of the reality which immediately surrounds me. I can shift my standpoint in space and time, look this way and that, turn temporally forwards and backwards; I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time.

We orient our thinking and perceiving within the framework of time and space, and we understand objects, or our sensations of objects, within that framework. Again, Husserl asserts that time is “infinite in both directions,” but that is a separate topic: whether we agree with him on that or not, there are few, if any, conceptions which we can meaningfully form outside of time and space. What it means to be outside of time and space, and if anything is outside of time and space, is difficult to conceive, and disputed by various groups of philosophers. But the centrality of space and time, in both our perceiving and in our reasoning, is indisputable.

What is Knowing?

We know many things, or at least we think we do, and we use the word “know” everyday. But what is knowledge? What does it mean to know?

First, we must sort out the different uses of the word: I know my uncle, and I know that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809. These are two very different mental states or processes. In philosophy, we are usually concerned with examples of the latter type - what we might call propositional knowledge: knowing that a proposition (a statement or sentence) is true.

One philosophical tradition suggests that knowledge is justified, true belief: it is justified, meaning that we have some reason to embrace it; it is true, because we would not say that one can know a falsehood ("I know that 2 + 2 = 5"); and it is a belief, because one can only know something if one also believes it.

A slightly different spin on knowledge is given by British philosopher A.J. Ayer, who writes

that the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that something is the case are first that what one is said to know be true, secondly that one be sure of it, and thirdly that one should have the right to be sure. This right may be earned in various ways; but even if one could give a complete description of them it would be a mistake to try to build it into the definition of knowledge.

Ayer is indicating that there would be different types of justifications for different types of facts: “I know that my neighbor’s car is blue” and “I know that my knee hurts” and “I know that 7 + 5 = 12” represent various types of knowledge. My answer to the question “how do you know?” will not only by different for each of the three, but will be of a different type.

How People Think - Or Don’t Think

The word “argument” is used in everyday life to indicate an often passionate or angry disagreement. Friends, coworkers, and families have arguments - often ending in tears, harsh words, slammed doors, or people leaving. In better circumstances, they can end in forgiveness, reconciliation, and mutual respect.

But this word has a different meaning in academic matters: an “argument” is not at all about emotions, but rather about logical reasoning. A philosopher, or a scientist, or a lawyer produces an argument to support a statement. If he believes that the planet Mars once supported life, he will state his reasons in a calm and neutral manner. If another scholar believes the very opposite, he will produce a different argument, devoid of passion.

The ability to produce arguments, and analyze arguments written by others, is central to philosophy, if not to humanity. Yet this very skill is sadly not so common: C.S. Lewis wrote that it would be naive if one “supposed that argument was the way to keep” a reader from embracing falsehood. Lewis continues:

That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

Instead of logical categories, an average human

has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.”

“Jargon, not argument, is” what keeps sloppy or lazy thinkers from truth, from rationality, and from accuracy.