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.