Explanations

One way to understand philosophy is to see philosophy as an enterprise which offers explanations. Philosophers explain things - things like time, space, causation, etc. If that's what philosophy is, then we need to understand the mechanics of explanations - how does one construct an explanation? What makes one explanation better than another?

(To be sure, this is simply one way to characterize philosophy; there are many others.)

If we think about the very first philosopher, we can understand his novel and bold statements as offering an explanation. We are confronted with the world - the phenomena of the five senses, of daily experience. What causes them? From what did they arise? Historian Anthony Esolen writes:

The first Greeks to call themselves philosophers strove to understand the physical world, to see what prime element underlay clouds and lions and marble and blood. We should not take for granted their bold assumption that such an element could be found, and that the world was intelligible! Thales of Miletus reasoned that such an element must be capable of assuming the three phases of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Hence he posited that water was somehow the arche or foundation or origin of all things, though he knew well that you couldn't squeeze water to make iron or clay. His successor Anaximenes voted for air. Others named earth or fire or some combination of the four so-called elements.

Thales was exploring the discipline we now call cosmology. What is the systematic structure of the universe? Although we may laugh at his notion that water is the foundational element of the universe, he had rational, if not correct, evidence: it covers 75% of the earth's surface, humans are approximately 75% water, it's necessary for all known forms of life; it's found everywhere on planet earth; etc. Not a bad hypothesis. But another Greek philosopher soon found the problem with the explanation offered by Thales, and the with the explanations offered by many of the other pre-Socratic philosophers:

But there's a logical problem with all explanations of the world that resolve it into such stuff as water or air. To say that the arche of the world is water doesn't explain anything, since water itself is one of the things that requires explaining. It is circular reasoning. Nor does it help to stretch the circle as wide as the cosmos. The philosopher Anaximander, therefore, reason that whatever the arche is, it cannot be like the things it explains. It must be beyond predication. So he called it apeiron or the boundless.

The explanation for the physical world cannot be, according to Anaximander's reasoning, simply one of the ingredients of that world. Later philosophers would use words like 'essence' and 'substance' to try to capture similar ideas. That thing, upon which the physical universe is contingent, cannot be merely one part of the physical universe. It must be something other. Anaximander may get credit for invented that branch of philosophy we now call metaphysics.

Different Paths to Philosophy

Not every philosopher has decided, at some young age, to be a philosopher, and followed this decision by studying philosophy at a university. To the contrary, many philosophers have started their careers in some other field, and shifted to philosophy after making a start in those other disciplines. Examples abound: Hegel and Schelling began as theology students; Tad Schmaltz intended to become a lawyer; Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Latin classical literature.

In this pattern we find also Karl Jaspers. As a young man beginning his university studies, philosophy from far from his mind. Hans Saner, who worked with Jaspers, writes:

Shortly before the end of his high school years, the father one day summoned his son. He showed him his books, oriented him about income and property, and said to him, " ... I think that you can assume that you have ten years to study independently and work, before you will need to earn your own living." The high school graduate decided to study law, and then as a lawyer or a businessman to enter "practical life."

In fact, however, Jaspers abandoned the study of law, not for philosophy, but for medicine. His interest in medicine was more than casual: he suffered from diseases which threaten to kill him. He did well, passed his examinations, and began a successful career as a physician. A fellow who studied first law, and then medicine, would hardly seem to be a likely candidate for a philosopher:

Jaspers had never begun the academic study of philosophy under the direction of a teacher. He did indeed occasionally detect the inclination toward it; but he considered himself in his youth to be insufficiently gifted for this. Even choosing philosophy as a profession in a planned way would have seemed to him like a presumption. Philosophy was for him not a subject among subjects, which one could learn; whoever approached it this way continually ran the danger of end up in mere babble. "The path to philosophy does not go via abstract thought," but rather via the recognition of reality: of nature and of humanity. For this reason, Jaspers, even in regard to philosophy, had studied natural sciences and medicine. "It was the path to philosophy which had determined my choice of studies."

It is, then, love of truth which drives the philosopher. Whichever subjects he may study, the underlying urge is the same.

This gaze toward philosophy had emerged during the loneliness of the high school and university years and in face of the awareness of being constantly threatened by illness. What meaning could lie in an existence which was necessarily separated from that of other humans? What meaning did the exertion toward activity have, if no objective result was to be expected because of the probability of an early death? No science answered these questions. "There remained only one path: philosophy must show the truth, the meaning, and the goal of our lives."

His questions about truth and about the meaning of life were motivated by a very personal sense that he was on the verge of meaninglessness.

For this reason, Jaspers began early to read the philosophers: Spinoza, Lucretius, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche; Plotinus, Schelling, Kant, only later (after around 1913) Kierkegaard and Hegel. Above all, the reading of Spinoza brought him into a state in which he could bear, and even often affirm, sickness. "Philosophy is of amazing value. If it did not exist, life would be terrible." This was true not only for reading, but rather above all for thoughts, which arose at that time in his own philosophizing: "I suddenly marvel, that I exist at all. Out of an unknown darkness, the individual human climbs step by step to the consciousness of his existence ... he feels, that in an isolated existence, he has no significance." His existence must, without surrendering his solitude, be open to other people and to God. One "must have the strength to retain these categories, despite the way the pastors have botched them up." But the biggest problems "on which everything seems to depend" are the questions "what death, and what an individuality, mean." The consciousness of the inevitability of death distinguishes humans, and bestows uniqueness upon their actions. One should therefore continually listen to the memento mori. Only in the presence of death does one learn to understand: "we are always on the border ...", and only in understanding finality do we become aware: "we must struggle."

The questions which drive Jaspers, then, are about the meaning of life, the meaning of death, and about discovering the truth. Living with an awareness of death brings us closer to discovering the meaning of life, and to discovering truth. Openness brings us closer to these discoveries: relationships to our fellow human being, and our relationship to God will help us to learn the truth. Jaspers is clear: despite the fact that some people who call themselves religious have "botched up" concepts of life, death, and God, we must continue to pursue the study of these things. Merely because other people have made a mess of spiritual thought is no reason for us to abandon it - we must rather fix it. Jaspers is encouraging philosophers to engage in thought which will clarify our understanding of God, thought which will correct the errors of sloppy thinking by other people in the past.

Society’s Right to Exact Your Compliance

Does society have a moral right to make you do something? This is different from the negative case, i.e., society’s right to prohibit you from doing something. William F. Buckley explains:

A society has the right to impose negative restraints; but positive acts of compliance it may exact only in extraordinary situations.

A century earlier, John Stuart Mill wrote something similar:

the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

These two ethical formulations pose a number of questions. What are the consequences for society if we accept these formulations? Why do those who allegedly accept them disagree among themselves about the practical application?

Plato and Science

One of the more quotable lines from Plato's Meno is about the limits of human knowledge. The general topic of the conversation is about virtue. After ruminating about possible definitions of 'virtue', Socrates says that he doesn't know what it is, but that he's going to "examine and seek ... what it may be" or "carry out ... a[n] investigation and inquiry into what it is." The interlocutor challenges him on the possibility of such an investigation:

How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?

One source of the ambiguity which leads to this paradox is the definition of 'know' as a verb. If there is more than one definition, i.e., if 'know' refers to more than one epistemological action, then one could be said to 'know virtue' and to 'not know virtue' simultaneously. Such homonymic cases are often the foundations for jokes and riddles, such as "what do you call a winter athlete from Warsaw? a ski Pole."

If Socrates claims that he does not understand what constitutes virtue, he says that he does not know virtue. But if he simultaneously can identify an instance of virtue, he can claim to know virtue. Perhaps I do not know what constitutes my favorite soup at a restaurant - I do not know its ingredients - but I certainly know this soup when I taste it - I can identify it: a possible solution to Meno's paradox.

In a reverse situation, I might not be able to identify a thing, but I might understand its constituents. Imagine that I've never tasted borscht, but I've learned that it's a soup made with beets and sour cream and often served at room temperature. If I were blindfolded and offered a spoonful of it, I would not be able to identify it - I would not "know" it - although I understand its composition - I "know" it.

To place the paradox in a different context, imagine that you are looking for something which does not exist. Serious scientists spent years looking for a sample of Phlogiston. They "knew" what they were looking for, and yet how can one "know" what does not exist? Likewise, I can "know" what a four-headed swan is, inasmuch as I can conceptualize and make to myself a representation of such a creature; but I cannot "know" a four-headed swan in the sense of being able to recognize or identify it, because it doesn't exist.

The same would be true of aether, more properly called 'Luminiferous aether', which occupied earnest physicists as late as the early 1900's, when Einstein wrestled with the concept; he eventually rejected it, along with almost all other physicists, although he sometimes confusingly used the word 'aether' to speak of a space-time matrix.

Additionally, we can note a connection to Ockham: if I can't "know" something, being able to neither identify it or understand its composition, then I cannot fit it into a chain of causes and effects. Being unable to locate it in a causal sequence, I cannot call it necessary, and therefore am not justified in positing its existence.

Although philosophy is not philology, we nonetheless should take care to recall that Plato's Meno has been translated for those of us who cannot read Greek. To that end, to be thorough, we include an alternate rendering of the passage:

But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn't know?

Meno's paradox presents us with richer food for thought than the perhaps more popular but silly aphorisms about "knowing nothing" which Plato sometimes places into the mouth of Socrates.

Ethics in Context

The study of ethics is perhaps unlike other branches of philosophy, inasmuch as it requires some consideration of context. A philosopher who asserts an ethical proposition does so in a social, historical, and cultural context; a reader considers that proposition in a context; an ethical situation occurs in a context.

By highlighting this notion of context, we do not automatically place ourselves among those who denial universal moral principles. Even if one acknowledges such eternal ethical truths, it is undeniable that they find applications in concrete situations, and that those situations vary.

In contrast, a timeless metaphysical truth, e.g., an assertion about the relationship between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind, will also find itself applied in various situations, but the contexts of those situations will not factor significantly into the applications of any universal metaphysical propositions. The mind-body problem is the same for the Frenchman as it is for the Chinaman; the same in 2000 B.C. as it is in 2000 A.D.

Ethical propositions are more affected by context because, although ethics is not psychology, ethics is nonetheless more closely related to psychology than, e.g., metaphysics or symbolic logic. On a meta-level, philosophical considerations, not about ethics, but rather about the way in which ethics is done, are also necessarily contextualized. Perhaps this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he wrote:

Rarely perhaps has any generation shown so little interest as ours does in any kind of theoretical or systematic ethics. The academic question of a system of ethics seems to be of all questions the most superfluous. The reason for this is not to be sought in any supposed ethical indifference on the part of our period. On the contrary it arises from the fact that our period, more than any earlier period in the history of the west, is oppressed by a superabounding reality of concrete ethical problems. It was otherwise when the established orders of life were still so stable as to leave room for no more than minor sins of human weakness, sins which generally remained hidden, and when the criminal was removed as abnormal from the horrified or pitying gaze of society. In those conditions ethics could be an interesting theoretical problem.

Lurking behind Bonhoeffer’s prose is a meta-level question: why engage in ethical philosophy? The impetus to ethical philosophy, in contrast to merely concrete moral thought, arises when there are not enough concrete instances of ethical situations to keep the mind occupied. Just as a pilot flying his spacecraft through an asteroid field has little inclination for theoretical physics - being quite occupied with actual mechanics - so the individual fully occupied with actual ethical situations may not be inclined to the analysis of systematic ethics.

Today there are once more villains and saints, and they are not hidden from the public view. Instead of the uniform greyness of the rainy day we now have the black storm-cloud and the brilliant lightning-flash. The outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Reality lays itself bare. Shakespeare’s characters walk in our midst. But the villain and the saint have little or nothing to do with systematic ethical studies. They emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed. What is worse than doing evil is being evil. It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than of a lover of truth to lie. It is worse when a misanthropist practises brotherly love than when a philanthropist gives way to hatred. Better than truth in the mouth of the liar is the lie. Better than the act of brotherly love on the part of the misanthrope is hatred. One sin, then, is not like another. They do not all have the same weight. There are heavier sins and lighter sins. A falling away is of infinitely greater weight than a falling down. The most shining virtues of him who has fallen away are as black as night in comparison with the darkest lapses of the steadfast.

Just as theoretical conversations about the shape of the earth ended when it was successfully circumnavigated, discussions about good and evil end when both are concretely present. Bonhoeffer’s distinction between “doing evil” and “being evil” bears closer examination. Perhaps it can be explained by analogy to the distinction between accident and essence. Yet to mark a human as essentially evil, or essentially good, seems to violate the laws of human nature, inasmuch as we are enjoined to “call no man good” and yet required to acknowledge the imagio dei in each human. Comparing occasional sins to accidental properties seems plausible, for even the most saintly commit sins, and even the most demonic might act corresponding to virtue. But if good and evil are to be essential in a man, then it would seem only in this way, that it would be a changeable essence - an odd turn of phrase, to be sure, because essence is often defined as that which does not change.

Perhaps a better understanding of Bonhoeffer’s distinction would be the difference between occasional evil act and being in a mode of evil. As in music, there are accidental notes - a sharp or flat which takes the melody momentarily out of key - and there are modes in which an entire melody may be composed: an occasional transgression contrasted with a systematic pattern of transgression.

A third way to see this distinction between “being good” and “doing good” would be teleological: the isolated transgression may be the result of succumbing temporarily to temptation and to desire; the systematic and overarching pursuit of evil, of bringing harm to others, might correspond to Bonhoeffer’s phrase ‘being evil.’

In any case, Bonhoeffer, who is not strictly speaking a philosopher at all, yields perhaps a stimulus for comparing various meta-ethical perspectives.

Types of Ethics

Organizing the many different ethical systems produced by philosophers over the ages, some scholars have divided them into two camps: deontological (duty-oriented) and teleological (goal-oriented). The former tells us to do the right thing because it's the right thing; the latter tells us to do what is needed to achieve the right outcome.

Others have added two more categories: "virtue ethics" (in which actions are seen as arising from, manifesting, and giving information about the character of the agent), and "pragmatic ethics" (in which the social context of the action, i.e., the properties of society - its views on, and response to, the act in question).

Given any number of categories, the critical question is then whether, if some of the categories can be shown to be equivalent, that the number could be reduced. Some scholars even suggest that there is only one category: ethical systems.

In any case, we are discussing categories of systems: in each category, there will be many distinct and mutually exclusive systems.

Professor Alfred Freddoso writes that

Important recent work in ethics signals a healthy shift away from "act-centered" moral theories and toward "character-centered" theories. The medievals, of course, fashioned several subtle and interestingly diverse doctrines of virtue, which could perhaps serve as touchstones for contemporary discussions.

Ethics done in this way identifies and enumerates virtues in the agent. Actions manifest or exemplify those virtues, and so remain secondary while virtues are primary in such an ethical system.

Events and Things

In the natural sciences, or observational sciences, descriptions can be about things or about events. Often we can construct two equivalent descriptions, one thing-centered, and the other event centered. A thing-centered description of magnetism states that a magnet has the power to attract bits of iron in its vicinity. An event-centered description would say that a magnet and a bit of iron moved closer together.

Although such pairs of descriptions may in many cases be equivalent, in other cases, or in other ways, they might not be synonymous. Professor Alfred Freddoso writes:

Some prominent philosophers of science, dissatisfied with basically empiricist conceptions of natural law and scientific explanation, now argue that natural substances are best thought of as nonfree agents endowed with causal powers and that laws of nature are properly expressed by specifications of those powers rather than by generalizations (whether necessary or not) about events. The medieval Aristotelians, despite the inadequacy of their scientific theories, elaborated just such a philosophical conception of nature. Their writings in this area may prove to be illuminating, as has been clear ever since Peter Geach published his penetrating essay on Aquinas in Three Philosophers.

Comparing events to objects, some philosophers have noted that objects can change location, while events cannot. Following Hume, we would think of a magnet as the conjunction of numerous attraction events which occur at different times and places. Following the medievals, we think of a magnet has having the power of attraction, which naturally remains with it when it moves. The medieval view is more intuitive; the burden lies on Hume to show why we would need to override such an intuitive view.