Great Ideas of Philosophy

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1. All other things being equal, A becomes associated with B when A and B have been present frequentlyin experience.2. Repetition becomes one of the principles. All other things being equal, when A and B occur togetherfrequently, A and B become more strongly associated.B. Causation, then, is simply what the mind assigns to constantly conjoined experiences.C. Hume also writes, however, that the concept of causation is not a recording of something observed in theexternal world. Rather, it’s a habitual mental process; the determinants of the concept of causality areinherent in our mental operations themselves.D. The categories of moral right and wrong, likewise, are reflections of human dispositions and sentiments.Certain characteristics we have in our very biological constitutions, along with experience, determine whatwe will come to call right and wrong.1. Hume does not so much relativize morality as he psychologizes it.2. Morality, then, should be looked at as social constructions designed by creatures of a certain kind whoare trying to maximize something as best they can. Hume has a word for what they are trying tomaximize—utility.3. Although Hume would reject all forms of moral realism, he is not skeptical about morality. Rather, heseeks to show how our constitutive nature brings about moral judgments.IV. Hume has tied the concept of causation to certain habitual modes of thought. He contends that passion mustrule reason. The reasoning for this is Darwinian: Our survival depends on our ability to avoid pain and seekpleasure. Reason becomes the deliberative means of securing what the appetites and passions of life require.A. We are all children of Hume. We understand that functions of government are to be understood in chieflyutilitarian terms. We understand that the world as we know it is the creation of our own mental machinery.B. A further concept of Hume’s is the problem of induction, which states that the future is under no obligationto mimic the past. Any inference we might make about what will happen in the future based on pastexperience has no rational warrants.Recommended Reading:Hume, D. “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in Essential Works of David Hume, R. Cohen, ed.Oxford University Press, 1999.Questions to Consider:1. Conclude whether you regard all regularly occurring pairs of events as causally related.2. Explain what makes a “complex” idea more complex than a “simple” idea and give examples of both.18©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
Lecture Thirty-TwoThomas Reid and the Scottish SchoolScope: Hume’s most successful critic, Thomas Reid (1710–1796) laid the foundations for a “common sense”psychology based on the natural endowments by which we (and the animals) understand the world and actin it. His influence was broad and deep, reaching the leaders of thought at the American founding.Reid was the leading figure in a group of scholars and scientists at Aberdeen who were committed to thelarger Newtonian perspective and who would find in it evidence of a providential God. Admiring Hume,Reid examined his and Locke’s foundational assumptions and discovered them to be defective. Allknowledge is not mediated, Reed showed; the Lockean aggregate cannot account, logically or evidentially,for persons, nor can Humean hedonism account for the historical evidence of human altruism.OutlineI. Thomas Reid (1710–1796) has come down to us as the “Father of Common Sense Philosophy.” Until quiterecently, Reid was largely ignored, and only in the last 10 years has he been restored to a position ofphilosophical eminence.A. Reid’s contemporaries considered him an exceptional person.B. He studied for the ministry and held a position in the church at New Machar for a period of years beforeteaching at his alma mater, Marischal College, University of Aberdeen.C. Even before publication of his An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Reid was called to Glasgow to take theposition recently relinquished by Adam Smith.D. At Aberdeen, he founded what came to be called the Wise Club, which met every fortnight, engaged all themajor philosophical issues, wrote papers, and planned longer treatises. A number of the club’s productionsturned out to be important philosophically.E. In his Inquiry, Reid anticipated by a half century Reimann’s non-Euclidian geometry.F. Reid also was a master of the science of optics. On his mother’s side, he was related to the famousCambridge University Gregory family, known for work in optics and mathematics. Reid, too, wrote but didnot publish original work in mathematics and astronomy.G. His writings were widely respected in the United States where, in the years leading to and just followingthe founding, Scottish thought was profoundly influential.II. By common sense, Reid always referred to what was universally and pragmatically represented in nature,including human nature, as part of the “constitution” of the being in question, whether caterpillar or man.A. The principle of common sense, for Reid, does not mean the wisdom of the crowd. It doesn’t mean theprevailing opinions, the settled ethos of a given community.B. Rather, it is that which we are under an obligation to accept in all of the ordinary affairs of life. Reidillustrates the point with the “lowly caterpillar” that will crawl across a thousand leaves until it finds theone that’s right for its diet.III. At the core of Hume’s epistemology is the theory that all our knowledge is mediated. Hume, thus, continues along, almost uninterrupted philosophical tradition that says the eternal world comes to be represented in someway via mediation by the senses, a view with which Reid disagrees.A. These philosophers conclude that, because all our knowledge is filtered through our senses, we can neverknow the real world except by way of these representations.B. What results are “ideas” about the external world, but there is no way of determining the adequacy of suchideas as actual records or copies of the world.C. If this were so, then skepticism is entirely appropriate.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 19
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Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D.Philosophy
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Lecture OneFrom the Upanishads to H
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E. The Upanishads would merge us wi
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2. Despite their oracles, priests,
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4. Looking at geometry, we are told
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E. The contribution of pre-Socratic
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of the mystery of earth itself impe
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Lecture SixHerodotus and the Lamp o
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Lecture SevenSocrates on the Examin
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Xenophon. Memorabilia. Cornell Univ
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II. A philosopher is engaged in the
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Lecture NineCan Virtue Be Taught?Sc
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Lecture TenPlato’s Republic⎯Man
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Annas, J. “Classical Greek Philos
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III. The dominant school of Greek m
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1. Epistemonikon is a special featu
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Timeline800-600 B.C.E. ............
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1705...............................
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1873...............................
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Functionalism: The view that consci
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Tabula rasa: A blank slate. In the
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progress in one of its most summoni
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John Locke (1632-1704): Physician a
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The Great Ideas ofPhilosophy, 2 nd
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Table of ContentsThe Great Ideas of
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Lecture ThirteenAristotle on Friend
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C. Aristotle is recovering the Home
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III. The problem of conduct is then
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C. The Stoic account relies on the
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Lecture SixteenThe Stoic Bridge to
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Recommended Reading:Bede. A History
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III. Roman law successfully permitt
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Lecture EighteenThe Light Within⎯
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B. Augustine approaches the problem
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B. Very early, the Islamic commitme
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Page 82 and 83: Lecture Twenty-TwoScholasticism and
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Page 100 and 101: Biographical NotesAeschylus (525-45
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Page 117 and 118: Lecture Twenty-EightHobbes and the
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Page 123 and 124: Lecture ThirtyNo Matter? The Challe
Page 125: Lecture Thirty-OneHume and the Purs
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Page 133 and 134: Lecture Thirty-FourThe Federalist P
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Page 139 and 140: Lecture Thirty-SixMoral Science and
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Page 169 and 170: Lecture FortyThe Aesthetic Movement
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Lecture Forty-ThreeDarwin and Natur
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2. There is room for altruism but o
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1. He is a Hegelian who stands Hege
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Lecture Forty-FiveThe Freudian Worl
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B. How can repressed elements be un
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III. What figures in the human imag
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Lecture Forty-SevenWilliam James’
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Questions to Consider:1. Conclude w
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III. As long as we subscribe to a
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Timeline800-600 B.C.E. ............
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1705...............................
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1873...............................
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Functionalism: The view that consci
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Tabula rasa: A blank slate. In the
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progress in one of its most summoni
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John Locke (1632-1704): Physician a
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The Great Ideas ofPhilosophy, 2 nd
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Table of ContentsThe Great Ideas of
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Lecture Forty-NineAlan Turing in th
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C. Searle thinks that the missing i
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3. Even activities could be simulat
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B. The inclination to classify is a
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Lecture Fifty-TwoPhilosophy of Scie
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V. These debates illustrate a far l
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1. The two had in common the idea t
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Questions to Consider:1. What does
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C. Locke and others emphasized that
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Lecture Fifty-FiveWhat Makes a Prob
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B. Kant suggests that the moral law
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1. Proponents have argued that so m
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Lecture Fifty-SevenOn the Nature of
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2. So far as it can coexist with th
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3. Slavery is commonplace in all of
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3. Does the just-war theorist have
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B. The quadrivium comprised arithme
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2. He argues that the former is pre
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1. The objects of the knowable worl
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etween a world of beauty and one of
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⎯⎯⎯. On Free choice of Will.
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Herodotus. The Persian Wars. G. Raw
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———. Toward a Science of Huma
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