Philosophy

Who am I? What ought I to do? What is justice? What is freedom? What is love? Philosophers have attempted to answer these questions for centuries. Today I’d like to talk about a few such philosophers.

In the West the philosophical tradition goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle developed the Socratic method of asking and answering questions in order to get at the truth about a philosophical question. For example, in his dialogue The Republic Plato asks a series of questions about what an ideal state would look like in order to give us a picture of how justice could be realized – arguing in effect that justice is achieved when society is well ordered and well governed.

Moving ahead to the Enlightenment, another philosopher Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, turned his attention to how the human mind worked. He believed that the mind provided a framework for filtering our apprehension of reality. Our knowledge of the world comes to us from our five senses. That data is filtered and processed based on the way our brains interpret such sensory data. Take the example of our experience of color. We see the color red in a certain way, but other animals may see it differently because of how their brains and eyes see the color red – our experience is unique to us.

An interesting corollary to Kantian thought concerns metaphysical knowledge, knowledge not gained via the five senses. For some, such knowledge is impossible. One possible way of gaining metaphysical knowledge would be through dreams. We dream when we sleep and the information contained in the dream would not be provided by our senses, but rather by an alternative route. Technological developments may make it possible to induce dreams. For example, dreams, including bad dreams could be induced via wireless technology. The dreams would then be experienced as computer generated videos. The privacy concerns raised by such technology would be obvious. Not only would it be intrusive, it would also arguably constitute identity theft, because our dreams contribute to our identity, to who we are as persons. Significant side affects could also result, including severe headaches and loss of concentration. But it would be a way of gaining knowledge without use of the five senses, answering a traditional question of philosophy of the mind.

Another philosopher I would like to mention is Friedrich Nietzsche, who in writings such as Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, Human All To Human, The Will to Power, and Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, sought to question traditional notions of religion and morality. Nietzsche is subject to various interpretations, and the spin I want to put on him today is that of the gentle Nietzschians, who ask, how can you, in whatever field you are working in, go beyond the traditional boundaries of that field. How can you, if you are a painter, become the next Van Gogh or the next Gauguin? How can you think outside the box to create something new, keeping in mind you are taking a risk in doing so, the risk some people may be offended, some feathers may be ruffled.

The next philosopher I would like to talk about is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in works such as Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations was interested in the question of how language pictures reality. Language is the clothing of thought. Our thoughts are expressed in words and language. One insight of Wittgenstein is that people who speak different languages can never communicate fully, something is always lost, because some thoughts are inextricably intertwined with a particular language.

The final philosopher I’d like to mention is Martin Heideggar. Heideggar was concerned with questions concerning technology, being and time. For Heideggar, technology is not a positive but a dehumanizing experience. The constant bombardment of our thoughts by television, radio, computers, cell phones, and pagers, is both dehumanizing, and to borrow a Marxian phrase, an alienating and an estranging experience. He was also concerned with being, different ways of being in the world, of being in but not of the world, of being in psychological states, such as being in love or being in trouble. Finally he was interested in time, how we experience time as flying, or standing still. In raising the question of time, Heideggar was resurrecting an ancient question of philosophy that dates back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, where we began, who first raised the question of time as a philosophical question. While I would like to discuss the question of time further, unfortunately, I am now out of time.