Philosophy: Key Concepts and Thinkers
Features of Philosophy: Interrogative Reason
Interrogative reason emphasizes the importance of questions over answers. Knowing at a deeper level is based on scientific data but viewed from a different perspective. It employs constant criticism with arguments, fosters a broader outlook, and integrates knowledge and science.
Forms of knowledge include:
- Science: Philosophy considers scientific data.
- Religion: Based on faith, it is subjective and meets on reason to explain the meaning of life.
- Literature: While literature seeks aesthetics, philosophy seeks truth.
Dualism: Mind-Brain Relationship
Plato: Believed that humans are a combination of a soul (psyche) from the world of ideas or the intelligible world (an idea taken from Parmenides), making the soul immortal, and a body from the visible world. The body is the prison of the soul, and this accidental union causes the soul to forget everything. When the body dies, the soul returns to the intelligible world of ideas if it has lived a good life. Plato believed that everything material has a parallel in metal. According to him, the soul is the principle of movement, and the body is subordinate to it (psychological or metaphysical dualism).
Descartes: Believed that only substance exists (whatever is self-sufficient). He identified three types of substances: Res cogitans (thinking), Res extensa (matter), and Res infinita (God). He proposed that humans are a compound of Res cogitans (soul) and Res extensa (body). (Epiphenomenalism: the mind is distinct from the body but interacts with it).
Monism
Ideal or Spiritual: Everything that exists is mental, a product of your imagination. (Berkeley)
Reductive Materialism: All phenomena are physical (brain-related) and can be explained by natural laws. (Marx)
Behaviorism: (Skinner) The only thing we can know is behavior, which is studied or observed through the body’s response to stimuli.
Physicalism or Identity Theory: (Feigl) Everything comes down to a set of physical processes. The problem is that while they argue that the cerebral is equal to the mental, it is unclear how a group of physical processes can give rise to thought.
Theory of Neural Firing: (Crick) Physical processes produce a neural firing that gives rise to the mental, but it is unknown why or when this occurs.
Central State Theory: (Armstrong) The brain is the basis of all activity, and if something does not go through it, it does not happen.
Eliminative Materialism: Rejects or eliminates the existence of the mental. (Churchland)
Alternatives to Monism
Non-Materialistic: Functionalism (Fodor) What is important is not the physical reality but the function. There are two types of functions: mental and physical. This is also called dualism of functions.
Materialistic:
- Emergence: Accepts the mental as something that has emerged from the brain.
- Interactionist: (Popper) The mental emerges from the brain and then interacts with it.
- Emergency: (Bunge) The mental arises from the brain with different characteristics.
- Structuralism: (Laín Entralgo) The mental arises from the brain and can only be understood within the whole or structure of the brain.
- Personalism: (Mounier) It is the person, not the mind or brain, that matters. However, when asked what a person is, he responded that it is something spiritual and physical.
Rousseau and the Social Contract
Rousseau placed great importance on feelings. Self-love drives human survival, and pride stems from it. He believed that private property creates civil society. Private property emerges through a series of events:
- In the state of nature, humans live to survive, which causes death but is not aggressive.
- Humans evolve through hunting, fishing, and the use of fire, leading to the emergence of perceptive humans.
- Perception and the association of concepts, such as recognizing the strongest animal, lead to a feeling of pride and a mechanical, unreflective prudence.
- Sensations evolve into thoughtful humans, characterized by a love of welfare, which motivates human associations and leads to new developments like housing (the first step towards inequality).
- Family and language originate from necessity, and nations emerge from feelings of consideration.
- Agriculture and metallurgy appear, giving rise to private property.
Inequalities caused by private property lead to the distinction between being and appearance, causing defects and the dominance of some over others (master-slave, which later becomes a mutual need). This mutual need, provoked by the master and sent by the slave, creates a perpetual conflict where the rich are at a disadvantage because they depend on the slave. The social contract was signed to provide solutions to the problem of inequality, establishing a common good.
Other forms of the contract include the conquest of power, leading to colonization, and the link between the weak, which is a contradiction because it suggests that the weak partner to favor the rich.
Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
Kant believed that all knowledge begins with experience (empiricism), but not all knowledge comes from experience (rationalism). His thinking is transcendental idealism: idealism because he believed the subject is most important, and transcendental because it is a meta-knowledge used to explain other knowledge. It is a necessary and universal knowledge independent of experience. It is a synthesis and critique of empiricism and rationalism. For Kant:
Intuition + Understanding = Scientific Knowledge
Understanding is the faculty that makes concepts.
Intuition (sensitivity and experience) = Reason and Philosophical Ideas
Human and Animal Culture
Human language is symbolic, creative, critical, and independent of stimuli. Its consequences are long-distance transmission, cumulative nature, dynamism, complexity, and variety.
Animal culture is learned through imitation and genetic programming. Its consequences are direct contact, statism, and uniformity.