Philosophy: All That Matters

All That Matters

by Julian Baggini

When you are reaching for your first introduction to a complicated subject like Bioethics, do you want a 400-page tome written by a aging professor 35 years ago? Or do you want a low-priced, up-to-date, quick-reference guide that gives you the basics of what you need to know, and the framework for further research?

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 27, 2012

About the author

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is the author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments (2005) and is co-founder and editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1996 from University College London for a thesis on the philosophy of personal identity. In addition to his popular philosophy books, Baggini contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and the BBC. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.

Reviews

[صَــــنَــــمْــــ · Rating 5 out of 5]

فلسفه؛ همه‌ی آن‌چه باید بدانید.

اگه دنبال یه منبع خوب، ساده و مختصر درمورد فلسفه هستین، بنظرم این کتاب گزینه‌‌ی مناسبیه. فلسفه‌ی "جولین باگینی" رو همینجوری تو کتابفروشی‌گردی‌هام کشفش کردم و جزو معدود انتخابهای یهویی بوده که ازش راضی‌ام :))

* گاهی آدم‌ها بدون دخالت خدایی که مجازاتشان کند از قتل قسر درمی‌روند، درحالی‌ که برخی دیگر بی آن‌که تقصیری داشته باشند خانه خراب می‌شوند.

* وقتی شروع کردیم به طرح پرسش از معنای زندگی، تن‌مان به لرزه افتاد که نکند هیچ معنایی در کار نباشد.

* اگر شهروندان گمان کنند حاکمان آزادی زیادی را از آنان سلب می‌کنند و در عوض چیزی به آن‌ها نمی‌دهند، شاید ترجیح دهند آن‌ها را عزل کنند، حال چه از طریق رای‌گیری و چه با انقلاب.

* از نظر روسو، "انسان آزاد آفریده شده اما همه جا در بند است."


ضمیمه‌ی آخر کتاب هم اختصاص داره به معرفیِ فیلم، نمایشنامه، نقاشی و رمانهای فلسفی و ... که خیلی مفید و بدرد بخور بودن.

[Matt D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best combined summary and introduction of Philosophy that I've ever come across. The length and language is approachable, and the topics chosen keep the reader intrigued. It doesn't get too deep into the weeds of topics which would scare off or bore readers, like some other lengthy introductions to philosophy can do. If I could recommend a book to everyone I know, especially those interested in Philosophy, it'd be this one.

[schrödinger’s cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتاب به راحت‌ترین شکل ممکن به بخش‌های مختلف فلسفه از فلسفه‌ی اخلاق و علم تا فلسفه‌ی سیاسی و دینی گریزی میزنه و علت و اهمیتش رو بیان میکنه. کتاب بسیار خوبی برای آشنایی با حوزه‌های مختلف فلسفی و فیلسوف‌های برجسته‌ی هر حوزه است.

[Scott Lines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neat little book that serves as a pleasant introduction.

[Xaverius · Rating 4 out of 5]

está muy bien como introducción para bebés cortita y fácil de engullir para luego leer otras movidas

aunque el capítulo de free will me hizo facepalmear

como todo el debate del free will en realidad, no le culpo

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This marked the third major step forward in thinking. First, primitive minds simply perceived the world through the senses, representing the world as it is. Second, more sophisticated minds modelled that world and used imagination to represent it as it could be. What was entirely new when ethics emerged is that for the first time we think not just descriptively but normatively: about the world as it should be. (Location 63)

Plato and Aristotle were contemporaries in Athens during the city’s heyday. Plato was the older of the two and Aristotle was, for a time, his pupil at the Academy, a kind of cross between a university and private members’ club set up by Plato around 387 BCE. Aristotle was a member for around 20 years before he went off and set up his own version, the Lyceum, around 335 BCE. Despite these biographical similarities, intellectually the two took very different approaches to their subjects. (Location 127)

A divided line which, while lacking the vivid drama of the cave, in many ways more accurately reflects the spirit of Plato’s philosophy. The line is divided into four parts, and each section represents a stage of human understanding, from the most primitive to the most advanced. The line can therefore be seen as a kind of ladder: the higher up you climb, the closer to true knowledge you get. (Location 134)

The bottom two rungs of the ladder both represent mere opinion (doxa). On the very lowest of these rungs, all we believe is illusion (eikasia). It is based on assumptions, all is second hand, and it isn’t even based on the physical world as such but representations of it. The contemporary manifestation of eikasia is basing all your opinions on what you read and see in the media and online, without questioning its basis and without having any first-hand experience of the people and events described. (Location 137)

For Plato, it is because such belief still rests on assumptions and, for him, the physical world is not the ultimate reality. The physical world is an imperfect thing where everything is always changing. In contrast, Plato believed that there also existed some kind of realm in which things were eternal and unchanging. This was the world of the forms. Forms are kinds of eternal, immutable ideals of which physical objects are merely individual, impermanent copies. So, for instance, there are millions of dogs, but only one form of the dog. (Location 153)

Plato imagines that on the very top rung, where we achieve true intelligence (noesis), we have first-hand knowledge of the real world of forms, which is based on no assumptions whatsoever. The only problem is, no one has got there yet. The divided line provides a map of the mountain, and Plato is confident that the peak exists, but no intellectual explorer has yet managed to find and ascend it. (Location 161)

Plato’s approach seeks to establish secure first principles, and to build a true picture of reality from these, through sound reasoning. This approach is often called foundationalist, for self-explanatory reasons. For Plato, these foundational first principles are not facts about the physical world, but immutable logical truths, ones that are established by reason alone, not experiment nor observation. They are universal and abstract. This manner of reasoning is called a priori – literally ‘from what is prior’; in this case from what is prior to any facts about the world. It is not incidental that, for Plato, the closest thing we have got to this kind of philosophy is mathematics, for this is what provides the model for how philosophy should be: moving in clear, logical steps, providing proofs from principles which are timeless and whose truth does not depend on facts about the material world. (Location 165)

To say Aristotle was a philosopher is, in modern language, to vastly understate the range of his thinking. He wrote on everything: biology, political science, metaphysics, rhetoric, art theory and so on. Unfortunately, little of his finished work has survived. What we now refer to as his books are in general collections of lecture notes. (Location 174)

He does not seek to establish secure, universal abstract a priori principles and reason from them. Rather, he starts by looking at the world as it is, at what people believe they know, and then works from there. This is a posteriori (literally ‘from what comes after’) or empirical reasoning, based on experience and the evidence from the real world, rather than on principles of logic and mathematics. (Location 178)

Plato’s style of reasoning has recurred throughout the history of philosophy, most notably in the seventeenth-century rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, but also in the twentieth-century logicism of Bertrand Russell, which sought to base logic on secure mathematical foundations. Aristotle’s approach has also echoed down the centuries, most notably in the eighteenth-century British empiricism of John Locke, Bishop Berkeley and David Hume, as well as the nineteenth-century American pragmatism of John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. (Location 190)

The two temperaments can therefore be fairly clearly distinguished. One leans more heavily on a priori arguments, the other on a posteriori ones. One focuses on universal, abstract principles, the other on particular, concrete ones. (Location 195)

Socrates is portrayed as the wisest man in Athens precisely because the only thing he knows for certain is that he knows nothing else for certain. (Location 203)

In John Locke’s taxonomy, these sense-dependent features of the world can be lumped together as the secondary properties of objects. They are not properties that the object inherently has; rather, they are properties that objects give rise to only when they encounter the human, or similar, sense perception system. (Location 293)

we can also say that objects have some primary qualities, ones that do not depend on how we perceive them but which are really there. (Location 295)

So it looks like there is a clear difference between mind-dependent and mind-independent reality, which we can know. This position is known as realism. (Location 298)

Berkeley’s solution to this problem was to collapse primary and secondary qualities into a single category. Both are varieties of idea, and both exist only as perceptions. This is the radical thesis called idealism: there is no mind-independent reality at all. To say that something exists is to say that at least one mind could, in principle at least, perceive it. ‘Esse est percipi’ – to be is to be perceived. The common-sense idea that there is a difference between appearance and reality has become the counterintuitive claim that appearance is reality. (Location 302)

transcendental idealism. Unlike Berkeley, Kant did think there was a ‘noumenal’ world of things-inthemselves-independent of our minds. However, he also thought that we could not possibly have any access to it. Our knowledge, therefore, has to be confined to the ‘phenomenal’ world of appearances. What’s more, how this phenomenal world appears turns out to say more about how our minds work than the way the world is. Time and space, for instance, are the ways in which we frame the world: they are not properties of the world itself. (Location 307)

Wittgenstein believed that ‘philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday’. But if philosophy is a victim of linguistic vacationing, it is also the means of its remedy, for ‘Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language’. (Location 339)

How, then, does language ‘bewitch’ or ‘go on holiday’? The general thought is that certain grammatical features of language mislead us about how things really are. The most obvious examples are nouns. With a few exceptions, every complete English sentence must contain a noun (or pronoun). But what is a noun? The standard answer is that it is a thing of some kind. That is the root of the problem. ‘A thing’ implies a singular object. But if you think about all sorts of nouns, it is not at all obvious that they refer to singular objects at all. Just consider this list: love, knowledge, stress, weather, ignorance, pride, prejudice, information, joie de vivre. (Location 341)

Category mistakes Gilbert Ryle imagined a tourist asking a taxi driver to show him the University of Oxford. After being driven past the Bodleian Library, All Souls College, the Ashmolean Museum and so on, the tourist asks, ‘Yes, but where is the university?’ His mistake is to think that the university is a singular object when in reality it is an institution made up of its members, its colleges, its buildings and so on. We make a category mistake whenever we confuse one type of thing (such as a collection) with another (such as an object). (Location 347)

As its name suggests, metaphysics sits one level up from physics. Physicists try to understand the laws that govern the workings of the universe. Metaphysicians try to understand the basic principles and mechanisms that these laws need to assume. (Location 404)

Popper took this further and claimed that the whole process of doing science is based on trying to prove things false, not correct. Science works, he argued, by a process of conjecture and refutation. First, a scientist comes up with a conjecture, a hypothesis, that she believes explains a natural phenomenon. The next stage is to conduct experiments to see if that conjecture can be proved wrong. Every time an experiment fails to prove the conjecture wrong, the confidence we have that it is correct increases. (Location 635)

influenced by Wittgenstein, many have argued that religious language needs to be understood in a different way from scientific or historic language. Whatever a phrase like ‘blood of Christ’ means in the communion service, it does not indicate the presence of haemoglobin. Similarly, perhaps, ‘eternal life’ is not the literal continuation of individual humans after bodily death, but a way of living in connection with that which transcends the particulars of our own time and place and partakes in universal values. Even to talk of ‘God’ may be to talk not of a real entity but of an eternal principle of love. This view is often called ‘non-realist’ religion, because it affirms the value and importance of religion while denying the real existence of gods, heavens and all things supernatural. (Location 752)

You and I are simply a mixture of five khandhas (‘aggregates’). We comprise our physical form and matter (rūpa); sensations which are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral (vedanā); perceptions of the five senses (saññā); thoughts, mental habits and opinions (sakhāra); and what is usually translated as consciousness or discernment (viññāa). Whether the list of khandhas provides the correct taxonomy or not, the principle is clear enough: we are the sum of our parts, mental and physical, and we do not exist separately from these parts. (Location 831)

So isn’t it incoherent to argue that I can be aware that I have no awareness, or you can have the thought that there is no you having that thought? But this objection misses the point. The ‘bundle theory’, as it is sometimes called, does not deny that there is a you or an I. It simply denies that this you or I is separate from the sum of its parts. This is no more paradoxical than saying that an army can march across a battlefield, even though an army is nothing over and above an organized collection of troops. (Location 854)

However, the case against democracy is not just that the people are ignorant. For Aristotle, the key was that democracy undermines the rule of law. The best society creates the right laws and then we all live under them. In the worst societies, the interests and wishes of an individual (tyranny), group (oligarchy) or the people (democracy) take precedence over the law. (Location 986)

Aristotle believes there is a good form of government paired to each of the three bad ones. In contrast to tyranny, proper ‘kingship’ is the good rule of one over all. Aristocracy, not oligarchy, is the right model for rule of a few over the many. And polity, not democracy, is how the many should rule themselves. Of the three, however, he preferred rule by the few over rule by the many because he believed rulers should be the people best able to further the goals of the state, and that meant the best, most virtuous persons: aristoi. Was Aristotle aristocratic? To call Aristotle’s political philosophy ‘aristocratic’ is technically correct but misleading, as today we associate that word with people who have inherited status and wealth, not the real great and the good of society. Aristotle's aristoi were the people genuinely best qualified to govern, not just those of noble birth. (Location 992)

Thomas Hobbes was one of the most famous philosophers to argue in this way. As he memorably put it, outside of a civilized society, the natural state would be ‘a war of every man, against every man’ and ‘the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. (Location 1019)

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, our natural state is one of liberty. Prior to the construction of societies, a human was a ‘noble savage’ who was naturally good. The problem is other people. We have to get along with them, keep the peace with them and share limited resources with them. From this springs all human vice: greed, acquisitiveness, envy, competition, deceit and so on. Rousseau’s vision of the state of nature may sound hopelessly romantic, but his explanation of why we can no longer live in it comes across as misanthropic. (Location 1021)

For Hobbes, the necessity of escaping the barbarous state of nature requires us to make a deal with the human beings we would otherwise be fighting. In effect, we all say, ‘I authorize and give up my right of governing, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner.’ For that ‘man’ or ‘assembly of men’ to be able to do the job, they need absolute power. Hence, the state or commonwealth that comes into existence must be one which has absolute power to which all must defer. Hobbes called this Leviathan. (Location 1026)

For Rousseau, we implicitly do a deal not to give up our freedoms to a third party, but to pool our powers over ourselves. So, rather than each following an individual will, we all come together and follow the general will. Hence, the terms of Rousseau’s social contract are that ‘Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole.’ Although this is in many ways fundamentally different from Hobbes’ conception, Rousseau himself seemed to accept that the practical result was very similar. For Hobbes, we are all subjects of the omnipotent Leviathan; for Rousseau, ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.’ (Location 1031)

It seems we are given no choice whether we accept the terms of the social contract or not, but the whole idea of a contract makes no sense if you have no option but to sign it. Rousseau’s solution to this problem is to insist that ‘residence implies consent: to inhabit the territory is to submit to the sovereign’. However, the idea that people can move elsewhere if they don’t like their political system is unrealistic. (Location 1041)

The metaphor of the contract may be misleading, but the quid pro quo it implies is at the heart of any justification for a state. And, as we have seen, when citizens do believe that their rulers are taking too much freedom and not delivering in return, they have a tendency to turf them out, through either the ballot box or revolution. (Location 1048)

Kwame Anthony Appiah seems to get close to the nub of it when he suggests that morality concerns only one’s relationship to others, whereas ethics is about what it means for a person to live a good life in a wider sense. (Location 1078)

You will often read that Aristotle claimed happiness was the highest human good, but the word he used was not happiness but eudaimonia, usually translated as flourishing. (Location 1086)

There is an old legal (Location 1099)

to close the gap between ethics and morality. The central idea is one that emerged in eighteenth-century Scotland, in the writings of Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. Although each of these thinkers differed, all agreed that sympathy or empathy was at the heart of morality. (Location 1114)

Immanuel Kant, to formulate this fundamental principle as the ‘categorical imperative’: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. (Location 1157)

Aristotle said, ‘It was their wonder, astonishment, that first led men to philosophise and still leads them’, while Plato wrote ‘philosophy begins in wonder’. (Location 1186)

Hume argued that too much of it can actually lead us away from sound reasoning to flights of fancy. ‘The imagination of man is naturally sublime,’ he wrote, ‘delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time.’ So (Location 1215)

There is an old saying that life is a journey, not a destination, and the same is true of life’s meaning. And that is the meaning of life. (Location 1253)

As Peter Strawson wrote, ‘There is no shallow end to the philosophical pool.’ (Location 1285)

So we must keep thinking. Philosophy is one way to do that, and one of the most demanding as well as most rewarding. No introduction to philosophy can contain all that matters about it, but it can, I hope, show where all that matters about it is to be found: in the doing of philosophy as a project without end. (Location 1295)

‘Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill.’ Marcus Aurelius (121–180) 8 (Location 1314)

‘Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known.’ Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) (Location 1316)

‘We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.’ George Berkeley (1685–1753) (Location 1318)

‘The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’ Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) 5 (Location 1321)

[Chris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a short introduction this is pretty reasonable - if you know nothing or very little about the subject then it's worth reading, otherwise you're unlikely to get anything out of it. This isn't really a criticism - it's a short introduction and that's what short introductions are about.

(It does suffer at times from an oversimplification of some areas though, but I suppose a thorough coverage is beyond the scope of the book)

[Rebecca]

quick and informative intro to philosophy. it was quite interesting and thought-provoking.

[Bahareh · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب خوبیه ولی عالی نیست و توضیحاتی صرفا سطحی در مورد سوالات فلسفی میده که تشنگی انسان رو به درک جواب سوال کامل جواب نمی ده.

[Melissa Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting raised some good questions

[Habib · Rating 4 out of 5]

IMHO Anything by Julian Baggini and Alain de Botton is enjoyable and worth reading

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief introduction to the world of philosophy. The concept of meaning, purpose of life may be boring to some but it can be interesting if your seeking a better understanding of our existence in this galaxy with the words of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Imannual Kant, Hegel and others as references.

The explanation to the concept of causation is something that I can't agree on. At the page 44, contemporary philosopher Ted Honderich gave an simple example of fire. In law, there is causation of law and causation of fact.

Causation of fact is where the defendants conduct in fact caused the plaintiffs damage, known as the but for test. "But for" the defendants breach of duty, would the plaintiff have suffered any injury/damage, if the answer is yes then the defendants breach did not cause the plaintiffs injury.

Causation of law is where it is reasonably foreseeable that defendant conduct will result in some damage to the plaintiff.

Going back to the fire example given by Ted Honderich, it could be concluded as a premature understanding of causation.

In conclusion, a further reading to the specific branch of philosophy of your liking or generally is needed for in depth knowledge of the matters.

[Sadiq Kazi · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the few who can simplify complex philosophy, Julian Baggini remains readable and interesting.