2. What's philosophy good for?
- Academic performance.
- Career and Salary.
- Intrinsic good.
- Broadness and your day in the sun.
2. What is philosophy?
My philosophy of teaching philosophy
- What do you think?
- Quick history: What's Ph. D?
- What do some philosophers think? 2 types of questions.
- Let's try one...
- My philosophy of teaching philosophy.
Let us consider the things that people ordinarily think
they understand best of all, namely the bodies that we touch
and see. I don’t mean bodies in general—for our general
thoughts are apt to be confused—but one particular body:
this piece of wax, for example. It has just been taken from
the honeycomb; it still tastes of honey and has the scent of
the flowers from which the honey was gathered; its colour,
shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold and can be
handled easily; if you rap it with your knuckle it makes a
sound. In short, it has everything that seems to be needed
for a body to be known perfectly clearly. But as I speak these
words I hold the wax near to the fire, and look! The taste and
smell vanish, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size
increases; the wax becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly
touch it, and it no longer makes a sound when you strike it.
But is it still the same wax? Of course it is; no-one denies
this. So what was it about the wax that I understood so
clearly? Evidently it was not any of the features that the
senses told me of; for all of them— brought to me through
taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing—have now altered, yet
it is still the same wax.
Perhaps what I now think about the wax indicates what
its nature was all along. If that is right, then the wax was
not the sweetness of the honey, the scent of the flowers, the
whiteness, the shape, or the sound, but was rather a body that recently presented itself to me in those ways but now
appears differently. {But what exactly is this thing that I
am now imagining? Well, if we take away whatever doesn’t
belong to the wax (·that is, everything that the wax could be
without·), what is left is merely something extended, flexible
and changeable. What do ‘flexible’ and ‘changeable’ mean
here? I can imaginatively picture this piece of wax changing
from round to square, from square to triangular, and so
on. But that isn’t what changeability is. In knowing that
the wax is changeable I understand that it can go through
endlessly many changes of that kind, far more than I can
depict in my imagination; so it isn’t my imagination that
gives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable.
Also, what does ‘extended’ mean? Is the wax’s extension
also unknown? It increases if the wax melts, and increases
again if it boils; the wax can be extended in many more ways
(·that is, with many more shapes·) than I will ever bring
before my imagination. I am forced to conclude that the
nature of this piece of wax isn’t revealed by my imagination,
but is perceived by the mind alone. (I am speaking of •this
particular piece of wax; the point is even clearer with regard
to •wax in general.)} This wax that is perceived by the mind
alone is, of course, the same wax that I see, touch, and
picture in my imagination—in short the same wax I thought
it to be from the start. But although my perception of it
seemed to be a case of vision and touch and imagination, it
isn’t so and it never was. Rather, it is purely a scrutiny by
the mind alone— formerly an imperfect and confused one,
but now vivid and clear because I am now concentrating
carefully on what the wax consists in.
As I reach this conclusion I am amazed at how prone to
error my mind is. For although I am thinking all this out
within myself, silently, I do it with the help of words, and
I am at risk of being led astray by them. When the wax is
in front of us, we say that we see it, not that we judge it to
be there from its colour or shape; and this might make me
think that knowledge of the wax comes from what the eye
sees rather than from the perception of the mind alone. But
·this is clearly wrong, as the following example shows·. If I
look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as
I have just done, I say that I see the men themselves, just
as I say that I see the wax; yet do I see any more than hats
and coats that could conceal robots? I judge that they are
men. Something that I thought I saw with my eyes, therefore,
was really grasped solely by my mind’s faculty of judgment
[= ‘ability or capacity to make judgments’].
However, someone who wants to know more than the
common crowd should be ashamed to base his doubts on
ordinary ways of talking. Let us push ahead, then, and
ask: When was my perception of the wax’s nature more
perfect and clear? Was it •when I first looked at the wax, and
thought I knew it through my senses? Or is it •now, after I
have enquired more carefully into the wax’s nature and into
how it is known? It would be absurd to hesitate in answering
the question; for what clarity and sharpness was there in
my earlier perception of the wax? Was there anything in it
that •a lower animal couldn’t have? But when I consider the
wax apart from its outward forms—take its clothes off, so to
speak, and consider it naked—then although my judgment
may still contain errors, at least I am now having a perception
of a sort that requires •a human mind
- PDF Meditation II
- Resources
- Formalization of the Argument
4. Basic tools for philosophy: Counter-exampling.
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