philosophy lecture series from u-tube by Dr Richard Brown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySS0bNeWZOg&feature=autoplay&list=PL656A4EDA0320618D&playnext=2

Lecture 1 - What is philosophy?

The epic of Gilgamesh - it tells the story of a great king called Gilgamesh who was a great king. and Gilgamesh wants to know why people die, what the meaning of life is and Gilgamesh decides that they way to answer this is to go on a journey to where the gods live and demand of the gods that they tell him the answer to these questions. so he does and he has a lot of adventures and he eventually gets to where the gods live and the gods set him a bunch of tasks and say Gilgamesh if you complete these tasks we will answer your questions and tell you what you want to know. the tasks are like the sort of things you find in Greek mythology, he has to kill a certain beast, cross a certain river and climb a certain mountain etc. so he does all that stuff and comes to the last task and the gods tell Gilgamesh he must stay awake for 3 days and 3 nights and if he does this, they will tell him the answer. Gilgamesh stays awake for 3 days and 2 nights and on the 3rd night he falls asleep and wakes up the next morning and the gods say, oh well you were so close but now you'll never know. Gilgamesh gets very angry but comes to the realisation that the way for humans to become immortal is to do deeds that make them remembered. this story illustrates 2 points. the first point is it's kind of wrong to think of philosophy as a group of questions. Notice the kind of questions Gilgamesh is asking here are kind of deep questions, why do we die, what's the meaning of life, do we become immortal, what's the right way to live etc. it's not only philosophers who ask those questions. human beings ask those questions. its kind of something that afflicts us in a way, we want to know the answer to those questions. but of course there are different ways of answering those questions. and Gilgamesh shows a particular way of answering those questions. notice that he never once entertains the idea that he himself can figure out the answer to these questions on his own. from the beginning the proposed solution to the problem is to find out those who know, the gods and to ask them. and this is the general theme of the pre-philosophical way of thinking. that human beings are not capable of knowing the way the world is, they are like children who cant understand the simplest things. the world is filled with these supernatural personalities who really know. the gods are who controls reality and if you want to know then you've got to ask. humans have to be told by divine revelation the way that reality really is.

there is another story that illustrates this point as well and this is something we can see from the code of Hammurabi. The code of Hammurabi is famous because it is one of the earliest written laws. if you read it, you will notice that they are dealing with the same kind of problems that we deal with, so their lives are very similar to our lives. you live in a city, and it deals with what obligations you owe to other people, what obligations they owe to you and ways of coordinating behaviour such that you can discourage certain kinds of behaviour and encourage other kinds. the laws were placed at the gate to the city so everyone knew them and had no excuse. so why should you obey these laws and not some other laws. who was Hammurabi to tell you that you had to obey this set of laws? The answer is in the preamble of the code of Hammurabi and it is roughly that Hammurabi is the son of god. so again we see this appeal to divine intervention or divine revelation as the only real way of knowing

what these laws are. so there is nothing about us discovering the truth but a lot about the truth being revealed by a greater source. and that idea is what is really contrasted with the origin of western philosophy. he is talking about western philosophy and we could tell a different story to tell about the origins of eastern philosophy. we date the origins of western philosophy to about 600 BCE. at around 3500BCE writing is developed so from then until 600BCE the pre-philosophical way of thinking dominates. around 1000BCE is when we think Moses lived and Moses gave us the 10 commandments and this is typical of the pre-philosophical way of thinking. what's the right way to live your life, well you cant answer that question, god reveals to Moses directly the correct rules for living a good life and if you don't do it then god punishes you for not doing it. these are the pre-philosophical ways of thinking, when there is an earthquake god is punishing you for breaking some rule, when there is a bountiful harvest god is rewarding you. so tis important for us to know what the rules are and how the world works, but we cant know for ourselves so were dependent on someone else, the gods handing that down to us. so when philosophy starts around 600BCE its not that this old way of thinking goes out of date, people still subscribe to that way of thinking at that time as well. its just that this is the earliest date that we know of where people start advocating some other way of thinking about human beings and our relation to reality.

we don't know for sure, but we have some ideas. and most of them come from historical writers like Aristotle and pieced together. we don't know for sure that no one ever thought like that but we don't have anything that was written down that has survived so what we don have, the best evidence suggests, that what we are going to call philosophy originated in Miletus in 600 BCE and in particular with an individual names Thales and Thales was roughly born roughly in the 620's BC and died in 546BC. Thales was an interesting person and the people around him who collectively are known as the pre-socratic philosophers. Thales was interested in questions about the make-up of the physical world. He wanted to know if there was some fundamental stuff from which all the other stuff was made. He also rejected any kind of supernatural explanations and gives naturalistic answers using reason and argument. Thales argues that supernatural explanations are not appropriate explanations. he argues that the world around us in an orderly system which is constructed according to some kind of rational principles and that we as rational human beings can try to figure out what those rational principles are.

to summarise what we have been talking about -

- philosophy is not distinguished by the questions that it asks, but by the method that it employs in answering those questions.

- pre-philosophical way of thinking is characterized by appeal to revelation as the only source of knowledge and the workings of supernatural personalities as the explanation of physical phenomena.

- the philosophical method denies both of these claims. so rather than divine revelation, reason, argument and observation are sources of knowledge about the world. this is a denial that revelation is necessary for knowledge, but you need to be careful to understand that it is not a denial that revelation can be a source of

knowledge. there is no conflict between religion and philosophy. you can be a religious philosopher.

- the history of this is the gradual separation of things we call science and things we call philosophy. but in those days it was all lumped in together and they don't recognise a distinction between philosophy and science except that there are different kinds of philosophy. so the philosophical study of the natural world was called natural philosophy and there were lots of different philosophies. eg Newton when he publishes his work on gravity titles it the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.

- for thales etc there is an emphasis on mathematics, geometry in particular.

- the philosophers have a commitment to the idea that the world is natural, and what they mean by natural is that it is explainable by law like relationships. so the appeal to the supernatural work of gods is no longer an explanation.

so philosophy is the commitment to the claim that we are going to find out the way things are.

the word philosophy comes from the Greek - phila sophia. phila meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom. love of wisdom. this world was first coined by Pythagoras (570BC)

there was a group of people who identified as 'sophists' - wise people, they would only teach for money, they were often skeptics, that is they denied real knowledge is possible. so philosophy was kind of opposed to that sort of view, because they are looking for the truth. so the philosophers are contrasted to the sophists who don't really care about the truth, and are only interested in money, but philosophers are seeking the truth.

the different branches of philosophy -

- perhaps the most fundamental is metaphysics - the study of the ultimate nature of reality. it asks questions like - - whether there are fundamental parts out of which everything else is made. - is reality completely physical or is there a non-physical aspects.- what is the nature of causation?- are my actions free or determined?- what exists? what does it mean to exist? (ontology which comes from the greek word ontos which means being and tology the study of so ontology means the study of being)

so they are questions about reality, but then we have questions about how we come into connection with that reality, how we know epistemology - the study of knowledge. the questions it deals with are -- what is truth, what does it mean for a sentence to be true? - what exactly is knowledge?- how is knowledge different from belief?- how is it related to truth?

- where do we get knowledge? reason only? the senses only?- how do we know when we have knowledge?- is it even possible to really know anything?

meta physics and epistemology are clearly related to each other like two sides of the same coin. because as soon as you say what's real you are saying that you "know' what's real. and as soon as you talk about what knowledge is, you are talking about which things can be known. so the two are intimately related. but no matter how intimately related, its important to keep them clear and understand that they are different types of questions.

another branch of philosophy is ethics - the study of right/wrong and good/bad. it asks questions like- what is the nature of value?- this will include aesthetics (the study of the beautiful) and political philosophy. these are all value judgements - which actions are moral?- are there things which are really good/bad or is this a human invention?- what kind of life should I lead?

last branch is the study of logic - the study of good/bad reasoning/arguments. this is important because philosophy is the use of reason and argument to discover what is true or what can be known. if that is the case then logic is extremely important because its the way we can determine which arguments are good and which are bad.