Introduction to Philosophy

Discussion of topics for Final Exam.

PHI 150 Final Exam (to be held from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 in the Computer Lab of the Science Building).

Write on one topic only.

1. “I am condemned to freedom,” writes Jean-Paul Sartre, paradoxically. Once you have established what Sartre means by freedom, move on to the larger issue of freedom versus determinism. Can there be both freedom and determinism in the same world? And how do you suppose it comes about that Sartre finds it impossible (or more precisely immoral, “bad faith”) to escape from freedom, while other thinkers have wondered whether there could even be such a thing?

2. Some philosophers have questioned whether there can really be such a thing as altruism; others, granting that there can be such a thing, wonder whether it is a good thing. On the other hand, many of the world’s great spiritual traditions have emphasized the value of putting the interest of the other person before self-interest. Is philosophy then somehow immoral or amoral? Or is their a philosophical path leading to a vindication of altruism?

3. Paul Gaugin notes, shortly after arriving in Tahiti from France in 1891: “There is something virile in the women and something feminine in the men.” Paul Valéry writes in his Aperçus (1938): “In every man there is a woman; no sultan’s wife was ever so carefully hidden.” Comment on these remarks, and try to reflect on questions of gender and sex (making the distinction between the two as clear as possible) in such a way as to answer the question: Is there any such thing as “the feminine?” Is there an essence of the feminine, or just the existence of women? Is one justified in finding meaning in gender differences?

Read to p. 398. Derrida, Irigaray.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Critiques philosophy as being "logocentric." A strict application of Saussure's definition of the system of signs negative and appositional, i.e. as a pure play of difference, leads Derrida to view meaning as never positively present but always "deferred." (Note: the French verb différer means to differ, but also to defer. This may be viewed as a felicitous homonym, grist to the Derridian mill.) This critique of philosophy, then, as we have called it, is based on philosophy's failure to recognize that its meanings (and therefore its truth) are conditioned by the same conditions that underlie all the other uses of language--such as the poetic, the metaphorical, the literary in general.

It is not possible to do justice to the philosophical contributions of Jacques Derrida, in my opinion, at the undergraduate level. Nevertheless, Palmer is right in attempting to convey some sense of the style of philosophizing of this important thinker.

In my notes to the preceding class I mentioned my reservations concerning the notion of language being a system of differences with no positive terms. I said this because it seems illogical to posit difference without an prior term to be differentiated. It would be hard to think of large as differing from small in the absence of any prior notion of small. But on further reflection, is it possible to have a notion of small in the absence of its opposite large? Perhaps it is best to think of these terms as being correlative within a relation. That relation is one of difference. In this sense perhaps it does make sense to speak of a negative relation of opposition as fundamental to language, at least on the level of the signifier. (E.g., the sound "t" is the unvoiced version of he sound "d". They are both "dentals," but differentiated on the basis of lack or presence of vocal chord vibration. And this differentiation can make the distinction between two morphemes, namely the words "ten" and "den." But the formal opposition on the level of the signifier is not directly reflected on that of the signified, since the meanings of den and ten, though different, are not "opposites." It might be more difficult, though not impossible, to show the role of (negative) differences on the level of the signified. "Large" is the opposite of "small," but man is only in some respects the opposite of woman, and salt is only the opposite of pepper in a rather vague or figurative sense.) If we try to think of the relaton between negative and positive terms on the basis of the difference between terms and the relation (e.g. the two terms large and small are in a relation of difference), we are still left with the problem of whether the terms exist prior to the relation, or the relation prior to its terms. It seems that in fact we have a dead heat between the terms that are defined by a relationship and a relationship that is defined by its terms.

I have developed this line of thought merely to show that in order to arrive at a valid understanding of Derrida's thought, it would be necessary to read him in the context of the sorts of problems to which that thought responds.

Deconstruction is not to be confused with a process of "debunking" so much as of disassembling in order to appreciate the workings of a system of thought. The point at which the concepts within a system may be said to collapse is one of absence. What cannot be thought in a particular system is what makes the system workable.

In his last years, Derrida wrote about the question of friendship, hospitality and the meaning of his own Jewishness.

Luce Irigaray (1932-present)
Her background is psychoanalysis, but she is highly critical of some of aspects of Freud's work (e.g. his theory of female penis envy). She critiques phallocentrism, which she believes to dominate the symbolic order, and philosophy in particular. She wishes to destabilize the logos of partriarchal discourse and of misogynistic logic. She thematizes the mother-daughter relationship. She emphasizes the important of a different parler femme or "womanspeak." Women are alienated in a world in which the do not have "les mots pour le dire" ("Words to say it," the title of an important autobiographical novel by Marie Cardinal, 1975).

Read to p. 390. Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Swiss linguist.

First to apply structuralism to language. Language as a system of negative oppositions, both on the phonetic and the semantic level. The sign = signifier + signified. The arbitrary nature of the sign. "There are only differences, without positive terms." (This seems to me to be an impossibility.) Semiology, or semiotics. This type of analysis goes beyond linguistic phenomena. It went in the direction of what Claude Lévi-Strauss would call structural anthropology, or structuralism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908- )

Rejects functionalism. Looks for universal categories of all societies. These universals exist only "latently," however, not necessarily as manifest fact. Rationalistic. La pensée sauvage, 1962). The logical nature of all human thought. Primitives do not think like children.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

"Poststructuralism," a pretty vague term for what followed. A careful reader of Freud. Psychoanalysis, the talking cure. The unconscious is "structured like a language." From prelinguistic "lack" to desire. Lack (of being) is cast into the unconscious. Metonymy, plays on words, puns, semantic displacements of various sorts (the Freudian slip). The unconscious as a chain of signifiers. Language uses conventions, suppressing but not eliminating the private or personal, solipsistic language. Poetry as the bridge between the consicous and unconscious. To exit the private world of the imaginary is to enter into the Symbolic. Naming distances, controls, objectifies, exorcises. Langauage and the social make individuality (differentiation) possible. The symbolic (cultural) replaces the private lived experience.

Read to p. 375. Sartre

Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-80)

In addition to being a philosopher, Sartre was a novelist, essayist and playwright. (He also wrote one screenplay, Les Jeux sont faits, or, The Die is Cast.) His most important philosophical work was written during WWII: Being and Nothingness. Sartre distinguishes between reflective and unreflected consciousness. The latter loses itself in its object, while the former is aware of itself. The phenomenological analysis (reduction) of consciousness reveals it to be a field of frightening freedom. A monstrous spontaneity. The experience of freedom as dread.

Sartre's novel Nausea describes the experience of vain excess ("de trop") of existence, its absurdity. And in Being and Nothingness Sartre explores the notion of a nothingness in being, a sort of hole in being, that is consciousness. Consciousness, i.e. freedom, is that necessary distance or space that allows for conscious being. Sartre's view of freedom is not entirely positive, in the sense that it constitutes the inescapable human condition. Inescapable? Well, not quite, because we can deny our freedom, fool ourselves and others into believing we are not free. This relieves us of much responsibility; hence Sartre accuses such people of being "in bad faith." A belief in fate or destiny would be, in Sartre's view, a way of trying to escape from freedom. But in fact we are "condemned to be free." That is not to say that there are not fixed elements in our experience, or what Sartre calls "facticity." But it is the way in which we choose to interpret facticity that determines our "situation." We must choose how to interpret facticity; not to choose is also a choice (but one of bad faith).

A friend-enemy of Sartre's, Albert Camus, also gave philosophical significance to the story of Sisyphus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. That mythic hero had displeased the Zeus,; his punishment was to have to push a rock up a hill; when it was almost resting at the top it would roll back, and Sisyphus would have to go back to his rock and begin again. But what is somewhat different in Sartre's treatment of the story is that Sartre claims the rock to be not our fate but our creation. So great a role does freedom play in Sartre's thought that Merleau-Ponty, another French existentialist, called him the philosopher of freedom. For a somewhat different view of freedom, one might consult Emmanuel Levinas's Difficult Freedom and his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, which distinguish between an empty or facile freedom and a freedom that is to be attained through an ethical vision of the face of the other. While for Sartre the look of the other is threatening, causing me to be transformed into an object (just as my look tends to transform the other into an object), for Levinas the look of the other summons me to full humanness through a direct experience of the command "Thou shalt not kill." The look of the other is that of a weakness that coerces me and admonishes me toward infinite responsibility.

Read to p. 361. Quine, Husserl, Heidegger. (We will omit consideration of the philosophy of Quine in this course--but note that he developed a compelling argument against the ultimate validity of the distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions: cf. p. 341-342.)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
Founder of a movement called "phenomenology," from the Greek φαινω, to appear. It is, as a first approximation, the study of appearances, the manner in which things appear, making abstraction of the ontological status of the content of what appears. It was to be purely descriptive, non-theoretical. The natural standpoint as our point of entry into the lived world (German: Lebenswelt). To describe the natural standpoint, however, it was necessary to "get behind it," i.e. to suspend it, to perform the "phenomenological reduction" (epochê, or "suspension of belief). Possible application of this notion to aesthetics. Non-interpretive seeing. The phenomenology of time-consciousness was elucidated by Husserl in a series of lectures published as Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness). The intentionality of all consciousness.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)Collegue of Husserl, whom he replaced when Jews were no longer allowed to work in Germany (1933-45). Heidegger extended the range of application of Husserl's ideas to the area of ontology. He distinguished between the ontic (study of "beings," das Seinede) and the ontological (study of "being," das Sein). The philosophical use of etymology, e.g. a-letheia, the Greek word for truth, means literaly un-covered, or dis-covered. Care (German Sorge) is an important concept in Heidegger, as it characterizes the human way of being (Dasein, or Being-There). He describes it as a Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in (der Welt-)als Sein-bei (innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden), that is, an "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). We are the only beings whose own Being is a question for itself. Other beings are, while we ex-ist. The "present-at-hand" (die Vorhanden) distinguished from the "ready-to-hand" (die Zuhanden). Dasein as a being-toward-death. Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), his unfinished but most important work, was published in 1927. Heidegger joins the Nazi (National Socialist) party of Adolf Hitler, and praises the ideas of the Third Reich. Becomes rector of the university of Freiburg. Is there a connection between his philosophy and his support of Hitler? Can one be a great philosopher and a miserable human being? There is no general agreement on this point.

Read to p. 339. Logical Positivism: Wittgenstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Born in Vienna, Austria of wealthy parents. Gave away his entire inheritance. Studied in England in 1911, a protégé of Bertrand Russell; returned to native country to fight in WWI, was taken prisoner in Italy, during which time he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, barely 100 pages long, analytically organized around 7 propositions. First interpreted by the Vienna Circle in positivistic terms, certain propositions were nonetheless troubling. E.g. (6.4312) "The solution to the enigma of life in space and time lies outside space and time." It was becoming apparent that there was a mystic dimension to Wittgenstein's thought.

Wittgenstein drops out of philosophy to become a rural primary schoolteacher in the Austrian Alps, then returns to Cambridge at the instance of Russell, who arranges for Wittgenstein's tractatus to be accepted as his doctoral thesis. He replaces the retiring G. E. Moore. He is secretive about his new ideas, and bids his students be so, too. But copies of notes circulated, and were published posthumously as Philosophical Investigations. His later thought was language-dominated. "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." (Already in the Tractatus.) Wittgenstein's new view of language was that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." (Philosophical Investigations). The rules of the (language) game(s). Language "gone on holiday." Wittgenstein questions the feasiblity of isolating "the simplest constituents of reality," or what he himself once called "atomic facts." He no longer thought the job of the philosopher was to reveal what was "behind" language, but to reveal the implicit logic of ordinary language.

Read to p. 321. The Analytic Tradition: Moore, Russell

G. E. Moore (1873-1958)
The annoying undergraduate. Skepticism, philosophy's legitimate son. Things are exactly as they seem. His refrain: "What exactly do you mean?" Truth, he held, is usually boring. But truth (and especially Truth) is not the goal of philosophy anyhow, but just the clarification of meaning. The revenge of common sense.

(Sir) Bertrand Russell (1872-1970!)
Great mathematical talent and penchant, meets Peano and Frege. Collaborates with Alfred North Whitehead to write Principia Mathematica in 1910-13. Russell champions Frege's idea that mathematics is an extension of the basic priniciples of logic. He develops a powerful symbolic logic. Philosophy is, in his view, subordinate to science. His own philosophy went through numerous changes. As an analytic philosopher, he felt the main function of philosophy was the clarification of vague terms like mind, matter, consciousness, knowledge, will, time, etc. The application of the question of existence to three problems (pp. 317-320). 1. The golden mountain, or unicorn problem. 2. Scott is the author of Waverly problem (which we can assimilate no doubt to Frege's Morning Star/Evening Star/Venus problem). 3. The present King of France problem. Russell believed he had solved these problems by a proposition central to his Theory of Descriptions, namely:

There is an entity C, such that the sentence "X is Y" is true if and only if X = C.

(C is an entity, Y is a characteristic written in the form of an adjective, and X is the subject of which the adjective is predicated, i.e. to which the adjective is attributed.) Existence has been neatly excised from (= cut out of) the proposition.

Russell's very active (and seemingly unrelated) life as a politically concerned citizen and sometime activist. Spent part of WWI in jail as a pacifist. Protested the presence of American atomic weapons in Britain. Opposed the Vietnam war when in his 90s!

Read to p. 308.
Pragmatism, the Analytic Tradition, and the Phenomenological Tradition and its Aftermath. (The 20th century.) James, Dewey.

William James (1848-1910)

Brother of well-know American (but oh so British) novelist Henry James. Pragmatism, a development of the thinking of the logician and semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced "purse"). Three theories of truth: coherence, correspondence, and pragmatic. The latter tends to equate truth with what makes a difference, and "works." The "tough-minded" vs. the "tender-minded."

James Dewey (1859-1952)

His thought developed in the context of politics, education and morality. The role of consciousness in the evolution of animal life. Habit vs. thought. Thought is a "response to the doubtful as such." Thinking as deferred action. Critique of traditional epistemologies: "spectator theory of knowledge." Knowledge should be instrumental: problem-solving. Dewey's influence on education in the United States. Learning through doing. Art as experience is perhaps his finest work.

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