If you would like to advertise your five complex points here (for your group project)- please do so.

Just enter them as a comment. This is a sort of insurance, as it can be more difficult to communicate before the class.

PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY. Last reading.

This reading highlights LINK FOR IT what is unusual about philosophy’s methodology. That said, the claims it makes are still (this is after all, philosophy) controversial. At issue might be the role that empirical research ought to play in philosophical fields like, say, ethics or personal identity.

Comment below.

KNOWLEDGE. WHAT IS IT?

Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Edmund L. Gettier

Various attempts have been made in recent years to state necessary and sufficient conditions for someone’s knowing a given proposition. The attempts have often been such that they can be stated in a form similar to the following:1
a. S knows that P IFF
i. P is true,
ii. S believes that P, and
iii. S is justified in believing that P.
For example, Chisholm has held that the following gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge:

b. S knows that P IFF
i. S accepts P,
ii. S has adequate evidence for P, and
iii. P is true.
Ayer has stated the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge as follows:3
S knows that P IFF
i. P is true,
ii. S is sure that P is true, and
iii. S has the right to be sure that P is true.
I shall argue that (a) is false in that the conditions stated therein do not constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of the proposition that S knows that P. The same argument will show that (b) and (c) fail if ‘has adequate evidence for’ or ‘has the right to be sure that’ is substituted for ‘is justified in believing that’ throughout.
I shall begin by noting two points. First, in that sense of ‘justified’ in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false Secondly, for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q. Keeping these two points in mind, I shall now present two cases in which the conditions stated in (a) are true for some proposition, though it is at the same time false that the person in question knows that proposition.
Case I
Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
d. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
e. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.
Case II
Let us suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition:
f. Jones owns a Ford.
Smith’s evidence might be that Jones has at all times in the past within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford, and that Jones has just offered Smith a ride while driving a Ford. Let us imagine, now, that Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith selects three place names quite at random and constructs the following three propositions:
g. Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston.
h. Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.
i. Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk.
Each of these propositions is entailed by (f). Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which be has strong evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these three propositions, Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is.
But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones does not own a Ford, but is at present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If these two conditions hold, then Smith does not know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true.
These two examples show that definition (a) does not state a sufficient condition for someone’s knowing a given proposition. The same cases, with appropriate changes, will suffice to show that neither definition (b) nor definition (c) do so either.
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Notes
1. Plato seems to be considering some such definition at Theaetetus 201, and perhaps accepting one at Meno 98.
2. Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 16.
3. A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 34.
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CONSCIOUSNESS

The reading is this chapter by David Chalmers: http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

Or read it here…
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

THE MATRIX AND PHILOSOPHY

We are reading three essays, but they do not seem to take very long to read as they are all on the same topic and are written in a modern style.

A. Dream Skepticism
by Christopher Grau
The Matrix1 raises many familiar philosophical problems in such fascinating new ways that , in a surprising reversal, students all over the country are assigning it to their philosophy professors. Having done our homework, we’d like to explore two questions raised in Christopher Grau’s three essays on the film. Grau points out that The Matrix dramatizes Ren‚ Descartes’ worry that, since all we ever experience is our own inner mental states, we might , for all we could tell, be living in an illusion created by a malicious demon.

Any comments on Aristotle and “eudaimonism”? type them up here!!

SCHOPENHAUER: Fellow Sufferer the Worst is Yet to Come: Pessimism as a philosophy

I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of
philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is
just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.

THE MEANING OF LIVES

Meanings of Lives
by Susan Wolf

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” was once taken to be a paradigm of
philosophical inquiry. Perhaps, outside of the academy, it still is. In philosophy
classrooms and academic journals, however, the question has nearly disappeared, and
when the question is brought up, by a naïve student, for example, or a prospective donor
to the cause of a liberal arts education, it is apt to be greeted with uncomfortable
embarrassment.

FEINBERG

Hi class, you are reading Feinberg on Absurd Self-Fulfillment (he believes it exists!) for next time. Feel free to comment on that paper here, but I’ve just asked you to riff on Plato for a bit.
Consider: does the divided line analogy contradict anything suggested by the cave analogy?
And/or: does learning math tell us anything about learning morality? What?

PLATO

Read this and don’t weep. These are very difficult and you’ll need to pay a lot of attention. They are wonderful, really. Take your time!

THE REPUBLIC BOOK VI.: The divided line
THE REPUBLIC BOOK VII.: The allegory of the cave
SYMPOSIUM: The origin of the sexes
MENO: The Socratic Method and the Pythagorean Theorem