Philosophical Puzzlement

A Short Book of Mind-bending Philosophy

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Table of Contents

Who Is the Book For?

About Philosophy

Some Understandings (Misunderstandings?) of Philosophy

Why do Philosophy?

The World’s Most Astonishing & Puzzling Questions

Why some questions can make your head spin

A word of warning

Logic and Argument

Essential Concepts and Ideas

Argument

Following From / Entailment

Valid and Invalid

Truth Values

Refute and Deny

Different Forms of Valid Argument

Inductive Argument

Abductive Argument

The Burden of Proof (or Whatever)

The Soul & The Zombie

The Strange Case of Consciousness

Consciousness

The Reductionist Program

The Eliminativist Program

Non-Reductive Materialism – Emergentism

Panpsychism

A Further Way of Showing That Consciousness Must Involve Something that cannot be understood physically or mechanistically.

The Mary Problem: The ‘Knowledge Argument’

Is Nature Mechanical?

Scientism

A Bad Argument in Favour of Scientism.

Naturalism

As Time Goes By

Time Travel: What sort of a Problem is It?

Presentism

Time and Change

Does Time Even Exist?

A Consideration of ‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’

For God’s Sake

Can Faith Be Rational?

A Few Preliminaries to the Arguments for The Existence of God

Theistic Personalism

Classical Theism

Arguments for God’s Existence

The Ontological Argument

Thomas Aquinas, “The Five Ways”

The First Way

The Second Way

The Third Way

The Fourth Way

The Fifth Way

The Argument from Contingency

But why wouldn't God's existence need an explanation?

What if the universe has always been around?

The ‘No Explanation’ Account

The Argument from Desire

The Argument from Design

Does Natural Selection Refute The Argument from Design?

Could God Do Anything To Prove His Own Existence?

Can Something Come From Nothing?

Science or Confusion

Free Spirits or Nature’s Robots

Exactly how free are we?

Compatibilism

A Sense of Freedom and Real Freedom: Hypnotism

Freedom and Options

A Better View of Freedom

Science and Free Will: The Badly Handled Case of Benjamin Libet

The Assumed Closure of the Physical

Knowers, Suckers and Doubters

How far can our knowledge extend?

How Far Can We Doubt?

The Problem With Global Philosophical Scepticism

Some Answers to the Sceptic

Problems with Empiricism

A continuing self through time.

Causation.

The uniformity of nature.

The Necessity of Mathematics.

Meaning and purpose.

God

Giving Up

What is knowledge, anyhow?

A Better View of Knowledge?

Seeing Things

Representationalism v Direct Realism

Some Essential Distinctions

The Time Lag Argument

The Argument from Neurophysiology

The Argument from Diverse Content

The Argument from Illusion

The Argument from Colour

Visual Imagery, Imagination, Memory and Photography

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Can Value be just a matter of how we feel or what God thinks or decrees?

The Infamous “Euthyphro Dilemma”

Who Is the Book For?

Easy! It’s for people who are like its author in at least one important respect – they feel a strange discomfort in the face of a truly philosophical question and embark almost as second nature on a quest to think about possible answers. They do not mind feeling even more discomforted by having those answers put to the exacting tests to which true philosophers willingly expose their ideas – the tests of logical analysis and whether they really shed any brighter a light or offer deeper insight into the issue at play. They don’t mind intellectual struggle. They don’t give up when their brains begin to hurt. More! They secretly rather enjoy the pain. They feel that such pain is just part of the cost of the love of wisdom (which is what the word ‘philosophy’ really means) and the quest that showing such love involves. There was a recent recruitment drive for the Royal Marines including a caption which read, “It’s a state of mind: you may already have it”. Ditto for philosophers, I say. (The difference is, or should be, that whereas the Marines try for what they call “maximum impact”, philosophers try for maximum insight.) If you have this state of mind, there is no further recruitment test, you are already a philosopher, even if one who is not too familiar with its history or literature - so keep on reading. If you do not have this state of mind, good luck with your life, but put this book down or give it to someone who has – you’ll just be bored to death if you carry on with it. (Though it may be wise to read the first two chapters if you are not sure whether you have what it takes.)

If you have got even this far, you will notice that I do not apologise for the existence of philosophy. It is the world’s oldest and most noble discipline and I am proud to be one of its soldiers, even if as nothing higher than a sergeant major rather than one of its high-ranking field officers. As such I am trained to fight on its behalf. The book is balanced for beginners and the somewhat more advanced – newly recruited privates and more experienced corporals, one might say - but this doesn’t mean it avoids some hard thinking. It is simply not possible to do that and still be philosophy. That is not my fault, it is the nature of the subject. Thus, the book will soon have you exercising on its uncompromising parade ground. (I promise not to shout.)

While the subject (the philosophical quest) can be hard at different levels, for the beginner, and I come with many years of experience teaching the subject to such people (with the WEA and as an extra-mural tutor in philosophy with the University of Hull) the real difficulty seems mostly to arise from a deep unfamiliarity with its characteristic, yet necessary, modes of thinking. This means that philosophy is hard right from the off, so any prospective students have to be prepared to encounter some dense undergrowth. (Having a sense of enjoying jungle warfare may not be entirely out of place. Your enemy, though, will be simple ignorance.) The willingness to cope with all this sort difficulty is part of the ‘state (or attitude) of mind’ that you will need in order to progress. If you are not prepared for all this then feel free to leave, just don’t complain about philosophy or accuse it of being a ‘meaningless word salad’ (I’ve had such complaints) just because you cannot accommodate the unfamiliarity.

Finally, you will note here and there that the book is written from a Christian perspective. Wisdom has everything to do with Christ in my view. However, the book is about rational argument, so suitably minded non-Christians can just as easily benefit. Indeed! Given what I have just been saying, the book is more suited to a suitably minded atheist or agnostic than it is to a non-suitably minded Christian.

About Philosophy

I tend to feel about philosophy the way Louis Armstrong felt about jazz: “if you’ve got to ask what it is, you’ll never know”. For the purpose of this book, though, and as a reward for your having had the good grace to read this far, I will pretend I do not feel this way.

Still, I start with my own question: Why do people ask what philosophy is? People rarely ask, 'What is Science?' or 'What is History?' What is at play here, of course, is simple familiarity. Science and History are taught at school, Philosophy much less so. Also, scientists and historians seem to play a more prominent part in our culture - there are popular weekly television programs in which we can see these people at work. In contrast, people are unfamiliar in the extreme with Philosophy. Not that familiarity is the same thing as understanding. Common understanding of the nature and methodologies even of History and Science is often rather superficial. It is easy to suppose, for example, that the study of science issues straightforwardly in hard, incontestable facts about the natural world. Yet, when one tries to tease out the exact relationship between, say, observation and theory, it becomes apparent that matters are not quite that simple. In fact, there are special branches of Philosophy which examine the nature and methods of subjects like science and history.

So what then is Philosophy? One answer is that one comes to understand the nature of the philosophical quest by cottoning on to it slowly in the course of doing it. This book is intended to help you to do this, so you should have a better idea of what philosophy is when you have read through it. But it would be helpful at the outset to distance the philosophical quest from a few common, and sometimes misguided, conceptions with which people are inclined to confuse it.

Some Understandings (Misunderstandings?) of Philosophy

What, then, isn't philosophy? In the first place, it is not a series of profound sounding aphorisms designed to sum up the world and its mysteries in handy, succinct little packages. That is (very often) home-spun nonsense, not philosophy. Secondly, we must forget any ambitions we may harbour of being invited vaguely to ponder the deep mysteries of life with the intention of achieving something like god-like clarity about the meaning of life. This may be mystical initiation, but it is not philosophy. Doing philosophy is not like consulting a guru. Finally, philosophy is not an activity designed to enable one to accept life's troubles with equanimity and calm detachment. (Though it has come close to this at times and is by no means irrelevant to the cultivation of various helpful life-attitudes.) On the whole, though, philosophers can get just as upset and agitated as anyone else. Philosophy, properly grasped, has some connection with peace of mind but it is not an easy escape route from spiritual unease.

None of this means that philosophy is just some arid exercise in showing off one’s intellectual skill. Looked at this way, philosophy would be at best rather tedious, and at worst, pointless. Philosophy is certainly concerned with some profound mysteries and it also has its broader connections with how we should lead good lives. Indeed, philosophy had its very origins in just that sort of reasoned curiosity, a curiosity that wells up in all reflective, intelligent people from time to time. (At least if they are fortunate enough not to have to bother with mere survival.) However, it does none of this in the manner of esoteric mystery-mongering.

Philosophy does not typically or simply solve deep mysteries. Where it appears to have so done, one can be sure that delusion has been at work somewhere. As I hope we shall see, this delusion is particularly at play in some of today’s fashionable ‘isms’: reductionism, eliminativism and emergentism. Philosophy is at its best and most useful when it has illuminated further the real, unfathomable depth of various mysteries, not when it proclaims that it has dispensed with them.

With those preliminary cautions off my chest, we get down to business. There are different ways of describing what philosophy is and does. The first kind offers a more formal definition and is focussed on accuracy. Here are a couple of examples from two contemporary eminent British philosophers.

“[Philosophy is] a process of reflection on the deepest concepts, that is structures of thought, that make up the way in which we think about the world. So it’s concepts like reason, causation, matter, space, time, mind, consciousness, free will, all those big abstract words and they make up topics, and people have been thinking about them for two and a half thousand years and I expect they’ll think about them for another two and a half thousand years if there are any of us left.” (Simon Blackburn, 2010, xix)

“Philosophy is thinking hard about the most difficult problems that there are. And you might think scientists do that too, but there’s a certain kind of question whose difficulty can’t be resolved by getting more empirical evidence. It requires an untangling of presuppositions: figuring out that our thinking is being driven by ideas we didn’t even realize that we had. And that’s what philosophy is.” (David Papineau, 2010, xx)

I commend these offerings for their accuracy but I rather have to say that they buy their accuracy at the cost of being somewhat airless. At one level they say well enough what it is that philosophers get up to in their working lives and they may also offer the kind of definition that one is after, but they buy their accuracy at the cost of only marginally capturing the real spirit of the discipline. I am not sure that philosophy can be too tightly defined in any case. Tightly defining philosophy is tantamount to tying its poor head in a plastic bag and expecting it to carry on breathing - and breathe it must if it is to breathe any insight. These definitions (especially perhaps Papineau’s, much as I like it) also give the impression that philosophy is a purely technical discipline, which perhaps explains their airlessness. Technicalities cannot be avoided as one starts to dig deep and they can help us express key arguments with sharpness and clarity but philosophy is not at bottom a merely technical discipline - as we shall see.

Here is a different tack, one that focusses on what it is to do philosophy rather than what it is about:

“I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of subjects. I regard it [philosophy] as involving the kind of questions where you’re not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together. This means that philosophical questions will arise in a lot of subjects.”

This comes from contemporary philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards. (2010, xxi) The trouble here is that just being told that philosophy is a ‘mode of enquiry’ and about how ideas ‘hang together’, and that it does not do all this this like science, though true as far as it all goes, is entirely vacuous without being told about the object of the enquiry or the nature of the ideas. It’s the sort of definition that upsets no one. (Though I suppose it is upsetting me a bit.) It plays it safe. Who can possibly argue against it? This fact alone though, should cause some suspicion. Besides, I don’t want my philosophical ideas merely to ‘hang together’. I want them also to ‘latch on to the world’ - to reality - some way or another, even if not like science, otherwise, why should anyone bother doing it? One important insight is given an airing here, though: philosophical questions can arise in pretty well any subject. Certainly nothing is safe from philosophy’s awkward gaze, no matter how far the subject may seem from philosophy.

Fortunately, there is a better way of putting what philosophy is all about. This way does not attempt to offer a formal definition but gets, rather, at more the spirit of the enterprise. Here are some examples.

The first comes from the great 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who thought that the purpose of philosophy is, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”. (2009, Section 309) I half like this one. As I hope you will find out, if philosophical puzzlement does not leave one feeling a bit like that trapped fly, then there’s something about the issue that you have simply failed to grasp - a sadly common occurrence. Unlike Wittgenstein, though, I am not sure that escape from the bottle is really possible. At best what usually happens is that one’s flight ends up in a merely bigger bottle. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘merely’ though. At least that bigger bottle represents some kind of intellectual progress. If philosophy can be pictured as some kind of imprisonment, at the least the cell needn’t be so small as to cramp one’s style.

How about the following? “Art shows how it loves, philosophy what it loves; mysticism knows only that it loves.” This comes from Constantin Brunner, a 19th century German-Jewish philosopher in his book Our Christ. I think that this places philosophy with pin-point insight in a very important wider context. It goes along with the idea that philosophy involves an inexhaustible search for wisdom but makes it clear that it cannot do that monumental job all by itself. It is an essential corrective to a certain attitude that places philosophy too much on a one-man pedestal. It also shows the kind of blind, pompous arrogance that would signpost science as the sole reliable path to righteousness, where it can get off. I speak here as a fan of science and a duly respectful camp follower of quantum mechanics. I also speak as a fan of the ‘Fantastic Mr. Feynman’, a renowned American physicist who once said, “The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.” (and) “Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”. (Quotes from internet.)

Another definition is of similar ilk:

“Philosophy ... moulds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone; it sits at the helm and directs our course as we waver amid uncertainties”.

This is Seneca, a first century (AD) Roman stoic philosopher (one who genuinely needed his stoicism). (Quote from the internet.) This offering, though perhaps usurping too much the part of religion, nonetheless expresses more directly than any other at least some part of the heart of philosophy. It leads us back to Brunner, too.

Of all philosophers, the ancient Greek, Socrates (who appears as a leading character in many of Plato’s philosophical dialogues) come closest, I think, to being a philosopher in the sense of being a lover of wisdom. In Plato’s dialogue The Apology, there is a story I just love of an associate of Socrates who asks the oracle of Delphi whether Socrates is the wisest person, to which he is given a loud ‘Yes!’. Socrates himself was of a different opinion. He believed firmly in his own ignorance. Socrates asks many of the great and important in his vicinity whether they think that they are wise. They all seem happy to give a loud ‘Yes!’, too. But Socrates knows better. The outcome is that Socrates changes his mind about himself. He is the wisest person, after all, not because of his superior knowledge but because he appreciates the weight and depth of his own ignorance. Others merely believe they have necessary knowledge and wisdom but Socrates suffers from no such monumental self-delusion. Real understanding, in the real depths, he realises, does not come easily. One needs dedication. Yet even our realised ignorance is still some kind of knowledge – and valuable knowledge, too. The foundation of genuine wisdom.

The key thing, though, is this: even to be sure of one’s ignorance of something is still to have some (mysterious form of) knowledge of it. (This has much later echoes in certain Christian claims about our knowledge of God.) Plato’s deliberations on all this led him to believe that this little seed of knowledge comes from outside of us but is well and truly part of us in the here and now. For Plato this knowledge comes from a previous, pre-natal awareness had by our immortal souls. In later Christian thought certain kinds of knowledge of God was understood as given in divine revelation. It was not something we have discovered for ourselves.

Whatever the explanation, I like the tone of all this. Anyone who approaches philosophy with assurance in themselves is destined for delusion, whether they are beginners or eminent professors. Somehow, we have to approach it with wonder, and though I don’t buy Plato’s back-story of pre-natal acquaintance, I do think that we must approach philosophy as an old friend, one who will lead us into even greater depths of realisation of our ignorance. This is the true love of wisdom – literally ‘philosophy’ and I believe that it is in danger of being lost in the sound-bite, dumbed-down culture of our own day.

But philosophy itself is also a loving subject and is so precisely because it depends upon rational argument. Why? Because rational argument can be regarded as the intellectual partner of love. Both want what is best for others – the one truth, the other a good life, and both want to persuade others without bashing them on the head. But neither are they satisfied with leaving others merely to stew in their own juice or uncared for in a state of merely bland, tolerated acceptance. In a sense, argument and love are just head and heart. They are intertwined in ways that do not allow their separation if either is to remain intact and coherent. Both are needed, for otherwise each will stew in its own juices. I can think of no better recommendation for doing philosophy. (This perspective I believe comes from the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas but I have been unable to check this out.)

Two crucial words which constantly emerge in coming to understand philosophy are 'reason' and 'argument'. Philosophy is very much about assessing claims to truth that people make from time to time concerning certain issues. An important part of a philosopher's job is critically to assess the reasons and arguments that people put forward in defence of their favoured views. In my experience this results in two things - impatience with philosophers and the addition of difficulty to the existing unfamiliarity.

Philosophy is undoubtedly hard, brain-hurtingly so. But one thing that has always struck me is that it is made unnecessarily harder still, especially for the beginner, by one simple fact - lack of grip on just what some of the central problems are supposed to be. It is one thing to have a vague curiosity about, say, the nature of mind or in what sense we have free will; it is quite another to have a clear view of a nicely defined, clearly stated problem. (See my book Philosophical Arguments Explained: A Resource Book) for a survey of typical philosophical arguments and, I hope, a clear view of their structure.)

Not having that clear grasp at all can often lead people into thinking either that there is no real problem at all, or that they can solve it simply. In fact, to get philosophy really going, we need two ingredients - a clearly stated problem and a deep sense of puzzlement about how it might be solved. And this puzzlement must be given a real cutting edge, otherwise it will be difficult to see what all the fuss is supposed to be about and one will judge philosophy to be no more than an intellectual show.

It is also important to distinguish between puzzlement and confusion. A student once remarked to me that she expected to be just as (or even more) confused at the end of one of my courses as she was at the beginning. The course would have been an unforgivable failure had this been the outcome. What ought to be produced is a sharper sense of puzzlement, puzzlement wrought by a clearer vision of the inadequacies of every known attempt to get to a good solution to the philosophical problem under consideration. Sharply focussed puzzlement comes, however, with greater clarity, not greater confusion: you have to see just what the problem really is. Indeed, a really good philosopher may be acutely baffled, but their bafflement will be accompanied by a very clear understanding of its source. Confusion will lead to none of this.

Why do Philosophy?

What is the point of philosophy? One thing is certain – it will never cure the common cold. But who cares? At least it will make life more interesting for all the times we don’t have colds. It will never feed the starving poor, either, but at least it can contribute to our understanding of the moral dimension of life, without which the starving poor may well starve some more. It can ask the question: Why is feeding the poor morally important? Thus, philosophy may not make progress the way science does, it’s just not that kind of enterprise, but it can improve our insight. That’ll do me. Quite seriously, I side with the ancients on philosophy. The word ‘philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom’. The ancients valued wisdom and the search for it. I’m with them. That’s its point. Philosophy is the best way I know of putting cracks in what we think we know. That’s the first part of wisdom and a strong point in favour of philosophy.

We have, however, already answered our question – to a point: philosophy asks the questions that other disciplines, such as science, do not – even cannot. But why deal with just those questions? I give two reasons. Firstly, it is because we are all, in a sense, philosophers. Most of our thinking to some small extent, and some of it to a much larger extent, is invested, shot through, with past philosophical assumptions, even if we are ignorant as to what they may be and may not even recognise the fact of it. Anyone who thinks themselves a ‘free thinker’ in the sense of taking their own thinking about various important issues to be liberated from past ties and traditions is utterly deluded, and the greater the denial of this, the tighter and more merciless is the grip of the delusion. Studying philosophy, even just to some extent, rids one of this delusion – to some extent. Secondly, we all – again to some extent – puzzle about certain philosophical issues, perhaps the ones I have already mentioned. Moreover, we all, from time to time tend to have opinions as to what the right view may be. Fair enough, but without the aid of philosophy we may think that our solutions and positions are sounder that they really are. We may even delude ourselves that the puzzlement has gone away. Even some philosophers fall for this trap, but delusion it still is, as I hope to show. As I have suggested, the point of philosophy is not so much to make the mystery or puzzlement go away as to get a much sharper focus on exactly what the mystery or puzzlement really is. We may think we’ve got a better grip on it than we in fact have. Only philosophy can help. Without it, we can only expect the growth of the delusion.

In this book, I present arguments for and against various positions, I must make it clear that the present book is not a rather tedious textbook which impartially considers all competing ideas. Where I think a position clearly delusional (such as the ideas that consciousness and free will are themselves delusions) I do not mince my words. A proper philosopher is not a neutral thinking machine but a searcher for wisdom.