Speaker 1: Welcome everybody, Thank you for having me. Rich Really cool
to be here. You know, I did when I was
doing undergrad and grad work, I did teach quite a
few student class situations, but I never taught an entire semester.
I left the university setting because I really felt like
I could do better doing it autonomously, and here we
are at autonomy. So I think Richard has the right
idea about where to go with education. But I've been
into and studying philosophy at various levels and in various
ways for about twenty years. So I'm happy to be here,
honored to be here. I do have some unique takes
that I think will be different than what you would
get in a traditional legacy university setting. So hopefully we
can get into some of that tonight kicking it off,
and we're going to get pretty deep, so you know,
jot down your questions. I'm a big fan of open
Q and A at the end. You know, we've done
in my discord. I think we have about eight or
nine thousand in the discord, and we've been doing these
open q and as that go sometimes six ten hours,
so I'm totally used to that. Very happy to have
people ask you know lengthy end of lecture Q and as, so,
be sure and jot down your questions and I will
answer them to the best of my abilities. You're not
gonna offend me, You're not gonna it's not gonna bother
me if you disagree, if you think I'm wrong about
something you know you don't like. UH. We're not gonna
be talking a whole lot about theism or any of
that tonight. That doesn't really play into tonight's topic. So
if you're an anti theist, if you're agnostic, none of
that bothers me. It's fine for you to have your positions.
I'm not gonna be coming at you or critiquing your
positions unless you want that right, So you can request that, Sir,
I would like you to request I would like to
request a demolished to goet my paradion. I'm happy to
offer that if you want that. Most people don't really
want that. But it's gonna just gonna be an introduction.
So we're gonna look at what is a philosophy all about.
The object of this course will be to take us
from this introductory UH situation to a pretty good knowledge
of deep knowledge. Hopefully that's what we're gonna shoot for
of the history of Western philosophy. Obviously, we have to
pick some starting points. We can't go back and do
all of Indo European philosophy, we can't do all the Babylonian,
a Syrian philosophy and whatnot. But what's most relevant, I
think for us in the West is the history of
Western philosophy. And like I said, I've you know, I've
had this course at the legacy institutional setting many times
over and in many in many in many different ways.
So I'm gonna give you a better version of that.
And I think again, this is really the way to
do it. Really, Richard is really pioneering when it comes
to where education is going. So let's get into philosophy.
What is philosophy? Well, hm, you say, I have there
a couple of figures that's from actually from a monastery,
an Orthodox monastery, where you have five philosophy guys, and
you know they don't have halos. So in the Orthodox view,
there's not going to be a perception of the philosophers
as equivalent to what you would get in divine revelation.
But regardless, some of the things that are going to
be present in my lecture is that we're not going
to see a strict divide between the various theisms, because
we're gonna notice that as we go through the history
of philosophy, there's a ton of theisms. So again, no
matter what you think about theism, we're going to need
to understand these people's positions from their vantage point, all right.
Ariosol has a famous quote attributed to Aristotl that it's
a mark of an educated man to understand the opponent's
position without adopting it. And we want to keep that
in mind as we work, as we work through these
various philosophers, because this is crucial to having the upper
hand right. And when I say the upper hand, I
mean in anything, if you're if you're in business, if
you're in debate, if you're in law, right, whatever you're into.
If you want to have the upper hand, if you
want a personal advantage, it's always better to know your
opponent's position at least as good as they do. Right.
Sometimes we can't achieve that, but to have that edge,
that's what you want to shoot for. So keep in mind,
no matter what your view, what we want to strive for.
And I think this is a virtue. We're going to
get to what virtue and vice and all that is
later on. We'll get to ethics. I think it's actually
a virtue to know the position that you're against, even
if you completely hate it and reject it, know it
is best you can. That's what we're going to shoot for.
And so those are some of the preliminary considerations as
we get into this. I want to remind you too
that I find it most helpful to break philosophy down
into three main branches. Those branches are epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.
Sometimes the phrase or the word esthetics is added to ethics.
We will get to that as well. Let's get into it.
So I will I did choose source materials. You don't
have to get these source materials unless you choose to.
I would recommend them because they're going to be what
I'm working from. In terms of the text, I will
at times refer to these texts for various source material
for pages that I think are really, you know, insightful.
That will be the famous text from Copplestone, which is
History of Western Philosophy or History Philosophy. I think it's
like four or five volumes. We're only going to be
early on concern with volume one. In volume two because
that covers the ancient and medieval periods, I will be
using and sourcing at times the well known text on epistemology.
It's very common in a lot of grad courses or
undergrad courses by Lawrence Bonjour epistemology. And there's a three
part series that matches up to the classification system that
I gave by these guys, and I think they're very
good because again they focus on virtue in these in
these domains, especially in terms of epistemology and ethics, and
that's going to be very crucial for where we go
in this course. You know, I know Richard makes a
lot of a great point throughout his talks to talk
about ethics and why, you know, having an edge in business, iss,
it's necessary to be ethical. We want to be ethical.
We want to display not in a showy way, but
we want to have a good reputation. Right, How you're
going to have a good business or good business at
repertoire if you have a bad rep right, if you're
known as the dude that scams everybody in lies and cheets, right,
So ethics will definitely play into this, and you're going
to see I think that ethics is very important and
crucial to philosophy, and that a lot of this is practical,
although it may seem early on that a lot of
what we're going to talk about is abstract. You know,
how does this relate to my business? We're talking about
freaking monads, We're talking about you know, crazy four elements
and all this mystical crap that doesn't relate to the practical.
I assure you that it will. But if you stick
if you stick it out right, you're going to see that.
You might not see that early on, but if you
stick it out you will. And so I recommend the W. J.
Woodbook on Epistemology, the William Hasker text on Metaphysics, and
the Arthur Holmes text on ethics. Now, the three on
the right are very easily accessible to people that may
not know a lot about philosophy. So if you're new
to philosophy, I'm gonna recommend the three on the right
there to start with, because the Bonjour Epistemology text is
a little advanced and the the Coppleston text is maybe
in between. Right, So you might you might see that one.
It's kind of in between the other two. And then,
as I said, I didn't put it on screen. But
there's also Coppleston's Volume two, which deals with medieval philosophy.
So those are our sources. Obviously, there are some other
sources that are gonna matter or be referenced here and
there for students of philosophy. Everybody should know about the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's very well known in academia.
It's commonly referenced as well as I forget which university
puts this one out, but it's the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Those will also be sourced at times, uh, you know,
just for very various reference references to words, terms, definitions,
and so forth. When I refer to Plato. I'll put
some of these up later when we do other slides,
but we'll be we'll be using various texts from Plato's Republic.
I use the Groove translation, and then also the bol
Engine series of Plato, which is a collected works of
Plato for some of the dialogues. That'll be the next lecture,
though we're not going to be getting into Plato tonight,
because one of the things that we want to we
want to understand is that philosophy is a centuries long discourse.
And just as if you were to walk into a
bar right and you were right in the middle of
some dirty story right to you know, drunk dudes in
the bar, or some wine mom in the bar whining
about her ex husband, you wouldn't know the whole story,
would you. You would only know you know what wine
mom is saying at this moment. Right. You want to
know who's let with who. You want to know where
they're from. You want to who's shooting on who? Right, Well,
maybe you guys don't. But that's what I'm getting at
with knowing the whole story here, is that the way
philosophy works is that it's a centuries long conversation. Basically,
the dude that's selling his stuff today is going to
be destroyed and demolished by the dude critiquing him tomorrow,
and this will go on for basically the last twenty
five hundred years. And that's what we're going to be
focusing on in terms of this course. So we need
to know, for example, who was saying what before Plato
that put Plato into the setting that he was in, right,
because there's a bunch of discourse and debate prior to
Plato that really you can't really understand Plato without that.
So in other words, we're going to have to step
back and understand some of the pre athens philosophy, the
pre Socratics or they're sometimes called the Milesians or the
Ionian philosophers, and what they were to be, what they
were asking, because they really initiate philosophy. In fact, Aerosol
himself says that it's the pre Socratics that, and we'll
look at this specifically in a moment, that initiate or
begin the process of what is properly philosophy. Now, yeah,
you could widen that definition such that any ancient religion
or empire had a philosophy, and we're gonna look at
a little bit of that too, But for Western philosophy
in particular, again, thinking about our threefold division of epistemology, metaphysics,
and ethics, it's going to be the pre Socratics that
first initiate this question. And they do it because they
begin to move out of the domain of myth and storytelling.
So prior to them. We'll look at in a minute, Homer, Hesiod,
these playwrights, these oral tradition storytellers. For them, virtue and
vice is essentially known via mythic or mythopoetic storytelling, not
primarily known through abstraction. This is gonna be a huge
step that a lot of these prestocratics are going to
take away from myth towards reason, rationality, abstraction, and stepping
away from myth and storytelling. Now this is not to
cast aspersions on myth and storytelling. We're not making judgments
either way. We're simply understanding the course of philosophy as
it progresses historically. Because again this I have to stress
this because a lot of people don't know how to
approach philosophy. Right. They just pick up David Hume and
start reading him. And you can't understand David Hume if
you don't understand the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, right.
Because Hume comes on the scene in the Enlightenment. It says,
as a skeptic, right, we need to throw out all
the metaphysics that came before. Well, if I don't know
what the metaphysics came before, or I don't know what
he's talking about. Likewise, I can't understand Kant without understanding
David Hume, because Kant's whole philosophy is a reaction to
human and we're going to see that throughout the history
of Western philosophy. It's a constant position, reaction, interchange. And
sometimes this is referred to as dialectics. Now, dialectics, I'm
going to I'll have more definitions later on screen for
you guys, but as we get into more of the
precise terminology, we don't have to really worry about dialectics tonight,
but I do want to bring it up because it's
going to be recurring themes. I want you guys to
pay attention to themes that will recur throughout this lecture series.
Dialectics will be one of them, because we're going to see,
especially in the Greeks and throughout the whole history of
Western philosophy, dialectical tension. And remember, dialectics means different things
in different contexts. Sometimes dialectics means just the methodology of teaching,
to back and forth question asking dialogue right. Sometimes dialectics
means something more metaphysical, which in the sense of like
actual principles in the world that are intention with one another.
Is there a stark war between determinism and free will? Right?
That's a dialectical characterized question. Right. The setting for that
is already kind of set up as dialectical. Are you
a determinist or do you believe in free will? Well,
that assumes that there's not some form of compatilist compatibilism
right now. I'm not saying which of those is correct
the wrong. I'm just saying that you can see that
a lot of times questions can be framed in a
dialectical way, and I want you to pay attention to that,
because as we go through a lot of these especially
these pre socratics, you're going to notice that they really
are operating in a lot of these kinds of assumptions.
So we want to pay attention to that. We want
to have some of those things in mind. But before
we get to that, after we've looked at some of
these course materials rough course syllabus, this is what we're
looking at doing here, We're going to do this introductory class. Uh.
This is then we're going to move to playto. I'm
going to try to squeeze playto into one talk these
could ease each of these people, as we know, could
easily be an entire course. They're very difficult, especially the
pre Socratics play aristotol, but we're gonna tackle it. I
have a lot of friends that are in academia that
are also solid people that I think you guys would
really like, you guys really benefit from. So I'm gonna
have a couple of guests, uh expert lectures come in
to also co teach and to do a little Q
and A with me on the epistemology class. I'm gonna
do the metaphysics class. We're gonna lump aesthetics with ethics.
I'll bring a guest expert in as well for that,
probably somebody who's a Renaissance expert. Then we're gonna look
at the Stoics and the new Platonists together for the
early non Christian philosophy of the meditations of for example,
Marcus Aurelius, and we'll look at some of the Roman philosophers.
Then we're gonna move to the what's called the Patristic period,
which means the Church Fathers. Again, regardless of what you
think of Christianity, you know it doesn't I'm not really
here to get into that with you tonight. Unless you
guys want to talk about those things, I'm happy to,
but that's not really prominently. The focus of this course
is not gonna essentially be Christianity. It's just gonna be
the history of West and philosophy. However, whatever one thinks
of Christianity or religion, we do have to treat this
very crucial, very influential period in the history of the West.
And we're not going to restrict it to Latin or
Western Church fathers as many college courses do. We're going
to look at figures who were crucial and very influential
in other civilizations like Byzante, particularly the Cappadocians John Emascus,
very famous Patristic church fathers as they're called, who were
heavily philosophical. So Augustine, a towering figure obviously in the
early Church, had many, many, many thousands of pages of
philosophical writings, and we're going to look at those. And
he's crucial as well because he's very influenced by the
Neoplatons right, as are the Cappadocian Church fathers Basil Gregory
and Gregory. Basil and to Gregory's Basically, we're going to
look at them in terms of their metaphysics. Their approach
to help the world is structured, and as you can see,
I mean this encompasses you know, at least this isn't
even all of them, weir. I've got thirty eight volumes
up here, and probably half of these volumes deal with
Augustin Cappadocian of John Damasca. So I'm going to compact
all of that into one long course. Then we're going
to get into medieval philosophy in general, which those guys
prepare the way for. And then we have to know
this because we're not gonna be able to understand the
Enlightenment what it's reacting against unless we understand some of
the medieval scholastic philosophy. So again that'll be compacted. We
won't go super deep into all that because that could
be its own course, right, people get their PhD in
even just one of the thinkers in any of these domains.
So we want to shoot for an overview. We like
I said, when we get to Descartes and the Enlightenment,
we're going to look at that as its reaction to
the medieval period. Again, this is not to demolish or
destroy all the Enlightenment philosophers. In fact, they're going to
have a lot of good arguments against medieval philosophers. So
we want to try to look for good art arguments
is another thing to try to train yourself to do
in terms of philosophy. We want to look for good
arguments irrespective of the man, irrespective of the person making
the argument, do they have a good argument? Because guess what,
even the worst philosopher, I don't care who you think
is the worst, he's probably got one good argument here there.
And it's kind of on a spectrum. Right, I'm not
a big fan of Hegel, but I think Hegel has
some really interesting insights here and there. Same with Emmanuel Kant. Right,
I'm not a contient. I'm not super into KNT, but
I think Kant has some really fascinating insights that we're
going to talk to when we get to number eleven there,
which is the Enlightenment empiricists and Kant's transcendent idealism that
is the human Kant Berkeley Locke period, and then modern
collapse of philosophy, And yes, I will argue that it
has pretty much collapsed, and by that I mean, what
we classically thought of the doing of philosophy as doesn't
really exist anymore. Then. That's not to say that in
the academic world or in the academic setting there aren't
people doing philosophy. There are, there are, But this is
but what we thought of as philosophy in terms of
the ancient and medievals has collapsed in the sense that
we don't do that anymore. Now. Philosophy has turned into postmodernism,
which is essentially an anti philosophical movement. It's actually ironically
reverted back to storytelling. That's the irony here is that
what the pre Socratics there in Part one are going
to be reacting to in Homer and Hesiod. Ironically, we're
going to notice that the modern collapse of philosophy has
basically returned in terms of postmodernism, has returned to myth
and storytelling, because of course they will say that really
every philosopher and everything is just myth, storytelling or power
relations right, power oppressor narratives and so forth, And certainly,
you know, we could include marks and so forth in
all of these modern figures or this modern era, but
it's just really difficult to put everything into one course,
and so, like Richard said, you know, if everything works out,
we'll probably just do a second season of covering modern stuff,
you know, and then we can do a class on
dar when we can do a class on Mark. So
we can do a class and you might think, well, Darwin, No, yeah,
you're gonna notice tonight. Just like with what I just
said about postmodernism being a return of an ancient view,
you're gonna notice quite a few things that are normative
popular views today. We're already in the presocratics and in
the ancient philosophers. Again, I'm not here to try to
convince you either way on these things. I have my views.
I'm happy to give my takes. But again, what we
want to stress and what we want to really really
strive for because this is very difficult for a lot
of people. I don't think this audience will be too difficult.
I'm sure you guys are a sharp crowd. I'm sure
you're striving to achieve objectivity. That's what we want to do.
We want to understand these people no matter what we think,
even if we think it's the stupidest thing, right, that is,
even I think if that dude is retarded, right, I
think if we think, you know, oh, Aristotle is the
most rhetorded of all the philosophers. Right, he was riding
the short bust to the Athens Academy, right, right, whatever
you think, I at least want you to understand Aristotle
and be able to give the basics of what he
thought to the to the appeasement of me or anyone
else who knows a decent amount about aerosolt Right. If
you can do that, then you have achieved what I'm
after in this course, which is to give you the
ability to speak to these topics fluently, and you're gonna
understand again how it relates to your life. A lot
of this, again will seem obscure and weird, but again
you're gonna notice some of the most prominent views that
people have in the world today that are thought of
as new, aren't really new. They're just repackaged, resurfacing, and
they kind of represent similar debates, copy and pasted actually
almost from twenty five hundred years ago. So what is philosophy? Yeah, obviously,
probably many of you already know this. I won't spend
too much time on the basics, but we do need
to have just a little bit of an overview of
what the basic terms are what they're referring to, because
we're going to have some people that are brand new
love of wisdom, fly low Sophia, Love of wisdom. Socrates
famously said the examined life is the only life worth living.
Now technically said the unexamined life is not worth living.
But I'm paraphrasing to say, Look, basically, he's just telling
you that if you're just going through through your your
emotions day to day, if you've never sat down to
contemplay what is life? Who am I? What's the meaning
of all this? Is there a point to life? Does
the universe have a beginning? Right? If you've never thought
about those things, then you're kind of like a boring
ass rock. And literally that's how I think, you know,
some of the Greek philosophers would sort of especially the
ones who kind of had disdaining for the masses, right,
some of these guys would just be like, these people
are really no different than rocks. And they're even gonna
liken some of the people to rocks because they're weighed
down by the cares of this world and the material
possessions and pleasures. Right the base passions or whatnot. They
keep people focused not on the here and the now
or me, not on the transcendent or on the ideal,
or on the true or whatever, but on the here
in the now, And so they're kind of like determined
in PCs. This is the ancient Greek idea of the NPC.
And I think if we were to think of somebody
like Socrates who will be the teacher of Plato, he
would definitely resident with the NPC meme, right, He would
probably be etching it out on tablets, right and showing
it to his fellow philosophy students in his class. And
so the idea here is that we want to not
just go through the motions, but want to understand the
world and not just have knowledge. This is an important
distinction that will come up in the early Greek philosophers,
not just having a bunch of data. Right. There's clearly
there's a difference between you know, some guy who's just
a Spurg and like memorize his sports statistics. Right, what's
the dust at Hoffman character rain Man? Right? Would you
call rain Man wise? No, he's just this sort of
weird savant, you know, Spurg, Right, But what about a
situation where you know, take the again, what dover you
think of the Bible the character of Solomon. Solomon in
the Bible and Ecclesiastices, Proverbs, he's touted for his wisdom,
and certainly he, according to the Bible, well knew a
lot of things. But he wasn't just a key figure
in history because he knew facts and could list them
on a spreadsheet or whatever, right ancient Hebrew spreadsheet, but
because he had the application of that knowledge in the
right way at the right time. And that's kind of
what we're shooting for for wisdom. So again, not just
love of bear knowledge, but love of wisdom, the appropriate
virtuous application of that knowledge at the right time and
in the right way. Those are going to be some
of the key questions that come up for philosophy and
what a philosopher is? What so, what are we after here?
What do we do? What is a philosopher? What do
they do? Some of the basic questions they're going to
be looking at philosophers do things like cross examine. We
want to know, is what's being said to me coming
from a rational, reasonable place? Is somebody lying to me?
Are they trying to scam me? Are they duping me. Am,
I watching movies that are full of propaganda, Right, maybe
I want to analyze this movie and say, hey, wait
a minute, this is a raytheon Boeing trying to sell
me on some new Pentagon War that has you know,
the face of Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon on it
or whatever. Right, so I'm cross examining a piece of
art or piece of propaganda in that case. Right, you're
going into law, you're going into business. You want to
you want to cross examined to see if this is
a good deal. I don't know, is it? So what
you might have thought isn't really the domain of philosophy
for philosophers, it is philosophy. Right, we're engaged in cross examination.
Obviously you could apply the law court. I mean, I
think hopefully the law court example is obvious. There don't
have to go into that really, but you know, cross
examination could come into anything. It could come into a
conversation that you're having at Thanksgiving dinner. Right, you're trying
to convince your family members of their their their terrible politics, right,
and how they're you know, idiots for believing the normy
story of nine to eleven who knows right. So let's
say you're having that company and you want to cross exams,
you want to analyze their bad arguments. So something philosophers
are interested in. Philosophers are analytical. That means they do analysis. Now,
not every philosopher is always engaged in this, but it's
certainly part of what philosophers do, and that's obviously very valuable.
It's valuable in today's world. Obviously a lot of what
we do, whether it's economics, whether it's the arts, whether
it's computer program whatever you're into, you're going to need
the skills and tools that allow you to be highly analytical.
As we get into modern philosophy, this actually becomes its
own branch of philosophy, analytical philosophy, which sometimes contrasted with
continental philosophy in the modern period. It's not exactly what
we're talking about here, we're just speaking in a more
general sense, but it will actually become its own kind
of school, so to speak, of philosophy. So philosophers are
definitely engaged in analysis, and primarily we're engaged in analysis
of what those three things that we talked about at
the beginning, that subdivision epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. That's in philosophy.
But again, this is one of the unique things about
philosophy is that philosophy can be a philosophy of anything.
That might sound weird at first, but if you think
about it, if you think about some of the famous
modern philosophers, there is, of course character he does philosophy
of Now that seems ridiculous, but that's exactly what z
Zek does. He's one of the most famous living philosophers
out there today, one of the few existing still explicitly
sort of Marxist philosophers. And z Zek, who you know,
recently debated Jordan Peterson for example. No, no, no, z
Zech does analysis from a Marxist fantash point of things
like toilets. And on the one hand, that's kind of ridiculous,
But at the same time, you think, well, toilets are
part of our lives, aren't they. We spend quite a
bit of our time on the toilet, right, So is
it theoretically possible that you could do a analysis of toilet? Sure?
Because didn't they say at one point that I don't
know Trump has a golden toilet. I didn't know if
that's true. But does Trump have a gold and tool.
What does that signify in terms of the figure of
Trump Saudi princes with golden, golden toilets. Right, So this
is the sort of beautification of a ritual that is
very mundane but also sort of you know, base and gross, right, shitting, right,
So a philosophy of shitting. Now, I'm being kind of
you know, silly here, but I'm also kind of making
a point that it really is the case that you
can do a philosophy of anything. For example, in some
of my grad classes, we were getting into some of
the guys who had done I forget the guy's name,
but he's a Semiititian guy who had done a analysis
of comedy philosophy of comedy. What is it that makes
us laugh? What is it that makes this thing funny
versus absurd and not funny? What is it that makes
you know, faces funny? You could do a philosophy of anything,
is my point. So it will it's broad in its scope,
and that it will range from a philosophy of things
in the domain of philosophy, knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, two weird
and sort of fanciful figures and characters, and philosophy who
do philosophies of anything. We can do the philosophy of
literary there, we can do the philosophy of music, do
the philosophy of comedy. As I said, so again there's
a potentially a philosophy of anything and an analysis of anything.
From this kind of perspective, philosophers are not just analytical, however,
they are also intuitive. There's a lot of creativity actually
that goes into the process of philosophy. Some mathematicians, for example,
I think Roger Penrose, and if you read Paul Davies's
book Mind of God, he will talk about how there's
actually a creative element that goes into even things like
mathematics and geometry. Right, I mean, some of the great
philosophers and thinkers and mathematicians, they have the flashes of
insight that don't come from some obvious source. We don't
really know where they get these flashes of insight, right,
I mean, for example, you know, the story about Nikola
Tesla is that he would get a lot of his
insights into these you know, elaborate engines that he would
build through these just visions that he would sort of
pass out or whatever. That's the story at least, right,
So philosophers are intuitive in that we are not just
analytical robots. We also have a will and intention of
creativity that we bring to the analysis. Again, we can
be analyzing anything, it doesn't matter. Philosophers are constructive. In
other words, they don't just focus on the particulars. Now,
they may in certain cases if they're doing their dissertation
on the particular and that will actually be something very
important in philosophy, But generally speaking, the philosopher is not
just concerned with that. He also wants to get a
big picture. He wants to construct a total picture about
what's going on, what's our situation in the world, what
does life mean, et cetera? Is their meaning in order
in the world? Does there meaning order to be found? Right?
These are the kinds of questions that we're going to
be asking. And so philosophers are constructive and that they
seek to build a total picture. Now there's limits to that. Obviously,
we don't mean it in a literal sense of like
I'm going to build a total picture of everything in
reality and everything that exists. Now, some of the technocrats
might think that with total information awareness and you know,
this kind of internet of things, they might think that.
But typically, speaking outside of these sort of maniacal mad
scientist positions, like the technocrats, typically philosophers, the people that
we're going to be analyzing and looking at are seeking
a total picture within some fixed domain or within some
general framework. Okay, they're not looking for or attempting to
create omniscience. However, we're going to see in some cases
where they actually do try to reach that. Right, We're
going to see what for example, deve cart, the cart's
going to try to find this indubital and infallible reference point.
Hegel will try to find this sort of omniscience or
pseudo omniscience within his process philosophy, for example. But typically
that's not what we're doing. However, many of them will
try to build world systems right from scratch, and that's
something that we want to pay attention to. So you
guys want to jot down your questions and just save
those for the end, and you can feel free when
we get to the end to come back to questions
at any point. So just just jot down if you
want to that you want to ask a question about
sort of stuff early on, but it might be better
to wait until we get through some of this preliminary
stuff before we start taking any questions philosophers. Thus, in
my and this is sort of this is more so
my my approach because some people would disagree with this,
But I think that the philosophy and what philosopher's really
about is worldview thinking. This is the attempt to characterize
and systematize man's knowledge and experience and show how these
things are interrelated. That man's knowledge is not totally fragmentary,
it's not totally disconnected discreet from other pieces of knowledge,
other facts, and other humans and their experience, but that
there is a commonly experienced world, and our experiences and
the facts that we experience and the knowledge that we
obtain from the world is interrelated. There is a world
historical we might say, there is a worldview from which
man can build a system and pause it right. Facts
about the world predicate things about the world. And lastly,
philosophers are concerned in my view, with presuppositions. Now, this
is specifically what the philosopher will be doing as he
does philosopher right, as we go through the history philosophy,
you're going to notice that each philosopher kind of does
this thing where he reads the guy before him, and
especially maybe the generation right before him, and he critiques.
Philosophy doesn't have to be relegated to only critique, but
critique is going to be crucial to the entire process
of philosophy. In the history of the West, each guy
will be critiquing the guy before him. Pretty much across
the board. There might be a few outliers here and
there who try to do different things, and maybe they
pop up and you know, they just focus on maybe
a literary theory, philosophy of aesthetics or something like that.
But most of the big people that we're going to
be focusing on are the ones that are known as
the big philosophers. They're typically concerned with critiquing the presuppositions,
the basic commitments and assumptions of the guys that came before.
So that's what we're going to be doing as well.
And keep in mind that a lot of what you
see there on that page is also what you, as
a philosopher, will begin to do. Now you might think, well,
I'm not a philosopher. I didn't take all these classes. Well,
guess what, you have a philosop and you are a philosopher.
Even if you don't know it. Even if you know
nothing about philosophy, if I ask you simple questions in
the domains of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, you might have
any know where those words are. But if I ask
you basic questions, you're going to have a view on
some boys. You're going to have some idea about knowledge.
Even if you think that we can have knowledge. That's
still a position, right, that's an agnostic position, but it's
still a position in a pistemology, right that you don't
believe anybody has knowledge, or you don't have knowledge, or no,
we can have knowledge. If I asked you a question
about ethics, right, well, I think it's wrong to kill people. Okay, Well,
then so now you have a philosophy of ethics, right
of virtue and vice right away, whether you know it
or not. So everybody is a philosopher, even if they
don't know it. Everybody has a philosophy because they have
a worldview, even if it's a commitment to agnosticism, because
everybody has basic commitments or believes or presuppositions. When it
comes to what are the three branches epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics,
all right, why one more point here. I'll try to
go through this kind of quick because I don't want
to spend too much time on This is kind of
a restatement kind of what we talked about. Be for
a lot of times people hear about philosophy and they'll
say philosophy is useless and impractical word sol And I
can't tell you how many times last twenty years, I've
heard this and my most off repeated boomer phrase when
I chose to study philosophy, Every boomer, Oh, the philosophy
corporations hiring around you. They thought that was the greatest show, right.
I never thought it was funny that was done the
first time, and I still hear it's still done. But
these are common objections that most people have to this
whole domain. And that's why, for example, people like Neilagrass Tyson,
you know, a couple few years ago, if you guys, remember,
basically said don't waste your timehilosophy is a useless enterprise.
I wonder why he was so emphatically opposed to philosophy. Well,
that might be because he doesn't fare very well when
asked philosophical questions, So that might have something to do
with maybe more of a personal motivation. But what are
the some of the pros? Then again that what does
philosophy help us do? Right? So maybe you're not so
interested in what philosophers do. How does it help you?
What do I get out of this? Philosophy helps us
to think creatively because it makes us better at analysis.
As I said, of anything, you're not going to fall
for bad arguments. You're not going to fall for fallacy.
You're not going to fall for dumb, stupid arguments, for example,
emotional appeals. Now, I know that one of Richard's buds
has taught a really excellent logical fallacies course, right, And
one of those logical fallacies that comes up all the time,
for example, is something like emotional appeal. Right, Oh, you
don't want to support the war effort in XYZ country.
I guess you hate the kids in those countries, don't you.
I guess you want the kids to die? Right? You
want Saddam to kill the kids? Right? These are all
ridiculous emotional appeals. Right. In other words, only a person
who anols their position cares about kids. Well, that's a fallacy. Right.
So understanding philosophy helps us to think critically makes us
better at analysis of anything. Doesn't have to be politics.
It's going to help you analyze again, business situations, right,
business deals. It's going to help you analyze the crypto
market right. For example, crypto deals a lot with human
emotions in human psychology. Right. If whales are dumping, you
know that people are going to follow the whales and dump.
So it's going to make you better at analysis if
you know the modus operandi of human operation in markets,
for example, and that's involved with that involves philosophical critical thinking,
even if we don't know these terms. Philosophy help just
think creatively. As we said, we have new approaches and
angles to things. I remember one of my philosophy professors
met a good point when I was first coming into
to philosophy, and I met with him and I said,
you know, I don't know if I should choose this
as a profession. I said, because you know, I just
don't know if I'll be able to get a job
and make money and do this for it. And he said, well,
I know a really famous guy who studied a lot
of philosophy that you might have heard of. And I said,
who's that? He said, Steve Martin. So Steve Martin used
a lot of his philosophy to go on into the
world of comedy. So I'm not guaranteeing you you know
that I'm going to teach you to be some great
comedian if you study philosophy. But he's an example of
a person who you studied philosophy, and I don't know
if you just did undergrad or if he went further
than that, but he utilized that to kind of give
him a unique approach to comedy. And although we look
back on Steve Martin as kind of a typical, you know, boomer,
a seventies eighties comedian, when Steve and came out in
the seventies, he was very unique and very weird and
odd in his approach. And I think that, as my
professor was arguing, that had to do with his taking
of a lot of philosophy classes when he was a
younger guy. So philosophy does help us to think creative
because it gives us new angles and new ways to
approach questions and things in the world. Philosophy helps us
systematize and particularize knowledge. Again, a classic example this is
that the taxonomy that we still use today for animals, kingdom, phylum, species, etc.
Genera that's from Aristotle. Aristotle, the great philosopher of Greece,
the student of Plato, gives us that taxonomy that we
still use today.