Philosophy For Dummies (US Edition)

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bullet Hearing some common misunderstandings of philosophy, courtesy of history’s illustrious thinkers Virtue ethics states that character matters above all else. Living an ethical life, or acting rightly, requires developing and demonstrating the virtues of courage, compassion, wisdom, and temperance. It also requires the avoidance of vices like greed, jealousy, and selfishness.

Whether you think you are just your body, or that you are something more than that is often closely tied to a broader question about the universe: Is there just one sort of fundamental substance in reality, like matter, or one-dimensional strings of energy out of which everything else is made, in all the wonderful diversity of the world? Or could there be more than one fundamental reality composing the wide variety of things?

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This great thinker was called a peripatetic philosopher (peripateo means "to walk around") because he liked to lecture to his students while taking a walk. Another group of philosophers were called stoics because they preferred sitting around on porches ( stoa) when they shot the breeze.

Ethical theory serves as the foundation for ethical solutions to the difficult situations people encounter in life. In fact, for centuries, philosophers have come up with theoretical ways of telling right from wrong and for giving guidelines about how to live and act ethically. Here are a few ethical theories to whet your appetite: Key works: Human, All too Human (1878–1880), The Gay Science (1882–1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Ecce Homo (1888)

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The ancient philosopher Aristotle believed that goodness comes down to how well things function in reference to their intended use or purpose. A good hammer serves its purpose well. So does a good watch. Following Aristotle, many philosophers are now suggesting that ethics isn’t just about rules or commandments or duties, but it’s rather about habits of living that promote happiness and flourishing.

Consider, for example, mouse traps. Mouse traps are devices for catching or killing mice. Mouse traps can be made of most any material, and perhaps indefinitely or infinitely many designs could be employed. The most familiar sort involves a wooden platform and a metal strike bar that is driven by a coiled metal spring and can be released by a trigger. But there are mouse traps designed with adhesives, boxes, poisons, and so on. All that matters to something’s being a mouse trap, at the end of the day, is that it is capable of catching or killing mice.Skeptics like Pyrrho and Sextus thought that we should live our daily lives in accordance with appearances, but that we should refrain from drawing any conclusions from those appearances as well as from holding any firm beliefs based on those appearances. The point of this caution was always the goal of unperturbedness of spirit, and ultimately a sort of peaceful happiness of life. So, to have knowledge, it’s not enough to have a firm belief. You have to have some good evidence or reason to think the belief is true. This is a high standard, which is why the world is much fuller of opinion than it is of genuine knowledge. The safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. — Alfred North Whitehead Chapter 3 The Love of Wisdom In This Chapter Searle considers a number of responses to his thought experiment, and offers his own replies. Probably the most serious response is that Searle begs the question when he asserts that the whole collection of stuff in the room including the books and himself, i.e., the whole system, does not understand. The “Systems Reply” holds that if functionalism is true then the whole system does understand Chinese, just as a Chinese speaker does even though it would be wrong to say that her brain or her tongue or some part of her understands Chinese by itself. We consult the writings of the great dead philosophers not for any final word on the ultimate questions of philosophy, but rather to help get us started, using the insights and avoiding the pitfalls already discovered by those who have gone before us. Early in this century, William Ralph Inge explained,