The Power of Ideas
Philosophy is, in the main, the study of ideas. One might wonder whether this is worth doing. I will try to maintain throughout the book that the study of ideas is extremely important. Why? So much of what we are as individual human beings and as a community depends on ideas. Our actions are based, in part, on our beliefs which are structured sets of ideas. Ideas are very powerful things and it is mainly because of that power that we should study them and attempt to understand them, both their origins and their implications.
The statement that ideas are powerful may not be obvious right away. Sure, we think about ideas but do they really have any effect on how we live our lives. They do have quite a powerful effect. This is true whether we consider them individually or, as I will do here, in combination. Ideas as discoveries lead to new inventions and developments which in turn lead to new ideas and the process continues. Permit me to illustrate with the following story. I leave out quite a few details and only mean to illustrate the idea (!) that ideas are powerful things.
In 1905 Albert Einstein wondered what it might be like to ride on a beam of light. This question gave rise to an idea that rewrote the laws of physics. Fundamentally, Einstein changed how we thought about the universe and our place in it with his theory of relativity. In a much more tangible way, he helped change the way we use energy with his famous equation E=mc2 because his theory helped pave the way for the atomic bomb.
When Einstein published his theory he was working in the Swiss patent office. Patents, of course, are society's legal way of codifying the importance of ideas. It is important to protect ideas because of their immense power and in some cases immense power to make money. The law and making money have always been important concerns but the two together created a problem in Europe after the fall of Rome. As historian James Burke points out, the legal problem in the middle ages was not a lack of law, it was that there was too much law. There was no standardized way to codify and understand the various forms of law from local custom to tribal law.
The problem was solved, in part, in 1076 when a liberal arts teacher named Irnerius found a copy of Roman law written by the emperor Justinian, lost since 603. I say the problem was solved in part because, having found the law, they still had to understand it. The technique they developed to help understand the law was called glossing. This was a way of interpreting the text by adding notes and analyses to the text which were often used as lecture notes by teachers. A great idea which led to the modern institution designed to communicate ideas: the University.
Of course, a university is no good without a curriculum. The solution to this problem was offered by none other than a lawyer! His name was Martianus Capella and the book he published shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 was to become the standard for learning during the middle-ages. He condensed into nine volumes the important subjects of learning which were to become the seven liberal arts. First were the more fundamental subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, and logic. To these, he added more practical subjects like music theory, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy.
Logic itself was the idea of a Greek philosopher named Aristotle. He designed it to help solve practical problems and in 1310 a German Dominican named Theodoric of Freiburg used it to design an experiment. In doing so he helped usher in the scientific method. The irony of this was that the experiment he designed, to explain the rainbow, involved looking into crystal balls!
Another example of the practical application of science came in 1436. At the time Florence was looking for a landmark; something to distinguish their city and put it on the map as a center of cosmopolitan activity. An architect named Filippo Brunelleschi had an idea to put the largest dome ever constructed on top of the unfinished cathedral. The problem was how to do it. A university friend of his named Toscanelli helped with the answer by appealing to a very old idea dreamed up by the Greek mathematician Ptolemy. The idea was to use geometrical grid lines. The principles of perspective geometry helped Brunelleschi complete his dome but it did more than that. Perspective allows you to map a three-dimensional surface on a two-dimensional piece of paper. Great for creating maps of the earth or anywhere else you care to explore. Thus allowing us to put Florence, and every other city in the world, on the map, literally. We used those principles to land a man on the moon in 1969 and put a rover on Mars just last year. In Brunelleschi's day, another explorer used them to attempt to make it to India by traveling west. He failed. But in doing so Columbus discovered America.
The nation of America itself was founded on an idea. The idea, expressed by Thomas Jefferson, that all human beings are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, was derived in part from the philosopher John Locke. He was just one example of a philosophical idea that led to a revolution. In 1789, the year we were ratifying our Constitution, another revolution was taking place in France, aided by the writing of a French philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The essence of the new French republic, and its motto, was a triad of ideas: liberty, equality, fraternity.
The power of ideas to cause revolutions was in part the product of an idea that was to change everything in the 1450s. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the swift and accurate dissemination of ideas including religious ideas. In particular, the religious ideas of Martin Luther and his reformation.
Three revolutions and at the heart of each is an idea. Revolutions represent, to say the least, the most radical changes that ideas can create. But not everyone is a fan of change. In 1752 a biologist named Linneaus set out to show that the one thing that plant and animal species never did was change. Ironically enough the series of ideas he set in motion with his book on nature changed our understanding of nature forever and forever made change an important part of that understanding.
The story of change in nature and the changes that this story created was begun in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The inspiration for Darwin's theory came, in part, from a geologist named Charles Lyell who said that yes, contrary to Linneaus, things do change but the rate of change is painfully slow.
Darwin himself was often accused of being against religion. Certainly, many of his most zealous advocates were. Darwin himself held a degree in theology which makes you wonder just how anti-religious he was. But, as I say, some of his biggest fans were against religion. In particular, a philosopher named Karl Marx who himself was the philosophical inspiration for yet another revolution in 1917; this one in Russia.
Religion has always been at the heart of change; as early as 1300 BC when the pharaoh Amenophis IV ascended the throne. Upon being crowned pharaoh he promptly changed his name to Akhenaton, declared that the only god worth worshipping was the Aten, and ushered in the religious institution of monotheism that three major religions today adhere to.
Einstein himself was very impressed with God's role in the cosmos claiming that the one thing God would never do is "play dice with the universe." The story comes full circle then, with a return to Einstein's theory of relativity. The theory depends, in part, on the fact that the speed of light is a universal constant; it never changes. Current physics research is beginning to call this fact into question. The ramifications of this we have yet to see but may involve another change and another example of the power of ideas to shape the world around us.
As I said in the beginning philosophy is essentially the study of ideas. In the course of this book, we'll look at such familiar ideas as God, the self, freedom, good, evil, faith, substance, reality. While the ideas we'll look at maybe familiar what we say about them and do with them may at times seem strange. The reason for this is that when we look at ideas philosophically, we are looking at them with a critical eye. We look at ideas not merely to state them but to state why we believe them. We'll look at the assumptions we make about our ideas and beliefs and, importantly, we'll look at the justification for believing them. This may, from time to time, lead you to question the practicality of what we're doing.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus once said "empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering." Philosophy addresses what, for lack of a better term, we can call the "big questions" in life. How can I deal with change? Does my being here have any meaning? How I can I deal with ethical conflict and moral dilemmas? How can I deal with suffering? How can I live a happy life? These too are important and inherently philosophical questions. The ability to reason and reflect may not solve these problems but it can be helpful. In this sense, philosophy can be, not only enjoyable but also therapeutic.
A final word is in order by way of introducing the subject of philosophy. The word itself means literally "love of wisdom." This puts many people in mind of something very subjective. One person's wisdom is another person's folly. So we may be tempted to conclude that philosophy is nothing but various people's opinions; unsubstantiated opinions at that. If this were true, philosophy would simply not be worth our time to investigate it and learn about it. After all, we all have opinions and some may turn out to be true. Socrates famously made a distinction between true opinion and knowledge. Some opinions may be true though we may not know why or what makes them true. This is why knowledge is to be preferred. Knowledge must be justified.
This is what makes philosophy more than just so many people's opinions. We will see philosophers expressing their opinions but to take them seriously, we will also demand that they justify them. That is we will want to see whether a philosopher can back up their opinion with facts to defend it. This is what we mean in philosophy by constructing an argument for something. We require this of scientists and will not accept anything less from philosophers. What we will be investigating throughout this course are various philosophical arguments (or theories if you prefer) concerning the questions I mentioned above. It will be our job to consider the arguments and determine whether they can stand up to critical scrutiny. In subjecting them to critical reasoning we will be strengthening our own philosophical ideas as well which is one of the many practical benefits to doing philosophy.
The important thing to remember about analyzing theories is what counts as evidence. We sometimes approach theories of past philosophers with a sense of wonder that they could have been so ignorant as to have come up with such crazy ideas in the first place; especially when there is so little evidence in favor of them.
In response to this consider the following story. Someone once asked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who we'll be studying later) if he didn't think that people in the middle ages must have been awfully stupid to have thought that the sun goes around the Earth when as any school kid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn't take too many brains to figure that out. Wittgenstein responded, "Well, perhaps but I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been going around the Earth?" The point of course is that it would have looked exactly the same. It’s not the evidence that guides the theory but rather the theory that guides the evidence. Theory creation always precedes the search for evidence because without theory we would not know what evidence to search for.
Please remember as we look at philosophical theories of the past that people back then weren't stupid; far from it. We do know different things than they did and in many cases, we have advanced far from them. But we can gain insight into our thinking today if we can understand their thinking in the past. After all, we live with parts of the past today. We have in essence taken the best of ideas in the past and developed them. Philosophy is in essence the study of ideas and this course can be thought of as a course in the history of ideas. And so without further hesitation, we will turn to a consideration of a theory whose fundamental component is the Idea: Plato's theory of Forms.
The statement that ideas are powerful may not be obvious right away. Sure, we think about ideas but do they really have any effect on how we live our lives. They do have quite a powerful effect. This is true whether we consider them individually or, as I will do here, in combination. Ideas as discoveries lead to new inventions and developments which in turn lead to new ideas and the process continues. Permit me to illustrate with the following story. I leave out quite a few details and only mean to illustrate the idea (!) that ideas are powerful things.
In 1905 Albert Einstein wondered what it might be like to ride on a beam of light. This question gave rise to an idea that rewrote the laws of physics. Fundamentally, Einstein changed how we thought about the universe and our place in it with his theory of relativity. In a much more tangible way, he helped change the way we use energy with his famous equation E=mc2 because his theory helped pave the way for the atomic bomb.
When Einstein published his theory he was working in the Swiss patent office. Patents, of course, are society's legal way of codifying the importance of ideas. It is important to protect ideas because of their immense power and in some cases immense power to make money. The law and making money have always been important concerns but the two together created a problem in Europe after the fall of Rome. As historian James Burke points out, the legal problem in the middle ages was not a lack of law, it was that there was too much law. There was no standardized way to codify and understand the various forms of law from local custom to tribal law.
The problem was solved, in part, in 1076 when a liberal arts teacher named Irnerius found a copy of Roman law written by the emperor Justinian, lost since 603. I say the problem was solved in part because, having found the law, they still had to understand it. The technique they developed to help understand the law was called glossing. This was a way of interpreting the text by adding notes and analyses to the text which were often used as lecture notes by teachers. A great idea which led to the modern institution designed to communicate ideas: the University.
Of course, a university is no good without a curriculum. The solution to this problem was offered by none other than a lawyer! His name was Martianus Capella and the book he published shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 was to become the standard for learning during the middle-ages. He condensed into nine volumes the important subjects of learning which were to become the seven liberal arts. First were the more fundamental subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, and logic. To these, he added more practical subjects like music theory, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy.
Logic itself was the idea of a Greek philosopher named Aristotle. He designed it to help solve practical problems and in 1310 a German Dominican named Theodoric of Freiburg used it to design an experiment. In doing so he helped usher in the scientific method. The irony of this was that the experiment he designed, to explain the rainbow, involved looking into crystal balls!
Another example of the practical application of science came in 1436. At the time Florence was looking for a landmark; something to distinguish their city and put it on the map as a center of cosmopolitan activity. An architect named Filippo Brunelleschi had an idea to put the largest dome ever constructed on top of the unfinished cathedral. The problem was how to do it. A university friend of his named Toscanelli helped with the answer by appealing to a very old idea dreamed up by the Greek mathematician Ptolemy. The idea was to use geometrical grid lines. The principles of perspective geometry helped Brunelleschi complete his dome but it did more than that. Perspective allows you to map a three-dimensional surface on a two-dimensional piece of paper. Great for creating maps of the earth or anywhere else you care to explore. Thus allowing us to put Florence, and every other city in the world, on the map, literally. We used those principles to land a man on the moon in 1969 and put a rover on Mars just last year. In Brunelleschi's day, another explorer used them to attempt to make it to India by traveling west. He failed. But in doing so Columbus discovered America.
The nation of America itself was founded on an idea. The idea, expressed by Thomas Jefferson, that all human beings are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, was derived in part from the philosopher John Locke. He was just one example of a philosophical idea that led to a revolution. In 1789, the year we were ratifying our Constitution, another revolution was taking place in France, aided by the writing of a French philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The essence of the new French republic, and its motto, was a triad of ideas: liberty, equality, fraternity.
The power of ideas to cause revolutions was in part the product of an idea that was to change everything in the 1450s. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the swift and accurate dissemination of ideas including religious ideas. In particular, the religious ideas of Martin Luther and his reformation.
Three revolutions and at the heart of each is an idea. Revolutions represent, to say the least, the most radical changes that ideas can create. But not everyone is a fan of change. In 1752 a biologist named Linneaus set out to show that the one thing that plant and animal species never did was change. Ironically enough the series of ideas he set in motion with his book on nature changed our understanding of nature forever and forever made change an important part of that understanding.
The story of change in nature and the changes that this story created was begun in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. The inspiration for Darwin's theory came, in part, from a geologist named Charles Lyell who said that yes, contrary to Linneaus, things do change but the rate of change is painfully slow.
Darwin himself was often accused of being against religion. Certainly, many of his most zealous advocates were. Darwin himself held a degree in theology which makes you wonder just how anti-religious he was. But, as I say, some of his biggest fans were against religion. In particular, a philosopher named Karl Marx who himself was the philosophical inspiration for yet another revolution in 1917; this one in Russia.
Religion has always been at the heart of change; as early as 1300 BC when the pharaoh Amenophis IV ascended the throne. Upon being crowned pharaoh he promptly changed his name to Akhenaton, declared that the only god worth worshipping was the Aten, and ushered in the religious institution of monotheism that three major religions today adhere to.
Einstein himself was very impressed with God's role in the cosmos claiming that the one thing God would never do is "play dice with the universe." The story comes full circle then, with a return to Einstein's theory of relativity. The theory depends, in part, on the fact that the speed of light is a universal constant; it never changes. Current physics research is beginning to call this fact into question. The ramifications of this we have yet to see but may involve another change and another example of the power of ideas to shape the world around us.
As I said in the beginning philosophy is essentially the study of ideas. In the course of this book, we'll look at such familiar ideas as God, the self, freedom, good, evil, faith, substance, reality. While the ideas we'll look at maybe familiar what we say about them and do with them may at times seem strange. The reason for this is that when we look at ideas philosophically, we are looking at them with a critical eye. We look at ideas not merely to state them but to state why we believe them. We'll look at the assumptions we make about our ideas and beliefs and, importantly, we'll look at the justification for believing them. This may, from time to time, lead you to question the practicality of what we're doing.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus once said "empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering." Philosophy addresses what, for lack of a better term, we can call the "big questions" in life. How can I deal with change? Does my being here have any meaning? How I can I deal with ethical conflict and moral dilemmas? How can I deal with suffering? How can I live a happy life? These too are important and inherently philosophical questions. The ability to reason and reflect may not solve these problems but it can be helpful. In this sense, philosophy can be, not only enjoyable but also therapeutic.
A final word is in order by way of introducing the subject of philosophy. The word itself means literally "love of wisdom." This puts many people in mind of something very subjective. One person's wisdom is another person's folly. So we may be tempted to conclude that philosophy is nothing but various people's opinions; unsubstantiated opinions at that. If this were true, philosophy would simply not be worth our time to investigate it and learn about it. After all, we all have opinions and some may turn out to be true. Socrates famously made a distinction between true opinion and knowledge. Some opinions may be true though we may not know why or what makes them true. This is why knowledge is to be preferred. Knowledge must be justified.
This is what makes philosophy more than just so many people's opinions. We will see philosophers expressing their opinions but to take them seriously, we will also demand that they justify them. That is we will want to see whether a philosopher can back up their opinion with facts to defend it. This is what we mean in philosophy by constructing an argument for something. We require this of scientists and will not accept anything less from philosophers. What we will be investigating throughout this course are various philosophical arguments (or theories if you prefer) concerning the questions I mentioned above. It will be our job to consider the arguments and determine whether they can stand up to critical scrutiny. In subjecting them to critical reasoning we will be strengthening our own philosophical ideas as well which is one of the many practical benefits to doing philosophy.
The important thing to remember about analyzing theories is what counts as evidence. We sometimes approach theories of past philosophers with a sense of wonder that they could have been so ignorant as to have come up with such crazy ideas in the first place; especially when there is so little evidence in favor of them.
In response to this consider the following story. Someone once asked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who we'll be studying later) if he didn't think that people in the middle ages must have been awfully stupid to have thought that the sun goes around the Earth when as any school kid knows the Earth goes around the sun and it doesn't take too many brains to figure that out. Wittgenstein responded, "Well, perhaps but I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been going around the Earth?" The point of course is that it would have looked exactly the same. It’s not the evidence that guides the theory but rather the theory that guides the evidence. Theory creation always precedes the search for evidence because without theory we would not know what evidence to search for.
Please remember as we look at philosophical theories of the past that people back then weren't stupid; far from it. We do know different things than they did and in many cases, we have advanced far from them. But we can gain insight into our thinking today if we can understand their thinking in the past. After all, we live with parts of the past today. We have in essence taken the best of ideas in the past and developed them. Philosophy is in essence the study of ideas and this course can be thought of as a course in the history of ideas. And so without further hesitation, we will turn to a consideration of a theory whose fundamental component is the Idea: Plato's theory of Forms.