Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Edward Craig
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0192854216
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How ought we to live? What really exists? How do we know? This book introduces important themes in ethics, knowledge, and the self, via readings from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Darwin, and Buddhist writers. It emphasizes throughout the point of studying philosophy, explains how different areas of philosophy are related, and explores the contexts in which philosophy was and is studied.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
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perception yields knowledge need not be saying that the process of perception itself involves no thought whatever, so that we can have as it were pure perception untainted by any thinking. Even to look at my table and see that there is a pen on it requires more of me than just passively registering the light patterns that enter my eyes. I need to know a y little about pens, at the very least about what they look like, and hp so then bring this knowledge to bear, otherwise I shall no
different choices. And it can only be a few. But be assured that there are plenty more, indeed that however much you read, there will still be plenty more. Descartes: Discourse on the Method In Chapter 2 I remarked that, whereas the ethical discussion presented in Plato’s Crito could almost have taken place yesterday, Plato’s cosmology takes us back to a completely different world. True – but we needn’t go back that far; four centuries will be enough. In 1600 it was, admittedly, over
not to bother too much about drawing a neat sharp line between philosophy and science. The point is not that the line isn’t sharp, although I believe that to be true. The point is that the line (if it exists) is not of much importance for philosophy. On any reasonable way of drawing it Darwin’s Origin is science, more specifically biology. But because of its subject-matter, and the claims it makes, very few books have had greater philosophical impact. For it implies a startling thesis about
immediate the benefits and the dangers, the more powerful the apparatus needed to maintain belief in them and faith in those who confer (or avert) them. This isn’t a matter of intentional deception – though it would be absurd 105 16. Dwarfing everything, Hobbes’s Leviathan rises out of the billowing hills of the English countryside. Can this really be safety? No wonder Locke was worried. to suggest that no such thing ever occurs. It isn’t even a question of whether what the priestly
going on or what claim it could possibly have on your attention, don’t transfer your reaction to the whole of philosophy en bloc. It may be that you are looking at a detail from some much larger picture that you don’t yet have the experience to recognize. Or the worst may be true, and you really are reading the philosopher’s equivalent of a chess problem, something highly ingenious but with no wider significance. Whilst developing your own powers of discrimination, stick to the good old
