— A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions Book 55
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1 Philosophy
Secondly, the moment they are prepared to say, however briefly and dogmatically, why it is useless, they will be talking about the ineffectuality of certain types of thought, or of human beings’ incapacity to deal with certain types of question. And then instead of rejecting philosophy they will have become another voice within it–a sceptical voice, admittedly, but then philosophy has never been short of sceptical voices, from the earliest times to the present day. – Page 2
George Berkeley (1685–1753): ‘Few men think, yet all will have opinions.’ – Page 10
3 How Do We Know?
For us to have good reason to believe that an event of that kind would have been contrary to a law of nature, it must be contrary to all our experience, and to our best theories of how nature works. But if that is so then we must have very strong reason to believe that The Event did not occur–in fact the strongest reason we ever do have for believing anything of that sort. – Page 30
5 Some Themes
Once we agree to take more than one basic value into account we will inevitably find that our values sometimes come into conflict. – Page 46
Integrity means wholeness, unity; the idea of integrity as a value is the idea of a life lived as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected episodes. – Page 49
Rationality is what you’ve got if you have some capacity to reason: to work out, given certain truths, what else is likely to be true if they are; perhaps also (though you need rather more rationality for this) how likely. – Page 52
This suggests that the idea that we have reasons for our beliefs is just a local appearance, which disappears as soon as we try to look at the wider picture: ‘reasons’ turn out to be relative to certain other beliefs for which we have no reasons. The search for a satisfactory response to this argument has structured a whole area of philosophical inquiry known as epistemology or the theory of knowledge. – Page 55
What makes all my experiences hang together doesn’t have to be a relation they all stand in to something else; it might be some system of relationships that they all stand in to each other – Page 57
6 Of ‘Isms’
What I am really aware of when I look at a table is not the table itself but how the table looks to me. ‘How it looks to me’ describes not the table, but my mind–it is the state of consciousness which the object, whatever it is, produces in me when I look at it. – Page 65
‘empiricism’ is a very general word for doctrines that favour perceiving over thinking, ‘rationalism’ for doctrines that favour thinking over perceiving. – Page 67
Nobody who thinks that knowledge is only of what you have perceived can claim to know that nothing imperceptible exists, since that isn’t something you could possibly perceive. – Page 68
It may be true that there is no thought-free perception; but it is also true that there is no perception-free knowledge. – Page 68
So if you hear someone going on about relativism without saying relativism about what, give a badly concealed yawn. – Page 73
8 What’S In It For Whom?
Simple, easily attainable pleasures are no less pleasant than extravagant and exotic ones; and reliance on the latter induces anxiety: the means to obtain them may be taken away from you. – Page 101
Harm Principle: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community … is to prevent harm to others’. – Page 103
The less tangible and 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. – Page 105
Of course it isn’t just priests who need to be needed. It’s also doctors and dustbin men and game show presenters and advertising consultants. And–I almost forgot–philosophy professors. They all exist because of people’s beliefs and values, hopes and fears. – Page 109
It may have been a victim of its own success–after all, there is no test of a theory like actually trying it out. (That’s the principle which underlies the enormous power of the experimental method in the sciences.) And no political theory ever gets a proper trial unless a lot of people are already convinced of it. – Page 109
Diagnosis is one thing, a cure is another. It turns out to be just as possible to experience alienation when the work one is doing is not one’s own but the State’s as when it is not one’s own but the company’s. That much identification with the interests of the community, when the community is a large and complex one, is not easily achieved or maintained. And even if it were, that would just help to make work endurable. If what you do is stand by a conveyor belt tightening the lids on jars of marmalade it may make things less intolerable to be doing it for Mother Russia than for the Global Marmalade Corporation. But that does nothing whatever to make it something positive, an expression of your personality or skills or a means to the development of your potential. – Page 111
History tells us a good deal about what women can do, because women have done it. It tells us nothing about what they can’t do, and it never will until they are routinely given the opportunity. – Page 112