lucy's introduction to philosophy

a brief overview of some of the philosophy i encountered at emory based on class notes and essays.

note: most of these philosophers have robust bodies of work that go far beyond what I’ll talk about, and i will be leaving out historical context and focusing solely on the texts, but historical context is often incredibly important to fully understanding a work.

what is philosophy?

philosophy aims to answer a range of questions related to the nature of existence, knowledge, and reality; the pursuit of fundamental truths that often cannot be explained by the natural sciences.

major branches

1. metaphysics (what is the world? what is it like?)

2. epistemology (what is knowledge? what does it mean to know something?)

3. ethics (how should we treat others?)

4. logic (how do we reason?)

5. political philosophy (how do we organize society?)

continental vs. analytic: a difference in methodology

analytic philosophy

• very concerned with logical reasoning

• tends to think of the natural sciences as prior to philosophy

• wants to get as close to science as possible

continental philosophy

• rejects the idea that the natural sciences are the best or only way of describing myriad natural phenomena or of answering certain questions

• wide range of approaches

• often centers the human experience

• we will be focusing on this because it is better

Plato: The Republic

• purpose of a city: human beings are not self-sufficient, so the purpose is to meet our needs

• division of labor: people do things best when they spend all of their time focusing on one craft

• classes in the city: rulers (guardians), enforcers (auxiliary), and producers (everyone else)

• The Noble Lie: every class has literal metal in their soul since we’re all children of the earth, and you belong to your class because of your metal (gold for guardians, silver for auxiliary, or bronze for producers)

• human soul is tripartite (reason, spirit, and appetite) and these three parts correspond to the three classes

• justice in the soul is each part securing its function for the good of the whole, thus justice in the city must be every class fulfilling its function  

• what kind of good is justice?

  • justice is good in and of itself and for the sake of something else

    • in order to be happy, we must be just

    • in order to avoid consequences and have a stable city, we must be just

• how societies disintegrate from perfect justice (the republic described above) to perfect injustice (tyranny)

  • republic → civil war → improper class of guardians who pursue private interests (timocracy) → degeneration → children of timocracy inherent wealth, become obsessed with money and miserly (oligarchy) → children of the oligarchs rebel with the drones based on their desires → love of freedom and rejection of regulation, that which is not equal is treated as though it is (democracy) → excess freedom leads to a tyrant ruled by his own desires and is afraid of everyone (tyranny)

Al-Farabi: Islamic Golden Age

• humans are made of the corporeal and the incorporeal (the incorporeal is unchanging)

• human beings have an obligation to perfect their rational faculties

  • the structure of society succeeds insofar as it serves the perfection of its citizens

• most people have a mixture of virtues and vices; very few people are fully good or fully bad

  • virtues are acquired through habit

• ranks in a city are determined by the degree to which someone can understand and carry out a particular goal

• the virtuous regime is virtuous because the end it aims for is human perfection and is ruled by one with complete virtue

  • the first perfection: possessing active intellect

  • the final perfection: perfection of that intellect

• inhabitants of a virtuous city work together to achieve happiness in a form of cooperation that is a kind of love (love of virtue)

• non-virtuous regimes are unified by lower aims: usefulness and pleasure

• revealed religion: knowledge given through divine intervention

  • how do we reconcile this with knowledge obtained through reason?

    • the perfection of reason leads us to knowledge of God through the study of the natural world, thus revelation does not tell us anything that logic cannot

    • a person who comes to knowledge through revelation has not obtained true knowledge

St. Thomas Aquinas: Natural Law

• definitions of law:

  • law is a rule and measure of arts that induces people to act or refrain from acting as is determined by reason

  • law is an order of reason for the common good by one who has care for the community, and promulgated

• reason determines the end of our actions, and happiness is the ultimate end

• reason is common because humans are rational animals

• law as the rational order must involve the community as a whole otherwise the community will be unjust and imperfect

• promulgation is necessary: people must know the laws in order for them to be properly applied

• chain of law (in order from highest to lowest):

  • eternal law: the divine providence of the universe, moral law as God knows it, identical to God

  • natural law: participation in the eternal law by rational animals, the vessel through which humans engage with eternal law

  • human law: regulations derived from human reason

• practical reason: the use of reason to decide how to act

• theoretical reason: the use of reason to decide what to follow/believe

• fundamental principles of natural law:

  • do and seek good, which is the end of all action, and shun all bad or evil

  • we should preserve human life and engage in sexual union

  • we have a natural inclination to be in a society and to know God

Machiavelli: Realpolitik

• realpolitik: the practical concerns of governing without concern for morality

• no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power

• you must learn to not be good

• don’t be generous unless it’s with someone else’s money

• appear to be virtuous only insofar as it allows you to maintain power

• must appear to be honest

• is it better to be feared or loved?

  • fear is in the ruler’s control, love is in the control of the people

  • better to be feared

Descartes: Metaphysics

• starts from a place of radical doubt: how can I know what I know? How can I know that I am?

• comes to the conclusion that since he thinks he must be

  • if he doubted, then something must have doubted, thus the act of doubting proved his own existence

• senses are unreliable, so you cannot know your existence through thought but must approach it via thinking

• mind-body dualism: the mind and body are closely related but ultimately separate entities

• the problem with hard dualism: can prove the existence of the mind but not of the body

Kant: Categorical Imperative

• moral duties: rules that must be followed because they are good or valuable in themselves

• three formulations of the categorical imperative

  • act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will it without becoming a contradiction

  • act always so that you treat other rational beings as ends and not merely as means

  • every rational being must consider itself universally legislating through the maxim of its will

• immoral philosophy is to ethics as contradiction is to mathematics

• people have personhood and are not things and thus deserve certain standards of treatment

• everything in nature works according to laws

• the “good will” is the intention behind actions 

  • that which is good in itself

  • all intentions presuppose a subject that makes active decisions

  • happiness is not related to the good will, reason requires things of us

• everything in nature works according to laws, which means that everything has an explanation, logic, or reason

  • 2 + 2 = 4 explanation: the meaning of addition, numbers, basic arithmetic (abstract science)

  • it will rain today explanation: weather patterns, temperature, wind currents (natural science)

  • i want a slice of pizza explanation: basic biology of hunger, psychology, my will to follow my biology and psychology (inclinations)

  • always tell the truth explanation: moral reasoning, duties, categorical imperatives (morality)

Hobbes: Social Contract Theory

• a rational basis for monarchical rule

• state of nature: people are equal insofar as they are equally able to kill each other, this state of equality leads to a state of war

  • life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

• why do we leave the state of nature?

• passions: fear of death, drive for a better life

• reason: tells us how to achieve our ends

• natural right: absolute freedom

• The Laws of Nature:

  • we should seek peace if possible and wage war if it is not

  • cede natural right if it helps preserve life (requires a third party with coercive power and a social contract)

  • obey the contracts you have made

Locke: Social Contract Theory

• no biblical basis for the right of kings, monarchy is not a legitimate form of political power and is worse than the state of nature

• state of nature: perfect freedom and equality

• laws of nature: no one may destroy themselves, do not violate the rights of others

• in the state of nature the law is enforced by everyone

• a state of war is entered when someone maliciously and systemically violates the rights of another (you can kill someone behaving this way)

• property in the state of nature: God gave the earth in common, private property is what we’ve produced through labor

  • entitled to only as much as you can use

  • gives people the right to land ownership

  • money allows you to increase your property

Rousseau: Social Contract Theory

• human beings are equal, strong, and independent in the state of nature; not a state of misery because compassion is a natural instinct

• reason is opposed to natural compassion

• no private property means no selfishness ot competition for goods unless there is scarcity

• no moral love in the state of nature means no competition over mates because nobody is attached to one single mate

• no oppression in the state of nature

• awareness of comparative relationship over time leads to the development of reflection and self-consciousness

• recognition of other humans leads to task-based association (there are tasks that are performed better cooperatively)

• first revolution: familial life (most stable and happiest)

• second revolution: producing the means of subsistence becomes social

• the state of nature is an incredibly dangerous place to have property

  • civic institutions exist to protect the property of the rich

• political institutions and civil law prevent the state of war

• note on the state of nature that concerns all social contract theory: it is a philosophical exercise and not an actual time in history

Fichte: Idealism v. Dogmatism

• concerned with different approaches to epistemology and our ability to do philosophy under different frameworks

• rejects dogmatism in favor of idealism

  • dogmatism: representations are necessary extensions of things in themselves

  • idealism: representations are presupposed by the representing subject

• why doesn’t dogmatism work?

  • it is impossible to move from the corporeal world of things in themselves to the metaphysical realm of representations

  • if you can’t deal with the metaphysical, then you can’t do philosophy

• in dogmatism the subject is merely experiencing a thing existing in the world whereas in idealism the subject is actively creating a representation of that thing

  • idealism is active

• idealism sounds pretty cool, but how does it deal with the world outside of the representing subject?

  • one must posit the self through a self-reverting activity that necessarily requires a second activity and a third and so on and so forth (these actions take place all at once)

  • since positing can only be done in a certain way and always results in further positing, one can eventually ascertain the external

  • the actions inherent to conscious representation lead to a line of reasoning capable of positing the external

Wollstonecraft: Women's Rights

• reason and virtue are what make human beings unique

• reason, virtue, and knowledge at the level of the individual is how we measure degree of perfection

• human society ought to be based on human nature and encourage happiness/virtue

• societies with greater equality produce a greater degree of human virtue and happiness

• respect paid to property is valuing the wrong thing, it should be due to virtue and reason

• inequality prevents women from becoming virtuous because their dependence on men encourages them to value traits that please men

• since the servility of women is conditioned, it can be fixed

• since women possess reason they have duties, but duties require rights

• women need:

  • education

  • right to own property

  • financial and civil independence from men

Hegel: Dialectics and Consciousness

• the subject initially tries to gain self-consciousness through its relation to objects which it can exert its will upon and thus differentiate itself from, but this is not a long-term solution because eventually it will run out of objects 

• in order to build a sustainable self-consciousness, the subject must seek mutual recognition with another subject in which it can recognize its own self-externality (the part of itself mirrored in the other)

• the tension between the two subjects that is ultimately resolved through mutual recognition, a process which both transforms and maintains the original subject, is known as sublation

• this process of recognition in another force opposed to yet related to the subject is sometimes summed up at “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” but that is WRONG

• the master/slave dialectic: what happens when a subject tries to treat another subject as an object

  • in the relationship between the slave and the master, the master seeks to gain a recognition from the slave that is not mutual by forcing the slave to recognize them without recognizing the slave in return

  • this extreme form of the movement of recognition described above is known as the life-and-death struggle and is what leads to the master/slave relationship

  • by forcing an unequal relationship, the master prevents the movement of recognition thus preventing themselves from obtaining the self-consciousness it initially sought

Marx: Historical Materialism

• historical materialism: explores human development and social change by looking at the conditions of production (human relationships are determined by the ways in which we collectively reproduce ourselves)

• human beings are fundamentally social and realize their own nature by the way they produce themselves (the way they labor); they can consciously reflect on their own activity, and they can create freely

• the way human beings work together and engage in activity determines our nature (species being)

• property is a social relationship expressed materially

• for every social structure there is a corresponding social structure and property relation

stage	social structure	property relation
hunting, fishing, beginning of agriculture	patriarchal family	tribal ownership
division of labor between town and country, trade, slave labor	city or union of tribes	communal ownership
serf labor for agricultural production, small artisans and guilds	feudalism	estates and small capital
industrialization	division between workers and owners	private property/wage labor

Nietzsche: Nihilism

• in ancient times morality was based on power

  • value system prioritized strength, beauty, wealth, etc.

  • good vs. bad

• the Jews were enslaved by the Romans and needed some way to deal with their persecution

• Christianity emerged as a “slave morality” out of this context in which what is seen as moral is subverted

  • value system prioritizes chastity, forgiveness, poverty etc.

  • good vs. evil

• this slave morality is basically just a cope for the inability of the oppressed to liberate themselves or seek revenge on the oppressors

  • a morality built on reifying that which is accessible

Arendt: On Totalitarianism

• what is needed for totalitarianism?

  • a mass of political disengaged, atomized individuals

  • complete loyalty which is made possible by the complete elimination of concrete political aims and by alienation

• how does totalitarianism function?

  • a mixture of gullibility and cynicism: “politics is a game of cheating”

  • hierarchically ordered

  • everything that happens is predictable in accordance with laws only accessible to the leader

• once in power, totalitarian states are hard for other states to understand

• control is an end in and of itself

• aims at a system where human beings are superfluous

traditional	totalitarian
legitimate vs. arbitrary exercise of power	justification from the source of legitimacy of positive law while at the same time eliminating positive law; exercises laws of nature without codifying into positive law (no difference between justice and legality)
sources of legitimacy are seen to be unchanging while human affairs are changing	laws are laws of movement and totalitarianism aims to “stabilize”
positive law stabilizes human affairs, makes space for freedom	total terror

Foucault: Power and Knowledge

• concerned with the way power constitutes what is and is not knowledge

• totalitarian theories: organized, systematized body of knowledge that sorts things into relevant and irrelevant, true and untrue

• insurrection of subjugated knowledges: emergence of knowledges that have been repressed by totalizing theories

  • erudite subjugated knowledge: historical contents that have been buried, looking to the origin of discourses (the denaturalizing of categories like natural and unnatural, for example)

  • disqualified subjugated knowledge: low-ranking, discredited, regional, popular knowledge, knowledge not given high value (indigenous farming practices, for example)

• genealogy: recognition of the union of subjugated knowledges that allows for the recognition of historical knowledge and the application of said knowledge in modern contexts

  • a history of struggle

• we need a model of power that goes beyond the economism of liberal juridical and Marxist models which see power as a thing

  • liberal judicial: power is had and vested in something else

  • marxist model: power as class oppression

• non-economistic models of power: 

  • reich: power as repression that is defined by that which it is used against

  • nietzsche: the political apparatus that comes out of war conditions is the codification of oppression

• power as it functions via techniques and technologies that are methods

• traditional political philosophy: a discourse of truth aimed at limiting power

• foucault: discourses of truth are created by power, power needs discourses of truth to operate that then establish rules of right

  • right in the west is modeled on sovereign power

  • sovereign power produces laws and rules of right that are eventually deployed against the sovereign

  • the theory of right fixes the legitimacy of power and effaces the domination intrinsic to power and its consequences

  • right should be viewed in terms of subjugation and not legitimacy

• precautions when analyzing power:

  • look for power at the periphery, not at the center

  • power is not at the level of conscious intent

  • power is not wielded by one person over another

  • start local and not from a given presupposition

  • power is not ideology

• to understand power we must look to local instances of coercion and technologies of control

• sovereign power: power exercised over the earth and its products, characterized by legal obligation encoded into law, the absolute expenditure of power

• dIsciplinary power: power exercised over bodies, codification of continuous surveillance, interested in minimum expenditure and maximum return

• sovereign power, or the system of right that understands power in terms of sovereign power, is a system of right that conceals the operations of domination through the democratization of sovereignty

• the arena of power operates via two incompatible limits:

  • the public right of sovereignty (the rule of law and sovereign will)

  • the polymorphous mechanisms of discipline (the rule of he natural or the norm)

• war-repression model is inadequate because you presuppose there is an intrinsic something being crushed, presupposes that a subject is naturally occurring

• the possibility of an anti-disciplinary form of right not based on a return to sovereign power

• discourse: ways of constituting knowledge, together with social practices, forms of subjectivity, and power relations which adhere in such knowledges and relations between them

• sovereign right to kill: a state can decide when its citizens must die in order to maintain sovereignty

• biopower: a sovereignty concerned with the population as a whole that is based in control over life

  • an outgrowth of modernity

  • a massifying form of power that deals not with the individual but with the species

  • public healthcare, environmental regulations, welfare

  • can turn its focus towards death in cases of racism where it is believed that an out-group poses a threat to the health and vitality of the in-group (see Nazism)

Derrida: Death

• “learning to live ought to mean learning to die – to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality – without positive outcome, or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else.”

• you cannot know how to live without knowing how to die

  • epistemological problem: he remains impervious to the knowledge of how to die

  • this means by necessity that he must also not know how to live

• this doesn’t matter though because learning to live is narcissistic 

• survival: the most intense form of life, life past death

  • problem with survival: we are unable to control who will inherit what we leave behind

  • survival is life beyond death, “life more than life”

    • thus this discourse is not death oriented but rather the discourse of one who prefers living, one who prefers survival

    • “survival is not simply what remains, it is the most intense life possible”

• there are mortuary rights across cultures, but no culture has an understanding or a tradition of how one must properly die, no culture of death itself

• death is neither entirely biological nor is it entirely cultural

• life and death are dialectically opposed, but through sublation we come to understand that the “to live” cannot be understood without the “to die”

  • this contradiction/tension are what compose a subject

• traditional hierarchies place life first and death second, but Derrida wants to flip this

  • we must understand life in terms of death

Fanon: Decolonialism

• the colonial society is a compartmentalized society in that upon its foundation, the spatial and social categories of colonizer and colonized are imposed and the formation of geographic boundaries is enforced

  • violently established, the colonist regime owes its legitimacy to force

• colonial violence can only be combated with greater violence

• colonist identity is based in the act of colonizing

  • the idea of oneself as white and not black or European and not African

  • this prevents recognition between the colonizer and the colonized as the colonizer compartmentalizes the colonized within themselves

    • this prevents the colonizer from existing for themselves

    • colonialism is thus a violent, uneven form of subjugation 

• racism provides a convenient means to distinguish between groups and build hierarchies and to justify said hierarchies with biological determinism

• decolonization is the undoing of this relationship and involves the confrontation of two necessarily intertwined antagonistic forces

  • the undoing of the colonial situation thus allows for a new subjectivity, and the sovereignty that comes with it, to become available to the colonized

• violence needs direction and ideology, otherwise it just works against the colonized

• violence is not just a means to an end for the colonized, it is the embodiment of decolonial ideology

• in a dialectical framework, violence can be seen as perfect mediation

Fuller: Legal Positivism

• legal positivism: laws should be analyzed in the context of a closed system; society as a legal order without an appeal to morality; study of the law as it is rather than as it ought to be

• the internal morality of the law: the morality of the law making itself, the form of the law (its procedure)

• the external morality of the law: whether or not a given law or code is moral, the context of the law, the substance

• there are eight principles of internal morality of law:

  • generality: the law is general rules

  • publicity: the law needs to be published

  • prospectivity: the rule must be forward binding

  • intelligibility: the laws must be able to be understood

  • consistency (non-contradiction): the laws must be consistent with one another

  • practicability: the law must be able to be followed by the people

  • stability: the laws must not be changed to frequently 

  • congruency: the rulings must match the actual decisions made in court

• judicial review is essential

• internal morality seeks the better system, not the best

Bauman: Modernity and the Holocaust

• we should not view the Holocaust as a moral regression into barbarism but rather as an outgrowth of the conditions and ideologies of modernity

  • factors including taxonomic classification of species, the focus of rule following as a moral good, and the division of labor

  • the introduction of Darwinism and evolutionary biology was bastardized into race science and eugenics

  • would not have eugenics outside of the context of a society heavily influenced by ideas of natural selection

  • would not be able to execute the Holocaust without proceduralism

• society as a social garden: some species of plant are privileged over others

• moral inhibitions against violent atrocities tend to be eroded once three conditions are met, singly or together; the violence is authorized (by official orders coming from the legally entitled quarters), actions are routinized (by rule-governed practices and exact specification of rules), and the victims of violence are dehumanized (by ideological definitions and indoctrination)

• violence and medicine are turned into tools of social engineering

• the Holocaust was executed at the peak of modern, rational society at a high stage of human cultural achievement and it is a problem of that society, civilization, and culture

Crenshaw: Critical Race Theory

• intersectionality: an explanation for the unique oppression of people with multiple marginalized identities within the legal system

• various forms of inequality tend to operate together and exacerbate each other, yet we tend to focus on single identities as if they operate independently of each other

• anti-discrimination laws are designed to operate on a single axis, thus when, say, a black woman faces discrimination they are often left without legal remedy

• example: DeGraffenreid v. General Motors

  • a group of black women argued that General Motors was discriminating against them by only hiring white women for secretarial positions

  • court could only operate on single axes of discrimination and thus did not provide remedy

    • since black men were hired in the factories there must not be racial discrimination

    • since white women were hired as secretaries there must not be gender discrimination

Mbembe: Necropower

• necropower: the idea that sovereignty is defined by the power to decide who is allowed to live and who must die

  • you are a sovereign being insofar as you have a prerogative over death

• a modern sovereignty

  • traditional notions of sovereignty tend to be rooted in the exercise of reason

    • problem: leads to the subjugation of people and groups deemed to be unreasonable, fundamental to colonialism

• same as the sovereign right to kill? 

  • no!

  • sovereign right to kill: killing is an exercise of sovereignty, but it is not what defines or creates that sovereignty

  • necropolitics: killing is fundamental to the essence of sovereignty, death becomes the truth of power

• same as biopower?

  • no!

  • biopower is obsessed with the species and with life and only turns towards death with the introduction of racism (out-group seen as a threat to the lives of the in-group)

  • necropower is always concerned with death, and life is secondary (see the notion of the power to “allow” to live)