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Think Summary | Simon Blackburn | PDF Download
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Book
Think A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy Simon Blackburn Oxford UP, 1999 Buy the book
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Recommendation Gertrude Stein observed of Ezra Pound that he was a village explainer, and very good to have around if one happened to be a village. Simon Blackburn merits the same level of praise. This book’s stated intention is to give readers some sense of how philosophers approach the really big questions of knowledge, free will, God, reasoning, and so on. That’s a tall order. Think is better appreciated as a chrestomathy of thought-provoking quotations and asides. The book’s strongest points are its useful tips on formulating and analyzing arguments. Incidentally, the politically correct reader will be delighted at Blackburn’s bows to genderneutral language, his digs at the religious right and his sly elbow in the dead ribs of Edmund Burke. getAbstract recommends this book for anyone interested in philosophy but short of time, or merely out to impress friends, colleagues and clients by dropping names of celebrity philosophers into conversations or sales pitches.
In this summary, you will learn • Why the study of philosophy better helps us understand ourselves • Why studying philosophy can help you to step back and critically examine the origins, validity and consequences of ideas • What some major philosophical concepts are
Take-Aways • Philosophy is not a body of knowledge, but a skill like playing the piano. • Ideas matter. • The way we think matters. • Every good argument in philosophy seems to have a counter-argument just as good. • The important thing is not to get the answer right, but to get an answer the right way. • Logic provides tools to test whether arguments are valid. • A valid conclusion is one that follows from its premises. • A sound argument is a valid argument whose premises are indeed true. • Philosophers cannot tell us for sure whether we exist, what we are, whether we are free, whether God exists, whether we know anything about the world, or whether the world exists at all for that matter. • Chance is as relentless as necessity.
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Think Summary | Simon Blackburn | PDF Download
Summary
“Reflection doesn’t get the world’s business done.”
“In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other.”
“The smoke never returns into the cigarette; the toothpaste never goes back into the tube. The extra extraor ordi dinary nary thing is that there was ever enough order in things for the smoke to be in the cigarette or the toothpaste to be in the tube in the first place.”
“Not all statements about the average are sensible or useful: As has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.”
“To process thoughts well is a matter of being able to avoid confusion, detect ambiguities, keep things in mind one at a time, make reliable arguments, become aware of alter alterna natives, tives, and so on.”
Knowledge On November 10, 1619 the philosopher, mathematician and pious Catholic René Descartes shut himself away in a room heated by a stove and had a vision followed by dreams. He concluded that this experience had revealed his vocation: to unfold the one true way to knowledge. The world was rapidly changing. Polish astronomer Copernicus had formulated a heliocentric model of the solar system, and such scientists as Galileo were laying the foundations of a "mechanical" science of nature. There seemed to be no room in the world for God. Descartes aimed to show that God still belonged to the world, or the world to God. He was the first philosopher to wrestle with the implications of the modern scientific world view. The issues he treated in his "Meditations" included most of the central problems for subsequent philosophy. He begins by introducing a world in which nothing is certain, in which nothing the senses tell him can be trusted, because an Evil Demon has the power to deceive people through their senses. However, if one can be deceived, one must exist. In fact, if one can think at all, one must exist. This is the famous "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). Although this tells us that "I" exist, it tells us nothing about what "I" is. A later philosopher, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, denied that Descartes’ argument was sound. "We should say ’it thinks’ just as we say ’it thunders’," he wrote. "Even to say ’cogito’ is too much, if we translate it with ’I think’." All Descartes can properly claim is that thought is going on - not that some "I" is thinking it! Descartes merely sidestepped that problem. Looking into the vague "I" whose existence he had proven to his own satisfaction, he discovered that he had an idea of perfection. An idea of perfection must have a perfect cause: God. Therefore God exists. And if the perfect God exists, he will guard us against any Evil Demon’s illusions. As long as we trust our clear and distinct ideas, we will be safe from deception. Cartesian reasoning has had many critics, none more acute perhaps than Scotland’s David Hume. Hume attacked Descartes at his starting point, the universal doubt. For Hume, it is important to trust our senses, reasoning and common experiences. For Hume and other British philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the best contact between mind and the world is the point at which you see and touch a familiar object. They were empiricists, rather than Cartesian rationalists. Reason The tool that philosophers like Descartes and Hume use in building their arguments, and, indeed the weapon that they wield when attacking one another, is logic - the study of the ways things can be true. People sometimes describe logic as coercive or masculine and accuse it of favoring linear thinking instead of lateral thinking. Both of these charges are mistaken. Formal logic does not direct the course of anyone’s thoughts, but rather tells whether there is any way in which all the propositions in a set, however arrived at, can be true together. The working parts of an argument are its premises. From the premises derive the conclusion. According to the laws of logic, an argument is valid if its conclusions follow from the premises. It is invalid if they do not - if there is some flaw in the reasoning. When the premises of a valid argument are true, the argument is sound. We want our reasoning to be valid, so when forming an argument, we need to analyze whether there is any way our premises can be true without our conclusion being true. The formula "p & -p" is a contradiction; it cannot be true. The formula "-(p & -p)" is true. Bracketing is extremely important in logic. Many fallacies in formal and informal reasoning can be avoided by knowing where brackets fall, knowing the
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Think Summary | Simon Blackburn | PDF Download
scope of the negatives, conjunctions, etc. One of the terrific virtues of formal logic is that it sensitizes people to scope ambiguities that arise when it is not clear where the brackets lie.
“Descartes was smart.”
Philosophers of language distinguish between the information carried by an utterance, its truth-condition, and its implicature, the suggested or implied meaning. The study of pragmatics addresses the way in which implicatures are generated, while the study of semantics addresses the structure of information. Uncovering the hidden presuppositions behind questions and opinions is an important part of thinking. Free Will
“Behavior is not a transparent guide to sensations, thoughts, or feelings.”
“Animals can presumably perceive the world, but we are nervous about supposing that they can represent to themselves distant and past and future states of affairs.”
“Chance is as relentless as necessity.”
“Perhaps blame and associated reactions have a function, and we just need things with that function.”
“If our best efforts come to often enough, wenothing need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.”
We are conscious of our freedom - at least, we seem to be free. Sometimes we are proud of our freedom, as when we struggle successfully against addictions. Freedom brings responsibility. The doctrine of determinism denies freedom. It can be stated simplistically as follows: 1) The past controls the present and future; 2) You can’t control the past; 3) You can’t control the way the past controls the present and future, so 4) You can’t control the present and future. People who accept this argument are called "hard determinists" or incompatibilists, because they think that freedom and determinism are incompatible. Some have tried to counter determinism by introducing an element of randomness into their model of the world. In fact, quantum physics offers a world where events seem to happen without any cause. But chance is as relentless as necessity. Freedom is as meaningless in a random world as in a deterministic world. Compatibilism, on the other hand, denies that there is any people contradiction between acknowledging determinism and simultaneously holding responsible for their actions. Compatibilists say that we are part of the causal order, part of the way that the past controls the future. We control nature from inside nature. If we exercise control badly, we can be held responsible. Thus, recklessness and negligence are faults, and we can be held responsible for them. The event of someone eating an omelet is always preceded by the event of someone breaking an egg. The event of reaching the top of the mountain is always preceded by the event of starting out. Doing nothing is invariably followed by no omelet, or no summit. Which events unfold from time’s womb depends on what we decide to do. When we are powerless, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny are sometimes consoling. But not when we are acting. When we are driving a car, we cannot safely think that it makes no difference whether we turn the wheel or hit the brake. Our best efforts do not come to nothing. The Self Descartes thought we had a "clear and distinct" perception that the soul was distinct from the body, although he could say little else about it. Hume pointed out that the self is elusive, unobservable. Looking into ourselves to find it, we see only perceptions, experiences and emotions, never the "I" that perceives, experiences and emotes. Yet we all feel that we know ourselves! Many philosophers reason that the soul is simple, rather than composite. Since all change, death and decay amounts to the falling apart of composite things, if the soul is not composite it may well be immortal. Yet John Locke pointed out that we can refer to a tree as the same oak tree even though its constituent parts change over time. Thus, the sapling, the mature tree and the pruned tree are all the same oak tree because all stages share the same life. Since we don’t know anything about immaterial substance, is it possible that it gets replaced the same way oak tree cells do? Hume, again, held that we could not properly talk about an "I" as distinct from its perceptions and experiences and emotions. For him, and for some others, the self is merely a bundle of perceptions. But we can no more have perceptions floating
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around waiting to be bundled up than we can have dents floating around waiting to affix themselves to a car. Perhaps the solution to these questions and problems is to think of the self as an organizing principle. In this case, the "I" is not something else to be experienced but rather the point of view from which interpretation of experience begins. “There is a curious difference between the past and the future, when we think of our own selves.”
“Many people called ’illogical’ may actually be propounding valid arguments, but be dotty in other ways.”
God Beliefs are supposed to be true, but religion may, in fact, not be a matter of truth or falsity. Accepting a religion may be more like enjoying a poem or playing football, an immersion in a set of practices. Poems, artworks and religions may be magnificent, moving and awe-inspiring, but not because they are true or false. Yet believers do not think of religion this way. They expect, for example, the resurrection of the dead in the same matter-of-fact way that they expect the arrival of the mail. Some have tried to prove their beliefs using reason. St. Anselm, for example, defined God as something than which nothing greater could be conceived. Since something that does exist is greater than something that does not exist, he argued that God must be true. This form of circular reasoning is deeply flawed, and was in fact rejected by other great philosophers and theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that God was necessary in order to explain the world. This cosmological proof of God’s existence comes in several forms. The first cause argument says that everything is caused by something - but that there must somewhere along the line be a first cause, itself uncaused, that caused everything else. Another form of the cosmological argument looks at the uniformity of nature. For example, one says that the chance of various cosmological constants being adjusted so that life becomes possible anywhere in the universe is so unimaginably slim that a wise architect must have adjusted them.
“Chance is just as good at throwing up im prob proba abili bilities as design.”
“To understand the structure of information is to understand the ways it can be true.”
Both the first cause argument and the argument from the uniformity of nature have been attacked by skeptics. The problem of evil is also particularly knotty for believers. Perhaps God merely has a twisted sense of humor - as the Jewish joke goes, he led the Chosen People around the desert for 40 years only to drop them on the only spot in the Middle East with no oil! Why Bother? Why bother to study philosophy? Philosophical reflection doesn’t accomplish anything, but there are three reasons we might want to study it. First, to better understand ourselves. Second, because how we think about ourselves and our actions affects what we do and how we do it. Third, because ideas have practical consequences. People kill each other when they disagree about ideas, rights, religions, etc. Philosophical reflection enables us to step back and critically examine the origins, validity and consequences of our ideas.
About the Author Simon Blackburn is Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. He was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford from 1969 to 1990. His books include the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy He edited the journal Mind journal Mind from 1984 to 1990. This document is restricted to the personal use of Teresina Teresina Sulipa (
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