2nd Term Study Guide

What is Philosophy?
● What is a philosophical question?
○ Open
■ There are right and wrong answers, but also different levels of
rightness and wrongness
○ Conceptual
■ About ideas, concepts, notions
○ Universal in Appeal
■ Talks about issues that can affect everyone
○ Invites rational inquiry
■ Requires critical reasoning to analyse
● The difference between philosophy, science, and religion
○ Philosophical questions are open and conceptual
■ About non-measurable things like justice, freedom, morals, etc.
○ Science questions are questions about the natural world that are answered
through the scientific method
○ Religious questions are answered through faith
● How do we answer philosophical questions?
○ Carefully defining our terms (ex: What do you mean by happiness?)
○ Analyzing the question using critical reasoning
■ Critical reasoning is using facts, evidence, and arguments to make a
judgement
○ Constructing clear and sound logical arguments
■ Using examples and counter-examples
■ Creating Hypotheticals
● An imaginary situation to test a new idea
○ Ex: ‘Imagine a world where there were no prisons…’
● Two types of thinking
○ System 1
■ Quick, instinctual thinking that can easily fall into fallacies
○ System 2
■ Slow, deliberate, analytical thinking less likely to fall into fallacies
● What is knowledge?
○ Plato defined knowledge as a justified, true belief
■ To be justified, there must be a valid and true argument to support it
● Four questions that are helpful in clarifying someone’s argument
○ What do you mean by…?
○ Can you give me an example?
○ How did you come to that conclusion?
○ Can you walk me through that?
● How do we write a philosophical essay?
○ Defines key terms
○ Clearly expresses exactly what the question is that the essay is answering
○ Explores the question from several perspectives
○ Every paragraph should have:
■ A claim (a statement that you believe is correct)
■ Evidence (facts or arguments relevant to the question and your claim)

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● This will always include a philosopher and a what they

believed
■ Reasoning (a sound logical argument that shows why the evidence
supports your claim)
● This may include examples, hypotheticals, and the
consequences of a certain belief

Philosophers and Others

Freud
● Interested in Psychology and Psychoanalysis
○ Philosophy is the study of knowledge, truth, and reality
○ Psychology is the study of the human mind and its behavior
● Examined the unconscious mind
○ These are the ideas and motives that are repressed in our mind
■ Repressed means we are not able to think about and examine these
thoughts and feelings
○ However, these repressed thoughts still exert a pressure on our conscious
thoughts and can influence our actions
■ They can make us biassed without us realizing it and interpret things
in different ways
○ Some things give us clues about our unconscious mind
■ Dreams
● ‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge
of the unconscious activities of the mind’ -Freud
■ Freudian Slips
● An error in speaking that reveals something else your mind is
preoccupied with
● Example: President Bush accidentally condemning ‘The
invasion of Iraq’, which he was responsible for, instead of ‘the
invasion of Ukraine’
○ Talking gives more opportunities to discover clues about our unconscious
■ Knowing more about it can help people understand and fix their
problems better
● Believed in Determinism
○ All behaviors are caused by internal, mental mechanisms in our mind
■ The unconscious!
○ Therefore, we do not truly control our actions
■ There is no free will

Popper and Kuhn

● Scientists struggled with The Problem of Induction
○ Discussed by David Hume in the 18th Century
○ Stating that things will happen in the future like they happened in the past
uses inductive reasoning
■ Example:
● Specific Claim: In the past, the Sun always rises in the East

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● General Claim: The Sun always (past and future) rises in the
East
○ We must do this all the time in everyday life
○ But science during the Enlightenment was founded on rationality and reason
■ The only way to justify induction is… using induction!
■ This is a circular argument and not rational
● Before we use induction, we must assume the past predicts
the future
● But we are already using induction in assuming the past
predicts the future!
○ Induction is ‘the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy’
● Popper claims science doesn’t use induction
○ Instead, science finds errors in hypotheses and says those hypotheses are
not true
■ By removing wrong hypotheses, the few remaining theories are more
likely to be true
○ This requires hypotheses to be falsifiable
■ They must have a test that could give an error and prove them false
○ This is what makes something a science: it is falsifiable
○ A pseudoscience makes claims that are unfalsifiable
■ Examples:
● Einstein said gravity can bend light and predicted that, during a
solar eclipse, the light from the stars near the sun should be
slightly out of place
○ Falsifiable?
■ Yes! If those stars were not out of place, his
hypothesis would have been wrong
● Freud said all thoughts and actions come from our
unconscious, which is mostly hidden from us
○ Falsifiable?
■ No! Freud can always say ‘but actually, it is the
hidden unconscious’ to any result
● Kuhn thought science is not just gathering more knowledge about the world
○ Science progresses by undergoing great revolutions every once in a while
○ These are called paradigm shifts
■ A paradigm is the common concepts and values a scientific
community has
○ Scientists do ‘normal science’ using their current paradigm until enough
experiments show that something is not quite right
■ Ex: People used to think that diseases were transmitted through ‘bad
air’. After enough experiments showed errors with this theory, a new
theory of germs replaced it
○ Paradigms are difficult to change!
■ It is hard to think outside of the current paradigm
■ But if scientists can convince the community that a paradigm will be
better at solving future problems, it will become the dominant
paradigm.

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The Existentialists

1. Existence Precedes Essence

● We arrive in the world and must create our own lives, values, and meaning
○ Contrasts with Aristotle:
■ Human beings have a nature that flourishes through practice
and virtue
● Theist context (ex: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky):
○ There is a God and ultimate purpose
○ Faith is not easy
● Atheist context (ex: Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus)
○ There is no God and no ultimate purpose
2. Human Beings are Free and Responsible
● Theist: We must rise in faith to the challenge of freedom
● Atheist: ‘We are condemned to be free’
3. Choices Create Meaning
● Theist: Done through choices in a personal and difficult religious faith
● Atheist: Done through choices without a God
4. Authenticity
● We must live without hypocrisy, thoughtless routine, conformity
5. The Absurd
● Human beings seek meaning
● But the universe gives no meaning

Søren Kierkegaard
● The ‘Father of Existentialism’
● Inspired by Jesus and Socrates
○ Both taught by challenging people through questions and discussion
○ Jesus also used parables
■ Parables are short metaphorical stories
■ They can serve as riddles and invite interpretation and discussion
● Subjectivity
○ To exist means we must make choices
○ People choose based on their experiences and relationships with other things
○ Subjectivity is the relationship between a person (the subject) and an object
○ What if the object is an objective fact?
■ Truth is more than just scientific facts
■ Scientific Facts:
● Based on experiment
● Reproducible
● Validated by a community of scientists
● Can be expressed in mathematics
■ Our subjectivity with a fact is more important than the fact!
● Ex: Using atoms to make nuclear energy to power cities is
more important than the fact atoms can give us energy
○ ‘Subjectivity is truth’ -Kierkegaard
● The ‘Leap of Faith’
○ Faith requires doubt

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■ Ex: You don’t have faith that fire is hotter than ice because you are
certain that it is true from experience
■ To truly have faith in God, you must also doubt your belief in God
○ Faith is not decided on evidence
■ No evidence could ever be enough to justify the incredible
commitment involved in religious faith or romantic love
■ Faith is making that commitment anyways

Friedrich Nietzcshe
● Style
○ Wrote in aphorisms
■ Small, independent paragraphs full of meaning
■ Imaginative, poetic
■ Not academic: often ironic, sincere, arrogant, and provocative
○ Examples:
■ What does not kill me, makes me stronger
■ There are no facts, only interpretations
■ Become who you are
■ Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does that
■ What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil
● Philosophy
○ Belief in the Christian god is no longer believable
■ Our present life is certain, while a Christian afterlife is uncertain
■ Focusing more on an uncertain afterlife only hurts us in the present
■ We can no longer rely on God for our morals
● ‘God is dead’
○ Therefore, everything built upon this belief must collapse
■ This includes European morality
■ We must rethink (and go beyond) ideas of good and evil!
● This includes Christian virtues like:
○ Compassion
○ Kindness
○ Altruism (helping others over yourself)
● These were the values of the weak to take power from the
strong!
○ Willfully destroying old values leads to nihilism
■ Nihilism: life has no inherent meaning or truth, so why care about
anything?
● We must pass through this idea and overcome it by creating
our own meaning!
○ Our new morals will be motivated by love of the present world and life
○ The people who create and follow these values are the Übermensch

Sartre
● ‘Existence precedes essence’
○ People don’t have any inherent identity or value

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○ Identity and value must be created by the individual

○ You are human first (exist) and then choose your purpose (essence)
■ ‘Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world…
and defines himself afterwards’
● Humans are ‘condemned to be free’
○ By simply existing, everyone must choose our own essence
■ We have no choice in having to choose!
■ ‘Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he
is responsible for everything he does.’
● Bad Faith
○ This is one's self-deception about their reality.
○ It can take two forms:
■ 1) Convincing yourself you are something you are not
● Ex: a bad student convincing themself they are a good student
who just doesn’t try that much
■ 2) Thinking of oneself as an object
● Ex: a mechanic believing they are just a person who fixes cars
○ We can escape this!
■ Realize who you are and who you think your are are independent
things
■ We can choose both of these and make them fit each other!
● There can be no form of self that is "hidden" inside consciousness
○ Directly contradicts Freud!

De Beauvoir
● Defined women as the "second sex"
○ Historically women are defined by men and as inferior to men
■ Aristotle: ‘women are female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities’
■ Thomas Aquinas: women are "imperfect men" and "incidental" beings
● ‘One is not born but becomes a woman’
○ There is a distinction between:
■ Biological sex (i.e. is someone male or female)
■ The historical construction of gender and its stereotypes (does a
person interact with society as a man or woman)
○ No uniquely female experience has an objective meaning in itself
○ But patriarchal societies can label female experiences as a disadvantage:
■ Menstruation
■ Pregnancy
■ Menopause
○ Accepting these societal constructions makes someone a ‘women’

Camus
● Overcoming the Absurd
○ ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’
■ In an absurd (meaningless, unfair) world, why go on? What hope is
there?
○ Uses the Myth of Sisyphus to answer

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■ Sisyphus is fated by the Greek gods to roll a boulder up a hill

■ But once it reaches the top, it rolls down
■ This continues forever
■ But Sisyphus revolts against the absurd world
● ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’
■ Sisyphus chooses to find his joy in the mundane and simple things,
even his meaningless punishment
● ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’

(End of Existentialism)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

● New Views on Language

○ Language is not just a system of fixed rules and meanings
○ It is a social practice that is embedded in culture, activities, and human life
■ Language is an human action
■ Language is a form of life!
○ Language-Games
■ The meaning of words or phrases changes based on the context
● Ex: The word ‘nice’ can mean:
○ A kind act (ex: ‘Helping your friend was very nice’), or
○ A good thing (Ex: ‘I went skiing for Christmas’ ‘Nice!’)
■ It depends on the context!
● The meaning of a word comes from how it is used
○ Not from the dictionary!
■ The rules of how to communicate and the meaning of words (in
context) are called a language-game
● We all have many different language-games
○ They also constantly change and evolve!
● Ex: The words and grammar you use in the classroom are
different than those you use on Instagram or TikTok
○ Switching language-games is called code switching
○ Familial Resemblance
■ People often group things because they believe those things all have
one common characteristic
■ However, maybe they are actually connected due to many overlapping
similarities but share no single feature in common
■ Things grouped this way have a family resemblance
● Ex: sports, language-games, art
● Art:
○ Made by humans/Not made by humans

○ Experience

○ Diverse media

○ Message/No Message

○ Purpose/Art for Art’s Sake

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○ Intention/No intention

○ Conscious/Unconscious

○ Emotion/No emotion

○ Representation/Non-Representation

○ Beauty/No Beauty

○ Spiritual/Material

○ Human Condition

○ Pleasing/Not pleasing

○ Meaning/No Meaning

○ Pattern, Design

○ Challenges viewer, society/No challenge

Hannah Arendt

● The Trial of Adolf Eichmann

○ Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi responsible for shipping millions to death camps
○ After the war, he was kidnapped and put on trial in Israel
○ Arendt attended the trial as a reporter
● The Banality of Evil
○ Eichmann committed terrible crimes
○ However, he was not a ‘monster’
■ ‘Monsters’ are not common and cannot explain the mass participation
of people in Nazi programs
○ Calling him a ‘monster’ obscures what Germany did
■ If we call Eichmann and people like him ‘monsters’, then we might
think the Holocaust was perpetrated by only a few wicked individuals
■ ‘A normal person [...] could be perfectly incapable of telling right from
wrong’
○ Eichmann was a normal person who did not think critically of his actions
■ ‘[Eichmann has] an almost total inability to look at anything from the
other fellow’s point of view’
■ ‘He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not
a cliché’
● Cliché: an overused phrase showing lack of an original thought
● Ex: ‘Think outside the box’, ‘All that glitters isn’t gold’
■ ‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his
inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think…’
○ These evil acts were the dull, boring, thoughtless acts of a normal person
■ His actions show ‘the banality of evil’
● Banal: so lacking in originality that it is boring
○ Totalitarian governments (like Nazi Germany) greatly repress critical thinking
■ They do this through threats and violence

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■ Without critical thought, citizens cannot challenge government actions

■ Eichmann claimed to be following Kant’s Categorical Imperative
● Kant’s Categorical Imperative:
○ ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at
the same time, will that it should become a universal
law’
● Eichmann’s version:
○ ‘Act in such a way that the Führer would approve, or
would himself so act’
● ‘Kant, to be sure, had never intended to say anything of the
sort; on the contrary, to him every man was a legislator [the
moral self] the moment he started to act; by using his 'practical
reason' man found [for himself] the principles that could and
should be the principles of law.’

● Thought Experiments
○ A method of abstract thinking (‘What if…’)
■ We do not need to actually experience a situation to learn from it
■ This is useful if it is not possible or ethical to do the experiment
○ Famous Examples of Thought Experiments:
■ Allegory of the Cave (Plato)
■ Chinese Room (Searle)
■ Being a Bat (Nagel)
■ Veil of Ignorance (Rawls)
○ Intuition Pump
■ A Thought Experiment made to steer you towards a specific outcome

● Philippa Foot
○ Created a famous Thought Experiment called The Trolley Problem
■ A trolly is heading towards 5 unaware people
■ Should you act and make the trolly change tracks and kill 1 person
■ Or should you not act (let the trolley act) and kill the 5 people?
○ When both choices cause harm, which choice is moral?
○ A possible answer is the Principle of Double Effect
■ Developed by Christian Philosopherslike Thomas Aquinas
■ If you know an action will have harmful effects, it is moral if:
● The nature of the act is good or neutral
● You don’t want the harmful effect
● The good effect greatly outweighs the harmful effect
○ Foot’s conclusion:
■ We have positive duties
● We must act to help and benefit others
■ We have negative duties
● We must not act to not harm others
■ We can compare similar duties easily
● Whichever causes the most good or least harm is moral

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■ But, when the choice is between a positive and a negative duty,

negative duties have more weight
● ‘It takes more to justify action than to justify inaction’
● Judith Jarvis Thomson
○ Created the famous Thought Experiment, The Famous Violinist
○ You are, against your will, medically attached to a famous violinist
■ Their kidneys are failing and only your kidneys are a match for theirs
■ Is it moral to disconnect yourself, even if the violinist will die?
○ What is the purpose of this Thought Experiment?
■ To find out what principles are really involved in our moral decisions
● People previously argued about abortion’s morality based on
whether or not the fetus was alive
● The Famous Violinist proposes that, even if the fetus was
alive, abortion may still be moral
● Maybe the fetus being alive or not isn’t the most important
variable in the question
● Positive and Negative Duties
○ Positive Duties
■ We must act to help and benefit others
■ Ex: A parent must provide food and shelter for their baby
○ Negative Duties
■ We must not act to not harm others
■ Ex: You must not assault people
○ Comparing similar duties is not difficult
■ Which one causes the most good or least harm?
● Either act to help 1 person or 10? Choose 10, the most good
● Either allow 1 person to be sick or 10? Choose 1, least harm
○ Comparing different duties is more complex
■ According to Foot:
■ Negative duties are stronger than positive duties
● Failing at a positive duty doesn’t seem as morally bad as
failing at a negative duty
● Ex: Not giving aid to a homeless person (failing a positive duty)
seems less bad than kicking a homeless person (failing a
negative duty)
■ If an act is a positive duty but it also makes you fail a negative duty,
there must be a lot more help than harm
● Ex: A person is sick. The doctor stealing a healthy person’s
organ (failing a negative duty) to save the sick person (a
positive duty) generally seems morally wrong
● Ex: A cave, full of many people, is slowly filling with water and
someone is stuck in the hole leading out. Blowing them up with
dynamite (failing a negative duty) to save many people’s lives
(a positive duty) might be moral
● Ex: A woman has a dangerous pregnancy. If we do nothing,
the fetus will live and the woman will die. If we perform
surgery, the woman will live but the fetus will die. Performing

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surgery to save the woman (a positive duty) that kills the fetus
(failing a negative duty) might be immoral

John Rawls
● Justice
○ Justice must be based on more than just individual morality
■ The rules that govern the system/community we are in must be moral
○ The social contract between the state and individuals must be fair
■ The needs of all individuals in the contract must be treated equally
■ To ensure equal treatment, society must make needs available to all
and redistribute when necessary
■ Justice is the first virtue of social institutions
○ Justice is fairness
■ ‘Impartial treatment without favouritism or discrimination’
○ Justice must be the first virtue of social institutions
● Original Position
○ How could we design a just society?
○ Rawls used a thought experiment called the Original Position
■ Which principles would you select for the basic structure of society?
■ But choose using the Veil of Ignorance
● You must choose as if you had no knowledge ahead of time of:
○ Your ethnicity
○ Your social status
○ Your gender
○ Anyone else's idea of how to lead a good life
■ Why?
● Rules that are fair and just must apply equally to everyone
● Not knowing who will be who makes favouritism and
discrimination impossible
○ Rawls believed we would select laws that help the most needy in society
■ We would do this because that could be any one of us
● Liberty Principle
○ In designing our society, everyone needs basic liberties:
■ Political freedom
■ Freedom of speech and assembly
■ Freedom of Thought
■ Personal property
■ Protection against arbitrary arrest and seizure
○ This must be included in our rules for a just society
● Difference Principle
○ In life, the natural distribution of things (resources, talents, etc) is not equal
■ This is due to:
● Inequality (e.g. someone being more talented than another)
● Luck (e.g. family wealth, being born in a peaceful country)
○ We often underestimate how much luck plays in a
person’s success!
○ This is neither just nor unjust
○ But, how our society deals with this fact can be just or unjust

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○ We can permit social and economic inequality if and only if:

■ There is equality of opportunity for positions and offices
■ Inequalities are of the greatest advantage to the least advantaged
● Ex: If some people don’t have enough resources, then
resources can be taken from those with more than enough
resources and redistributed

Alan Turing
● One of the founders of computer science
● During WW2, led a team that broke the Enigma Code
○ The Nazis used to this code to hide the meaning of their radio messages
○ Turing broke it using clever maths and a computer with electrical circuits
● Developed the Turing Test
○ When would we consider a computer truly intelligent?
○ Because humans are intelligent, why not when computers can pass as a
human?
○ The Turing Test
■ A volunteer is asked to communicate with a screen
■ On the other side is either a human or a computer
■ After the volunteer has asked their questions, they then guess if they
were talking with another human or a computer
■ If a computer can make over 50% of the volunteers think that it was
human, it has passed the Turing Test
○ Since Turing’s time, many computers have passed the Turing Test
○ Do we consider them intelligent?
■ Not really!
■ Many computers use very specific, clever ways to trick people into
thinking they were a human
● Ex: that they were a young child with poor English skills
○ We have had many ‘intelligence tests’ for computers throughout history
■ Ex: being the world chess champion
○ However, every time computers beat these tests, we tend to (looking back)
view the test as insufficient for determining intelligent

John Searle
● The Chinese Room
○ Searle questioned whether a computer can ever have a mind exactly like a
human’s mind
○ The Chinese Room was a thought experiment to demonstrate this
■ A person who does not speak Chinese is in a small room
■ There is an opening on the wall where papers can come through
● These papers are full of Chinese characters
■ The person has a book full of instructions
● The instructions tell the person what to write on their paper
when they see a certain Chinese character on the other paper
● Note: the person has no idea what the characters mean
■ After the person has followed all of the instructions, they slide their
paper out of a different opening on the wall

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■ What if…
● …the paper that came into the room was a statement in
Chinese from a native speaker
● And the response (the paper the person inside slid out)
convinced the native speaker that the ‘room’ understood
Chinese?
■ Would we say that the person in the room with their instructions
understood Chinese?
■ Is there a real difference between this and a computer translator?
■ Searle says no
● Computer only have syntax
○ Syntax is just a set of rules
○ They require no understanding
■ Ex: the person in the Chinese Room did not
understand what any character represented
● Human minds have semantics
○ They understand what symbols mean
■ Ex: The native speaker knows that a certain
character means ‘dog’ and what a dog is
■ If a computer cannot understand, we cannot say it thinks

Peter Singer
● Animal Treatment
○ Jeremy Bentham was one of the first philosophers to support animal rights
■ ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can
they suffer?’
○ Singer wrote Animal Liberation (1975) in support of better animal treatment
■ Most people practice speciesism
● A bias of members of one’s own species against members of
another species
■ But… is this justified?
■ Singer’s argument:
● If a thing can suffer, it has interests (one is not suffering)
● Humans and other animals can suffer
● We cannot know if one’s interests weigh more than another’s,
so it is reasonable to assume that they have equal weight
● So an animal’s interest in not suffering should be weighted as
much as a human’s interest in not suffering
● Therefore, we should avoid making animals suffer
○ Vegetarianism and veganism help reduce suffering
● Effective Altruism
○ A thought experiment:
■ If you saw a child drowning in a nearby pond, would you save them
even if it ruined your expensive clothes?
○ Most would say yes, and Singer agrees
■ Humans tend to value human life over material possessions
○ But he questions:

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■ What is the difference between this and a faraway, dying child that
you could help by donating resources?
■ Does distance mean we are not responsible to help?
○ For Singer, there is no difference in the two scenarios
■ We must reduce suffering, if reducing it doesn’t make us suffer the
same or more
■ We must practice impartiality
● Everyone’s well-being (reduction of suffering) counts equally
○ Therefore, wealthy people are morally obligated to help the global poor
■ They can do this by giving a significant portion of their disposable
income (i.e. what they don’t need to live a life full of well-being)
○ Singer promotes Effective Altruism:
■ The use evidence and reasoning to figure out how to help others as
much as possible, then doing it
■ Example:
● If you donate €10,000 to Charity A, they will use €1,000 to help
people who may not have great need and use the other €9000
to pay their employees
● If you donate €10,000 to Charity B, they will use €8,000 to help
people who have great need and use the other €2000 to pay
their employees
● Effective Altruism would advocate you donate to Charity B

Sample longer answer questions:

● Should AI be allowed to make moral decisions?
● Should society strive to be more equal in how it divides its resources or more just?
● A trash collector finds their job intolerable: they are always dealing with garbage that
smells and the work never stops. In the voice of a philosopher we’ve studied, give
them some advice.
● In sport, sometimes a new strategy can completely change how people play the
game for decades to come. Compare this to Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science.
● A student claims that we should eat less meat because meat production is bad for
the environment. How would Peter Singer respond to this statement?
● Explain how Jarvis Thomson’s thought experiment changed how many people view
the debate on women’s reproductive rights.
● ‘There is an afterlife after someone dies.’ How would Popper and Kierkegaard
respond to this statement and each other’s views?
● In many cultures, there is a particular age where a young girl is then considered a
woman. Respond to this from the perspective of de Beauvoir.
● A student claims that philosophy and critical thinking are not needed in modern
society. Respond to this statement from the perspective of Arendt.
● Should dictionaries define and regulate how to use a word or phrase correctly, or
should they reflect how the word is currently used?

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