Review: The Great Philosophers

Title: The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy
Author: Bryan Magee
Publisher: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 (2000)
ISBN: 0-19-289322-X

The Great Philosophers provides a surprisingly thought-provoking introduction to major figures in western philosophy through an unexpected format: a series of interviews. In 1987 the BBC created a series of television programs in which Bryan Magee interviewed recognized experts on prominent philosophers. This book was created by editing and in places enlarging the transcripts from those shows. What results is a lively play that draws the reader into important philsophical issues and at the same time provides an insight into the experts doing the discussing.

The Great Philosophers serves as an excellent companion to Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, as much of the same material is covered in a shorter format; the "live" debate fills in the gaps and gives even more personality to the subjects on which Russell already expounded. (Later developments are also covered, such as existentialism and even the contributions to modern logic of Russell himself.)

In fact, the book gives the sense that Magee followed Russell's work as a backdrop for this series; not only is Russell and A History of Western Philosophy mentioned, certain sections of Magee's introductions seem to spring from the pages of Russell's book. Take, for example, the description of Descartes:

Descartes never married, though he had an illegitimate daughter who died at the age of five: her death was the greatest emotional blow of his life. He always had an eye to dress, was proud of being an officer, and on the whole preferred the company of men of affairs to that of scholars. (Magee, 78).

Descartes never married, but he had a natural daughter who died at the age of five; this was, he said, the greatest sorrow of his life. He always was well dressed, and wore a sword. (Russell, 560).

Magee's effort has created a short but engaging dip into major flows of western philosophical thought. Beside Bertrand Russell's extensive work, The Great Philosophers provides a refreshing alternative but supporting view into the same subject matter.

Notes

Plato

Two of Plato's major ideas, according to Burnyeat: the Theory of Forms, and the idea that learning is recollection. (20).

Aristotle

Nussbaum: "Well, its origin is disappointingly trivial. In an ancient edition of Aristotle's work, the editor put the work that now has the title Metaphysics after the work that was called Physics: and the editor gave it the title Metaphysics because in Greek that simply means what comes after the work called Physics. (39)
Aristotle made a distinction between the attributes that make an object what it is, and the attributes that an object has. (43). Aristotle says that a thing's identity rests not in its matter or material, but in its form and function (44) —its functional structure or organization (49). He finds four explanations, working in conjunction, of why things are the way they are: the Material Cause, the Formal Cause, the Efficient Cause and the Final Cause. (47).

Medieval Philosophers

Aristotle created a large study of logic which grew in the Middle Ages. "But after the Middle Ages people lost interest in logic, and to a great extent lost interest in the philosophical study of language," concerning themselves instead with epistemology, or, "How do we know what we know?" It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that philosphers such as Frege, Russel, and Whitehead picked logic back up from a mathematical viewpoint. Most recently, in Britain and America, the focus of philosophy has been on logic and language, or "What do you mean?" rather than "What do you know?" (64-65).
Arguments from the Middle Ages for the existence of God are of one of two types. A cosmological argument, such as the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, which take something from the cosmos, or the material world, and use truths of philosophy to attempt to arrive at a conclusion. In contrast, an ontological argument, such as the classic formulation of St. Anselm, starts in the world of ideas, with the very concept of God, without appealing to the world around us. (68-70). St. Anselm's argument of God as the greatest conceivable thing has been thrashed over and over again, but for different given recents. In America a group of philosophers of religion have recently tried to revive the argument and reconcile it with mathematical logic. "[A]n argument which twenty years ago was thought as dead as the dodo is now alive and well and living in Indiana and California." (71).

Descartes

There is a curious parallel with Magee's description of Descartes here and Bertrand Russell's description of him in A History of Western Philosophy:

Descartes never married, but he had a natural daughter who died at the age of five; this was, he said, the greatest sorrow of his life. He always was well dressed, and wore a sword. (Russell, 560).
Descartes never married, though he had an illegitimate daughter who died at the age of five: her death was the greatest emotional blow of his life. He always had an eye to dress, was proud of being an officer, and on the whole preferred the company of men of affairs to that of scholars. (Magee, 78).
Descartes thought that objects are a volume of space, rather than simply being in space, because he didn't believe in such a thing as a vacuum. (88).
"[I]t was Descartes, and almost Descartes alone, who brought it about that the centre of Western philosophy for these past centuries has been the theory of knowledge." (94).

Spinoza

Spinoza is commonly thought of as a religious or quasi-religious thinker when in fact he did not believe in the existence of a personal God, did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and did not believe that we have free will. He has often been described as a pantheist - indeed, he is thought of as the pantheist among the great philosophers, in the same sort of way as Schopenhauer is thought of as the pessimist, or Hume as the sceptic, or Locke as the liberal, and so on. (106).
No one has any difficulty, [Spinoza] said, in understanding that a person has a passionate love of nature, yet we should consider such a person mad if he wanted nature to love him back. Now because nature and God are one and the same, the same thing is true about God. It is conducive to our happiness to love God, but meaningless and absurd for us to expect God to love us. (107).
Spinoza's Jewish upbringing may have been influential on his ideas. "As for freedom, in the general domain of man's ethical relationship to God the Jewish religion does not have a place for petitionary prayer, for asking God to do things for you. The Jewish attitude is one of grateful acceptance of what God offers, rather than the Christian posture of cringing mendicancy. One accepts what God has to give one with such patience, submission and fortitude as one can bring to bear. That is an entirely Spinozist point of view." (107).

Leibniz

Leibniz was the first to thoroughly and clearly distinguish between analytic statements (truths of reason), those whose truth or falsehood can be established by analysis of the statement itself, and synthetic statements (truths of facts), those whose truth or falsehood can be established only by going beyond the statement and setting it against something outside itself." (111).

Kant

One of the possible reasons Kant's writing is difficult to understand is that German was only just becoming an academic language. "The German language had barely become accepted as a decent language for academic and learned use. … [T]here was not an established style, or tradition, of academic, learned German prose for Kant to adopt." (186).

Schopenhauer

"[Schopenhauer] was the first major Western philosopher to be openly and explicitly atheist." (213).
Schopenhauer used "Will," not to indicate some conscious purposed movement, but to represent the driving force to which all phenomena can be reduced—energy of a sort. "The reason why he chose this ill-fated term for it is that the nearest we human beings come to having a direct, unmediated experience of go or impulse is in our capacity as agents, in so-called willed activity; and also because the deepest of all human impulses is the will to survive." He believed that Kant's noumenon, or reality-in-itself, must be something that can be manifested as this "Will" of the world of phenomena. (210)."
"It's" should be "Its." (223).
Schopenhauer believed that humans feel compassion towards each other because all humans are manifestations of the same neumenon, so an identity is felt. (224). This view doesn't explain why almost all humans feel no compassion for mosquitos, or why sharks feel no compassion towards humans. Going further, humans should in this view feel compassion towards limestone, as both are manifestations of the same neumenon. Noting that humans feel more compassion towards dogs and cats than towards dolphins, the real basis for compassion might lie in a perception of similarity on the part of humans, an identity that derives from appearance rather than reality—exactly the opposite of Schopenhauer's contention.
Schopenhauer, before Freud was born, advanced the ideas of the unconscious as repressed motivation, and of the "omnipresence of sexual motivation." (228-229).

Husserl and Heidegger

Husserl's phenomenological reduction, as explained by Maggee and Dreyfus, sounds attractive at first: if, as Descartes and his progeny proposed, we really don't know if anything exists outside consciousness, we can simply ignore whether things exist in-themselves, and instead study objects as they appear to our consciousness (254). In this mind-set, if phenomena make themselves manifest to our consciousness, they exist as far as phenomenology goes, and it is meaningless to question their phenomenological existence. A problem arises if I set 100 video cameras in my living room and then, after taken certain narcotic substances, I think I see my furniture dancing. Playing back the video some time later, every single camera reports that my furniture budged not an inch, although I acted quite strangely. Obviously my viewing the video (and the existence of the cameras themselves) are part of my sensory experience just as were the dancing furniture, but it's strange that my perceptions of all video cameras are identical, and they all contradict my perception of the dancing furniture. Suddenly there is a qualitative hierarchy of sensory perceptions, even if we are to make irrelevant any existence outside of our consciousness. Some perceptions are either less true than others, or our set of perceptions have a strange set of interrelating rules, which subtracts from the utility of the whole phenomenological reduction.
Heidegger talks about "transparent coping" mode, such as in his example of an expert carpenter hammering nails, in which our body seems to take over an interact with the world, not as subject and object, but as interrelating objects with no directed intentionality. (257). But this misses the point. One could build a machine (indeed, many a factory has surely done so) that could hammer nails automatically for as long as there were electricity, but no one would purport that any consciousness were involved on the part of such a basic machine. There would be merely materials interacting with other materials, and no subject-object contemplation would arise. The expert carpenter, through training, is able to put his body into such a mechanistic mode that his muscles swing the hammer and drive nails without directed intentionality (although he has directed intentionality to put his body into this mode). In such a mode, his actions are nearer to a machine than to a mind. But we can already explain machines—it's the mind—consciousness—that we set out to explain. Explaining that the mind can make the body act like a machine does not mean that consciousness is not directed just because mechanistic acts, separate from consciousness, are not directed conscious actions. Heidegger merely changed the focus of study away from consciousness on this point—he did not explain consciousness.
In Heidegger's existentialism, we're all zombies doing things that everyone does just because everyone else does those things and we need to do them to in order to be understood. We do all these things automatically, and the solution to the arising anxiety (which the later Heidegger interpreted as being unique to our age) is to do thing intentionally—to break out of the efficiency of our automatic actions and do things purposefully, although still without society's expectations. This intentionality can free us. (267-268). This explanation doesn't show what to do if one wants to do things that are outside of society's expectations—this would apparently not be allowed, even if someone in another culture or another era could find freedom by doing just that thing, if it were then and there within society's allowed bounds.

The American Pragmatists

"'[I]s true', [James] says, is an evaluative predicate; 'is true' is what it is good to believe. He seems to be saying that we can equate truth with verification: the verified is good to believe." (290).
"In pragmatic philosophy things are nearly always seen from the standpoint of an agent, and it seems to me that this is just about the most important single insight which pragmatism has to convey: that knowledge is of its nature bound up with activity, and that criteria of meaning and criteria of truth need to have some relation to activity. (294).
"Dewey challenged the dualism between fact and value, the thesis that matters of fact can be rationally discussed whereas matters of value cannot, the idea that before rational discussion of value can begin or rational deliberation can be undertaken we must make judgments about the intrinsically valuable and keep that judgment fixed." (295).
Magee: "The institutions on which Dewey's ideas made the greatest impact were educational: in education his influence can truly be said to have been international. (296).

Wittgenstein

Searle: "If you read enough of his prose, you start thinking that way yourself. You begin to address your wife in Wittgensteinian aphorisms, which can be very exasperating for her." (341).