Thinking It Through: Kwame Anthony Appiah
Thinking It Through:
An Introduction to
Contemporary
Philosophy
Kwame Anthony Appiah
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Thinking It Through
Thinking It Through
AN I NTRODUCTION TO CONTE M PO RARY
PH I LOSOPHY
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, …show more content…
The important thing is to grasp the ideas these terms express and the distinctions they make and to see how these distinctions and ideas can be used in arguments that deepen our understanding. And one general rule to keep in mind was set out by the Greek philosopher Aristotle about twenty-five hundred years ago: he insisted that we should adopt the degree of precision appropriate to the subject matter. We could say, more generally, that distinctions are worth making only if they do some work in an argument or help us to see something we wouldn’t otherwise see. The technical terms are tools for a purpose, not the point of the exercise. As far as possible, contemporary philosophers actually prefer to use what the English philosopher Bernard
Williams once called “moderately plain speech.” So while philosophy has a technical vocabulary, doing philosophy means more than knowing and throwing around those special terms.
The book is organized around eight central areas of the subject: mind, knowledge, language, science, morality, politics, law, and metaphysics. (Only the last of these, as you see, has a technical name. When we get to the chapter on metaphysics, I’ll explain …show more content…
For if they were in your head, you could find out where they were in your head, and how large a volume of space they occupied. But you cannot say how many inches long a particular thought is, or how many centimeters wide, or whether it is currently north or south of your cerebral cortex. There is a fifth and final characteristic of this passage that is typical of Descartes’ philosophy of mind: throughout the argument
Descartes insists on beginning with what can be known for certain, what cannot be doubted. He insists, that is, on beginning with an epistemological point of view.
These are the major features of Descartes’ philosophy of mind, and, as I said, this has been the dominant view since his time. So dominant has it been, in fact, that by the mid-twentieth century the central problems of the philosophy of mind were reduced, in effect, to two. The first was a problem M made us think about, the problem of other minds: What justifies our belief that other minds
An Introduction to
Contemporary
Philosophy
Kwame Anthony Appiah
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Thinking It Through
Thinking It Through
AN I NTRODUCTION TO CONTE M PO RARY
PH I LOSOPHY
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, …show more content…
The important thing is to grasp the ideas these terms express and the distinctions they make and to see how these distinctions and ideas can be used in arguments that deepen our understanding. And one general rule to keep in mind was set out by the Greek philosopher Aristotle about twenty-five hundred years ago: he insisted that we should adopt the degree of precision appropriate to the subject matter. We could say, more generally, that distinctions are worth making only if they do some work in an argument or help us to see something we wouldn’t otherwise see. The technical terms are tools for a purpose, not the point of the exercise. As far as possible, contemporary philosophers actually prefer to use what the English philosopher Bernard
Williams once called “moderately plain speech.” So while philosophy has a technical vocabulary, doing philosophy means more than knowing and throwing around those special terms.
The book is organized around eight central areas of the subject: mind, knowledge, language, science, morality, politics, law, and metaphysics. (Only the last of these, as you see, has a technical name. When we get to the chapter on metaphysics, I’ll explain …show more content…
For if they were in your head, you could find out where they were in your head, and how large a volume of space they occupied. But you cannot say how many inches long a particular thought is, or how many centimeters wide, or whether it is currently north or south of your cerebral cortex. There is a fifth and final characteristic of this passage that is typical of Descartes’ philosophy of mind: throughout the argument
Descartes insists on beginning with what can be known for certain, what cannot be doubted. He insists, that is, on beginning with an epistemological point of view.
These are the major features of Descartes’ philosophy of mind, and, as I said, this has been the dominant view since his time. So dominant has it been, in fact, that by the mid-twentieth century the central problems of the philosophy of mind were reduced, in effect, to two. The first was a problem M made us think about, the problem of other minds: What justifies our belief that other minds