50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to KnowHave you ever lain awake at night worried about how we can be sure of the reality of the external world? Perhaps we are in fact disembodied brains, floating in vats at the whim of some deranged puppetmaster. If so, you are not alone--and what's more, you are in exalted company--for this question and other ones like it have been the stuff of philosophical rumination from Plato to Popper. In a series of accessible and engagingly written essays, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know introduces and explains the problems of knowledge, consciousness, identity, ethics, belief, justice, and aesthetics that have engaged the attention of thinkers from the era of the ancient Greeks to the present day. |
Contents
Introduction | |
PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE | |
The brain in a vat 02 Platos cave 03 The veil of perception 04 Cogito ergo | |
Reason and experience | |
The tripartite theory of knowledge | |
MIND MATTERS 07 The mindbody problem | |
What is it like to be a bat? 09 The Turing test 10 The ship of Theseus 11 Other minds | |
Humes guillotine | |
The divine command theory | |
The boohoorah theory | |
Ends and means | |
The experience machine 18 The categorical imperative | |
The golden rule | |
Acts and omissions | |
Slippery slopes | |
Beyond the call of duty | |
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Common terms and phrases
according actions animals apparently barber paradox basic behavior belief brain categorical imperative cause cave claim Cogito ergo sum concept conclusion condensed idea cosmological argument debate Descartes Descartes’s difference principle distinction divine command theory dualism Ends and means essentially ethical exist experience machine fact Faith and reason false feel pain Forms of argument freewill defense God’s golden rule human Hume Hume’s guillotine induction inference influential instance intuitions justified Kant kill kind king of France knowledge language logic look matter mental mind mindbody problem moral nature negative freedom objects Occam’s razor one’s ontological argument particular philosopher physical Plato possible premises prisoner’s dilemma problem of evil pseudoscience punishment question rational Russell’s Science and pseudoscience scientific sense similar skeptical Slippery slopes socalled sorites paradox suppose things thinking thought Timeline c.375BC true truth Turing test utilitarian veil of perception virtue Wittgenstein wrong