19. What is Wisdom?

 

 

 

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

 

          For the benefit of those of you who have not yet had the opportunity to read the book I mentioned at the end of the last lecture, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I will begin today by giving you a brief summary of its contents. After that, I'd like to hear how those of you who have read the story would answer the following three questions:

 

(1) What does flying represent in this story?

(2) What does the story tell us about the pursuit of wisdom?

(3) Where does Jonathan go in Part Two?

 

 

Finally, I will end today's lecture by explaining how some of the lessons contained in this story are related to the various issues we will be examining during this third part of the course.

 

          This little book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is a story about a rather unusual bird-a seagull, as the title indicates. At the beginning this bird, named Jonathan, is experimenting with different ways of flying. Whereas his fellow birds all use their flying skill only to fulfill their main interest in life, eating, Jonathan sees flying as a skill that ought to be pursued for its own sake. However, as he is trying out a new method for high-speed flying, he offends the leaders of his flock, who respond by banishing him to the "far cliffs". After living a long, lonely life, two mysterious birds come and take him to another place. In Part Two Jonathan learns about a new kind of flying that focuses not on wings and feathers, but on thought and imagination. He is excelling faster than all the other birds in this new world, when suddenly he decides he must return to his old world. So he goes back to the far cliffs. The third and final part of the story then tells how he gathers some outcast birds and begins teaching them how to fly and how to understand flying. Once they have learned some basic skills, his students return with Jonathan to the old flock, where they had been declared outcast. They hold their practice sessions right there on the beach, and eventually some of the birds from the flock show interest in learning how to fly. When they begin learning for themselves, Jonathan leaves them to continue on their own.

 

          Now, let's begin with the first question. Who has an idea as to what flying might represent in this story? By the way, don't say "the search for wisdom", because that's too obvious. I've already told you I want us to view the whole story as giving us insight into the search for wisdom, so now I'd like you to be more specific. Then, in our discussion of the second question, we can try to apply what we learn from the symbolism of flying to the issue of the nature of loving wisdom. So who would like to be first?

 

          Student N. "Freedom."

 

          Yes, I suppose that's a good place to start. Without even reading the story we could be fairly confident that this is part of the intended symbolism, since it's quite common to associate a bird in flight with freedom. This is probably part of the reason the author chose to write a story about a bird, rather than, say, a fish or a dog. The story itself confirms this by telling how Jonathan saw himself as free from the things that trapped the other gulls into an unhappy and meaningless life, such as the desires for food, acceptance by others, and political power. As he learned to fly, he also learned to free himself, more and more, from such entrapments; and in so doing he learned how to live a truly meaningful life. In Part Two he even learned to free himself from his life-long tendency to view literal flying (i.e., flying with his physical body) as the ultimate purpose of his life.

 

          But "freedom" is almost as difficult a word to understand as "wisdom". So did anyone find in this story any clues that can help us understand what freedom is? What did Jonathan have to do in order to gain insight into the nature of freedom?

 

          Student O. "To me, Jonathan seemed to be on a quest for the unknown. And this always required him to be breaking through the limits that he or the other birds had previously set."

 

          Very good. I agree that the element of the unknown plays an im­portant role throughout the whole story. Jonathan was willing to pursue his goal even though he never seemed to know what was around the next corner-at least, not until he returned to the flock in Part Three. As you suggest, his quest for "perfect speed" was really a quest for the unattain­able. As a result he was, paradoxically, able to reach his goal only when he was willing to give up all his conventional ideas about how it could be reached, especially his assumption that it would be reached by means of the "flight of wing and feather". Likewise, I think you've chosen exactly the right words when you say he was always "breaking through the limits ...". In fact, one of the reasons why the flight of a bird symbolizes freedom is that birds seem to have found the secret of breaking through the chains of the law of gravity, which binds us human beings so firmly to the earth. Moreover, the story itself suggests that breaking through old boundaries is one of the fundamental keys to self-discovery. Did you notice that in Part One Jonathan actually referred to one of his major discoveries about flying as "the breakthrough"? Then, in Part Two, his discovery of the "flight" of the imagination was a breakthrough not only in his level of skill, but also in his understanding. And his return to the flock in Part Three represented yet another kind of breakthrough, which also has to do with the symbolism of flying as it is presented in the story.

 

          Did anyone happen to notice how Jonathan's final breakthrough gives us another way of explaining the symbolism of flying?

 

          Student P. "His return to the flock at the end seemed like a really sacrificial act. After all, he could have continued learning so much more if he had stayed where he was! Could flying represent this kind of self-sacrifice?"

 

          Indeed it could. Remember, Jonathan had to sacrifice a lot at the beginning of the story just in order to begin his quest for perfect speed. In fact, precisely this idea is expressed in one of my favorite passages in the whole book, though it is put in different words than those you have used. Just after Jonathan made his initial breakthrough in Part Two, his teacher, Chiang, told him he would soon be ready to begin working on the breakthrough that is "the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and love" (JLS 83). Likewise, Chiang's last words to Jonathan were "keep on working on love" (84). Jonathan showed he had begun to learn this lesson when he himself became a teacher, at first as Chiang's replacement, and then, in Part Three, to the gulls back on the far cliffs. But he only fully demonstrated how well he had learned to "fly up" when he actually returned to the old flock that had once cast him out.

 

          What other lessons can we learn from the symbol of flying? In a philosophy class, an obvious answer, suggested by some of my past students, is that flying for a bird corresponds to thinking, or perhaps self-understanding, for a philosopher. Or another possibility is that the whole story is about the learning process in general, the passage from ignorance to knowledge, which, of course, is also one of the main themes we have been developing in this course. Do any of you have anything to add to these ideas, before we go on to the second question?

 

          Student Q. "I think flying represents perfection, since the story mentions 'perfect speed' several times. Even though we cannot fly, we can strive to be perfect in the things we are able to do."

 

          Maybe so, but I think we have to be careful not to misunderstand what this kind of "perfection" is all about. I don't think it merely refers to being right or good all of the time, otherwise Jonathan would have had to follow the "Law of the Flock", even though it sometimes went against the "true law", of "freedom" (JLS 114). In any case, perfection is a very high ideal to set for oneself. Do you think Jonathan's quest for perfection did him any good? What can we learn from his experiences?

 

          Student Q. "Well, without that goal, I don't think Jonathan's life would have been very meaningful. I think flying is what gave Jonathan's life its meaning."

 

          So flying represents not just the quest for perfection, but the quest for a kind of perfection that can bestow real meaning on our otherwise mundane life. Yes, I think this is one of the key points of the whole book. Not everything can function in this way, and this means we must be very careful in choosing what we make the object of our life's quest. Jonathan himself, as I've already said, changed the way he viewed flying several times during the story, coming closer and closer with each change to achieving the ultimate goal of participation in a meaningful reality.

 

          We have actually already begun to answer the second question, concerning the specific lessons this story can teach us about the pursuit of wisdom. All the points mentioned so far have implications for this second question; they should be clear enough without going over them again. So instead of just repeating what we've already said, let's see if we can draw from the story any further insights about the nature of wisdom. If we regard the whole story as a story about one individual's pursuit of wisdom, then what can we learn?

 

          Student R. "Those who are really serious about pursuing wisdom are likely to live a hard and lonely life."

 

          Judging from Jonathan's experience, this certainly seems to be true. Moreover, they are also likely to be misunderstood by others. Jonathan was misunderstood not only in the first part, by the members of his flock, but also by his friend Sullivan in Part Two, and by some of his students in Part Three. But we should keep in mind that the difficulties caused by such hardships are, in a sense, "easy" to cope with for those who have set their eyes on a goal as high as the pursuit of wisdom. (This is similar, by the way, to Jesus' claim-despite the many so-called "hard sayings" he used to describe those who set their eyes on the "kingdom of God"-that anyone who follows this heavenly kingdom will discover that "My yoke is easy, and my load is light" [Matt. 11:30]!) Jonathan was such a fast learner precisely because he did not let such apparent burdens weigh him down for any extended period of time. In the same way, although the life of a person who pursues wisdom appears to be lonely by our ordinary standards, the story itself says Jonathan "lived a long fine life" on the far cliffs; and the reason, no doubt, is that his hardships had purged him of "boredom and fear and anger", these being "the reasons that a gull's life is so short" (JLS 41). If the story is true to real life, then the apparent hardships, failures, and suffering are well worth the price: without them, a breakthrough would be impossible.

 

          Student S. "Jonathan's quest seemed to be continuous, if not unending; he needed a lot of will power to stick to the task. I suppose the same is true for the pursuit of wisdom."

 

          Yes indeed. But what is it that gives us the power to stick to such an endless task? What keeps us from losing hope and simply giving up in despair? Does the story give us any clues?

 

          Student S. "I believe Jonathan was able to continue pursuing his goal only because he was able to see a dimension that goes beyond time and space."

 

          This is a very important point. But actually, it takes us directly to the third question; so before I comment on your answer, does anyone have any ideas about where this strange place was that Jonathan was transported to in Part Two?

 

          Student T. "Doesn't the story say he went to heaven? I got the impression that Jonathan was supposed to have died at the end of Part One, and the two gulls were like angels taking him up to heaven."

 

          I'm not surprised the story gave you this impression. Indeed, it would certainly be one possible interpretation, especially since Jonathan himself actually interpreted the new place in this way at the very beginning of Part Two, when he thought to himself "So this is heaven ..." (JLS 57). Nevertheless, a little bit later (64), after realizing he had not yet reached his final goal, Jonathan asked Chiang "this world isn't heaven at all, is it?" and Chiang answered "there is no such place. Heaven is not a place and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." Unfortunately, when Chiang was just about to explain in more detail what heaven really is, Jonathan interrupted him (79)-but not before Chiang had the chance to tell Jonathan that perfection is intimately interconnected with love.

 

          If the place Jonathan went in Part Two was not heaven, since the story portrays heaven more as a state of being, then where was that place? Or, in other words, what could that place symbolize for us?

 

          Student U. "How about the 'self' or 'mind'?"

 

          This is one good way of looking at it, though I would prefer to say he went into his imagination. For he was able to do things in that place that we can do only in our imaginations. One of the main points of Part Two, in fact, seems to be that the imagination is just as real as the parts of our mind that give us knowledge of the external world. In any case, however we wish to interpret that place, it was certainly a place where the dimension beyond space and time was more readily at hand than it is for us most of the time. Thus, if we say that in Part One Jonathan found a treasure chest within himself, but it remained locked, then Part Two would be the place where he found the key, in the imagination, or if you prefer, in the ideas found in his own mind. And in Part Three he un­locked the treasure, for the benefit of those who had once cast him out.

 

          Using a bit of eisegesis, we can also compare the place Jonathan went in Part Two to a philosophy class. Part One is like the life each of you have lived up until now in the real world, where you have learned a great deal about how to live. But in Part Two Jonathan learned about learning; this "second order" activity is one way of describing the task of philosophy. This interpretation implies that the purpose of studying philosophy is not to become a professional philosopher who writes boring, technical papers no one can understand, in order to publish them in scholarly journals that no one reads; rather, the purpose is to prepare you to return to the place you were before (or at least to its horizon), but with a newfound sense of your connection with a higher reality, a reality capable of empowering you to pursue the study of wisdom to the very end of your life, regardless of your profession. Along similar lines, if we think of the three parts of the story as corresponding to three types of skill, arising out of the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of human nature (cf. Figure II.8), then we can use Figure VII.1 as a map of the developmental process illustrated in the story of Jonathan's life.

 

 

 

Figure VII.1: The Three Stages in Jonathan's Life

 

 

          Looking back over what we have discussed today, we can discern three important lessons about wisdom that should be kept in mind throughout this third part of our course. First, wisdom requires us to recognize that there is a boundary between our knowledge and our ignorance. This much we should have already learned from our study of metaphysics in Part One. Second, wisdom requires us to believe it is possible, despite our necessary ignorance, to find a way to break through this very boundary line. Our study of synthetic logic in Part Two should have taught us this lesson as well. Finally, then, the new lesson is that we

only really begin to understand what wisdom is when we recognize that, even after we succeed in breaking through our former limits, we must return to our original home. How­ever, there is a crucial difference between our original state and our state when we return: for we now have some awareness (even if we cannot call it "knowledge") of both sides of the boundary. A good way to picture this would be to say that when we return home, we still live, as it were, on the boundary (or "horizon"), as pictured in Figure VII.2.

 

 

 

Figure VII.2: Wisdom As Returning to the Boundary

 

 

          Let's look briefly at two other stories that powerfully illustrate the importance of returning to the boundary of our former world to share the insights we gained by breaking through the boundary. The first is a part of Plato's story of the cave (see Figure II.7) that I did not mention in Lecture 5. Those who manage to find their way all the way out into the sunlight and are able to see the world as it is, having learned the philosophical skill of seeing things according to their form, are so im­pressed by the sun's power that they are impelled to return to the cave in hopes of freeing those who are still prisoners in the world of shadows. So Plato's story actually follows the same form shown in Figure VII.2. The second one, adapted from a story by G.K. Chesterton (see CO), is quite different from both Plato's and Jonathan's, but has a similar moral.

 

          Once there was a boy who grew up in a small village, secluded in the hills of a far-away land. Throughout his childhood, he frequently heard the older villagers telling stories about a Great Mountain that was shaped in the image of a person's face. He was so filled with wonder at the tales he heard that he left home at an unusually early age to search for the famed mountain. Yet, after many years of tiresome wandering throughout his entire country, he never caught so much as a glimpse of the image he sought. Disappointed at what he now regarded as the decep­tions of his youth, he finally decided to return home. As he approached his village, however, he was shocked to discover that the mountain rising up behind it was shaped in the distinct form of a per­son's face! Throughout his entire youth he had never traveled far enough from home to see "the whole picture", and once he left, he had never turned back to look. Now, of course, his travels had changed him so much that he would never be able to fit into the life of the village the way he used to: he would always remain, we might say, "on the boundary".

 

          With this new insight in mind, let us now recall that Parts One and Two of this course have dealt primarily with the two most important areas of theoretical philosophy. In Parts Three and Four we will be turn­ing our attention to the two most important areas of practical philosophy. The first can be called "applied philosophy", since it requires us to apply what we have learned about logic to various kinds of human endeavor. But it can also be called science, since the aim in each case is to establish some kind of knowledge. For the remainder of Part Three we will be examining three of the major branches of the tree of philosophy: the philosophies of natural science, moral science, and political science. In each case our goal will be to discover the boundary conditions that can be transcended (e.g., by means of synthetic logic), yet constitute the proper home of any philosopher who wishes to reflect upon these disciplines. In so doing, we will actually say very little about wisdom as such. However, the underlying assumption throughout our examination of each of these topics will be that in locating the proper position for the boundary lines, we will in fact be carrying out one of the most important tasks in the quest for wisdom.

 

 

 

20. Science and the Anatomy of Wisdom

 

 

 

          One of the most important lessons we learned from our discussion in the previous session was that philosophy, like learning to fly, is primarily a skill. I want to begin this lecture by emphasizing the same point, especially since the first eighteen lectures dealt mainly with the theoretical aspects of the tree of philosophy. If your study of philosophy so far has given you the impression that philosophy is more a set of theories or doctrines than an activity, then please forget that impression right now! Philosophy is first and foremost something people do. And learning to do philosophy is in many ways similar to learning to play football or speak a language. There are always certain theories and methods that have to be learned along the way; but in the end you'll never become a good football player without repeating hours of drills out on the field, and you'll never become fluent in a language without finding someone who speaks that language and conversing with them.

 

          The examples of games and languages suggest that two indispens­able steps to learning a skill are practice and imitation; and the same applies to the skill of doing philosophy. This is why I have encouraged everyone who takes this course to set aside a regular time for reflecting on philosophical issues raised in the lectures or listed in the "Questions" section at the end of each week, and then to write insight papers in re­sponse. The insight papers are your chance to practice doing philosophy. But, unless you have a natural talent for philosophizing, mere practice is not enough to bring success. You also need someone to imitate. With this in mind, I hope that as you are attending (or reading) these lectures, you are paying more attention to the way I do philosophy than to memorizing "facts" about various philosophers. But, just as there are many different strategies for playing good football and many different ideas about how best to learn a language, so also, as we have already seen, there are many different conceptions of the best way of doing philosophy. This is why it is important for you to read the original writings of other philosophers as well (such as those suggested in the "Recommended Readings" sections at the end of each week). When reading these texts, you should not think of yourself as merely learning the content of philosophical ideas, but also as learning to imitate how that philosopher does philosophy. Eventually, you should be able to do philosophy as you read, by actively employing appropriate methods in dialogue with the text you are reading.

 

          Philosophy is a skill, but it is not just any skill. Indeed, it would be easy to take the comparison between philosophy and other skills too far. For philosophy can actually be regarded as the ultimate skill, or the skill of skills. In other words, philosophy at its best, as the skill of having ideas and discovering the truth in them, provides the foundation for all other skills. This is the reason virtually every academic discipline has a "philosophy of ..." attached to it. In addition to the branches of the tree of philosophy to be considered here in Part Three-philosophy of science, philosophy of morals, and philosophy of politics-we could study the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of physics (and of other specific sciences), the philosophy of art (and of specific forms of art), the philosophy of education-the list goes on and on. That the skill of philosophizing is the foundation of all these skills is reflected in our educational establishment by the fact that a person who masters a certain academic discipline is usually given a degree entitled "doctor of philos­ophy". Although most doctoral degrees do not actually require students to study any philosophy as such, the name of the degree does suggest that graduates have mastered the foundation of the discipline-and so ought, in principle at least, to be able to philosophize about it. However, even skills not normally associated with university education can have a "philosophy of ...", such as the philosophy of playing chess, the philosophy of cooking, the philosophy of hunting, etc. And then, of course there is the philosophy of life, not to mention the philosophy of death. Both of these topics, to be examined in Week XII, refer primarily to skills: namely, learning how to live, or learning how to die.

 

          How does this view of philosophy as the ideal skill relate to the fundamental myth of this course? In other words, if philosophy is like a tree, then what should we call the skill of doing philosophy? And how should we picture the philosopher? Philosophers work with philosophy in much the same way gardeners work with the plants in a garden: just as gardeners do not create or even construct plants, but nurture something that is already given (e.g., in the form of a seed), so also philosophers do not (or at least should not) see their task as inventing arguments out of nothing or as building systems up in some mechanical fashion, but as nurturing a reality that is already given (e.g., in the form of an idea). With this in mind, let's take a closer look at this course's basic myth.

 

          The tree of philosophy as I am presenting it in this course is quite different from the one described by Descartes (see Figure III.1). In fact, the only thing these two analogies have in common is that both associate metaphysics with the roots of the tree (cf. Figure VII.3). Just as the roots of a tree are almost entirely hidden under the soil, so also the subject-matter of metaphysics is hidden almost entirely from the inquisitive gaze of our cognitive minds. Hence, the fundamental lesson we learned from studying metaphysics was that, just as a gardener who continually uproots a tree to see how its roots are growing would soon kill the tree, so also philosophers who refuse to recognize the necessity of our ignorance of ultimate reality and who instead claim to have reached a definite knowl­edge of ultimate reality (or of its non-existence), will soon inadvertently kill the very organism they are responsible for nurturing.

 

          The trunk and branches, as we have seen, are for us not physics and the other sciences, but logic and science (where "science" is taken in its original meaning to refer to any justifiable "knowledge", not just to those types of knowledge patterned on the methods of the physical sciences). Just as all the branches of a tree grow out of the trunk, all our knowledge (i.e., sciens) is expressible in words (i.e., logoi). We could add that the bark of the tree is like analytic logic, showing us the protec­tive surface of our ways of thinking, whereas the core of the tree is like

 

 

Figure VII.3: The Tree of Philosophy

 

synthetic logic, taking us to the very heart and life of thought itself.

 

          Although Descartes did not carry his analogy of the tree beyond the branches, we will see in Part Four that the leaves of a tree can be compared to the area of philosophical inquiry usually known as ontology (the "study of being"). Just as the leaves of most types of trees fall off each year and grow anew in the spring in a continuous cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth, so also the phenomena we will study in Part Four are often fleeting and temporary. Yet, even as a tree's leaves give it its distinctive character, so also the distinctive character of human beings is determined by such experiences as beauty, love, religious experience, and death. Moreover, just as dead leaves fall to the ground and then decompose, in order to constitute the soil that nourishes the roots of the tree, so also the accumulation of generations of human experiences has constituted a tradition that cannot be neglected without peril, since it forms the very ground in which the tree of philosophy grows.

 

          Now let's take this myth of the tree of philosophy one step further, by assuming we are nurturing a tree that bears fruit. If so, what is the nature of this fruit? I suggest we view it as the starting point of the vari­ous sciences. History tells us that most of the disciplines we now regard as sciences were at one time regarded as branches of philosophy. Math­ematics, for example, can be traced back to the ancient Greek philoso­pher named Pythagoras (whose "Pythagorean theorem" you probably learned in school). Sciences as diverse as physics, biology, psychology, and politics all have their origin in Aristotle's philosophical empiricism. Even chemistry developed out of a quasi-philosophical discipline, named Alchemy, in which people who called themselves "philosophers" tried to find ways of converting various common materials into gold. (Alchemists regarded the "arbor philosophicus" as a symbol of this transformation process, though this version of the tree of philosophy, as described by Carl Jung (in PSA 420; see also Figures 122,131,135,188,221,231), was very different from the one employed in this course.) Sociology and Economics also began as aspects of philosophical systems. And again, the list goes on. Why is it that sciences so often arise in this way? The tree of philosophy provides a plausible answer: the branches of this tree repre­sent science in the special sense of the love of wisdom; on them grow various types of fruit; when one such fruit drops to the ground, rots, and then takes root, a specific science is born. This explains, incidentally, why trying to make philosophy itself into just another science is so hope­less: the tree of philosophy can never become a science, because she is the mother of all sciences! The tragedy is that these younger trees, though protected as tender young shoots under the shade of the tree of philoso­phy, often threaten to choke out their mother when they reach maturity.

 

          If the new trees that grow out of the fruit of the tree of philosophy are the specific sciences, then what are the seeds we find at the center of each fruit? The seeds can represent our ideas, or insights. I believe most, if not all, of us have many valuable insights throughout our lifetime. The problem is that we usually fail to recognize their value when they come to us, so we eat the sweet fruit of opinion, to satisfy our appetite, but throw away the bitter seeds, even though they could eventually give birth to knowledge. An insight must be planted, watered, and nurtured by our constant attention if it is to grow into an idea worth considering by other people, not just held by ourselves as a personal opinion.

 

          This distinction between knowledge and opinion is an important one to understand before we proceed with our discussion of science and the love of wisdom. Toward the end of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggested an interesting way of distinguishing between knowledge, belief, and opinion. He said that in order to claim we "know" something, we should have both objective (external) certainty and subjective (internal) certainty. "Belief" can have a level of certainty just as strong as knowledge, but its certainty is only subjective; if I feel certain of something, even though the external facts are not sufficient to construct an objective proof (i.e., a proof constraining other people to agree), then and only then should I say "I believe ...". In a situation where I am neither objectively nor subjectively certain, by contrast, I should regard myself as holding an opinion.

 

          Kant's distinction is actually based on two questions that form a 2LAR: (1) Is the truth of p subjectively certain? and (2) Is the truth of p objectively certain? Kant explained three of the possible situations that arise out of these two questions, but he did not address the fourth possibility. He probably assumed it is meaningless to think of a proposition as being objectively certain, yet subjectively uncertain. Yet I do not think we should be too quick to regard this as an imperfect 2LAR. For what about ignorance? Is not ignorance the state of being subjectively uncertain about something that has in itself some kind of objective certainty? If so, then we can map these four cognitive states onto the 2LAR cross, as in Figure VII.4.

 

          An insight is never a mere opinion; it is more like a sudden revelation of something new, an awareness of potential knowledge about something we were completely ignorant of prior to having the insight. Accordingly, once we have recognized our ignorance, philosophy calls

 

 

 

 

Figure VII.4: The Four Cognitive States

 

 

us to focus our attention away from opinions and toward knowledge and belief. Science, by contrast, always aims for knowledge alone, in the sense of objectively provable certainty. The scientist studies the relations between particular natural phenomena by observing their general structure, and attempts to discover patterns that will eventually lead to the understanding of some natural law followed by the phenomena in question. If a phenomenon always operates in a certain way, then its activity will be predictable; and of course, one of the great attractions of science is that, whenever it truly reaches its ultimate goal of establishing objectively justifiable knowledge, it enables us to know the future! The philosophy of science, by contrast, is not interested in establishing particular items of empirical knowledge, but in studying the nature of the overall assumptions and methods of science. Thus, philosophers of science, instead of asking questions about particular phenomena, ask questions such as: What is science? What is the proper scientific method? What gives science its reliability? and Does science give us knowledge of a reality that is entirely independent of our minds?

 

          In this course we will not be able to examine these questions very thoroughly. For example, we will not be able to go deeper into the last question than we did in Lecture 8, where we saw that Kant, at least, believed all scientific knowledge depends on certain "synthetic a priori conditions" that the mind itself imposes upon objects in order to make them knowable. This aspect of his criticism of metaphysics is therefore closely related to the philosophy of science. In the next lecture we will look more closely at one of Kant's arguments, concerning the philosoph­ical foundation of the reliability of science, which also has implications for the nature of the proper scientific method. But for now I would like to make a few more remarks about the nature of science itself.

 

          There is a common view, especially popular among scientists and science students, that in order for anything to be true, it must be scientif­ically provable. This view is often called "scientism". A similar view, called "naturalism", goes even further, claiming everything that exists is material, determined, and mechanical. These two views often go together, since inhabitants of a world that is entirely "natural" (in this special sense) would be unlikely to be able to discover truth by any non-scien­tific methods. As we shall see in Lecture 21, scientists must assume the phenomena they study are natural in something like this sense, because otherwise gaining objective knowledge about them would be impossible. However, the naturalist takes this a step further by claiming there is nothing outside the realm of what scientists can observe. Even in the social sciences, where the knowledge established is often knowledge about people's opinions and beliefs, there is sometimes a tendency to assume the scientist's objective knowledge is somehow untainted by any stain of subjectivity. However, as Figure VII.4 suggests, genuine knowledge al­ways has a subjective as well as an objective element. Indeed, the notion that we can have purely objective knowledge is dangerously misleading, for such a state actually defines ignorance, not knowledge! The ignorance accompanying any view that makes scientific knowledge abso­lute can be described as, at the very least, ignorance of the mythical character of the subjective beliefs forming the very foundation of such views.

 

          The main point I want to make about views like scientism and nat­uralism is that, contrary to the assumption of many who hold such views, they are not part of science, nor are they in any way necessitated by the nature of science; rather, they are philosophies of science. Scientism is, or ought to be regarded as, an epistemological theory, and naturalism, a metaphysical theory. Yet in many cases they are more a result of a one-sided prejudice, an inability to see anything from more than one point of view, than a well-reasoned philosophical foundation for science. The fact is that other philosophies of science recognize that our world consists of more than just mechanically determined material, that science is only one of many legitimate ways of discovering truth, and that these views of science provide just as good a foundation for scientific research as do their more narrow-minded alternatives. Once we realize that an absolute trust in science has nothing to do with science itself, much of the force is taken away from philosophies such as scientism and naturalism.

 

          The difference between science and the philosophy of science illustrates how the disciplines of applied philosophy relate to the kind of wisdom under consideration here in Part Three. For we have come to view "wisdom" in a general sense, as referring to the activity of knowing how to decide what counts as real; or knowing where to place the boundary between knowledge and ignorance, and when to pass beyond that boundary. In other words, loving wisdom requires us not so much to gather as many scientific facts as possible, as to come to know what we could call the Way of science. Indeed, this same notion is suggested by one of the most common definitions of wisdom, as "knowing how to use our knowledge (scientia)".

 

          One problem this raises is that applied philosophy, understood as related in this way to the love of wisdom, might be regarded by some as itself useless. Complaints such as the following have, in fact, been raised by some of my previous students: "Why study the 'philosophy of' something, when we can study the thing itself?" "Scientific facts enable us to make all kinds of technological advances; but what improvement to our technological society has ever been made by the philosophy of science?" "It's just a waste of time to study this mysterious 'way', when we could be using our precious time to study something really useful!"

 

          Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher whose ideas we met in connection with our discussion of synthetic logic, was a champion of "the Way" (called the "Tao", or "Dao", in Chinese). As we might expect, he was acutely aware of this accusation that a study of the Way is useless. On several occasions his response was to point out that a tree we think of as "useful" is likely to have a short life. If the wood is very hard, we will want to use it for building something. If it is very soft, we will want to use it for carving something. If it has a fragrant aroma, we will want to use it to make decorative ornaments. But if the tree is useless, we are more likely to leave it alone. He infers from this that being useless can be very useful: the apparently "useless" tree is more likely to have a long life! This application of synthetic logic may not be the most persuasive way of defending the usefulness of the tree of philosophy; but it is not without merit, for it demonstrates that we must reconsider our common assumptions concerning what counts as "useful".

 

          According to Wittgenstein, philosophy is useful only for people who are plagued with a certain kind of "mental cramp", and his task as a philosopher was to act as a "masseur" to relieve that cramp. Since it is mainly, if not exclusively, philosophers who suffer from this cramp, he saw his task as that of helping philosophers avoid falling into meaning­less ways of thinking. Once we recognize, however, that ordinary people also tend to apply knowledge in meaningless ways, the usefulness of studying philosophy can be more fully appreciated.

 

          Indeed, our inability to use wisdom in an instrumental sense-e.g., as we use a fork and knife, or chopsticks, to eat-is precisely what en­ables it to serve as the foundation for all that is useful. Merely knowing the boundary between knowledge and ignorance may not enable us to build a new kind of rocket to explore the universe faster, nor insure that we will automatically do the right thing when we are in a morally diffi­cult situation, nor is it likely to empower us to make peace between the leaders of two warring nations. But it will enable us to see more clearly the difference between a meaningful and a meaningless application of these and other kinds of knowledge. Hence, we can use philosophical knowledge to help those who are engaged in such human activities not to use their technological know-how, or their moral reasoning, or their political power, in an irrational, destructive, or self-defeating way.

 

 

 

21. Causality and the Boundary of Science

 

 

 

          Today we will look more closely at one of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of science: the reliability of induction as a tool for gaining knowledge. But first, let me direct your attention to a question I want you to think about during the next few weeks, though it is not directly related to the philosophy of science, . The question, paraphrased from Kierkegaard's quote (in CUP 97) from Lessing (1729-1781), is:

 

If God had all truth in his right hand

and the lifelong search for truth in his left,

which hand would you choose?

 

 

In a later lecture, about the time I think you will have forgotten my request that you reflect on this difficult question, I shall make some suggestions as to how I believe we should respond.

 

        Do you recall our discussion in Lecture 11 of the analytic and synthetic methods of argument? At that point we contrasted deduction, the method that begins with two or more premises and draws a necessary conclusion from them, with induction, the method that begins by gathering evidence from observations and generalizes from these to form a probable conclusion. Many scientists, from the beginnings of science down to the present day, have assumed their task requires careful observation more than rigorous argumentation, so that the proper way of doing science is to proceed by the path of induction. The problem this raises is that scientists nearly always view their task as a search for facts, and they normally assume that once a "fact" is demonstrated, it is known for certain to be true; yet, as we saw in Lecture 11, induction on its own cannot provide us with such certain knowledge, since it always depends to some extent on guesswork. Solving this problem is of the utmost importance for the philosophy of science, because it appears to call into question one of our most basic beliefs about scientific knowledge: that scientific facts are reliable and trustworthy, because scientists have proved that they must be true.

 

          For most scientists who have thought philosophically about what they are doing, the solution to the "problem of induction" has been to assume the phenomena they observe are somehow bound together by a necessary connection. This would mean the necessity of scientific facts comes not from the logical structure of the scientific method, but from some law within the phenomena themselves. And the most basic natural law, governing all other more specific laws about how phenomena interact, is that any effect we observe in the world is necessarily determined by some preceding cause. The important thing to understand about this solution is that this use of the law of necessary causation is a philosophical assumption, not one based on any scientific proof. Indeed, we could call it the "myth" that most of modern science is based on. In this century there have been some scientists, mostly physicists, who claim to reject this myth, on the grounds that on the subatomic level events "just happen": the path of an electron, for example, is believed to be entirely random, and thus unpredictable at any given point of time, so that only the "probability" of any given path can be known beforehand. Other scientists, however, believe that such an explanation, even as a way of accounting for the mysterious movements of subatomic particles, is merely a confession that the physicists have come to the end of their science. Indeed, it is as if they had "bumped their heads" on the outer boundary of science itself.

 

          If physicists really have reached the boundary of the physical world, then the assumption that subatomic events are uncaused is just as mythical as the more traditional assumption that all events have a cause. In either case scientists ought to recognize that the debate over which assumption serves as a better myth to build a science on is primarily a philosophical debate, not one that can be answered merely through scientific observation. Accordingly, I shall now introduce to you two ways philosophers have dealt with the issue of the necessary connection that is so often believed to give inductive knowledge its reliability. One comes from the doubts raised by David Hume (1711-1776), and the other comes from Kant's influential attempt to refute Hume's position.

 

          Hume was a Scottish philosopher who thoroughly defended a philosophical method called "skepticism". Skeptics call into question the reliability of our knowledge (in science, morality, aesthetics, or any other area where people claim to have knowledge), usually by demonstrating that the foundations (or roots) of that knowledge are either insufficient or nonexistent. Hume called into question many kinds of knowledge, defending his skeptical alternatives with some persuasive arguments. At the basis of all his arguments is the assumption that truth can be reached in only two legitimate ways (cf. Figure IV.4): through mathematical rea­soning (i.e., deduction, producing what Kant later called analytic a priori knowledge) and through empirical observation (i.e., induction, produc­ing synthetic a posteriori knowledge). Using this assumption, sometimes called "Hume's fork", he attempted to locate and discard any and all claims to knowledge that do not depend on either ideas (thoughts) grounded in logic or impressions (feelings) grounded in the senses. Thus, his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), concludes:

 

 

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume-of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance-let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (EHU §XII, Part III)

 

 

          When it comes to scientific knowledge, Hume used this "fork" not to deny the validity of all science whatsoever, but to argue that it is wrong to think of such knowledge as giving us access to any necessary truth. For he believed it is impossible to use induction to reach necessity. The reason is that he could find no grounds for believing in a hidden law of necessary connection. We cannot observe such a law, and we cannot prove it by deductive reasoning; so it must not be true! He expressed this argument in a variety of ways. For example, when discussing the possi­bility that the human will might give us access to such a law, he reasoned:

 

 

Why has the will an influence over the tongue and fingers, not over the heart and liver? This question would never embarrass us, were we conscious of a power in the former case, not in the latter. We should then perceive, independent of experience, why the authority of will over the organs of the body is circumscribed within such particular limits. Being in that case fully acquainted with the power or force ... we should also know, why its influence reaches precisely to such boundaries, and no farther. (EHU §VII, Part I, my italics)

 

 

Here Hume recognized that the search for necessary connection is a search for a boundary, outside of ordinary experience, that would give us consciousness of why things are connected the way they are. But he went on to reject such a possibility, on the following grounds:

 

... consciousness never deceives. Consequently, neither in the one case nor in the other are we ever conscious of any power. We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constant­ly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connection, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable.

 

 

          Hume's argument here is that, in order to understand the reasons the human will works the way it does, we would have to be conscious of some power underlying and determining our experience. But we are in fact conscious of nothing but our own experiences; we never have even a glimpse of such a hidden power. We come to believe in such abstract ideas by copying impressions from our senses and "associating" the resulting ideas with each other. A simple example is that we may form the illusory idea of "a golden mountain" by copying legitimate impressions we have had of gold and mountains (EHU §II). The problem is that some of our most trusted beliefs seem to be just as poorly grounded (§VII, Part II):

 

 

... upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of [necessary] connection which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined; but never connected. And as we can have no idea of anything which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connection or power at all, and that these words are absolutely without any meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life.

 

 

If the idea of necessary connection is indeed "without any meaning", then this poses seemingly insurmountable problems for the view that the inductive method is sufficient for establishing scientific facts. This way of undermining the foundation of what was previously assumed to constitute knowledge is typical of the skeptical method in philosophy.

 

          Hume's skepticism concerning the common idea that there is a necessary connection between cause and effect implicitly raises two challenges, one directed more to scientists, and the other, more to philosophers. If Hume is right, his ideas challenge scientists to choose between two alternatives: either find a scientific method that is more suitable than induction, or else give up the notion that science can ever achieve the goal of certainty. That this choice is implied by Hume's skepticism should be clear enough, especially if we revise Figure IV.2b by taking Hume's arguments into consideration, as follows:

 

 

 

Figure VII.5: The Uncertainty of Inductive Knowledge

 

 

          Of course, philosophers of science have responded to this challenge more often than scientists. One response has been to suggest Hume was right in rejecting the certainty of inductive knowledge, but to claim that, in fact, the method followed by scientists is not primarily inductive but deductive. Karl Popper, for example, argued that scientists actually begin not with a bare observation, but with an hypothesis that functions like the premise of a deduction. The scientist assumes this hypothesis, then tests it by trying to "falsify" it through various experiments. Induction on its own would never enable scientists to reach factual conclusions; but de­duction and induction together are able to do so. Another response has been simply to agree with Hume, so that scientists need not view their task as a search for certainty. For instance, Paul Feyerabend has argued that, rather than searching for the one perfect scientific theory, philoso­phers and scientists should encourage a proliferation of theories: the more different scientific theories there are, the better-even if they seem to be opposed to each other. Philosophers have attempted to legitimize science in so many other ways that a fuller account is beyond the scope of this course.

 

          The more strictly philosophical challenge arising out of Hume's skepticism is to find a way of defending induction in one of two ways: either by appealing to some principle other than necessary connection, or by attacking Hume's arguments more directly, and demonstrating that the idea of necessary connection is meaningful after all. Hume himself actually pursued something like the former alternative. He recognized that some explanation must be given for our feeling of expectation that things will happen in the future the way they have happened in the past. Accordingly, he argued that this feeling, seeming to close the "gap" between the evidence and the conclusion in an inductive argument (see Figure VII.5), is actually a result of nothing but "custom" or "habit":

 

 

But there is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar; except only, that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connection, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connection. Nothing farther is the case. Contemplate the subject on all sides; you will never find any other origin of that idea. (EHU §VII, Part II)

 

 

In other words, when we get used to experiencing objects in a certain way, we imagine that this way is necessary, and so we expect to continue experiencing them in the same way. We expect, and even feel "certain" that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, even though there is no factual basis whatsoever for real certainty, but only for a judgment of probability based on the habits we have developed from past experiences.

 

          We might defend Hume's answer to his own challenge by noting that, in fact, some people do not expect the sun to rise in the east! For instance, on the north and south poles there are certain times of year when the sun never rises or never sets. For example, I was actually born in a small town in northwest Alaska in the early morning of a long summer's day. My father has told me he walked home from the hospital at 2am that morning, watching the sun set in the north. A few hours later it rose again, a bit to the east, but still mainly in the north. So the typical example of the sun rising in the east also illustrates how what seems to be a reasonable conclusion ("The sun always rises in the east") can actually turn out to be based on our habit of viewing the world from the limited perspective of our own past experiences. Only when we are surprised by discovering an unexpected exception do we realize the influence of our habits on what we believe to be true.

 

          Kant, however, was radically dissatisfied with Hume's way of accounting for our feeling that phenomena are connected with each other in a necessary way. He therefore took the second way of responding to this challenge. Kant agreed with Hume about the importance of regarding necessary connection as a boundary between what science can and cannot know; but he rejected Hume's claim that all knowledge must be either mathematical or observational. According to Kant, a third type of knowledge, called "transcendental", is synthetic and yet also a priori -i.e., it is expressed by a proposition that is necessarily true, yet its necessity is not derived merely from logic (see Lecture 11). And this, it turns out, is the distinctively philosophical type of knowledge. Anyone who accepts Hume's fork in its strictest sense will find that it eventually excludes philosophy itself from the realm of worthwhile knowledge! But when we recognize that Hume's fork functions as the mythical founda­tion for his system, we will be free to replace it by some alternative, more appropriate myth, such as Kant's "Copernican" myth, that the mind imposes certain synthetic a priori conditions onto any object in the very process of coming to know that object.

 

          Kant responded to Hume's skepticism in a number of different ways; but his most influential response came in his theory of the "principles of pure understanding". They exist in the mind, he argued, yet determine the character of our experience to be the way it is. One of the principles Kant defended in this way is precisely the one Hume had rejected as a mere feeling, based on our habitual way of interpreting our past experiences: the idea of necessary connection. Kant defended this principle in a section of his first Critique entitled the "Second Analogy", calling it the "principle of succession in time, in accordance with the law of causality" (CPR 218). This principle states: "All alterations take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect." He provided a complex set of interconnected arguments in defense of this principle-far too complex for us to examine here. However, we can get a general idea of how he argued by taking one paragraph out of context and examining it in a bit more detail.

 

          Kant and Hume both agreed that we have experience, but they dis­agreed over what our subjective experience implies about the objective world. Whereas Hume argued that our subjective experience is merely a "bundle of perceptions", implying little or nothing about objective reality, Kant argued that "we must derive the subjective succession of apprehension from the objective succession of appearances", otherwise it would be impossible to explain why we perceive, or "apprehend", a series of events in a given order, or a group of objects as distinct from each other (CPR 221). In other words, our subjective experience is only possible on the assumption that it is "bound down" to some objective reality. With this in mind, Kant constructed the following argument:

 

 

If, then, we experience that something happens, we in so doing always presuppose that something precedes it, on which it follows according to a rule. Otherwise I should not say of the object that it follows. For mere succession in my apprehension [as in Hume's theory of "habit"], if there be no rule determining the succession in relation to something that precedes, does not justify me in assuming any succession in the object. I render my subjective synthesis of apprehension objective only by reference to a rule, in accordance with which the appearances in their succession, that is, as they happen, are determined by the preceding state. The experience of an event [i.e., of anything as happening] is itself possible only on this assumption. (223)

 

 

If Kant's argument is correct, then the principle that there is a necessary connection between cause and effect must be true, even though we cannot use either observation or mathematical reasoning to prove it.

 

          This type of argument has come to be known as a "transcendental argument". The general form of such an argument is:

 

In order for experience to happen, p must be true.

I, at least, have experience.

Therefore, p must be true.

 

 

Hume would not deny the second premise; so his only rebuttal would be to question the first premise. Is there really anything that must be true in order for our experience to be possible at all? If so, then those truths, taken together, would define the boundary line between what we can and cannot know. Would it be possible, for example, to imagine a kind of experience that does not require us to presuppose that we have in some way been determined by something that happened at some time in the past? Kant believed that in such a case we would not be justified in claiming to have any experience. "Experience" here refers to an aware­ness of "subjective succession" in our perceptions; and if there were not also some "objective succession", then there would simply be no basis for our subjective succession to be apprehended. In other words, an appeal to "habit" is irrelevant, since without an objective succession as the basis for our so-called habits, we could not even be conscious of those habits.

 

          Some of you are probably rather confused at this point. This is not surprising, for the arguments we have been considering are among the most difficult ever proposed by philosophers. Professional philosophers who study Hume and Kant all their life still debate over how to interpret their views and which one gives a better description of the way the world really is. So we cannot hope to settle the question once and for all in an introductory course! Nevertheless, in hopes of clarifying what each of these positions involves, and perhaps at the same time, helping you make up your mind about which one is closer to the truth, I would like to perform a little "thought-experiment".

 

          Imagine you've just finished with all your classes for the day. Let's assume you live in Shatin, as I do; so you walk up the road to the nearest bus stop and wait there for the next bus. After only a few minutes, the bus you normally ride drives up. It is full of people; but the driver, a friendly man who you remember seeing before, stops to let you on. Even though the only place for you to stand is an awkward space right next to the driver, you love philosophy so much that you immediately pull out the book you are currently reading from the lists of Recom­mended Readings, and begin to read. The traffic is not too bad, so after only a minute or two the bus enters Lion Rock Tunnel, on its way to Shatin. You hardly notice this, though, since you are so engrossed in your philosophizing. Then, all of a sudden, you feel the bus stopping. At first, you just continue reading, assuming there must be heavy traffic in the tunnel. But after a few minutes, you begin to wonder why the bus still isn't moving. So you pull your eyes away from your book to see if you can tell what is causing the delay. To your surprise, there are no vehicles in front of the bus; and the bus driver is still sitting in the same position he was in before, with his hands on the steering wheel and his feet on the pedals, just as if he were still driving!

 

          What would you do in such a case? My guess is that, given a long enough delay, you would eventually ask the bus driver to explain why he had stopped the bus. Now let's imagine he answers you by saying "I didn't stop the bus" (or the equivalent expression in Cantonese). You would probably respond by saying "Well, then, you better call for help, because the bus must be having some engine trouble." But the driver replies: "No, the engine is working just fine. Listen." And sure enough, you then notice that the rumble of the bus engine sounds the same as it normally does when it is driving through the tunnel at a normal speed. I think you would be a bit perplexed; but after a while, especially if you were going to be late for dinner, you would again raise some kind of question, such as: "Well, if you didn't stop the bus, who did? God? Or a ghost?" If the driver then answered "No, of course not. How many times do I have to tell you, nobody stopped the bus", then most of us, I think would say, or at least think, something like: "Look, either someone stopped the bus intentionally, or there is some engine trouble, because buses just don't stop for no reason at all!"

 

          I wonder how would you respond if the bus driver replied to this claim by retorting: "Ha! You just feel that way because of the habit you have developed over your years of living in Hong Kong, of thinking that buses don't stop in polluted tunnels for no reason. In fact, they can and do sometimes stop for no reason; it's just that this is the first time you have experienced an exception to your habitual expectations." If the driver then turned away and resumed his driving position, as if nothing at all were unusual, I suspect that most of us would try to get out of that bus as fast as we could! Why? Because we would all assume this driver is either playing a very inappropriate (possibly dangerous) joke on his passengers, or else he is crazy!

 

          We all (even physicists who believe there is no cause behind the movements of subatomic particles) normally assume that whatever we see and experience in our everyday life is caused by something. Even miracles are caused events, since they are events believed to be caused by God. Likewise, people living in primitive tribes naturally assume that whatever happens is caused to happen, perhaps by some spirit or god. If we didn't make some kind of causal assumption, we would simply be unable to function in any human society. If Kant's view is right, we would not even be able to be aware of our own subjective experiences. But it is important to understand that Kant's principle is transcendental, whereas Hume's "habit" is empirical. That means the two views are not necessarily incompatible, provided we reject the narrow presupposition of Hume's fork. Hume was actually right when he said there is no way to observe or calculate our way to an understanding of necessary connec­tion. Kant's argument shows that Hume's mistake was to ignore the transcendental boundary line between these two, because that is the true home of necessary connection, and so also the best justification scientists can appeal to when defending their use of the inductive method.

 

          Even if you are not convinced by Kant's arguments, or by the foregoing thought-experiment, to believe that the principle of causality, or necessary connection, is a transcendental condition for the possibility of experience, I hope you will agree by now that a view like Hume's would, on its own, undermine the possibility of science. There could be no objective facts if everything depended on our own subjective habits. I think most of you probably agree that habit alone is simply not good enough. There is something absolute about our idea of the necessary connection between cause and effect, something that seems almost beyond question! Incidentally, the fact that Hume disagrees with this does not prove that the idea is "relative"; Hume's theory could be incorrect!

 

          If, on the other hand, we accept Kant's argument and regard every­thing that happens as determined by something that happened prior to it, a new problem arises: How can we explain the feeling we human beings have that we are free? If everything in the world is determined, does this mean we must discard our belief in human freedom? This would cause a major problem, given the close relationship between freedom and wisdom (see Lecture 19). Here the philosophy of science impinges directly upon one of the central questions of the branch of applied philosophy we will climb in the next lecture, the branch of moral philosophy. There we will find to what extent our search for wisdom can lead us to accept both the determinism of science and the freedom of moral action.

 

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

 

1.  A. What is the difference between a limit and a boundary?

     B. Is it possible to be free from all limitations?

 

 

 

2.  A. Is heaven a place?

B. Where do insights come from?

 

 

 

3.  A. How can we be certain of our own uncertainty?

     B. How would a metaphysical habit be different from ordinary habits?

 

 

 

4.  A. Are there any subjective facts?

     B. Could we ever have knowledge of an uncaused event?

 

 

 

RECOMMENDED READINGS

 

1. Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (JLS).

 

2. Daniel N. Robinson, "Wisdom through the Ages", Ch.2 in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Wisdom: Its nature, origin, and development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.13-24.

 

3. Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, tr. P. Møller (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Inc., 1994[1991]).

 

4. John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

 

5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, §VII, "On the Idea of Necessary Connection" (EHU 62-85).

 

6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, "Second Analogy" (CPR 218-233).

 

7. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1972).

 

8. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge (London: Verso, 1978).

 

 

 

Send comments to the author: StevePq@hkbu.edu.hk

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