This is going to be very, very thumbnail. There's a huge amount of detail, reports being left out to try to cover thousands of years of philosophy in just a few minutes. But nevertheless, I want to start thinking about what philosophy is really at its core all about. So if you had to put in a nutshell what philosophy is really all about, how would you do it? What is philosophy? And what you might say are the main problems of philosophy. I'm not talking about the detailed stuff, right? I'm talking about the big picture, in the broader sense, what's philosophy? What do we know? Ooh, good, what do we know? What is it? Say it again. Inquisitivity. Inquisitivity, okay, asking deep questions, some big questions. What else? How we know what we know. How we know what we know, good. You guys are very epistemologically oriented, I see. And the theory of knowledge is one of the central questions of philosophy, no doubt about it. What else? What we ought to do. Good. What we ought to do. Ethics. We're actually in this course going to have very little to say about that. We're going to concentrate on the other parts of philosophy. There's a huge amount that goes on with respect to ethics in the 20th century. We'll occasionally allude to it, but it's independent enough from some other things that we're not going to spend a few minutes on. Other things that are core questions. But here's a very broad way of thinking. All of the things we've mentioned, how you know what you know, how you know what you know, what you want to do, and you might say the basic question of metaphysics, what there is, is really all about, in some sense, the connection between the mind and the world. It's all about the connection between our thoughts and reality. And so I'm going to draw you a little picture of that. Let me give you a picture, first of all, of a typical person. I studied drawing and painting for a year to get this good. Okay, imagine that that's you, right? And now I want to show, I want to blow up what's inside your mind. So let's have this little cartoon bubble. And there's your mind. Now, suppose you have a thought. I don't know how to draw a thought exactly, but imagine it's something like a little electrical charge in this mind. So we've got a little zap here. And I don't know. What are you thinking about? Suppose we've got something very simple, like, for example, a trine. And you're looking at the triangle, and you're saying, huh, that's a triangle. So we might think this thought has a content. We could draw it maybe this way. That's a prime. And now right away we might think, well, what's the connection between that thought and its content? And not the. And that actual trouble, right? Now you might think, well, the thought is supposed to reflect that. But in general, we might think, oh, this is a place where these questions about knowledge become crucial. How do I know that I'm actually capturing the world? How do I know I'm getting it right? Having thoughts that either correspond to the world or however you want to think about truth, that somehow succeed in doing what I'm trying to do in thinking. Now, here is one way of thinking about this problem. We might think, well, there is some property that this has, and am I really capturing that property accurately? It becomes especially problematic if I imagine another person. looking at the triangle. And let's imagine that that person also has a mind and is having a similar thought, and that that thought has a similar sort of content, or at least it looks similar. But now there are a bunch of skeptical questions we can start raising, right? We can worry about the connection between my thought and reality. So that's one kind of skepticism. But then we could think, well, how do I know that what you're saying about this and what I'm saying about it actually correspond? How do we know that the content of my thought, that that's a triangle, actually matches the content of your thought, that's a triangle? And we might worry about the possibility of communication. Can we really communicate? Are we talking about the same thing? Well, With something like triangles, this isn't really a crucial problem. We tend to think, look, we can explain in simple geometric terms what a triangle is. But there are lots of concepts where it's not so clear, right, that my concept of it matches your concept. So what are some examples of controversial concepts? Concepts where you might think we're talking about something, but it's not at all clear what is actually being discussed and that you have the same idea that I have. Yeah, I mean, we're going to have a clue to this whenever we start thinking, gosh, maybe our dispute is actually semantic. We really agree about the facts. We're just calling them different things. It's just really in the end coming down to definitions. So where might that happen? Where you and I are worried that maybe we just have different concepts of this. We attach different meanings to the term. Okay, God, right. Somebody's saying, do you believe in God? And suppose somebody's answering, well, I don't know. I believe that there's a very powerful spiritual force behind the universe, but I don't know if it's God. And I feel very drawn to certain Eastern religions that are all about spirituality, but not really about God per se. Does that person believe in God? Well, some people might say, yeah, sure. I mean, what do you mean? God is the spiritual power behind the universe. Other people might say, no, that's pretty bad. I don't count that in belief. And so this might be a place where people really have different concepts of God. And a view like that might be sort of on the borderline. Some views, both parties might agree. Yes, definitely people who believe in God. Others, people who definitely don't. But there might be this area where people disagree. And one way of looking at the early platonic dialogues, by the way, is really like that. You've got all the... all these cases where there's something sort of ambiguous, as in the youth of Rome, where youth of Rome is taking this action against his own father, and is that right or not? Well, you might think, gee, I don't know. We better find out what it is for something to be right, and then the dialogue proceeds to try to sort that out. There might be cases where everybody agrees that's right, everybody agrees that's wrong, but now maybe we have different concepts of right and wrong, and so these things have sort of vague borderline or part to sort out. Anyway, sometimes this can become a real issue and we can worry about whether your concept of God or the right or the wrong or justice or whatever it is, is really the same as mine. So that's a different kind of interpersonal sort of skepticism. We're going to look at some other cases of this. For example, suppose this isn't a different person. Suppose it's me at another time. And so do I mean by this term what I meant? yesterday or last year or 20 years ago. And we can worry about whether that's really right. If you're interpreting a philosopher, right? So for many years, you can worry about whether they're really using terms in the same way, whether Bertrand Russell in 1947 is actually using the term the way he used it in 1903, et cetera, et cetera. We have a person on the faculty who specialized in Russell thought. And when he was talking about Russell, which was wonderful, he gave beautiful lectures on Russell, but he would sort of say, this is the view. in March 1908. Now by July 1908, it's different. And he was using these terms in different ways, and so on. And then, of course, there's the Russell 1910. So there were many of these temporal slices of Russell that all had different views. So it could be a sort of dynamic skepticism. Am I using the term in the same way? We'll see that when we get to Kripke's book on Wittgenstein. But there could also be another interpretation. Suppose this isn't me at a different time. It's just me in another possible. Okay, so maybe I would use the term different if only something were different. If I had, let's say, gone to a different graduate school, or if I had studied under different teachers, or if I had just read different things along the way, or if I didn't have so many cats, or whatever it is, it might be that in another nearby possible world, maybe I'd be using the term different. In any event, Plato introduces a way of trying to solve this problem. because he's worried about the possibility of skepticism. And in Greek thought at the time, there were plenty of skeptics. There were also the Sophists who turned this into an argument for relevance and said, look, I don't know if you're using triangle the way I'm using it. The most we can say is that's a triangle for me. Triangle the way I'm using the term. Maybe it's not a triangle the way you're using it. That person does believe in God the way I use the term God, but maybe that person doesn't believe in God the way you use it. So really, in the end, truth is relative. That was the position of the Sophists. So what does Plato do to solve this problem? Forms, exactly. The idea is, well, yes, okay, you have a concept, let's say, of triangularity. And I have a concept of triangularity. Do they match? Well, gosh, we're not sure. But what if there were a form of triangulary? We might say an operating triangulary or a universal corresponding triangulary. I'm going to draw it in boldface. Boldface triangle. Okay? That's the war. And now the idea is this. My concept is really a concept of that. The meaning of my word triangle and the content of my thought that that's a triangle. He slides that form. Moreover, that form is what really is exemplified in that object problem. Now, why is that a solution to the problem? Well, first of all, he can say, let's just look at the problem that's monadic that concerns me. I'm worried about whether the content of my thought is reality. But relax, my thought is tied to the form. And the form is precisely what is present there in reality. That thing is participating in the form of triangularity, and so is my concept, so is my thought. The content of my thought is tied to the form. So I can solve this problem of truth, right? But I thought that the triangle is true. Why? Because its concept pertains to a form that really is exemplified in that. And that gives us a way of thinking about what truth is. It also gives us a way of reassuring ourselves about knowledge. Because we do have this ability, this power to relate to the forms. It's not so much that we reach out to the forms. It's rather that the forms have a power to connect. Now, how does that solve the problem with another person, or me at a different time, or me in a different possible world? Answer is that concept too is tied into the form, primeularity and you're having the thought about that particular object. And again, that form is exemplified in that. So you and I have thoughts that we could reasonably describe as the same thought because they attach the same form. And that form is really the one present in the object in that triangle. Okay, now, in a way, that's a beautiful solution, and yet it didn't last very long. By, well, really, actually, by one generation, Plato's Academy was no longer teaching things. In fact, academic became the term for skeptic. When Augustine writes his work contra academicos, against the academics, it's a work against skepticism. And so Plato's Academy within a generation was just filled with skeptics. This solution didn't work, they thought. Now why not? What's the problem with that sort of solution? It's kind of like another layer of the initial problem. Because how could you define the form if you can't find the concept that you're trying to define? Good, good. So first of all, you might think, well, I'm still not convinced that you and I are actually tied into the same form, right? How are we going to define that? Indeed, that's the problem with these early platonic dialogues. How do you define justice? How do you define courage? How do you define self-control? How do you define virtue, et cetera, et cetera? All of those things become problems. And so you might think, oh, yes, it's all tied into the same form. But is it really? What if you and I have different concepts? Then maybe it's not tied to Satan. In fact, now it becomes a problem, how many forms are there? At one stage, play the words. Is there a form of blood? That sounds like a dumb. It's a problem to many people. But you might put it this way. Look, if there's a form for everything I could think of, then actually this doesn't solve the problem at all. It just duplicates it, right? Maybe you and I are attached to different forms. And then we've got the problem of, well, which form is really present in the object? Maybe we don't know. So yes, I think one problem here is, how do we distinguish this form from, let's say, counterfeit stuff, right? We've got this problem of counterfeit forms. And I shouldn't say counterfeit in the sense that one is, You know, it might be that they're just a bunch of different alternatives. I have this concept, and maybe from my point of view, your concept is really a counterfeit. But of course, you're going to call mine a counterfeit. So I don't mean to use the term to imply there's one true thing any more than people need that counterfeit money. In the end, what makes real money different from counterfeit money, which is officially recognized? And so you might say the problem is precisely that maybe we just have a bunch of different forms here, we're attached to different ones. Now there's another sort of problem here. Can you see another problem with this sort of solution? Actually, when we get to Kripke, that was going to be Kripke. But there's another problem that historically was even more disturbing. Yeah. We have different ideas of forms as well. We have different ideas of forms? Ah, okay, yes. One problem is, I mean, here, what does a form have to be like to solve the problem for us? First, it has to be concrete. Well it's not concrete in the sense that I can causally, you know, that I can directly sense it. It's not like I can touch the form of triangularity or I can kick it around or whatever. But yes, it has to actually have causal power, right? It has to interact causally. I have to be able to know it. And so one problem is, look, it has to be something that is knowable. Otherwise I won't be able to. Otherwise it won't solve the problem of skepticism. But what else? It's got to be outside my mind. If it's just inside my mind or dependent on my mind, then gosh, I've got one, you've got one, we're back to the same skeptical problem. It's got to be something outside my mind, outside your mind. So it's got to be mind independent. Otherwise, you've got exactly this problem, but we just have different concepts of this. Now we still might have different concepts of what this is, and people did, so there's a problem, but what the heck are these forms? But also if you stop and think about this, you might say, well, okay, wait a minute. They've got to be outside the moment. They've got to causally interact with meaning. They've got to have some kind of causal power. Since I don't sense them, I must, I see them, Plato says at one point, with the eye of the mind. But that's really metaphorical. You might think, wait, I don't get it. This thought, in some way, it's not just that the content ties in. Somehow, there has to be some epistemological connection. Somehow, I have to be able to know the form. But now how is that? What do you mean, eye of the mind, right? Here I've got some sort of, I've got physical eye, that is seeing that triangle, but now I've got to have, well I can't put it in the head, this is my physical body, it's got to be up here in the mind somewhere, so I've got to have this eye of the mind, that's really mysterious. So how can I causally interact with it? Now Plato, if you think of it, doesn't really have a good solution to this problem. It's just weird. But in the Meno, he ends up saying, well, I guess you should. what he really does is a result to a sort of, he tells you a story. And whatever Plato tells you a story, he's getting to something very, very deep, but also he has no good solution. So deep question, no answer is really, I think, what those stories and myths and all of that mean. And here's what's happening. He's saying, well, aha, before you were born. Your soul was united. You were living in the realm of the forms. And your soul was united with the forms. And the forms were impressed upon your soul. But you forgot them. And so now we have to remind. And in the Mino, he's talking to the slave about, you know, geometry and getting it to prove a theorem. Say, see, he knows all of this implicitly because the forms were all printed. Smile. Now, how's that as a solution? All right, yeah, he's shaking his head, laughing. Several of you are right. What's wrong with that as a solution? How do you know what's being learned at this point in time is the same as what was learned a long time ago? Well, ah, how do you know what time? Right. Well, okay, good. Actually, take this memory idea seriously and think, gee, what I remember about that birthday of mine many years ago, is that the same? is what I remembered about it, you know, that day, the next day rather, or what I remembered about it 10 years after the fact and so on, you might think actually my memories have changed a bit. Some, surely a lot of detail has been lost. What was I wearing that day, for example? I probably could remember that for a while afterwards. I certainly don't remember it now. Are there things I remember better now than I would have 10 years after the event? Probably so, because I've actually had occasion to think more about social choice theory. So I could probably tell you more now, Alan Gibbard's lecture that day, than I could 10 years after the actual event. So yeah, it's a question of memory. Memories change. And so we might think that's not a very secure anchor for this. Can you see any other problems? well if it's the responsibility of somebody who's older uh assuming an authoritarian position and teaching someone that forgot before he or she was born then that brings into play the entire well preconceived notion that all forms are the same it doesn't make sense because how can you be the same if you're teaching somebody later on in life who is much younger than you are and and therefore it it definitely is connected to the counterfeit form of a form of the form at least what donna But dominance over what? Oh, all right. Good. Good. One of the things that's really disturbing, actually, when you start learning about criminal law is how unreliable I was. Ask a bunch of witnesses to an event. What happened? And you're going to get very different. And when somebody first is exposed to this, they start thinking, wow, people lie all the time. And that's true. They do. But it's not just that. People are going to observe different things. They're going to report different things. And so you might worry that law people, it's like that. You and I might all be remembering the same form, but actually doing it really differently. So it's not obvious that helps, right? And it might be that, after all, we rely on teachers and so on. But that means, uh, what's being conveyed to one person about this, let's say about justice, is not going to be the same as what's being conveyed to someone else about justice. And how do you explain all that? It's as if different eyewitnesses are repeating their stories to different people and talking to different reporters, let's say, who have then published very different events in the crime. And so you might think that actually doesn't give more knowledge. So, yeah, okay. No, I was agreeing with you. Okay. Okay, there's one other thing that occurs to me, which is... Look, this is really, in a sense, dependent. Just as my memory of something now, you know, how do you know that? Oh, I remember it. That's only. partially enhanced. Because it's like, I remember it now because I knew it then. So that's how I know it now. But it depends on my knowing it then. So really, this is, oh, I can know about the Force now because I knew about them then. You can say, well, how did you know about them then? To tell me some spooky story about your soul before you were born isn't very much of a solution. And so there's something inadequate about that. Here's a different story in the Republic. There it is the light of the good. that shines like the sun and illumines the world of the forms. And at that point, you might say, oh, okay, I can know about these forms because I can know about that form. Yeah. So Plato's idea... As you're describing it, is that these forms were sort of impressed on the structure of mind before they came into being? Right. Right, exactly. And so in the later rational tradition, this becomes the view that the forms are a priori, that we have a priori knowledge and we have innate ideas. And so in the end, really, by the time you get to, say, Descartes or Leibniz, these are now viewed as something that can't really be fully mind independent because you don't really know how. But I'll get to that point shortly. But you're absolutely right. These become the foundation for the doctrine of innate ideas, for the doctrine of a priori knowledge. And so, in some sense, all of the rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Maubranche, etc., are all really plateless in the Bible analysis. They all have a version of this basic Platonic story. But Descartes does complicate it, and in a way that I'll explain. Well, put in, first of all, Plato's Republican account. We've got the form of the good that shines like this. And that has the causal power to enable me to see the realm of forms. It's, again, metaphorical. It says these forms have causal power because that one does, which is kind of unsatisfying. But also, how does the form of the good do this, right? That seems mysterious. So what happens in early Christian philosophy, in early church philosophy, in Augusta, for example, in origin? Okay, if the forms are just in this mysterious mind independent realm, the problem is how it's knowable. The form of the good is supposed to have some special power, but who knows? However, if it's God, and if the forms now exist not in some weird alternative realm, but instead in the mind of God, we've got a solution. So Origen, Tontius, and a few other early church fathers come up with the idea that the forms are really ideas in the mind of God. And what Plato was talking about with the form of the good, that is really God. Now, how can the form of the good have this power? Mysterious. How can God do it? God can do anything. Yay! Okay, so in Augustine you get a doctrine of illumination. God is the one who illumines our minds and essentially reveals part of the divine mind to us. And this is an account that has a huge amount of power in Christian philosophy, also in Jewish philosophy and Islamic philosophy. It is not the only tradition, but it is a powerful tradition that lasts for more than a thousand years. So it turns out to be a highly stable solution to this problem. And it's overturned by Descartes. Even though he adopts this idea of innate ideas, of real knowledge and so on, he does something that ruins the Augustinian solution. Now, why? Think about the problem of the evil recidivism. What if the universe is ruled not by a good guy, but by an evil deceiver out to kill? Here's why that's such a devastating problem. We could think, look, what's happening here is that God is basically illuminating our mouths, giving us the concepts we need to understand reality, and is also structuring reality. So it's really divine power behind these arrows. God, and to use Philo of Alexander, he said, God is stamping the world with the stamp of the forms, which he refers to, by the way, as the word of God, the logos, is what is. sort of the mind of God. Reality is stamped with that stamp. And our minds are stamped with it too. We're made in the image of God. And what that means is that our minds are stamped with the logos. Not the full thing. It's not like we can understand everything about reality. But we get sort of the cheap knockoff version of it. We get partially stamped anyway. Or maybe we get stamped with the full stamp. Our matter is kind of crummy. I mean, there's disagreement about exactly what goes wrong. But we have only a partial picture. Nevertheless, that explains what's going on. In other words, the innate ideas match the underlying structure of man. So one way to look at it is here's the mind. Here's the world. and here is god who is stamping us with exactly the same yeah but now here's the force of dacorn's evil deceiver on you what if it's not the same state what if god is giving us the wrong innate items Okay, the wrong ideas that come from experience, telephones, chalk, etc. Maybe that's not a big deal. But what if those innate ideas, the fundamental ones, things like unity, things like necessity, things like, oh gosh, what are other basic concepts in terms of which we build others? Good causation. Yeah. Good. Basic concepts of mathematics, exactly. Basic concepts of ethics, concepts of the good, concepts of the right, wrong, just, unjust. What if all that is bogus? Right? It's an evil deceiver. Kind of like, I don't know, the teacher comes in and says, Gosh, these people, you know, imagine somebody in an elementary school. These kids don't know anything. Music. I'm going to teach them all the wrong names. So instead of every good boy does fine or whatever, it's going to be some totally different thing. And they're going to learn all of it wrong. Well, what if God's like that? What if God did that to our minds? It's to fill us with these ideas, right and wrong, and causation and unity and substance and properties and blah, blah, blah. It's all bogus. Now, Descartes reassures you and says, no, no, no, it's not, because I can prove the existence of God, and I can prove that God is good, and blah, blah, blah. But almost nobody buys that Cartesian solution, right? It seems like, look, once you've understood that, I've got no material left. Okay, I think, yeah, yeah, maybe I've got that, but how do I get from that? And so Descartes'evil deceiver argument really messes up this picture. Now, what do we do once we've messed up the picture? But one way is to say, yeah, what do I have to do? I'm going to get rid of this. Now, by the way, in early modern philosophy, it's not that Descartes, Leibniz, or for that matter, the empiricists for the most part, really are not believers in God anymore. Though Hume is the question mark. People at the time thought he was an atheist. It's sort of unclear from the dialogues concerning natural information, I think, what he really thinks. He might be one of those vague people in this sense of thinking, oh, there's some causal power behind the universe, but who knows? Whatever that is. Anyway, the idea is to then say, aha, what if we put the forms inside the mind? OK, so now they are innate ideas. These aren't concepts in the mind. How does this solve the interpersonal problem? Well, now I have to say there are categories that are basic to be human. And so actually we all share the same ideas. We might construct this or that derivative idea differently, but the basic ideas are ones we share. We all have the same concept of causation, all of the same concept of an object, etc. So at least some of these things are core. And this becomes then the theory of the category. And categories, these sort of logical concepts of the understanding are built in a priori. We all have the same ones. But now, okay, that might explain how I can know about these. They're part of the structure of my mind from the start. It's not a question of having to relate to a mind-independent realm. I'm just relating to my own mind. And, hey, it's not like you and I are worried that we have different concepts of objects. No, part of the theory is that as human beings, we just have things. To put it in a more modern parlance, they're part of our biological life. Okay? Evolution has just given us the same concepts. The human mind has a certain kind of structure because the brain has a certain kind of structure. And although there can be lots of variations in details, the basic structure is there for all of us. Okay. But now we still have a problem with the object. What about and by the way, you might worry that we haven't solved this problem of the interpersonal part. We've just said we all share them. That goes away very quickly, but but suppose we did share, but we still got this problem of the. So, what do we do with it? Well, here's the problem as long as the object is out there independent of the mind. Right? It's sort of like the forms when the forms were independent of the mind. You might say I couldn't explain to the. So, what's Kant's solution? What's the solution of the rationalists in general? Well, get rid of the mind in the past. Make the mind deeper. Yeah, make the mind deeper. And now I can explain how they're known. But I still have this problem with that stubborn object outside. How do I know that those a priori concepts of the understanding actually match the one? Well, I can't sense. Actually, I don't see how to solve that problem. If I assume that the difficulty is there's a world out there, it's my job to understand. But what if it's not like that? What if I'm constructed? The mind is constructed. And so in short, as long as I think this thing is mind independent, I can't solve this problem. It's out there. I can't prove that my mind actually matches what's out there. But if it's dependent on the mind. So the idealist says, aha, make this thing also mind dependent. Now, of course, historically it doesn't happen that quickly. I've jumped from Descartes to Kant. No attention to what happened in between. And what does happen in between? Well, a distinction, in a sense, between the object as it appears to me and the object as it really is. So that's a shortcut. What happens really is something like this. And maybe I'll put it over here. We have this image. of the mind here, and then really two sort of objects here. One is the object as it is, the thing in itself, Kant refers to it as, the thing on Zik, the noumenon. And even before Kant puts that label on it, it's the way reality really is, independently of the mind. So this is mind independently. But now, we also have the way that things appear to us. And so here is, I'll put it in a sort of shadowy way. There's the appearance. Phenomenal in Kantian terms. And even in Locke, for example, you see a clear distinction between these. We've got this, the thing in itself being the thing that actually exerts causal power on us. And Locke has a wonderful image here. He says, how is it that I know, for example, about you guys sitting in this classroom? The answer is light bounces around. And he actually has this wonderful idea. He says, look, light bounces off you like a little tennis ball and bounces in your eye. Now, he doesn't have a theory of light, but he's in fact talking about photons, right? And photons like a little tennis ball of light that bumps around and that. And so in short, he has no real account of how it works, except that he has the atomic theory. And the atomic theory is what blows up the traditional picture as much as the Cartesian argument about the evil sea. Why? Because it implies that the world isn't as we see it. For example, a piece of chalk. What is it consistent according to physics? Molecules, yeah. molecules involving calcium and other things. And is it solid? This thing seems to be solid. Press on it. It's not spongy or anything. It seems solid, right? Is it solid according to physics? No, it's actually these tiny little particles zooming around in lots of empty space, or at least vibrating in empty space. It seems to be unchanging. But is it really unchanging? No, right? Things are moving around in it all the time. It looks like it, gosh, what else? It looks white. Are the molecules white? No. And so you might think, ooh, in reality it's quite different from the way it appears. And so in Locke, you have an account of, well, these things have secondary qualities. These things have colors. And those are really creations of the mind. So you already have this picture of the mind as creating this sort of appearance. And the secondary qualities like colors are the things that are constructed by the mind. They're a matter of how this object in itself relates to the mind. But then the idea is, look, the things in themselves, they are the things with the primary qualities. Things like length and mass and the other qualities that we assign to physics. And so in Descartes, he said, well, these are the mathematical properties of things. These are the other things. Whether something is red or blue or white, that's a question of how our minds are constructing it. But whether something has a mass of, let's say, 15 grams, that's something that actually is a primary quality of the thing. And then you get Barclay and Hume actually attacking that distinction, saying, what do you mean? How do you know these are the things? But as soon as you say that, and indeed in Kant, the things in themselves are now these mysterious things. These all are things, well, being mind independent, how do we know them? In a way, that's the Barclay-Hume-Kant line. Once again, we've got the same problem. They're mind independent. But if they're mind independent, how do we know what they are? How do we distinguish the primary qualities from the secondary qualities? This is supposed to be the actual substance, but what's the content of that idea of substance? And they argue there really isn't one. Even Locke admits, substance in the end is something I don't own. So once we get rid of this, and Kant doesn't get rid of it, by the way. He keeps them around, but he can't talk. So can Kant actually say there are noumena, there are things in themselves? No, existence is a category. Categories apply only to one. So here's the broad picture. These things are known for me because they are mind dependent. I'm constructing them so I can know. But these things are independent of mine so I can't. So here's roughly the picture that emerges from it. You and I have a mind that's sort of like a projector. And the projector is projecting reality. Projecting the objects we see, projecting the colors, the shapes, the sizes, everything. Something presumably is out there that is making us do this. But we can't really say anything. and so by the time you get to common this is really the solution all these a priori things are now inside the body we've got the innate ideas the categories in here they're not mind independent but the world isn't mind independently nothing's to be mind independent except the stuff we can't talk in the first edition actually kant has a foot where he talks about the forms of the things in themselves as uh causing us to have certain sensations giving rise to things in sensibility and he cuts it out in the second edition because he realizes I can't say there's a causal relation because cause is another one of the categories. So beginning of the 19th century, Hegel comes along. And not only Hegel, but a variety of other people, Schelling and so on, they look at this picture and they said, wait. Well, actually, what do you think of that picture? And that you are. hard-headed philosophy. And you've got Koch saying, yes, we construct a world. But of course, there really is a world itself out there. We can't say anything about it, don't know anything about it, can't even think of it. So, come on, what do you do? What's your first move? Well, it's not really a solution. I just think that with the whole day card thing, it also kind of opens again the problem of how do we know the forms, like that line that you made. I think that's... Yeah! Okay, good, good, good, good. So, we've got this problem of how we know things. Now, here the idea is supposed to be, look, I can, through reflection, know what's in my own mind. But now, I can take your question in two ways. One is to say, hold on a second, can I really do that? How transparent is my mind to myself? Now after Freud, we're inclined to think not very, even though hardly anybody's a Freudian. Nevertheless, he pointed to the fact that much of what goes on in our minds is unconscious. And so now, do you know actually what's built into the structure of your mind? I don't know. I'd much rather talk about my knowledge of the chop than my knowledge about my own motivations, let's say. So, yeah, you can raise this question. Wait a minute. We'll call that the problem of transparency. I don't know what's really going on in my head. What's going on in my own mind. But let me take your question a different way too. How do I know what's in your mind? I mean Kant says these are part of the basic structure of being human. So we all share the same logical concepts. We all have the same categories. But how do I know that? Let's go back to this interpersonal. How do I know it across time? And so one thing Hegel does is say, well, look, this is mine, or really, he says ours. Out of time. But somebody else at the same time? Or me at a different time? Us at a different time? Maybe it's totally different to you. So Hegel is, first of all, in his stories. He said, I don't know that those are universal in the way Kant thought. Maybe they're not universal. Maybe they change across time. He thinks they change, but for rational reasons. By the time you get to Nietzsche, he's saying, what if they change but for utterly irrational reasons? But the idea is, what if? How do we know these are the same across people? It feels like the same problem we have. Putting them in the mind doesn't solve the problem. Even if minds are transparent, what I'm thinking about you are. Now, there's another thing you might do, which is to say, look, the things in themselves aren't doing anything. They're just not playing any role. I can't talk to them. So who needs them? Suppose I tell you, look, your grade will be determined in part by your performance in the homeworks, in part by attendance, and in part by something. I don't know. You say, well, what is that? I don't know. I can't tell you. I don't know. It's not that I'm hiding. I don't know. None of us can know. None of us can know. But stay. A, that's creepy, right? But B, you might think, wait a minute, that's not right. You know, suppose I said, oh, yeah, 50% homeworks, 20% attendance, 30% something I know not what. You'd be freaking out. You'd be going to the chairman and saying, what's the deal? And so Hegel, in effect, is saying, what's the deal, Kant? What do you mean there are these mind-independent noumena that are actually in some way driving all of this? Though we can't say that because that talk is causal. And so Hegel suppose. Get rid of them. You've just got the appearances. Now Hegel says, look, but you think I've gotten rid of the things, I've gotten rid of the world? Relax. These are the things. This is the world. And so for Hegel, look, these are the things. These are the objects. This is the world. The world is a construction of the mind. As Josiah Royce put it at the beginning of the 20th century, a prominent American philosopher at Harvard, he said, the world is the stuff as I deem. In the end, the world is nothing but a mental construction. Well, this is the philosophical set into which analytic philosophy is born. And this basic picture in in Reuss and in, well, the descendants of Hegel, is still very much alive. Not so much in, well, to some extent, philosophy departments, much more so in other humanities departments. You'll find people all over the place who believe that everything is a social construction and so on. And those people in other humanities departments who often talk about theory instead of philosophy, they actually have a version of this sort of view. But analytic philosophy is to some extent born as a rebellion against us. Now, at first, well, before we get into that, we only have a few minutes left, so let me just ask you for your reactions. The world is just a mental construction. And do you construct it the same way I do? I don't know. Maybe we have to be run on this. Or maybe we do it because we share the same language and society and conceptual framework and all that, but do we construct it the same way other people in the world do? Or the way people did a hundred years ago? Probably not. And so on. So... Yeah, we have to now push it one step. What's disturbing is I'm on that. We thought up. Well. What is long what is love? Ooh. Okay. Say more. Good. Oh. Not only what is law, but I mean, what is the very idea of a beginning middle and end and what is the very idea of choice? What is the very idea of value? How do we know this cause that? And how do we know. this will ever be a causation of, you know, A or B, and could this ever result from whatever we constructed? This seemingly patterned and structured chaos that isn't really chaotic, but yet not really structured at the same time, and that alone is a little bit... terrifying. Yeah, okay, good. It is a little bit terrifying. I mean, it's a little bit like saying, look, reality is like something, let's say, the law. The law changes, right? Something can be legal today and illegal tomorrow, or vice versa. It's also different from society to society. What's legal in Texas may be different from what's legal in Massachusetts or in India, etc. And so you might look you said you're saying we have a reason like that so two problems one thing There are things we deeply care about like what's right and wrong And it's sort of disturbing to think that right and wrong go the same way For a bunch of reasons for one thing it's strange to think of murders a terrible crime here But not there and under the law that might be true But now you want to say so it's perfectly moral to kill somebody over there even though it's not here That seems wrong secondly You might worry that, look, we've got to have some way of thinking about what the law ought to be. We have some way of reforming laws. Some laws we think are unjust, but on the basis of what? Right? There's got to be some anger. So that's one thing. Another thing might be, wait, everything? You mean like the chalk is white? Or this is one piece of chalk? And one plus one is two? That's relative? That's historically changing? When Socrates said 1 plus 1 is 2? Or said, you know, the angles of a triangle add up to 180? He meant something different? That's weird. Also, to think what we mean by an object? Really, that changes? I mean, certain things we think, like Aquinas'concept, he didn't have that idea of the atomic theory, so maybe in that sense he had a different concept of an object. But surely, if we were talking to Aquinas and we talked about, you know, things, it's not like he was like, oh, I don't know what you mean. And so it might seem this makes things too pragmatic, too much at sea. And indeed, as Nietzsche points out, once he sees this vision, he says, well, we've gone to sea, we have no anchor, we have no compass, we can't tell what's up and down, east and west, north and south, we're in trouble. Now he thinks that's exciting. So yeah, we're in trouble! But you might think, we're in trouble! There's got to be something wrong here. Yeah. Can we get rid of a lot of those problems by just removing the door system? And saying that this structure... Always have it as a mess. Oh, okay, good. We could get rid of one thing by saying, well, Khan is right about there being certain things that are just part of our biological heritage. So that would be one response. Another is to raise a problem. And we're actually out of time, but I'll just toss it out there for a second. If this picture is right, how is it that you and I and all of us are looking at a piece of chalk? it should be a mystery. Because after all, your mind is projecting a world so is mine. And look, they're all projecting something in a piece of chocolate. My name, well, dude. It's as if we all came in and said, you know, I had a dream last night of a cow. You said, I did too. I did too. And it was a white cow. Yeah, it was a white cow. And it gave white milk. And then there was this brown cow that gave chocolate milk. And we said, I had the same dream. We think, whoa, that's wacky, right? How is that possible? It looks like this leaves us in the same position. How is it possible that we share perceptions, that we share some images of the world? they come up with in this tradition. There can be only one mind. If there were two minds or many minds, we'd have that problem. So Royce says there's only one mind. There is the world mind. One object in the universe. It's the world mind. You and I are just ideas. And by then you might think, okay, this is insane. Well, next time we'll start talking about Frege's philosophy and see how it is in some ways a reaction against this idealist twist on the philosophical solution.