Create your own flash cards! Sign up here. Supporting users have an ad free experience! Flashcard Library Browse Search Browse. Create Account. Additional Philosophy Flashcards. Term What are the four main branches of philosophy? Definition Metaphysics study of ultimate reality ex. Is there a god? Epistemology study of knowledge ex.
What is truth? Axiology study of value ex. He again raises philosophical questions, mostly bearing on understanding and bettering our human condition as paradigm philosophical questions arising out of everyday questions about how we should live in the context at hand, given the available facts involved, and what practical attitudes and resources we should adopt to that end.
Limits of space do not allow anything more than mentioning the scope and generally compelling set of reflections on these topics as they bear on how these modes of understanding inevitably promote the conflicted character of philosophical problems.
His refutation of moralism, ideology, scientism, absolutism and relativism are well-constructed and convincing. Part III, "Toward a Pluralistic Approach," is an effort to delineate a pluralistic approach to resolving conflicts between modes of understanding and coping with vital philosophical problems.
Kekes argues credibly I believe that this approach is better than either the absolutist or the relativist approach, both of which are strikingly defective. Here again, he regularly reminds us that the philosophical problems he addresses bear on making our lives better in terms of what we can plausibly expect given variable circumstances and unique contextual, cultural, legal, religious, moral, scientific and historical considerations.
Chapter nine deals with "good reasons" and treats sensitively, among other things, the question of where understanding and reasoned justification of our views must come to an end in common sense beliefs we all pretty much hold, given the available evidence and pervasively contingent circumstances.
Reasons, of course, are presupposed in any challenge to the need for having justifying reasons. Any line of reasoning must come to an end in an act of faith that is fallible and can be challenged, but then only by another act of faith. The latter good for the moment under the circumstances but still subject to reflection and revision going forward in a world of changing and incomplete evidence.
Kekes agrees with Nagel that there are some acts of faith , that there "are some types of thought that we cannot avoid simply having -- that it is strictly impossible to consider merely from the outside" This extends to practical reasoning and moral reasoning within our point of view. Even so, he affirms that "when it is all said and done, the best we can do in the context of deciding how we should live is to hold relevant beliefs and perform relevant actions that after critical reflection we have reason to endorse and no reason to suspect" Those reasons, however, will still be particular and conditional, rather than universal and general.
His overall discussion on the role and limits absolutism and relativism and why those positions fail in the light of his defense of pluralism is well done as an approach to rationally coping with perennial philosophical problems. Also well done is his treatment of theoretical and practical reasons in coping with philosophical reasoning.
Space does not allow for a fuller discussion here of his answers to these proposed questions. Naturally, the answers he offers are not intended to be definitive answers to perennial philosophical problems. Rather they are presented as the best available contingent solutions under the circumstances to vital questions that bear on our capacity to make our lives better.
Certainly, I warmly recommend his careful and well-crafted treatment of these vital questions. They are deserving of serious consideration. But since we do not know for sure, we should attach probabilities to the various possible events, do not we? By Hume, no! Because the probability that the Sun turns into an elephant any second might be 0.
It might be the case that we have just been unbelievably lucky in that the Sun is still the Sun! It is like flipping a coin: even if you get heads in a row, the probability of getting a tail on the next move is still one half, provided the coin is fair…wait!
Did we flip it before to measure that? Fortunately, there is the concept of likelihood. Suppose you have a coin and you do not know whether it is fair or not, and you do not know what is the probability of getting tails or heads. After you get heads in a row without getting any tails, you can ask: what is the likelihood that the probability of tails is 0.
Whatever it is, the likelihood must be less than the same for 0. I copypasted this paragraph from wikipedia, forgive me. Suppose the world is a totally arbitrary place and tomorrow something very weird could happen.
Thus there are two options: either everything will be as we normally predict, or not. So we would like to prepare ourselves to both events. Thus, believe we in the laws of physics or whatever or not, we should act as we believed them to be true. Probably the following argument is fallacial, but you can see what I mean. The likelihood approach seems very intuitive and ingenious at first sight, but it has an inherent methodological problem, which is: how to specify the probability distribution, based on which we perform our likelihood calculations?
In order to calculate any kind of likelihoods you obviously need to have the probabilistic parameter that you want to calculate the likelihood for. This parameter pertains to a particular probability distribution or, in practice, to a certain random variable, which obeys that distribution.
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