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Philosophy Through the Year offers and lively and welcoming space in which to learn about philosophy – and start to ask and explore philosophical questions with others. In each instalment, we will look at one set of big philosophical issues – the problem s and questions that have been puzzling people for well over two thousand years. Tutors will give short introductions to some of the most important ideas and arguments in each topic, and provide short philosophical texts for participants to read, think about, and discuss together.
How do words form whole expressions and how do these relate to the contents of our heads and the world around us? Truth and meaning, sense and reference, representation and reality, logic, fact, myth and metaphor. These are some of the philosophical pools we will be diving into this summer.
For prior reading: Text 1 (Parmenides), Text 2.2 Plato (Sophist); Text 3 pp 115-121(Aristotle).
Starter Questions:
1. What do you need to have to have a well-formed sentence?
2. How do sentences (propositions) relate to the world?
3. What makes for a sound argument?
For prior reading: Text 6 (Knudson) pp 479-480; Text 5 (Russell) pp. 479- 480.
1. Who or what does ‘my pet unicorn’ refer to?
2. What– and where – is a ‘meaning’?
For prior reading: Text 8 (Wittgenstein p 31); Text 9 (Ayer) p35 para 2; Text 10 (Quine) p74;
1. What truths can we be clearest about?
2. What roles do logic and experience play in establishing those truths?
3. Are there important candidates for truth that we cannot be clear about?
For prior reading: Text 11 (Wittgenstein) paragraphs 6 – 12; Text 12 (Austin) p 13; Texts 16 (Origen and Augustine)
1. What is the minimum number of words you need to make a statement?
2. How do I make you understand what I mean?
3. Is there an ideal language?
For prior reading: Text 13 (Davidson) pp19 and 20; Text 14 (Heidegger) p 214 paras 1 and2; Text 13b (Derrida) pp 84-85.
1. How do I explain what a sentence means to someone who doesn’t know?
2. Do other people’s words detach us from reality?
3. Does Google AI mean what it says?
These texts have been selected to illustrate the range of thinking. They do not give a complete picture – both in the Middle Ages and in the twentieth century there were explosions of interest in how words work, generating masses of intricate writing. Most of the pieces here are extracts from seminal texts that have become reference points for particularly (but not exclusively)anglophone philosophy. Thus, you will notice there is nothing here that is very recent. That said, there may be a few supplementary pieces appearing later on in the course.
Do not feel any obligation to read all (or indeed any) of this. If you find the material hard going, it is not your fault. We will try and tackle text and background together in class, and my hope is that by the end you will then find some of them a more accessible read, and understand something of which answers are being provided to what questions.
1. Parmenides and the Problem of Is: a seminal text that set up a logical-linguistic problem or ‘being’ that has spawned two and a half thousand years of philosophical and theological responses.
2. Plato’s response to that problem in the Sophist generates a basic theory of the structure of propositions and reference. His discussion of ‘logos’ in the Phaedrus contrasts the ‘living’ and the written word.
3. Aristotle’s On Interpretation lays the basis for a technical analysis of propositions and the logic of contradiction that has been refined but rarely superseded.
4. Wilfred Hodges’ introduction to truth tables and the propositional calculus, the fruit of a hundred-year effort to produce an algebra of propositional logic.
5. Wilfred Hodges’ introduction to predicate calculus, the basic ‘algebra’ for capturing sentences making universal claims (all, some, none).
5a. Bertrand Russell’s attempt to capture the logic of noun phrases involving particulars(‘the X’) and solve the problem of the truth value of statements about non-existent entities.
6. An article by Christian Knudson about the concept of ‘intention’ a key term in the medieval system for relating language and ideas, the mental and the extramental.
7. W V O Quine’s discussion of Russell’s solution to the problem of imaginary entities from the perspective of ontology(what’s real?).
7a. From Derrida’s On Grammatology challenging the notion that a sign can have a reference to a mental reality that is not itself a sign within a dynamic system of writing.
8. Extracts from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: a basic mapping relation between propositions and facts; a discussion of reference, truth tables and the criteria for deductive truth; the limitations of propositional language.
9. A J Ayer’s famous thesis banishing metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic statements from the realm of meaningful propositions.
10. Quine’s discussion of the problems of mapping the basic propositions derived from empirical phenomena and logic onto the propositions of ordinary language science.
11. Wittgenstein’s turn away from the focus of language as propositions, and exploration of language as tool – meaning as use. How to ask the right questions when thinking about universal terms.
12. J L Austin’s exploration of sentences which have the form of an assertion, but are actually doing something – making something happen.
13. Donald Davidson’s attempt to get round the problems generated by theories of meaning using the idea of a ‘recursive definition of truth’. Meanings are defined by ‘extension’: by identifying all the situations in which a proposition applies. This is the philosophical link with AI.
13b. Derrida On Grammatology again. This section focuses on the linearity of modern writing systems and envisages a world and a humanity liberated from this by (amongst other things) writing machines (computers).
14. Heidegger on Idle Talk (from Being and Time) the way that common language allows common opinions to circulate without deep personal acquaintance: language detached from experienced reality.
15. McGilchrist (from The Matter with Things) on the importance of myth and metaphor in approaching reality.
16. Theories of interpretation in the Christian tradition (extracts from Origen and Augustine). How religious readers of text can find multiple meanings.
John Moffatt SJ works at the London Jesuit Centre. His first degree was in Classics. He taught in London secondary schools intermittently between 1985 and 2016 and has worked briefly in University Chaplaincy. He has been involved with teenage and adult faith education in Britain and South Africa and has recently completed a doctorate in medieval Islamic philosophy.
