NAME:______________________________________
DATE:_________________________
INTRO. TO PHILOSOPHY : FINAL EXAM: CHAPTERS 12, 13, 16, AND 17, SPRING 2020
FILL IN THE BLANKS: PLACE THE CORRECT ANSWER IN THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE STATEMENT: ONE AND ONE-HALF POINTS EACH
1.________________________________This economist believed that that overpopulation occurred because the food supply increased at an arithmetical rate while the population increased at a geometrical rate.
2._______________________________Jeremy Bentham’s principle of utility said that we should create the greatest amount of this for the greatest number of people.
3._______________________________This follower of Jeremy Bentham added the notion of the quality of pleasures to Utilitarianism.
4.________________________________Marx obtained his concept of the dialectic from this philosopher.
5.________________________________Marx believed that the proletariat would be victorious in its struggle with this social class.
6._______________________________This friend of Marx, who was the son of a wealthy German textile executive, edited some of Marx’ works and aided Marx financially.
7._______________________________According to Marx this occurs when the worker is no longer at home with his or her labor.
8._______________________________According to Nietzsche life is governed by the will to obtain this.
9._______________________________This philosopher influenced Nietzsche with his philosophy of pessimism which said that life was disappointing.
10.______________________________According to Nietzsche faith in this religion was part of the cultural sickness of modernity.
11.______________________________To Nietzsche this “higher type” of a more than human being that would emerge by overcoming conventional morality and religion.
12.______________________________ Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophers based their philosophy on the analysis of this.
13.______________________________According to Nietzsche slave morality constitutes the value system of this kind of man.
MULTIPLE CHOICE: PLACE THE LETTER FOR THE CORRECT ANSWER IN THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE STATEMENT: ONE AND ONE-HALF POINTS EACH
14._____________Marx obtained his concept of materialism from this philosopher.
A. Lincoln B. Chatsworth C. Feuerbach D. Ziegler
15.______________Marx obtained his concept of class struggle from this French radical thinker.
A. Flaubert B. Rincon C. Brunet D. St. Simon
16._____________Marx believed that the substructure of society determined the nature of this of society.
A. Racial composition B. Superstructure C. Atmosphere D. Equalibrium
17.______________This is what Marx called it when the workers identify with the economic system that oppresses them.
A. Stupidity B. Ignorance C. Co-option D. Disease
18.______________Where Marx believed that under capitalism the workers would eventually rise up and carry out one of these..
A. Reform B. Revolution C. Reaction D. Capitulation
19.______________According to Bentham, when deciding to do something, if this outweighs the pleasure in doing it we shouldn’t do it.
A. Headiness B. Exuberance C. Enlightenment D. Pain
20.______________Benthan believed that in addition to teaching skills and knowledge necessary for the individual to live well, the schools should teach this.
A. Benediction B. Delight C. Altruism D. Physical Education
21.______________Mills believed that we should seek this instead of mere contentment.
A. Duplicity B. Happiness C. Cohesiveness D. Vindictiveness
22._____________This is the name for the form of relativism that Nietzsche espoused.
A. Utilitarianism B. Esotericism C. Egoism D. Perspectivism
23._____________According to this philosophy, the universe lacks meaning and purpose.
A. Transcendentalism B. Objectivism C. Nihilism D. Opportunism
24.______________To Nietzsche this was another word for the group.
A. Solitary B. Herd C. Isolated D. Established
25._____________This is the name of the ego defense mechanism that prevents dangerous desires from expressed by endorsing opposite attitudes.
A. Reaction formation B. Impossible endeavor C. Fractious frenzy D. Reconstruction
26.______________Although analytic philosophy emerged in England in 1912, this type of philosophy emerged on the European mainland during the 20th Century.
A. Your father’s B. Undisputed C. Official D. Continental
TRUE OR FALSE: PLACE A “T” IN THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE STATEMENT IF IT IS TRUE AND AN “F” IN THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE STATEMENT IF IT IS FALSE: ONE AND ONE-HALF POINTS EACH
27.________Malthus believed that it was very important to raise the minimum wage in order to help the worker.
28.________Bentham believed that the use of the hedonic calculus would make Utilitarianism more scientific.
29._________Bentham praised the owners, bosses, and ruling classes for helping the worker.
30._________Bentham believed that the government should show the individual how promoting society’s happiness would promote his or her individual happiness also.
31._________Mill believed that the way to determine which of two pleasures was superior was to obtain a consensus of opinion of those who have experienced both pleasures.
32._________Marx believed that mystification was a good thing for philosophy to be based on.
33._________Marx believed that competition was a good thing for society.
34._________Marx believed one way in which alienation was expressed was in the exploitation of nature.
35._________Marx and Engels predicted that the exploitation of the proletariat would not cease until members of the proletariat realized that their class interests were the same.
36._________Marx believed that different ethnic, gender, age and religious groups should each pursue their own particular interests and not join together as workers.
37._________Marx believed that humans are lazy by nature.
38._________Nietzsche saw the German leader Otto Von Bismarck as an example of a higher morality based on strength, power and the will to dominate.
39._________Nietzsche believed that the group was superior to the individual.
40._________According to Nietzsche the herd man pursues power in an underhanded way while the overman pursues power openly, honestly, and nobly.
ESSAYS: ANSWER TWO OF THE FOUR ESSAY QUESTIONS: TWENTY POINTS EACH
1. How did Jeremy Bentham believe that we should treat animals?
1. Why did John Stuart Mill believe that some people did not seek higher pleasures?
1. What did Karl Mark believe that the substructure of society was based on?
1. What did Nietzsche want to replace objectivity, universality, and reason with?
CHAPTER 1
2
: THE UTILITARIAN: JOHN STEWART MILL
1. Social Hedonism
1. Modern Utilitarianism was developed in response to the Industrial Revolution which ran in Britain from 1780 to 1835.
1. Hordes of workers sought jobs in mill towns and cities creating large slums.
1. Workers competed for jobs that were often repetitious, dangerous, and poorly paid.
1. Conditions in cities consisted of overcrowding of the workers. e.g. seven people trying to sleep in one bed.
1. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834, Anglican Minister and economist that specialized in overpopulation.)
1. Malthus feared overpopulation and under production of food.
1. He said that population increased geometrically but food production only increased arithmetically.
1. Raising wages would only encourage the poor to marry younger and have even more children.
1. The population would outgrow the food supply and poverty would return.
1. Welfare programs would only encourage increased idleness and large families with population outgrowing the food supply.
1. The only way to avoid the harsh results of natural cures to overpopulation such as famine, disease, war and rebellion was to stop helping the poor and remove all restraints on the free enterprise system.
1. The law of supply and demand would make it more difficult for the poor to marry early and having more children thereby stopping the geometric rise of population.
1. This theory enabled businessman to justify keeping wages low by saying it was their duty.
1. Malthus’ principles blamed the terrible conditions the poor lived under on the poor themselves.
1. Philosophy and Social Reform
1. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
1. Bentham blasted those in power for pursuing their own narrow, socially destructive goals instead of pursing happiness for everyone.
1. Bentham’s solution to society’s problems was to establish democratic rule by the whole people rather than by a select class. The workers outnumbered the bosses and, therefore, through democracy could have their demands met.
1. To Bentham the only justification for government, since the bureaucrats rather than the people themselves ran the government, was to use the government to prevent worse evils.
1. For Bentham the legitimate functions of the government were social reform and establishing the conditions most conductive to promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
1. Many 19th century philosophers viewed metaphysics as irrelevant, meaningless and unverifiable.
1. Philosophers’ interests shifted from shifted from the search for transcendental truth of systematic coherence to practical remedies for the pressing problems of society.
1. Philosopher felt no longer obliged to produce elaborate theories or systems since they thought even their own theories were culturally limited.
1. Growing belief in evolution resulted in efforts to identify an evolutionary view of ideas rather than a search for a static truth.
1. These philosphers explored social and political philosophy and the application of science to the immediate problems of human happiness.
1. Their secular fact oriented approach revived interest in cultural relativity.
1. Particular strategies and factual information were thought to be reliable if they were scientific and objective.
1. They believed that the application of scientific methods of inquiry could identify and eliminate poverty, crime and ignorance.
1. If the Enlightenment was the age of reason the nineteenth century was the age of reform.
1. The Principle of Utility
1. Due to his interest in science Bentham attempted to base his philosophy on careful observation of social conditions and actual human behavior.
1. Bentham declared that actual observation of human behavior made it crystal clear that pain and pleasure shape all human activity. He came up with two types of hedonism.
1. Psychological hedonism – belief that all decisions are based on pleasure and pain because it is psychologically impossible for humans to do otherwise. We do seek pleasure and avoid pain.
1. Ethical hedonism – belief that although it is possible deliberately avoid pleasure and chose pain it is wrong to do so. We ought to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
1. Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure.
1. Utility – can refer to how well a thing performs a certain function or is pleasure producing and pain avoiding. Bentham uses it for the latter.
1. Principle of Utility – act always to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
1. The principle of utility revolutionized the concept of hedonism since it transformed personal hedonism into a potent social and ethical philosophy that Bentham could use to reform society.
1. Hedonic Calculus
1. Bentham tried to base his philosophy on observations of actual conditions and he tried to derive principles of behavior from facts.
1. Hedonic calculus – positive units of pleasure and negative units of pain are attached to Bentham’s seven elements (intensity, duration, extent, etc.) and if the units of pleasure are greater we should perform the contemplated action.
1. Bentham believed that each of us already uses the hedonic calculus on an intuitive level.
1. The Egoistic Foundation of Social Concern
1. Psychological egoism – we are always interested chiefly in our own welfare whether we admit it or not.
1. We care about other people based on how it affects our own happiness.
1. Reason is simply a tool that helps us determine whether our actions will result in more pleasure or more pain.
1. Bentham believed that if people could be shown how a better society for others would result in less pain and more pleasure for them, genuine social reform would occur. e.g. Senior citizens usually don’t want to pay property taxes because property taxes are used for the schools and they no longer have children in school. However, if they can be shown that paying property taxes results in better schools, which means that when that child grows up he or she is less likely to turn to crime or be on public assistance, they wouldn’t mind paying property taxes because they would see how it would benefit them.
1. Laws should not only be fair and effective but also designed to motivate people to consider other’s welfare as well as their own.
1. Hedonistic reasoning remains potentially destructive because whatever sense of community it creates is based on selfish concerns rather than compassion of empathy.
1. The Question is Can They Suffer?
1. Bentham extended the ethical reach of the pleasure principle beyond the human community to include creatures with the capacity to suffer.
1. Some philosophers didn’t think humans had an ethical duty to treat animals well because those philosophers believed that animals couldn’t reason or couldn’t speak.
1. Kant believed that humans didn’t have a moral duty to treat animals well because he didn’t think they could reason. However, he didn’t think we should be cruel to animals because it would make it more likely that we would be cruel to humans.
1. As far as Bentham was concerned suffering places moral claims on us whether or not the subject of suffering can reason or speak.
1. Bentham rejected the notion that animals lacked moral worth simply because they cannot reason. He compared it to racist thinking whereby no moral duty was owed to blacks due to their alleged inferiority.
1. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
1. After becoming a follower of Jeremy Bentham John Stuart Mill’s father came to believe that all minds are the same at birth and proper education would produce a healthy, rational child.
1. Bentham and James Mill decided to raise little John Stuart according to the principles of Utilitarianism to show how effective a philosophy it was.
1. In an effort to refine John Stuart Mills’ thinking his father forced him to try to learn everything for himself before his father would even consider explaining it.
1. The strictness of Mills education caused him to have a nervous breakdown, however, he recovered by studying music and Romantic poetry.
1. Redemption and Balance – Mill married Harriet Taylor who helped him to apply his philosophy to the workings of human society.
1. High Pleasure
1. To Bentham the difference between two pleasures was merely the intensity of the pleasures. e.g. if a game of pin the tail on the donkey brings more intense pleasure that the arts and sciences the game of pin the tail on the donkey is more valuable.
1. Mill, who overcame depression by studying art and music, introduced the notion of quality to pleasures. He believed that pleasures such as art and music were of a higher quality than the pleasure that came from pin the tail on the donkey.
1. Mill said that human beings who have access to activities that employ their higher faculties will always participate in those activities rather than the ones that employ their lower faculties. e.g. I may love the developmentally disabled but we don’t’ wish to join them.
1. Mill said that they way to determine if one pleasure was superior (higher) than another was if there was a consensus among people that were fully acquainted with both pleasures that the pleasure was superior to the other.
1. Not everyone agrees that the higher faculties are superior. Many people live their lives as if their values regarding pleasures are just the opposite from Mill’s in that they are not devoted to using their higher faculties.
1. Low Pleasures
1. Mills said that here was no inconsistency in appreciating the superiority of a higher pleasure and succumbing to the temptation of more easily secured lesser pleasures.
1. Mill said that people may indulge in lower pleasures rather than higher pleasures because they may not have the time or opportunity to participate in the high pleasures.
1. Also, even though a person may start out by being capable of participating in the higher pleasures, by not participating they may lose that ability.
1. Our environment also may prevent us from participating in the higher pleasures.
1. Altruism and Happiness
1. Having added the notion of quality to utilitarianism, Mill expands Bentham’s appeal to enlightened self-interest into and full-fledged altruistic social philosophy.
1. Mill says that ultimately utilitarianism rests on the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures.
1. Altruism – to promote the welfare of others.
1. According to Mills’ altruistic utilitarianism no one’s self-interest is more important than any other’s self-interest.
1. Mill wanted to show that as civilization advances the social spirit grows.
1. In this effort he made an eloquent defense of the importance of universal education to the general happiness.
1. For Mill, the function of education was to instill the knowledge necessary for the individual to live well and to create healthy, altruistic citizens.
1. To Mill, to create healthy, altruistic citizens education must become a lifelong activity.
1. After selfishness the cause of the inability to be happy is lack of mental cultivation.
1. Mill was convinced that science and utilitarian thinking could produce a better environment.
1. Utilitarian Social Logic
1. An excellent example of enlightened utilitarian reasoning can be found in the practice of busing children to a school in another neighborhood to achieve school desegregation. This practice gained controversy during the civil rights movement of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.
1. The textbook gives another example of how people could achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people by pursuing their self-interest by using this example of the bussing. The example goes like this: Busing the children of more influential families to inferior schools will cause the more influential families to make those schools better by using their greater influence to do so. This makes things better for the children stuck in inferior schools too. This is an example of using motives of self-interest to help the larger society.
1. Happiness and Mere Contentment
1. Mill was not content with just modifying behavior. He also wanted to reform character. In this regard he distinguished between happiness and what he called mere contentment.
1. He said that mere contentment consisted of enjoying the lower pleasures.
1. Mill wanted to make as many people happy as possible, not as many people content as possible.
1. Mill argued that the principle cause of unhappiness was selfishness.
1. He believed that happiness requires a balance between tranquility and excitement and selfishness robs us of both.
1. Selfishness robs us of tranquility because we are never satisfied if we are selfish, and it diminishes our possibilities for excitement because selfishness narrows our range of interests.
1. Mill’s Persistent Optimism
1. Mill believed that no insurmountable conditions existed to prevent the emergency of a truly healthy society.
1. Mill believed that the chief task of well-intentioned people was to address the causes of social misfortune that can be avoided or altered.
1. Mills believed that liberties of thought and speech are absolutely necessary for the general happiness since we can only determine truth by the ongoing clash of opinions.
1. Mills worried about the tyranny of the majority and assigning to much weight to majority beliefs. e.g. the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution keeps the majority from trampling on the rights of the individual.
1. Mills believed that by applying reason and good will the vast majority of human beings could live with dignity, political and moral freedom, and happiness.
1. He believed that the wisdoms of society combined with good sense could eradicate poverty.
1. He believed that scientific progress along with good education could alleviate disease.
1. Bad social institutions, ill-regulated desires and gross imprudence are the source of bad fortune and other disappointments according to Mill.
1. However, Mill believed that they are conquerable by human effort.
1. Mill’s optimism is based on a universal sense of connectedness.
1. Against Liberty
0. Philosopher Sarah Conly rejects the liberal principle that respect for our dignity as individuals rests on our freedom to make poor choices.
0. According to Conly, our liberties need to be curtailed in light of new knowledge about our limits as rational thinkers.
0. She believes that we need restrictive laws to nudge us to do, according to those who know best, whatever is necessary to improve the well-being of society and individuals.
1. Commentary
1. Bentham’s failure to consider the quality of pleasures is a fatal flaw to his philosophy.
1. Bentham’s hedonic calculus is unworkable and not really scientific.
1. Mill fails to completely resolve the tension between hedonism and altruism.
1. Mills’ attempt to rate the quality of pleasures according to the judgment of those who experienced them cannot be empirically supported.
1. Mills’ distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures reflects his cultural bias. e.g. is possible to know action hero movies and art house movies and prefer action hero movies.
1. Mill’s idea of what is a higher pleasure is influenced by his biases as a member of an educated, culturally conditioned, aristocratic elite.
1. Emphasis on the greatest happiness for the greatest number can ignore minority rights.
1. Even though we know if something will result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number we should still ask whether it is right. Morality is based on more than just considerations of happiness.
2
CHAPTER 13: THE MATERIALIST: KARL MARX
1
.
Hegel (1770-1831)
1. Hegel believed that Kant’s transcendental ideas were both mental processes and objective realities.
1. Hegel believed that it was the task of philosophy to discover the relationships of particular aspects of Reality to the whole which is a single, evolving substance known as the Absolute Spirit.
1. Hebel believed that history consisted of the all-encompassing Absolute Spirit self-actualizing to perfection.
1. To Hegel, the pattern that all consciousness follows constitutes a dialectical process.
1. As Hegel used the term, dialectic refers to a 3-step pattern.
1. In the dialectical process an original idea known as a thesis is opposed by a contrary idea known as an anti-thesis.
1. The struggle between the thesis and the anti-thesis produces a new idea that combines elements from the thesis and the anti-thesis, which is known as the synthesis.
1. Once established, the synthesis becomes the thesis for a new cycle until everything is realized in the infinite synthesis of the Absolute Spirit.
1. Each resulting level of consciousness includes its predecessors.
1. According to Hegel, the ongoing dialectic represents the actual structure of reality.
1. History is the rational development of progressively inclusive stages toward the realization of the Absolute Spirit.
1. Pervious philosophers were unaware that they were working with a particular stage of the development of Reason as it unfolds in history.
1. Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel from whom he derived the concept of alienation and the notion of historical evolution.
1. Other Influences
1. Marx obtained his doctorate in philosophy and planned to be a college professor.
1. However, the Prussian government issued a decree preventing young radical Hegelians such a Marx from being college professors.
1. Marx obtained employment editing a democratic journal.
1. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-187
2
)
1. Feuerbach argued that material conditions and not some spirit of the age controlled how people behaved and thought.
1. Feuerbach said that different material conditions result in what we think of as different cultural eras.
1. Marx’s retained Hegel’s belief in the dialectics of history and a single reality, but concluded that reality was material, not spiritual.
1. Marx’s understanding of materialism was crystalized by a series of articles he wrote on the exploitation of wine growing peasants. The vineyard owners repressed the workers, punishing their efforts at self-improvement.
1. The Wanderer
1. After Marx wrote a series of editorial criticizing the Russian government the German government, not wanting to offend the Russian government, shut down the journal Marx was writing for.
1. Marx moved to Paris where he was influenced by the ideas of Saint-Simon who argued that economic conditions determine history and historical change is the result of class conflict.
1. St. Simon said that those who control material necessary for production are in constant conflict with those that do not.
1. The social classes that were in conflict during Marx’s time were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
1. The theory of class conflict was brought home to Marx by a group of exiled German workers who demanded that property held in common and were known as communists.
1. Marx was expelled from Paris and moved to Brussels where in 1847 he became the first secretary of the International Communist League.
1. Marx continued to be expelled from France and from Germany and ended up in England.
1. Marx and his family led a hand to mouth existence, moving from one shabby apartment to another.
1. Marx was so poor that two sons and a daughter died during their childhood.
1. Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
1. In 1844 Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he attacked the abuses the upper and middle classes heaped on the poor.
1. It was said that Marx was the deeper thinker, but Engels added breath and fire to Marx’s ideas.
1. Engels acquired the hard facts to support Marx’s arguments.
1. Engels also edited Marx’s works and made Marx’s difficult thinking easier to follow.
1. As the son of a wealthy factory owner, Engel’s also supported Marx financially.
1. Vindication
1. In 1874 Marx became involved in International Workingmen’s Association and dominated the meetings of their general council.
1. He tolerated no deviation from his views.
1. Around this time he wrote the first volume of his famous book, Das Capital.
1. Dialectical Materialism
1. Dialectical process (from Hegel) – internally governed evolutionary cycle in which progress occurs as the result of a struggle between two opposing conditions.
1. From Feuerbach Marx concluded that reality is material and consequently the material conditions of life control reality.
1. From St. Simon Marx learned to observe the relationship between the owning class and the exploited class which led to class conflict.
1. Combining elements of the influences described above with a deep concern for the conditions of the workers and an awareness of the importance of economic conditions to other aspects of life, Marx constructed the social-political-economic philosophy known as dialectical materialism.
1. According Marx’s to dialectical materialism history is the ongoing result of the constant tension between an upper class of rulers and an exploited underclass.
1. From struggles between different economic interests emerges a brand-new economic structure.
1. Marx described conflicting economic interests in terms of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, and the proletariat, or working class.
1. The bourgeoisie do not produce anything, yet they control the means of production.
1. The proletariat’s labor produces goods but they do not control the means of production.
1. Marx took Hegel’s concept of the dialectical process and applied it to historical stages, which he called the five epochs of history, they are: 1.)Primitive/communal, 2.) Slave, 3.) Feudal, 4.) Capitalist, 5.) Socialist/Communist.
1. Marx said that in the feudal stage of history the struggle was between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, in which the bourgeoisie emerged victorious.
1. Marx argued that as each epoch develops, its basic economic structure matures.
1. Changes in economic structures alter the conditions of people’s lives.
1. These altered material conditions eventually lead to a new social structure.
1. According to Marx, since the great injustices of capitalism result from the private ownership of property, a new socialistic economy (antithesis) will eventually emerge in which private property is abolished.
1. Society will then be able to provide decent meaningful lives to virtually everyone (synthesis).
1. Instead of having to compete for a good life, we will all live harmoniously, doing creative, satisfying work that benefit us individually at the same time in benefits us collectively.
1. There will be only one class, hence no class conflict.
1. Economic Determinism
1. Marx transformed Hegel’s dialectic by confining it to the material world.
1. Marx rejected excessively abstract philosophy, calling it mystification.
1. Marx asserted that man’s consciousness changed with every change in the conditions of his material existence, his social relations, and his social life.
1. Marxian materialism sees a reciprocal relationship between individuals and their environment.
1. Marx believed that human consciousness was very important in shaping society.
1. Marx’s emphasis was on the here and now.
1. According to Marx, the process of human history is shaped by inseparable social and economic conditions, much more so than by ideas.
1. According to Marx the economic structure of a culture creates and forms its ideas.
1. For Marx, the term economic refers to the complete array of social relationships and arrangements that constitute a particular social order.
1. The material (economic) base or substructure of society consists of 1.) the means of production (natural resources such as coal, water, land and so forth), 2.) forces of production (factories, equipment, technology, knowledge, and skill), 3.) relationships of production (who does what, who owns what, and the effects of this division on each group).
1. The material (economic) substructure determines the nature of all social relationships.
1. Because ideas and institutions emerge from the economic structure of society Marx refers to them as the superstructure of society.
1. The superstructure consists of the political structure, legal system, media, arts, religion, educational system, philosophy, etc.
1. The substructure (economic conditions) determines the superstructure (everything else).
1. Critique of Capitalism
1. Tension under capitalism increases as inequities of distribution destroy any correlation between how much an individual contributes or produces and how much he or she receives.
1. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism: The law of supply and demand determines prices, yet a large pool of workers keeps wages low.
1. Surplus value occurs because manufacturers keep prices higher than the actual cost of production and the workers get less and less for their effort.
1. Surplus value is invested as capital into the capitalists businesses.
1. The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat
1. The government is a tool of the bourgeoisie.
1. The bourgeoisie reduces everything into crude calculations of self-interest and personal wealth.
1. The bourgeoisie through its exploitation of the world market compels all nations to adopt the bourgeoisie mode of production on pain of extinction.
1. Not only are the proletariat paid as little as possible in order to maximize profit, but they are also seduced by bourgeoisie-controlled education and media to consume overpriced, useless products.
1. Co-Option and Class Struggle
1. Marx and Engels were among the first modern philosophers to recognize the plight of women in modern society.
1. When physical strength became less important employment opportunities expanded from women, however, the work available and pay offered were often substandard.
1. After generations of capitalistic conditioning through schools and the media, the workers may fail to recognize their exploitation.
1. One reason why working class and middle-class people support the capitalist system is that they believe that some day they may become rich even though in reality they have little chance of doing so.
1. Marx believed that the proletariat were co-opted, somehow convinced to further interests that were not to their advantage and do so willingly.
1. The bourgeoisie forges the instruments of its own destruction as it grows smaller but richer and more powerful.
1. The exploitation of the proletariat will not change until its members realize that they have the same class interests
1. Under capitalism it is in the bourgeoisie’s short-term interest for different ethnic, gender, age, and religious groups to distrust and despise one another.
1. For the bourgeoisie, it is good for token members of all disadvantaged groups to become publicly successful because then they can say that the system works for everyone.
1. Change will not occur until the exploited identify with one another and not with their ethnicity, religion, gender or age.
1. As capitalism becomes more efficient it produces more than it can consume. This causes economic depressions.
1. Also, capitalisms technological progress renders large numbers of workers obsolete, putting them out of work.
1. This results in an overburdened welfare system that provides barely enough for the displaced workers.
1. Marx and Engels predicted that more and more workers would suffer as the bourgeoisie acquired capital at their expense and the workers’ unhappiness would erupt in violent revolution.
1. From the revolution a new social order would emerge in which all class distinctions, private ownership of the means of production, and exploitation would disappear forever.
1. Alienation
1. Marx thought of alienation as the most destructive feature of capitalism.
1. Alienation – when the worker no longer feels at one with the product of his or her labor.
1. Alienation results from the transformation of the human being into a commodity.
1. Marx was convinced that we were not happiest when we were idle, but when we were engaged in meaningful work.
1. Meaningful work can be virtually any kind so long as the worker has control over its products. e.g. a designer whose boss has control over what brushes, colors, etc. that he uses in his job becomes alienated.
1. Anyone who takes a job solely because of what it pays becomes alienated, by reducing himself or herself into a money-making machine.
1. Alienation even extends to our relationship with nature and the environment
1. Nature provides the material basis for all work. Yet unchecked capitalism uses up nature because the capitalist does not feel as part of nature.
1. The capitalist sees money rather than the natural world.
1. Because most of us must work to live, we spend a high percentage of our time at our jobs. If we are alienated there, we are likely to be alienated elsewhere, for we cannot avoid being shaped by all those hours at work.
1. Alienation causes the worker to externalize work as something he does rather than something he is.
1. People that are alienation separate themselves from other people and lose touch with themselves.
1. Species-Life
1. Animal species are at one with what they do, whereas, humans are not at one with their work (which is what they do).
1. Species-Life – fully human life lived productively and consciously; not alienated.
1. Alienated life – unconscious, unspontaneous, and unfulfilled life; deprived of fundamental conditions necessary for self-actualization.
1. Alienation prevents us from being fully human.
1. Marx is propounding not just an economic theory, but a sophisticated philosophy of self-actualization.
1. Marx thinks that at the next stage people work to fulfill themselves, for the creative, self-actualizing joy of it.
1. What makes something work is not whether it is difficult or easy, but how we relate to it. e. g. we are not alienated when we mow the grass for our parents of help a friend move.
1. If we are involved and care about our work we are at home.
1. If we have significant say over how we do something, and it for reasons we understand and for values we hold, we may not like what we do, but we are not alienated from it.
1. Commentary
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx seems to have confused the evils of industrialization with the evils of capitalism.
1. The author of the textbook is conflicted about the strong strain or resentment and bitterness that runs through contemporary political Marxism.
1. According to the author or the textbook, Marx did not allow for the possibility of societal self-correction.
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx did not imagine the effects of the great technological revolution we are living through.
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx seems to rob individuals with any significant capacity for self-determination.
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx’s emphasis on class and class struggle does not pay enough attention to the individual.
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx romanticized the proletariat and vilified the bourgeoisie.
1. According to the author of the textbook, Marx’s vision of a fuller, better life places him among the champions of the oppressed and exploited.
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CHAPTER 16: THE ANTI-PHIOLOSOPHER: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1890)
1. Nietzsche saw himself as the first to recognize a profound sickness at the core of modernity.
1. Modernity – refers to the historical period of the nineteenth and twentieth century nation-states and to a corresponding set of cultural conditions and beliefs dominated by Enlightenment ideals.
1. Modernity includes a faith in science, objective truth, and rationality, expectation of inevitable progress, capitalism, urbanization, large scale industrial enterprise mass literacy, media, culture, political democracy, anti-traditionalism, individualism and secularization.
1. The Outsider
1. Nietzsche, a depressed outsider, came across the work of Arthur Schopenhauer.(1788-1860) and his philosophy of pessimism.
1. Pessimism – life is disappointing and for every satisfied desire, new desires emerge; our only hope is detachment and withdrawal.
1. Schopenhauer believed that life was an irrational, purposeless striving for a pointless existence.
1. According to Schopenhauer, what little salvation there is comes from resisting the will to live at all costs and curtailing our desires.
1. From Schopenhauer Nietzsche concluded that life makes no objective, absolute sense.
1. For Schopenhauer life does not result in a divine plan or orderly way.
1. Schopenhauer believed life was governed by the will to live but Nietzsche believed it was governed by the will to power.
1. Tragic Optimism
1. Nietzsche saw Bismarck, the Prussian leader who won wars against Austria and France, as an example of a higher morality based on strength, power, and the will to dominate.
1. He was impressed that Bismarck ruled by “blood and iron.”
1. Nietzsche then combined Bismarck’s power of domination with Darwin’s ideas of evolution to come up with his own unique doctrine of overcoming.
1. Nietzsche transformed Schopenhauer’s doctrine of pessimism into his own doctrine of overcoming.
1. Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer was right in recognizing that life consisted of continual struggle and hardship. However, Nietzsche believed that Schopenhauer’s reaction of retreat and renunciation was decadent and weak-willed. Nietzsche’s solution was tragic optimism.
1. Tragic optimism – Nietzsche’s sense of joy and vitality that accompanies the superior individual’s clear-sighted imposition of his own freely chosen values on a meaningless world.
1. To Nietzsche Schopenhauer failed to recognize that the struggle to survive aims at the dominance of the strongest and the fittest.
1. Zarathustra Speaks
1. Thus Spake Zarathustra
1. Nietzsche used the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra.
1. Zarathustra was a call to rise above decadence and mediocrity.
1. Zarathustra was at once a great destroyer of values and a creator of newer, higher values.
1. Zarathustra’s destroyer-creator announces the arrival of a new evolutionary type, the overman.
1. Nietzsche’s purpose was clear, to destroy conventional morality and replace it with higher immoral idea.
1. Truth is as Matter of Perspective
1. According to Nietzsche aesthetic vision (art or taste) e.g. what pleases me, is the basis of meaning, not science, religion, morality or rationality.
1. Nietzschean perspectivism – every view is only one among many possible interpretations, including especially Nietzschean perspectivism.
1. Nietzsche calls the different points of view experiments.
1. Nietzsche’s value system is anti-moral from the point of view of conventional Christian morality.
1. Anti-philosopher – a radical critic of certain foundational doctrines of modern science and philosophy who disputes the possibility of objectivity and universality and who rejects the absolute authority of reason.
1. Attack on Objectivity
1. What can Nietzsche offer in place of objectivity, universality and reason?
1. Instead of offering a recognizable philosophical argument, Nietzsche offers a twofold appeal, 1.) calls on us to justify life as an esthetic phenomenon,
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.) the will to power.
1. Neither component depends on reason or scientific inquiry for its justification.
1. Nietzsche says that knowledge itself is an invention.
1. Nietzsche says we have no chance of discovering the objective truth about anything. He says that truths are creations that serve our will to power.
1. Truth is seen by Nietzsche as a function of the physiology and pathology of the individual, not absolute, unchanging fact of nature or proposition derived from reason.
1. The idea of self that persists throughout a lifetime is a fiction or metaphor, not a fact.
1. According to Nietzsche a hidden agenda lurks behind science, philosophy, and religion.
1. Philosophers, scientists, true believers of all types seek power over the world, over others, even over themselves.
1. They often disguise this as efforts to improve life and human behavior
1. The Will to Power
1. The single goal of science, religion and philosophy is the assertion of power.
1. Modernity, with its mass movements, reliance on science, technology and educated reasonableness, and Christianized emphasis on altruism, devolves away from the intensification of life and toward the mere preservation and extension of it.
1. The Disease of Modernity
1. Nietzsche claimed that late nineteenth century European culture was dominated by a superficially optimistic belief that scientific progress and Christian morality could subdue the will to power and thereby make life safe and meaningful for the masses.
1. The cultural sickness Nietzsche describes is based on unwarranted faith in science, philosophy, and Christianity.
1. Each of these decaying belief systems in hostile to the will to power, the will to exalt ourselves, and the will to live.
1. The Problem of Morality
1. Nietzsche believed that like science, modern ethical schemes reduced the great passion of living to his utilitarian calculations or pinched Kantian formulae.
1. Far from expressing objective truths, or even scientific facts, moral codes reflect the desires and perspectives of those who create them.
1. Nietzsche said that what philosophers called a rational foundation for morality was merely a scholarly variation of in the common faith of the prevalent morality.
1. Nietzsche accuses modern European culture of being moralistic.
1. Moralistic – consists of expressing commonplace moral sentiments that conflict with one’s behavior and equating moral sentimentality with virtuous living. Today we would call that being hypocritical.
1. Being moralistic is a form of hypocrisy that resembles what Freudian psychologists call reaction formation – the ego defense mechanism that attempts to prevent dangerous ideas from being expressed by endorsing opposite ideas and behaviors as barriers against them.
1. For Nietzsche all modern morality has a Christian basis.
1. In Nietzsche’s view, modernity is anti-life and anti-nature and modern Christian moralities are symptoms for decadence and decay.
1. The Problem of Generalized Accounts
1. Nietzsche didn’t like utilitarianism because he said it sublimated the individual to the group, manifested unwarranted faith in reason, and preached altruism.
1. Nietzsche disagreed with the modern notion that with proper education and the application of scientific empiricism, society can be reformed.
1. To Nietzsche modern culture is wrong in its belief that bad actions stem from curable ignorance and not evil. Modern morality reduces threatening but vital passions to mere errors.
1. Nietzsche says that the ideal modern citizen is tame, democratic, sheep=like, and compassionate.
1. Nietzsche’s critique of culture centers on his deep and abiding suspicion of all attempts to generalize a code for living.
1. Science, modern philosophy, and transcendental schemes turn away from life, itself, from vitality, to the extent that they speak of and to all.
1. Modern science and philosophy lead to cultural and spiritual disease because they generalize where one must not generalize.
1. So intense is modernity’s assault on individual expressions of the will to power it forgives, tolerates, and emphasizes with those that would harm it.
1. In Nietzsche’s view, all of modernity’s efforts to make scientific and moral progress are pointing toward the cultural shift that heralds the next great level of evolution, the end of human history and the beginning of the age of the overman.
1. Philosophy and science do not provide us with meaning, we create it.
1. God is Dead
1. By God is dead Nietzsche believed that the ideal of God had lost its creative force.
1. If we dig deep into our psyches we will discover we no longer have ultimate faith in God, our true faith is in scientific and technological progress.
1. The idea of God is so deeply ingrained we are not aware of this great spiritual shift.
1. If there is no God, all values must be re-evaluated.
1. According to Nietzsche the death of God leads to nihilism
1. Nihilism – belief that the universe lacks meaning and purpose.
1. Consequently, moral, social and political values are creative interpretations.
1. Under nihilism what counts is found in the particular subjective interest of individuals and groups. What gives me and my kind advantage over others?
1. We chose value systems and philosophies based on our sense of power.
1. Overman
1. The death of God and increasing democratization of western culture signals both a great calamity and a great opportunity depending on your perspective.
1. It is a calamity for those inferior types who cannot bear to stand on their own and who crave the security of the democratic heard.
1. It is a glorious opportunity for the fearless, the brave, the overman.
1. Overman – higher type, more than human being that will emerge only by overcoming the false idols of conventional morality and religion.
1. Without God to limit us, to define us, to smother us, we can finally grow beyond man.
1. The same science that has given us so much has robbed us of purpose.
1. The overman is Nietzsche’s answer to the pessimism and nihilism that follows in the wake of God’s death.
1. To Nietzsche the overman is further from the mere man than we are from the ape.
1. Slave Morality
1. A herd man is a merely human type of person that cannot face being alone in a godless universe, refuses to be an individual, and who turns to the group or herd for power, identity and purpose.
1. The inferior person’s awareness of his or her inferiority produces a resentment of the higher types and elitist value systems.
1. In an effort to control their superiors the herd has created a slave morality, a value system guilt, fear, and a distortion of the will to power in which characteristics of the inferior type, humility, passivity, and dependency are praised as virtues. Under herd morality the characteristics of the superior type (overman), love of domination, delight in one’s own talents, and fairness are condemned as arrogance and cold-heartedness.
1. Today rationalistic Christian and Greek ethics are the two chief sources of slave morality.
1. Fairness, equality, moderation, stepping aside, refusing to claim the full rights accompanying superior ability and talent, and resentment are all characteristics of slave morality.
1. Ressentiment
1. Slave morality originates from a deep form of psychologically polluting resentment that Nietzsche always referred to using the French word ressentiment.
1. Ressentiment – French for the psychically polluting resentment that generates slave morality; the dominant emotion of the underman.
1. Slave morality is so opposed to the authentic individual that the herd man’s own self-creating impulses are stifled in favor of the external stimuli that function as guidelines from others and from the herd.
1. Slave morality is phony because it is always a reaction and never an originating impulse.
1. The herd man fears the other in the form of the authentic individual or even the different.
1. Thus, the slave morality encourages conformity; national, ethnic, and religious bigotry; and unthinking patriotism.
1. Slave morality is a morality of resignation, deferral, withdrawal from the full range of life, and prohibition.
1. In reality, the merely human members of the herd do not reject the lusty, fateful, self-affirming, creative aspects of the human psyche because they are bad, but because they are too weak, corrupt and sick to live up to them. Out of ressentiment they prevent others from living up to them as well.
1. Master Morality
A. Although, both the overman and the herd man have a will to power they approach their will to power differently.
B. The overman expresses the will to power openly, honestly, and nobly through exuberance, life-affirmation, self-creation, and self-imposition.
C. Because the underman lacks courage he must resort to appeals to God, to neurotic guilt, and demands for pity.
D. In the herd the will to individual power is perverted through manipulation, ressentiment, and indirection, and shaped by feelings of gross inadequacy. It is not expressed honestly and openly.
E. Master morality – morality that looks only to the overman for values that transcend the slave morality’s good – evil dichotomy. It replaces it with values defined by aesthetic terms: glorious-degrading, honorable-dishonorable, refined-vulgar, and so on.
F. The overman only looks to himself or herself for value.
G. Whereas the overman’s morality begins with the affirmation of himself or herself, the herd man’s morality begins with the invention of the evil other.
H. The master morality is a positive orientation, the slave morality is negative.
I. We are living in the twilight of our culture and no new value system has replaced the older one.
J. This provides us with unlimited opportunities for growth.
K. Having overcome merely human resentment and self-loathing the overman looks forward to being precisely what and who he or she is.
XVI. Amor Fati
1. According to Nietzsche, in the absence of God we must redeem ourselves with the sacred yes to life expressed in the amor fati.
1. Amor fati – the love of fate, expressed as joyous affirmation and delight that everything is exactly as and what it is.
1. Nihilism teaches us there is no purpose that gives meaning and quality to our lives.
1. Science shows that matter follows inexorable laws.
1. Amor fati blesses everything exactly as it is.
1. Through amor fati we exist as part of a complex whole that can be precisely what it is and cannot be otherwise.
1. Commentary
1. Nietzsche’s assertive denial of objective meaning has influenced a whole generation of scholars and literary critics.
1. Nietzsche has influenced contemporary theories founded in the rejection of the possibility of unbiased interpretation.
1. When being an individual becomes the goal what happens to Nietzsche’s assertion that you shouldn’t follow the herd?
1. Today it is politically incorrect to assert that we are not all equal, but does that assertion have any validity?
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CHAPTER 17: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
1. From the 18th Century on, philosophy has become increasingly specialized due to the following: 1.) Influence of the university system;
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.) Emphasis on the development of a technical philosophical vocabulary; 3.) Attempts to make philosophy systematic and precise; 4.) Renewed interest in the history of philosophical arguments concerning being, reality, knowledge, truth, value, and reason.
1. By the 20th Century, philosophers were struggling for or against furthering what was called “post Nietzschean deconstruction of metaphysics.”
1. Deconstruction refers to the treatment of philosophical problems as conceptual and linguistic confusions that reveal their ulterior purposes when complex claims and statements are reduced to their smallest meaningful components.
1. Philosophical deconstruction includes any close textural analysis that focuses on overcoming “privileges” hidden in philosophical arguments and theories by taking the text apart – deconstructing it; questions whether any text can have definite meaning. (Privileges are philosophical assertions that are not explained or justified by the philosopher asserting them e.g. Descartes a priori ideas.)
1. Philosophical assertions that cannot be clarified are set aside as empty, meaningless, nonsensical, mystical, poetic, or inauthentic.
1. Deconstructionists challenge the notion that any text can have any definite meaning.
1. Careful linguistic analysis is a hallmark of approaches to philosophical deconstruction.
1. In the loose sense of deconstruction, we can say that: 1.) Hume deconstructed the self, causality, and ethics; Kant deconstructed Cartesian rationalism, dualism, and Humean skepticism; Bentham and Mill deconstructed the good; Marx deconstructed capitalism, philosophy, science, and theology.
1. Philosophical deconstruction had its most direct and influential expression in Nietzsche’s critique of Western philosophy as just one more historically rooted expression of the will to power.
1. Nietzsche said that anti-philosophers such as himself were historians who deconstructed traditional philosophy and metaphysics.
1. To Nietzsche to think unhistorically was to think was to think objectively, universally, generally, and formally (which he didn’t like) rather that existentially and concretely (which he did like.) The philosophy of a particular historical period reflected the values of that period rather than absolute values.
1. Against the backdrop of two world wars, fast-paced scientific advances, and changing social mores, twentieth-century philosophers questioned the very possibility of philosophy itself.
1. Philosopher John Dewey said that “despair of any integrated outlook or attitude is the chief intellectual characteristic of the twentieth century.”
1. Two Approaches to Philosophy
1. Analytic philosophy began with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstien.
1. Analytic Philosophy – refers to a non-literary philosophy that stresses logic, testability, precision and clarity.
1. Analytic philosophers do not belong to a single school of philosophy but to a tradition that goes back to Locke and Hume.
1. Common to the analytic tradition is a notion that the universe consists of independent (atomic) entities.
1. Philosophers disagree as to whether these entities are material particles, sense data, impressions, facts, or something else.
1. To analytic philosophers, philosophy is restricted to analyzing complex statements and claims in order to reduce them to elemental, unanalyzable components.
1. Logic or linguistic analysis are thought to be the only proper methods for sorting out philosophical confusion.
1. As currently used, the phrase “continental philosophy” came into vogue after World War II to acknowledge the growing divide between the English-speaking world (The analytic philosophers were English-speaking) and that of Continental Europe.
1. Continental philosophers tend to explain things not by reducing them to simple entities but by understanding them in their broader holistic context.
1. Like analytic philosophy, twentieth-century continental philosophy is not a school of philosophy or a single way of doing philosophy, but a diverse, often interdisciplinary approach to philosophy.
1. The linguistic turn began when philosophers such as Locke began to wonder about the effects of linguistic confusion on philosophy.
1. Analytic philosophers concentrated on clarifying our experience of experience by clarifying what we say about it.
1. This is so that we do not waste ourselves haggling over empty noises and fighting one another over what they really mean.
1. An important task of philosophers is clearing up of language confusion.
1. Analytic philosophy was focused more on logic and language than on life.
1. Analytic philosophy rejected traditional idealistic metaphysics in favor of what it took to be down to earth realism.
1. Realism – the belief that there exists an independent objective world of things, facts, and states of affairs that are accessible to us.
1. The proper task of philosophers is to toss aside mistaken claims about reality and replacing them with the testable assertions identified by rigorous analysis.
1. The Tractatus was written by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
1. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein said that can be said must be said clearly, and what cannot be said must be passed over in silence.
1. The aim of the book was to set a limit on the expression of thought and asserted that only through language could the limit be set.
1. Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s attempt to show the underlying structure of language.
1. In Tractatus Wittgenstein rejects earlier philosopher’s attempts to grapple directly with problems of existence, knowledge, truth, and value because those problems are illusory, linguistic, results of misunderstanding of language and how it works. Wittgenstein said in Tractatus that these bogus “philosophical problems” will disappear once their true nature is recognized.
1. According to Tractatus what can be said is what can be said meaningfully. What can be said is the same as what can be thought. What cannot be said is what cannot be thought and trying to say the unsayable (as philosophers had done) amounts to trying to think the unthinkable.
1. In Tractatus, Wittgenstein thought that he had set the stage to show that complex propositions were meaningful only if they could be analyzed into simpler propositions that consisted only of names. He thought that analysis had to end in simple unanalyzable names that refer to objects.
1. Tractatus said that sentences that could not be reduced to simple symbols – primitive names – were meaningless. Objects themselves could not be analyzed only pictured. The objects existence could not be proven, only shown.
1. Most philosophical questions were not false, but nonsensical. Therefore, we could not answer them but only establish that they were nonsensical.
1. Most questions of philosophers arose from our failure to understand the logic of our language.
1. The problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world that came from Locke and Hume could not be refuted in the conventional way because it rested on linguistic misunderstanding. Skepticism was not the powerful expression of an irrefutable philosophical principle at all but was nonsensical.
1. The problems of life, such as religion, are not nonsensical, but trying to say anything about them is.
1. What is left for philosophers to do? If philosophers do their job they will see that all meaningful propositions fall to the natural sciences and they will allow science to deal with them.
1. Actually, Wittgenstein was concerned with the meaning of life. Wittgenstein realized that for all of its successes, science would never touch the really important problems of life. His deconstruction of traditional philosophy was not intended to leave us with nothing of value. Rather, it was a way to of telling philosophy to put up or shut up.
1. Actually, Wittgenstein was concerned with the meaning of life. His deconstruction of traditional philosophy was a way to say put up or shut up.
1. Wittgenstein’s Turn (His book Investigations)
1. Wittgenstein later decided the Tractatus’ claim that the only meaningful language was one in which sentences stated facts that reflected the logical structure of the world was in itself a metaphysical assumption. A misunderstanding of the logic of language.
1. In Tractatus Wittgenstein said that the structure of the real world determined the structure of language.
1. In Investigations, he made a turn-about and said that the structure of language
determined the structure of thought, and so the structure of our experience.
1. In investigations, he began to think of words as tools and sentences as instruments.
1. He said that fact stating was only one language use. There were countless others, and therefore, countless other ways of experiencing the world.
1. In Investigations, Wittgenstein said that language that we used in ordinary life, using expressions such as “forms of life,” language games,” and family resemblances,” not as once-and-for-all, fixed, logically exact relationships, but rather as certain kinds of natural human practices.
1. Wittgenstein said that we may not advance any kind of theory.
1. He said that we sought clarity only to clarify the ever more complicated structures that that occurred in our march toward progress (which was really our end) and not as an end in itself. To Wittgenstein, clarity was valuable as an end in itself.
1. To Wittgenstein, there was no one philosophical method, there were many different methods each for different problems.
1. In Investigations, Wittgenstein said that those methods were demonstrated by examples rather than by philosophical theories.
1. Our task as philosophers was not to solve grand problems but to assemble reminders for a particular purpose. That purpose was to see how language really worked.
1. To Wittgenstein in Investigations, description had to replace explanation.
1. He said that philosophical problems we solved not by giving new information but by arranging what we had always known.
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