Knowledge is justified true belief. /
There is something inside your mind, called a "Propositional Attitude" which has a truth value regardless of the world around you. The truth value sits on your mind. /
Now for the primitive ones (these are extremely relaxed, and angry, descriptions/summaries): Man is naturally good, but rich people made a contract which started a bad nature. Rousseau /
Man is naturally mean, but an abstract entity made itself as of the creation of a social contract (implicit or explicit) and that is what prevents evil from spreading. Hobbes. /
Angels are separated by 72 Kilometers each in the heavens. Aquinas. /
Brace yourselves for this one: That of which nothing greater can be thought is smaller than not that of which nothing greater can be thought, thus the latter can't exist (don't ask for what sense of smaller), because it can't exist, there is one thing that is that of which nothing grater can be thought, and since its negation can't be thought, all its properties must be positive, and it is God, because it is great and undeniable. Anselm. (ok, I grant that I forgot the bulk of his original since last reading it in 2007... but it is along these lines)
EDIT: Just to clarify before people read Robb below, I'll put in my disclaimer about his response: RoBB Your philosophers descend from the anglophone tradition of philosophy, and were trained in analytic. The ones I mention descend from french tradition, are fond of structural readings, and do in fact state all those as fact.
Knowledge is justified true belief. /
Ever since Gettier's 1963 paper, this has not been taught except as a useful extremely close approximation of the correct definition. Since philosophers (and some linguists) are the ones who have been criticizing this heuristic, and since their criticisms concern very special cases of 'epistemic luck,' this is a doubly misleading charge. The standards philosophers are adopting when they doubt that knowledge is justified true belief are actually, in most contexts and for most everyday purposes, unreasonably high; dict...
Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
I've complained before that philosophy is a diseased discipline which spends far too much of its time debating definitions, ignoring relevant scientific results, and endlessly re-interpreting old dead guys who didn't know the slightest bit of 20th century science. Is that still the case?
You bet. There's some good philosophy out there, but much of it is bad enough to make CMU philosopher Clark Glymour suggest that on tight university budgets, philosophy departments could be defunded unless their work is useful to (cited by) scientists and engineers — just as his own work on causal Bayes nets is now widely used in artificial intelligence and other fields.
How did philosophy get this way? Russell's hypothesis is not too shabby. Check the syllabi of the undergraduate "intro to philosophy" classes at the world's top 5 U.S. philosophy departments — NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, Michigan Ann Arbor, and Harvard — and you'll find that they spend a lot of time with (1) old dead guys who were wrong about almost everything because they knew nothing of modern logic, probability theory, or science, and with (2) 20th century philosophers who were way too enamored with cogsci-ignorant armchair philosophy. (I say more about the reasons for philosophy's degenerate state here.)
As the CEO of a philosophy/math/compsci research institute, I think many philosophical problems are important. But the field of philosophy doesn't seem to be very good at answering them. What can we do?
Why, come up with better philosophical methods, of course!
Scientific methods have improved over time, and so can philosophical methods. Here is the first of my recommendations...
More Pearl and Kahneman, less Plato and Kant
Philosophical training should begin with the latest and greatest formal methods ("Pearl" for the probabilistic graphical models made famous in Pearl 1988), and the latest and greatest science ("Kahneman" for the science of human reasoning reviewed in Kahneman 2011). Beginning with Plato and Kant (and company), as most universities do today, both (1) filters for inexact thinkers, as Russell suggested, and (2) teaches people to have too much respect for failed philosophical methods that are out of touch with 20th century breakthroughs in math and science.
So, I recommend we teach young philosophy students:
(In other words: train philosophy students like they do at CMU, but even "more so.")
So, my own "intro to philosophy" mega-course might be guided by the following core readings:
(There are many prerequisites to these, of course. I think philosophy should be a Highly Advanced subject of study that requires lots of prior training in maths and the sciences, like string theory but hopefully more productive.)
Once students are equipped with some of the latest math and science, then let them tackle The Big Questions. I bet they'd get farther than those raised on Plato and Kant instead.
You might also let them read 20th century analytic philosophy at that point — hopefully their training will have inoculated them from picking up bad thinking habits.
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