PHI 2394 B00 · Week 2 · candidates for a cheat sheet

Nine Thinkers, One Page

Everything from this reading that could be asked for by name on 7 October. Built to be revised from, and to print.

The one-line positions

If an exam question names one of them, this is the sentence to start the answer with.

Who	The position, in one line	The term to name
Platoc. 375 BCE	Real knowing is argument that can justify its own starting points, so making and doing rank below philosophy	technē, dialectic, the divided line, the Form of the Good
Schadewaldt1959	Greek technique completed nature and stayed answerable to knowledge, so it could never treat nature as raw material	physis, technē, empeiría, epistēmē, atechnía, deinótēs
Bacon1620	Knowledge and power are the same thing, and the mind must be purged of four built-in distortions before method can work	the four Idols, true induction, Novum Organum, Salomon's House
Comte1830s	Every field passes through theological, then metaphysical, then positive, and the positive stage gives up on causes and asks only for laws	law of three states, positive philosophy, hierarchy of the sciences, sociology
Rousseau1752	The sciences are real achievements and they corrupt a nation's morals, because standing out by talk is cheaper than standing out by conduct	Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the Dijon prize
Vienna Circle1929	A statement that cannot be checked against experience is meaningless, so only empirical statements and the empty truths of logic survive	verification, logical analysis, unified science, synthetic a priori, Isotype
Lynn White1971	Medieval Europe out-invented richer neighbours because of religious attitudes to God, work and action, and invention became a project	the invention of invention, machina mundi, Mary and Martha
Dennett1994	No principled reason rules out a conscious machine, and objections based on where a thing came from are a prejudice	origin essentialism, origin chauvinism, Cog
Foucault1975	Modern power works by making people visible and uncertain whether they are watched, so they police themselves	panopticism, discipline, the plague town, the diagram of power

Lists you may be asked to produce

Numbered, in order, because the order is part of the answer.

Bacon · most likely of all

The four Idols

1. Tribe, built into the species: we see more order than there is and treat human senses as the measure.
2. Cave, personal: temperament, upbringing, what you read, whom you admire.
3. Market-place, from language, and he thinks the worst: bad words force bad thinking and definitions cannot escape it.
4. Theatre, inherited philosophical systems, which he calls stage-plays.

Comte

The three states

1. Theological. A will causes it. Peaks in monotheism.
2. Metaphysical. An abstract force causes it. Peaks in one entity, Nature. Transitional only.
3. Positive. Abandon causes, state laws, meaning invariable relations of succession and resemblance.

Plato

The divided line, low to high

1. Imaging and 2. Belief together are opinion, about becoming, what changes.
3. Thought and 4. Knowledge (dialectic) together are intellect, about being, what does not change.
Crafts sit on rung 2.

Comte

Hierarchy of the sciences

Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology. Ordered by rising complexity and falling generality, each depending on the ones before. Sociology is last because it is hardest.

Schadewaldt

Three states of a knower

empeiría, skill with no account: knows only that.
technē, skill with a correct account: knows why.
atechnía, skill with a false account.
Above all three, epistēmē, knowledge of what never changes.

Vienna Circle

The two legitimate statements

1. Empirical. About the world, checkable against experience, always capable of being wrong.
2. Analytic. Logic and mathematics. True by meaning, carrying no information about the world.
Rejected: Kant's third category, the synthetic a priori.

Lynn White

Three religious causes

1. God as engineer. The Creator with compasses, machina mundi, Oresme's clockwork heavens.
2. The Mary and Martha switch. The West ranked action with contemplation, and the Greek East did not.
3. Dignity of manual labour. Monasteries put learning and handwork in one building.

Dennett

Three objections he answers

1. Dualism. Nothing coherent can be said about where mind meets matter.
2. Only organic brains. Vitalism is dead, so what is left is an engineering worry about speed.
3. Robots are artefacts. This is origin chauvinism.

Terms, with the definition an examiner wants

physis: Greek for nature, meaning a process of coming-to-be. Aristotle: whatever has the source of its own motion inside itself.
technē: Craft knowledge. Skill made automatic by habit, aimed at producing something, with a correct account of the thing itself.
empeiría: Experience. Knows that something works and cannot say why.
epistēmē: Theoretical knowledge of what never changes. Produces nothing. Ranked highest.
atechnía: Productive skill resting on a false idea of the thing. Translated as blunder.
deinótēs: From Sophocles: "terribleness", holding ability and monstrousness in one word.
dialectic: For Plato, argument that dismantles its own assumptions and climbs to a first principle needing no support.
being and becoming: Becoming is what changes and perishes. Being is what stays fixed, the Forms. Knowledge is of being; opinion is of becoming.
the Form of the Good: The sun outside the cave. Last and hardest to see, and the cause of everything correct and beautiful.
idols (Bacon): False images lodged in the understanding. From Greek eidōlon, phantom, the same family as Plato's shadows.
true induction: Tables of presence, absence and degree; eliminate by negative cases; climb in small steps. Not a leap from a few instances.
positive: In Comte, the final stage: laws only, with causes and purposes abandoned as unanswerable.
synthetic a priori: Kant's category of claims both informative about the world and knowable before experience. The Vienna Circle denies it exists.
verification: A sentence means something only if you can say what observations would make it true or false.
discipline: In Foucault, power that works by sorting a crowd into individuals, each with a place, a timetable and a record.
panopticism: Being visible and unable to check whether you are watched, so you supervise yourself. A diagram, and not a building.
origin chauvinism: Dennett: treating a difference in where a thing came from as an intrinsic difference between things nobody can tell apart.

Names, dates and objects

399 BCE: Socrates tried by 500 Athenian jurors on impiety and corrupting the young, convicted about 280 to 220, executed by hemlock.
c. 387 BCE: Plato founds the Academy in a grove outside Athens. Closed by Justinian in 529 CE.
c. 375 BCE: The Republic. The cave is Book VII, and the honours for shadow-forecasting are at 516c.
1620: Bacon's Novum Organum. He is impeached for bribery in 1621 and dies in 1626.
1660: The Royal Society founded, naming Bacon as its inspiration. Motto Nullius in verba.
1750 to 1752: Rousseau wins the Dijon prize, then spends two years replying. The packet has the Final Reply.
1787: Bentham designs the Panopticon. Never built in Britain; compensated £23,000 in 1813.
1830 to 1842: Comte's Cours de philosophie positive. He coins sociology and altruism.
1854: John Snow and the Broad Street pump, the worked example of Comte's positive stage.
1929: The Vienna Circle manifesto, dedicated to Moritz Schlick, who is murdered in 1936.
1949: Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the lobotomy.
1959: Schadewaldt's two radio lectures. Heidegger's essay on technology is 1954.
1967 and 1971: Lynn White's ecology paper, then the essay in this reading.
1975: Foucault's Surveiller et punir, in English Discipline and Punish.
1994: Dennett on Cog, the MIT humanoid robot built by Rodney Brooks's group.

Pairings an exam question is likely to ask for

Compare two of them, and these are the pairs that have something to compare

Plato and Bacon. Both ask what real knowledge is; they give opposite answers about making. Plato: craft cannot justify itself, so it ranks low. Bacon: if you cannot make it happen you never understood it, so making is the test.
Bacon and Rousseau. Rousseau grants everything Bacon claims and denies that it makes anybody better. He changes the measure from true to good.
Comte and the Vienna Circle. The same position, ninety years apart, hardened from a historical claim into a rule about meaning. The Circle names Comte as an ancestor.
Bacon and the Vienna Circle. Idols of the Market-place and the attack on grammar are the same complaint: language shapes thought and deceives it.
White and Comte. Comte says the method is the endpoint of a universal sequence. White says it grew from one culture's religious attitudes and could have failed to appear.
Bacon and Foucault. Both say knowledge is power. Bacon means it as a promise, and Foucault means it as a diagnosis.
Plato and Foucault. Plato wants the person who sees clearly to govern. Foucault says the apparatus for seeing people clearly is the apparatus for governing them.
Schadewaldt and White. Both explain a culture's technology by what that culture believed, one about Greece and one about medieval Europe.
Dennett and the course. Who counts as a knower, and what grounds justify excluding them. The same question returns in Weeks 10 to 12 on animal minds.

Quotable lines

Bacon: human knowledge and human power come to the same thing, and nature is commanded only by obeying her.
Bacon: the human understanding is like an uneven mirror that distorts what it reflects by mingling its own nature with it.
Plato, 518c: the power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and education is turning the whole soul around.
Plato, 519a: people who are vicious but clever have keen sight that has been forced to serve evil ends, so the sharper they see, the more harm they do.
Rousseau: the more the interior is corrupted, the more the exterior is composed.
Bentham, quoted by Foucault: morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens lightened, all by a simple idea in architecture.
Bentham, quoted by Foucault: power of mind over mind.
Sophocles, via Schadewaldt: holding something clever beyond expectation, man stands where the path forks toward good and evil.
Neurath: we are sailors who must rebuild the ship on the open sea, and never in dry dock.

Objections worth having ready

A seminar remark or an essay paragraph is worth more when it names a weakness.

Against the Vienna Circle: the verification rule fails its own test. It is neither checkable against experience nor a truth of logic, so by its own standard it is meaningless.
Against Lynn White: explaining a difference in outcomes by a difference in cultural attitude is flattering to the West and very hard to falsify. His stirrup thesis has been dismantled by medievalists.
Against Plato: he is inconsistent about whether character is installed or native. The same book says virtues are added by habit and practice, and also sorts citizens by nature with a myth about gold, silver and bronze souls.
Against Comte: his own hierarchy excludes psychology on the grounds that introspection is impossible, and he puts phrenology in its place, which is the course's thesis arriving at his expense.
Against Rousseau: he abandoned five children to a foundling hospital while writing the century's most influential book on raising them.
Against Bacon: he described the method and performed very little science, and the Idols are easier to name than to escape.

Exam 1 is Wednesday 7 October, 30%, in class, covering every reading and lecture to that date. Exam 2 is Wednesday 11 November, 30%. The final is 40% and the Registrar sets the date.

Drawn from the reading guide, which has the full argument behind every line here.