What is philosophy? Philosophy has been around for centuries now and is defined as the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Philosophy in turn provides people with powerful tools for thinking about problems throughout life and applying them to a person’s everyday life. Philosophy is important to the average being because it can help improve a person’s critical thinking skills. Not only that but it can also help provide a person with more knowledge on logical thinking which can in turn also benefit a person’s critical thinking skills. Philosophical questions differ from other sorts of questions such as questions of social science, etc. because philosophical questions accommodate both subjective and objective kinds of questions. Philosophy raises questions while at the same time answering others, it involves a lot of critical thinking and knowledge. Philosophical questions essentially help create knowledge through brainstorming and pensive thoughts which can then be applied throughout a person’s everyday life. Philosophical questions usually have very important, certain characteristics to them. They tend to have what is and what should be posed in the question and they are most of the time about subjects such as ethics, etc. They pursue answers that are not only fundamental but are also comprehensive. An example of a philosophical question would be “What is a person? Is it the mind, or the body?” This question would make the average person really think and brainstorm. A famous example of a philosophical question that has been around for years “Which came first? The chicken or the egg?”. Philosophical questions, like the two examples given, are generally questions that makes a person think about the answer for quite some time. But in reality, there tends to usually be no right or wrong answers when it comes to answering a philosophical question. How ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ the answer to a philosophical question is depends on that of the arguer, in the sense that it generally all hangs on the strength of the argument behind a person’s claim and how well that person is at defending their claim to others and/or the public.
There are two very important types of arguments that are significant in not only philosophy but as well as when it comes to critical thinking, they are called deductive arguments and inductive arguments. A deductive argument is an argument that is supposed to provide a surety of the truth of the conclusion if the evidence supported by the argument is found to be true. An example of a deductive argument is “It’s raining in Miami. If it’s raining in Miami, then he will be carrying an umbrella. So, he will be carrying an umbrella.” The conclusion of a deductive argument is usually followed after the word “So”. Also, the conclusion of deductive arguments is thought to be completely guaranteed and not just made up out of thin air. Whereas an inductive argument has no specific term, it is either seen as a strong argument or one that is weak. Inductive arguments also have the ability to have a very wide-range of usages in life. An inductive argument is intended to be strong enough that if the evidence of the argument is true then it is very unlikely that the conclusion of the argument will be false. An example of an inductive argument that can be perceived as one that is somewhat strong is “Every time I’ve pet that cat, it has not tried to scratch me. So, the next time I pet the cat it will not try to scratch me”. The reason this example may not viewed as concrete or too strong of an argument is because the next time you pet the cat you cannot account or be sure of the conditions or what may happen that could possibly startle the cat in turn causing it to scratch you or cause harm to you. It would be a much stronger argument if the more times you pet the cat it does not scratch you because you have more a lot more ‘evidence’ to back up your argument. An example of a much stronger inductive argument which is based on much stronger evidence would be, “Two witnesses claimed Nick committed the murder. Nick’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. Nick confessed to the crime. So, Nick committed the murder”. This is a stronger example of an inductive argument because of the evidence supporting the argument is more air tight rather than the other example of the cat which had space for doubt.
A fallacy is essentially a common error of thinking that can be conveyed as a standard system of logic. A fallacy is when someone uses an invalid reason or has faulty reasoning when they are constructing an argument. An argument that is thought to be fallacious is viewed as an argument that is untrue because of a flaw in the argument’s logical structure. The vast majority of fallacies involve arguments, explanations, definitions, and other results of reasoning. The term “fallacy” is used as a broad term to indicate some sort of belief or the cause of a false belief. An example of a fallacy that appeals to ignorance would be “You cannot demonstrate that there aren’t Martians living in caves on the surface of Mars, so it is sensible for me to accept there are”. Another example would be of a fallacy that appeals to popular opinion is “A lot of individuals’ purchased this collection, so it must be great”. Those are a just a few examples of fallacies and the kinds of appeals there are in regard to fallacies.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is said to be one of the most philosophical writings in the form of allegory. An allegorical writing is the kind of writing that has two levels of writing to it, it has both allegorical meaning and literary meaning. A literary meaning is the content or the subject matter of the subject at hand. An allegorical meaning usually has a suggestion of either a metaphor or some sort of symbolism. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave he gives a vivid description of the cave of the cave world. He describes the cave as very dark because there is very little light inside of it and the objects in the cave can hardly be seen. There are people chained on both their necks and feet and they can barely move. He also describes a world outside of the cave world and a wall is what separates these two worlds from each other. In the outer wall, unlike in the cave, there is a lot of light and everything can be seen clearly. The shadows of the people who live in this outer world can be seen by the chained people in the cave. He talks about how one of the chained people leaves the cave to the outer world when he first sees the light his eyes seem to ‘dazzle’ in the light and slowly but surely his eyesight adjusts and he begins to recognize everything in this outer world. He classifies the outer world as the real world and the cave world to be the unreal world. If he attempts to persuade the people chained inside the cave of the outer world his ignorant friends kill him because they refuse to believe that the cave world is the ‘fake world’. The allegory of the cave has allegorical meaning because of how much symbolism is featured throughout it. The dark cave where the chained people live is said to symbolize the modern world of ignorance. The chained people who reside in the dark cave symbolize the ignorant people of the ignorant world (the dark cave). The raised wall that separates the dark cave from the other world is said to symbolize the limitations of our minds and our knowledge. The shadows of the other world seen by the chained people signify perception, specifically sensory perception. Plato also talks more about perception when he describes human perception in the Allegory of the Cave by mentioning how there are two kinds of perceptions, sensory and spiritual perception.
There are two very important and significant theories of truth in philosophy, the correspondence theory of truth and the pragmatic theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth states that “a proposition must correspond with a fact or event” in order for it to be acknowledged as something that is true. The pragmatic theory of truth was developed in the mid twentieth century and incorporates the idea of Pragmatism. Pragmatism is a kind of approach that evaluates the meaning of theories or beliefs in the sense of how they are applied throughout life every day. The correspondence theory of truth is said to be the most common and most widespread theory of truth because it has to do with understanding the nature behind truth and the nature behind falsehood. This theory basically argues that the truth is anything that can be tied to reality. Whereas the pragmatic theory of truth simply determines whether or not a belief is true or not based on how useful the application of it would be in the real world.
An objective claim is some sort of statement that has to do with an accurate matter, a statement that can be proved to be true or false. These kinds of claims can be either true or false, just because something may be objective that does not guarantee its accuracy or that it’s true. Subjective claims on the other hand do not really deal with whether or not a statement is true or false. Subjective claims often express opinions, feelings, values, etc. towards a specific matter. Subjective claims can involve factual information but that does not mean that they make factual claims. Richard Rorty attacks the distinction between objective and subjective claims by saying that these claims do indeed have application but that the only sort of application they do have is in some way usually to that of context and interest bound. For example, Richard Rorty says that there is nothing really useful or interesting to be said about truth overall. Richard Rorty was an American philosopher whose expertise focused mostly on combining philosophy with comparative literature into a perspective which is called “The New Pragmatism” and/or neopragmatism.
Feminist ethics are essentially ethics that incorporate and build on the belief that women’s moral experience have been undermined and/or not appreciated enough by others and therefore in that case chooses to reimagine ethics through a general feminist approach to alter it and transform it into something more suitable. It basically can be viewed or perceived as an attempt to revise or rethink those aspects of traditional western ethics that seem to criticize or diminish women’s moral understanding. Traditional ethics by feminists are viewed to be ethics that not only put women down in certain ways but they also let women down according to many. For example, traditional ethics tend to usually portray women as simple housewives who simply cook for the family, take care of the children, etc. Another example of how traditional ethics diminish women, a very important one to many, is that a lot of times women are seen unequal to men. They are said to be not really as mature, competent, etc. like men are thought to be perceived. That is why, for the most part, feminist ethics were brought up, to change the stigma that traditional ethics portray of women worldwide.