프레드 웨스트팔 - [철학이란 무엇인가]( Fred A. Westphal, The Activity of Philosophy) (011230)

*Fred A. Westphal, The Activity of Philosophy, Prentice Hall (011230)

<감상>
웨스트팔의 이 책은 한글로 두 번, 그 다음 영어로 두 번, 도합 네 번을 읽었다. 하지만 요번에 읽을 때는 예전과 같은 그런 즐거움을 얻어내지는 못했다. 철학적 주장과 그 주장의 난점을 제시하는 책의 구성이 너무나 단조롭다는 느낌이 들었기 때문이다. 그리고, 책을 읽기 전에는 뭔가를 얻을 수 있기를 기대했는데, 별다른 소득이 없었기 때문이기도 하다.
보유하고 있는 철학 서적의 목록을 살펴보다가, 내가 철학에 대해서 뭔가를 이야기하기에는 내 읽은 책의 양이 턱없이 부족하다는 걸 깨닫고, 입을 다물어야겠다는 생각이 들었다. 이제 나는 겨우 걸음마를 시작한 주제인 것이다. 그런데, 뭔가 일성을 내야겠다는 주제넘은 생각을 품다니. 부지런히 플라톤을 읽어 나가자.
철학의 문제는 이 책의 분류에 따르면 몇 가지, 신의 문제(우주론), 영혼의 불멸, 자유 의지, 도덕의 문제, 지식의 문제 등으로 크게 나눌 수 있다. 하지만 나에게 좀더 관심이 가는 분야는 그러한 형이상학적인 측면보다는, 우리의 언어의 사용이나, 사고의 명료성을 지향하는 부분이다. 아가리를 다물고, 묵묵히 공부해 나가자.

*What is Philosophy
*He<Descartes-quoter> argued that if you doubted the truth of this proposition<I think, therefore I exist--quoter>, you would still be thinking(since doubting is a form of thinking). And in order for a person to think, a person must necessarily exist. A person contradicts himself if he sincerely claims to doubt that he exists, since the very fact that he doubts requires that he exist in order for him to be capable of doubting. Consequently, Descartes maintained that "I think, therefore I exist" is a proposition whose truth is self-evident. (13)
*What. . . is the distinctive difference between the philosopher as discoverer and the scientist? It seems to boil down to differences in the ways in which their respective theorists are confirmed or refuted. An important part in the testing of a scientific hypothesis involves the making of predictions which will come true if the hypothesis is correct. Ordinarily, the scientist sets up an experiment so that he can observe whether or not the predictions which he believes follow from his hypothesis come true. If the predictions come off as expected, then the hypothesis has some confirmation. The important thing is that something of an observable nature must be able to count either for or against the hypothesis in order for it to be classified as empirical or scientific.
Now the case is quite different when it comes to testing a philosophical theory or hypothesis. one does not go about confirming or refuting it by setting up experiments and seeing whether or not some specific predictions come about which are implied by the hypothesis. A philosophical theory does not, in short, have "predictive power" at all and, consequently, to "test" such a theory, one must content himself with analyzing and evaluating the arguments which have been advanced by the philosopher in support of his position. (15)
*We should not underestimate the difficulties involved in weighing an argument fairly, disinterestedly, and dispassionately when we might already have formed an opinion or begun to lean in some direction on the issue under review. By the same token, these obstacles should not discourage us from making careful, concerted attempts to analyze and evaluate the arguments of those who purportedly have uncovered some truth. (16)
*One cure, then, for a good many philosophical perplexities is this: If you find yourself trapped in a perplexity and can't find your way out, retrace your intellectual steps. Chances are that somewhere along the line you have unconsciously allowed some picture, analogy, or model to capture (or at least affect) your thinking. Do not press these pictures or models which abound in our everyday speech about the world and ourselves. Take them for the anlalogies they are and do not allow yourself to become bewitched into regarding them as literal representations of some thing or entity. (22)
*What the existentialist finds so unique about human beings is that they are the only beings in whom "existence precedes essence." If we can make fairly clear what is meant by this existentialist slogan, a giant step toward understanding this philosophical approach will have been made.
Consider, if you will, any particular thing in the nonhuman realm, such as a desk. What a desk is (its various properties) is determined by something outside that object itself. When the desk was manufactured, its nature (or essence) was fixed once and for all. The possibilities of its being anything but a desk are virtually non-existent, though it might on occasion be used for purposes other than those for which it was designed. Its nature was, of course, determined by the individual or individuals who designed and assembled it. This fairly obvious fact about things like desks should come as no startling revelation. But the existentialist sees a radical difference between things like desks, on the one hand, and human beings on the other. The difference is not one of degree such that a human being could, in principle, be completely described by the various sciences when they are sufficiently refined to unravel the complicated structure of man. The difference between man and every other thing in nature is one of kind. Whereas the nature or essence (defining characteristics) of things like desks precedes their coming into existence, the nature or essence of human beings comes after they have begun to exist. (33)

*The Problem of God
*Since statements about God cannot be true in either the analytic or the synthetic (i.e., empirical) sense, they must be considered to be factually or literally meaningless. A statement can be literally or factually meaningful only if some possible sense experience could serve as decisive evidence for its truth or falsity. Theological statements are by their very content incapable of verification through perceptual means even in those cases where something is asserted about God which is purported to be taking place in the present, i.e., God's ever present action guiding and controlling the course of nature. (51)
*Theological statements may perhaps serve some purpose for the theist. . . . They may be used to express certain feelings of awe and wonder at the universe and man's place in it. They may on occasion be used to comfort and reassure the bereaved and anxious as well as to regulate people's conduct by reminding them of the divine punishment and rewards they may expect for their actions. But since ｅxpressions of feeling of any sort cannot be true or false because they really don't assert or claim anything, theological statements, since they are ｅxpressions of certain kinds of feeling, can be neither true nor false. (52)

*Mind and Immortality
*Can't we carry Descartes's doubt further than he did? If there could be some being, personal or impersonal, which was deceiving him about the existence of his body, couldn't this same source deceive him into believing that his mind is different from his body? Couldn't such a source of deception provide the feeling of certainty regarding the existence of his thoughts just to make him think his body and mind were different? Why such a being should do this is beside the point. The point is that it is possible (in Descartes's use of the term), and therefor the certainty regarding the fact that he is thinking is thrown open to the same "doubts" as those regarding the reality of the body. If such a thing is "possible" on Descartes's use of terms, then he cannot conclude that the body is different from the mind simply because he can be certain of one and doubtful of the other. (90)
*There is one fatal flaw in dualism and especially in Descartes's formulation of that position. It is simply this: If indeed the mind is a special kind of entity of substance in which events take place and certain kinds of acts are performed, and these events and acts are known only to the person in whom they take place, how could we ever come to talk about other people's minds the way we actually do? As a matter of fact, we do know a great deal about other minds. We know how to follow their thoughts, evaluate and appreciate their capacities, teach them how to acquire mental capacities and much more. If the dualistic view were true, we would be utterly unable to do what we do with our mental-conduct concepts. The dualist, in short, proposes that we accept a theory of mind which, if true, would make impossible what we do every day of our lives, namely correctly describe and refer to people's mental qualities. (103) [A Dispositional View of Mind]

*The Problem of Free Will and Determinism
*Philosophers have so often assumed that the actions of human beings could be explained by using the same categories as were employed to explain the movements of bodies. Just because mechanistic, causal explanations worked in the non-human realm, they uncritically thought that the same principles could be applied everywhere. Both the determinist and the indeterminist agree that the question, "What causes human actions" was a meaningful and properly-put question. But there seem to be good reasons for believing that the question is based on a failure to distinguish reasons from causes, and that the tangles involved in the free-will problem are, in part, the consequences of this important oversight.  (159-60)

*The Problem of Morality
*The Eskimos think it is right to take one's aging parents out into the frozen wastelands and leave them to die, rather then to keep them in the village. The Spartans taught their youth that it was wrong to get caught stealing but not that it was wrong to steal. The Dobu tribe in New Guinea believe that stealing someone else's vegetables is more honorable than growing one's own. (166-7)
*Kant's contention that you ought never to make a deceitful promise or tell any sort of lie for that matter seems questionable. Suppose a man, obviously enraged and carrying a loaded gun in his hand, appears at my door. He asks me if that "dirty so-and-so Westphal" is at home so he can fill him full of lead. Now according to Kant, I should not lie to the man; I should acknowledge that I'm the man he's looking for. However, Kant also maintained that a person has the principle of self-love or self-regard within him, which impels him to preserve and improve his life. If I told the truth to my would-be killer, I would be disobeying the implanted principle of self-love, and, if I choose to take due regard for my own life, it may necessitate telling a lie. Admittedly, I could refuse to answer the fellow or try to talk him out of it, but suppose he pressed me for a yes or no answer to the question "Are you Westphal?" Either silence or an attempt to dodge the question on my part would most likely be taken as an affirmative answer. There seem to be some situations, therefore, in which telling the truth would necessitate our disobeying some other principle which Kant takes to be a universal rule. Wouldn't Kant be forced to admit that by obeying one moral law we would thereby have to disobey another equally binding law? Such an admission seems to undermine his view of the moral life and its duties, but it nevertheless seems to be an inescapable conclusion. (183-4)
*Human beings require higher forms of pleasure because they have the higher faculties of intellect, imagination and feeling. No human being who really thought it through would trade places with one of the lower animals, whose whole existence appears to be a constant round of fulfilling a few basic bodily drives. "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied that a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." (188) [Mill, Utilitarianism]
*When a person is unable to find enjoyment in life, the usual cause is selfishness. The person who cares little or nothing about the interests of others and desires happiness only for himself is likely to find his existence a lonely and miserable one. Part of the happy life, then, is actively to seek to promote the interests of others. The next most important reason for unhappiness (after the needs of the body have been taken care of) is the lack of a cultivated mind. By this I mean a mind that has been initiated into a knowledge of the workings of nature, the wonders of art, and the ways in which sensitive and creative persons have expressed themselves in literature, history, and philosophy. A person capable of enjoying the pleasures these activities afford has an excellent opportunity to live the good life. Most of the things which cause unhappiness and pain in the world would be less effective if human beings would take the proper steps to subdue them. The principal method of making the good life available to the greatest number is to prepare people for it through a liberal education. Along with this should come the application of scientific knowledge to the elimination of ignorance, poverty, and disease. (191)
*There are cases, however, in which exceptions may be taken to a moral rule like "Do not lie." If a man comes to my house with gun in hand and angrily asks when my "dirty so-and-so" neighbor will be home, I have no moral obligation to tell the truth. We would say that my obligation is to lie to the would-be murderer if that will save my neighbor's life. Saving a life rates higher than telling the truth if veracity on a given occasion would most likely contribute to someone's death. (192-3)

*The Problem of Knowledge
*Now that you know the difference between a priori statements on the one hand and synthetic statements on the other, you should be introduced to a problem which has bothered more than a few philosophers. The question is: Are there any synthetic a priori statements? That is, are there any statements whose denial would not involve a self-contradiction but which are known to be true prior to or apart from experience or sensory observation? Kant maintained that there were some ture synthetic a priori statements, one of which is "Every event has a cause." It was argued that to say "Some events are not caused" is not self-contradictory (and hence this statement is synthetic). but the truth of the statement is known prior to or apart from sensory experience and therefore must be a priori in nature. If you are inclined to saying that there are some true synthetic a priori statements, you would be siding with rationalists in the dispute concerning the nature and origin of knowledge. Should you deny that there are any true synthetic a priori statements, you would be lining up with the empiricists.  (210)
*There are some statements which are not clearly members of either the analytic or the synthetic camp. First, a number of borderline-case examples take the form of "all A's are B" such as "all crows are black." Should this assertion be taken as a generalization based upon experience (and hence synthetic), or should its user be regarded as stating a necessary condition for a thing's being called a crow? If it is intended as the latter, it would be classified as an analytic statement; to say "That bird is a crow but it is not black" would be contradictory.
Second, consider the statement "I exist" made by Hug Hunt. When he says "I exist," it seems he is saying something analytically true since, if Hugo were to say "I don't exist," he would be contradicting himself in some sense of that term. However, if someone other than Hugo were to say "Hugo Hunt exists," he would clearly be making a synthetic and contingent assertion.
Third, some first-person psychological statements have a peculiar logic to them. If I were to say "There is a sharp pain in my elbow," there is no way I could be wrong in what I say, provided I am sincere and I know how the words composing my statement are ordinarily used by people who speak English. Nothing could count as evidence for or against my assertion as far as I am concerned. Yet, for other people my assertion about the pain in my elbow must be treated as an item of evidence to be taken account of, when they decide if what I say is true or false. They must find out about my pain. Here is a case, then, of a statement which is synthetic and contingent for some people but not for me. We might want to say that it is analytic, but even then we would have to add "but analytic only for me."
Fourth, there is a great host of statements which we find difficult to place in either the analytic or the synthetic camp, but which we would still like to classify as statements and hence capable of being true or false. I refer to what might be called "philosophical statements," such as "there are correct moral rules which everyone ought to adopt" and "mental processes are identical to certain processes in the brain." These assertions resemble synthetic statements more than they do those of the analytic variety, since we could say "mental processes are not identical to brain processes," for example, without thereby stating contradiction. Yet when we try to determine if philosophical assertions are true or false, the usual procedures for verifying synthetic statements do not help. We would use various perceptual tests to tell if rain is falling in Rio, but such tests fail us when we try to determine if there are any correct moral rules which all people should adopt. (211-2)
*Are there any statements which pass the test of indubitability? Fortunately for there are. Let us assume the very worst, namely that there actually is a great deceiver like the one just mentioned who can exert some power over my mind. Suppose he (or it) is constantly leading me into error. There is still at least one thing about which he could not possibly deceive me--that I exist. For even if he is deceiving me all of the time, I must necessarily be existing all the time he is deceiving me. We amy say that even though all my thoughts might be mistaken, I am still thinking; and that I find impossible to doubt. As long as I am thinking, I must be existing, so the statement "I think, therefore I am" must be necessarily true. It cannot be false even if it should be the case that some malicious being is producing my ideas in me. Since we do not know that such a being does not exist, we must regard its existence as an open possibility; but in any case we are now justified in taking our first steps in knowledge--"I think, therefore I am." (217)
*<반론>Suppose we press the method of doubt which Descartes used to the point beyond which he himself took it. When he says he cannot doubt the truth of the statement "I think, therefor I am," is he not assuming that he remembers what each of the words in this statement mean? Memory has deceived him in the past, so how does he know it is not leading him astray here? The method of doubting everything unless and until certainty is attained, rather than being a fruitful means of building a body of true propositions actually leaves us with nothing we can rightly claim as knowledge. A consistent application of the method of doubt can end only in complete scepticism--that is, a belief that knowledge of any sort is impossible to attain. Descartes's method then does not serve his purpose in philosophy, but rather undermines it. (222)
*Descartes is caught in a dilemma: he cannot prove that God exists unless he already knows that a number of other statements are true, but he can't know that these other statements are true unless he has already proved that God exists. (223-4)
*The second factor which has helped puncture the rationalist's approach to knowledge is the development of various non-Euclidean geometries and diverse mathematical systems. The rationalist always pointed to the absolute certainty of mathematical statements as evidence for his belief that the principles involved in this area were innate or unlearned. He elevated them to a place of near reverence so that they virtually became a model for any kind of truth. he made an ideal out of mathematical certainty and believed that all knowledge worth of the title must be comprised only of necessary truths.
It has become quite apparent that we can, if we so choose, start with almost any mathematical axioms and develop a system in which, for example, 2 plus 2 need not equal 4. The necessary, non-empirical status of mathematics is still acknowledged by many philosophers, but the reason for this is not that we are born with the principles of mathematics already in our minds. The truth in this area is completely dependent upon the definitions of the symbols we have accepted and upon the axioms from which we start. But it is pointed out by the empiricist that which axioms and which definitions we choose to employ is up to us. In short, the principles of mathematics which we use are what they are not because they have been defined that way. There is no longer any need to invoke the doctrine of innate ideas (which has theoretical difficulties of its own) to explain why we can make various statements which are necessarily true or a priori.  (224-5)
 *As long as he<Berkeley--quoter> confined himself solely to an analysis of what we actually experience in sense perception as opposed to what we believe experience, he was making philosophical progress. But poor Berkeley was sidetracked by the question, "What causes our perceptual ideas?" The phenomenalist refuses to get dragged into the issue of what or who causes our sense perceptions. He is inclined to think that any proposed solution to that inquiry is strapped with difficulties which it would be better to avoid altogether. The phenomenalist believes that if we approach the problem of perception properly, we can show that we need not concern ourselves with the question of whether material objects exist. (239)
*In attempting to determine when we are justified in claiming to know something, or simply what we perceive, we must be careful not to go beyond what is actually experienced. This means that we should be aware of the distinction between that which we definitely experience in perception and what we are led to believe or infer on the basis of our perceptions. This is why, as phenomenalists, we will not be lured into any discussion about the cause of perceptions. Any position concerning their ultimate origin would have to be an inference (and a very shake one at that), and we had better not call beliefs in this area "knowledge" at all. (240)
*It would seem that if one insists on defining knowledge in terms of certainty, and certainty is taken as being incapable of doubt, no knowledge is possible at all, which is a conclusion the phenomenalist would hardly find very attractive. (254-5)