Metaphysics and Epistemology

UNAM 2020
DR MASOUD NASSOR MASOUD
Recap from our last lecture
• We have all pondered seemingly unanswerably but significant
questions about our existence—the biggest of all being, “Why are we
here?”
• Philosophy has developed over millennia to help us grapple with
these essential intangibles.
• There is no better way to study the big questions in philosophy than
to compare how the world’s greatest minds have analyzed these
questions, defined the terms, and then reasoned out potential
solutions.
• Once you’ve compared the arguments, the final step is always
deciding for yourself whether you find an explanation convincing.
• Philosophy is all about our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and
the world.
• Doing philosophy, therefore, is first of all the activity of stating, as
clearly and as convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we
believe in.
• This does not mean, however, that announcing one’s allegiance to
some grand-sounding ideas or, perhaps, some impressive word or
“ism” is all that there is to philosophy.
• Marxism, atheism, feminism, postmodernism, structuralism etc etc
etc.
• Philosophy is the development of these ideas, the attempt to work
them out with all their implications and complications.
• It is the attempt to see their connections and compare them with
other people’s views—including the classic statements of the great
philosophers of the past.
• It is the effort to appreciate the differences between one’s own views
and others’ views, to be able to argue with someone who disagrees
and resolve the difficulties that they may throw in your path.
• One of our students once suggested that she found it easy to list her
main ideas on a single sheet of paper; what she found difficult was
showing how they related to one another and how she might defend
them against someone who disagreed with her.
• In effect, what she was saying was something like this: she would
really enjoy playing quarterback with the football team, as long as she
didn’t have to cooperate with the other players—and then only until
the other team came onto the field.
• But playing football is cooperating with your team and running
against the team that is out to stop you; philosophy is the attempt to
coordinate a number of different ideas into a single viewpoint and
defending what you believe against those who are out to refute you.
• Indeed, a belief that can’t be tied in with a great many other beliefs
and that can’t withstand criticism may not be worth believing at all.
• Articulating and arguing your opinions has another familiar benefit:
stating and defending a view is a way of making it your own.
The Fields of Philosophy

• For convenience and in order to break the subject up into course-size

sections, philosophy is usually divided into a number of fields.
• Ultimately, these are all interwoven, and it is difficult to pursue a
question in any one field without soon finding yourself in the others,
too.
• Yet philosophers, like most other scholars, tend to specialize, and you,
too, may find your main interests focused in one of the following
areas:
Metaphysics
Metaphysics: the theory of reality and the ultimate nature of all things.
The aim of metaphysics is a give us comprehensive view of the
universe, an overall worldview.
One part of metaphysics is a field sometimes called ontology, the study
of “being,” an attempt to list in order of priority the various sorts of
entities that make up the universe.
Ethics
• Ethics: the study of good and bad, right and wrong, the search for the
good life, and the defense of the principles and rules of morality.
• It is therefore sometimes called moral philosophy, although this is
but a single part of the broad field of ethics.
Epistemology
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge, including such questions as
“What can we know?” and “How do we know anything?” and “What
is truth?”
Logic
• Logic (or philosophical logic): the study of the formal structures of
sound thinking and good argumentation.
Aesthetics
• Aesthetics (or the philosophy of art): the study of the nature of art
and the experiences we have when we enjoy the arts or take pleasure
in nature, including an understanding of such concepts as “beauty”
and “expression.”
• Philosophy begins with nagging personal questions.
• Quite often, our philosophical awareness begins in disappointment or
tragedy, when we first start wondering whether life is fair or whether
we are really learning anything in school.
• Sometimes, philosophy begins when we find ourselves forced to
make difficult decisions that will affect the rest of our lives and other
people’s lives, too—for example, whether to attend college or enter a
trade or the military, whether to get married, or whether to have
children.
• We all feel a need to justify ourselves from time to time—living in
relative luxury in a world in which millions are starving, attending
college when it sometimes seems as if we are not really getting much
out of it (or not putting very much into it), saying that we believe in
one thing when our actions (or inaction) would seem to indicate that
we believe something quite different.
• Our philosophizing can begin with a trivial incident: we catch
ourselves lying to a friend, and we start thinking about the
importance of morality; we suffer from (or enjoy) a momentary
illusion or hallucination, and we begin to wonder how it is that we
know anything is real or even that we are not dreaming all the time;
we have a quick brush with death (a near car wreck, a sudden dive in
an airplane), and we start thinking about the value and meaning of
life.
• In such moments, philosophy takes hold of us, and we see and think
beyond the details of everyday life.
• philosophy, in turn, is thinking further about these dramatic
questions, which can suddenly become so important to us.
Recap
• Philosophy, simply stated, is the experience of asking such grand
questions about life, about what we know, about what we ought to
do or believe in.
• It is the process of getting to the bottom of things, asking those basic
questions about ideas that, most of the time, we simply take for
granted, never think of questioning, and probably never put into
words.
• We assume, for example, that some acts are right and some are
wrong.
• Why? We know that it is wrong to take a human life. Why is this? Is it
always so? What about in wartime? What about before birth? What
about the life of a person who is hopelessly sick and in great pain?
• What if the world were so overcrowded that millions would die in one
way if others did not die in another?
• However you respond to these difficult questions, your answers
reveal a network of beliefs and doctrines that you may never have
articulated before you first found yourself arguing about them.
• Not surprisingly, the first time an individual tries to argue about
questions he or she has never before discussed, the result may be
awkward, clumsy, and frustrating.
The big questions…
That is the point behind philosophical questions in general:
• to teach us how to think about them
• articulate, and argue for the things we believe in
• to clarify these beliefs for ourselves
• To present them in a clear and convincing manner to other people,
who may or may not agree with us.
• Very often, therefore, philosophy proceeds through disagreement, as
when two philosophers or philosophy students argue with one
another.
• Sometimes the dispute seems trivial or just a matter of semantics.
• However, because what we are searching for are basic meanings and
definitions, even arguments about the meaning of words—especially
such words as freedom, truth, and self, for example—are essential to
everything else we believe.
• With that in mind, let’s begin our today’s lecture with a series of
somewhat strange but provocative questions, each of which is
designed to get you to think about and express your opinions on a
variety of distinctly philosophical issues.
Task: opening questions: write down your answer

1. Is there anything you would willingly die for? What is it?

BE AS HONEST AS POSSIBLE.
IF YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DIE FOR ANYTHING STATE SO.
2. If you had 5 days to live, what would you do with them?
List things you would do.
3. A famous philosopher once said that human life is no more
significant than the life of a cow or an insect. We eat, sleep, stay alive
for a while, and reproduce so that others like us can eat, sleep, stay
alive for a while, and reproduce, but without any ultimate purpose at
all.
• How would you answer him? What purpose does human life have, if
any, that is not to be found in the life of a cow or an insect? What is
the purpose of your life?
4. We have developed a machine, a box with some electrodes and a life-
support system, which we call the “happiness box.” If you get in the box, you
will experience a powerful pleasant sensation, which will continue
indefinitely with just enough variation to keep you from getting too used to
it. We invite you to try it. If you decide to do so, you can get out of the box
any time you want to; but perhaps we should tell you that no one, once they
have gotten into the happiness box, has ever wanted to get out of it. After
ten hours or so, we hook up the life-support system, and people spend their
lifetimes there. Of course, they never do anything else, so their bodies tend
to resemble half-filled water beds after a few years because of the lack of
exercise. But that never bothers them either. Now, it’s your decision: Would
you like to step into the happiness box? Why or why not?
Metaphysics: cosmology and ontology
• Metaphysics is the attempt to say what reality is.
• Cosmology is a component of metaphysics, or how we think the
most real things have come into being.
• Cosmology deals with the origin and general structure of the
universe, with its parts, elements, and laws, and especially with such
of its characteristics as space, time, causality, and freedom.
• Another is ontology, the study of what is.
• In developing an ontology, as part of our attempt to formulate our
metaphysics, we have to evaluate the different entities in the world,
picking out those that are most basic.
• It is branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or
being as such.
• But we have already anticipated two of the tests that are usually
imposed on this notion of what is “most real.”
• First, that which is most real is that upon which all else is dependent
(on).
• For a religious person, God is most real because all else depends on
him; for a scientist, what is most real are the principles and particles
on which all of reality can be reasoned to be based – quantum
particles or subatomic particles.
• Second, that which is most real is that which itself is not created or
destroyed.
• Thus, God created the earth, and he can destroy it, but God himself
was neither created nor can he be destroyed.
• You can destroy a chair, by burning it up or chopping it to pieces, but
you cannot destroy the basic particles and forces out of which the
chair is made.
• When we look back to the very beginnings of philosophy and
metaphysics, when people first made the attempt to formulate their
view of the world in terms of what was most real and what was not,
we find these same two tests being invoked.
• Indeed, both modern science and modern theology, as well as
philosophy itself, are continuations of this same ancient metaphysical
tradition.
• Metaphysics is the foundation of philosophy.
• Without an explanation or an interpretation of the world around us,
we would be helpless to deal with reality.
• We could not feed ourselves, or act to preserve our lives.
• The degree to which our metaphysical worldview is correct is the
degree to which we are able to comprehend the world, and act
accordingly.
• Without this firm foundation, all knowledge becomes suspect.
• Any flaw in our view of reality will make it more difficult to live.
Metaphysical approaches:

• monism
• dualism
• pluralism
• materialism and
• realism