ETHICS REVIEWER John Dewey (1859-1952)
A systematic pragmatist or instrumentalist
PRAGMATISM – defined what is true, what is
moral, and what works
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)
Semiotics – theory of signs
Focused on Linguistics
Classified signs as natural, iconic, and
conventional (agreed upon)
Conventional signs are “symbols”
“The word is not the object.”
“There are no ultimate truths that philosophy
can establish about the nature of reality.
Individual ideas must always be tested by the
effects they produce.”
William James (1842-1910)
Influenced by Pierce’s Pragmatism
Ideas should not be seen as abstract meta-
physical entities but tools with practical uses
Functionalism (if you believe it works, go for it)
Books:
The Principles of Psychology (1980)
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
“Mapagkaka-kitaan ba ‘yan? Then go for it”
“Human evolution is an interactive process in
which consciousness and the environment
influence each other – consciousness exists in
order to enable us to survive.”
PHENOMENOLOGY - philosophy of
experience, main paradigm of thinking
Being “philosophical” really meant being
critically intelligent and maintaining a scientific Franz Brentano (1838-1917)
approach to human problem Philosopher and psychologist
Dewey’s Educational System is implemented in Proposed a “descriptive or phenomenal
the Philippines psychology
Pedagogy – art of teaching
“But what is it that we are experiencing when
“I propose that educationalists should no longer we experience?
conceive of children as passive, empty jam jars
who need to be stuffed with information, but as “I want to know exactly WHAT it is that the
independently-minded problem-solvers who individual knows when presented with
need to be continuously challenged.” something in his consciousness.”
NEO-PRAGMATISM – revival after
European imports of analytic philosophy and
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
phenomenology
Intentionality –whenever you are aware of your
consciousness, something is inside it
John Rawls (b. 1921)
Method of Bracketing – to perform a series of
Book: A Theory of Justice reduction which ignores all metaphysical and
Justice is fairness theoretical distractions
It started with a thought experiment by
imagination “The trick is to suspend or bracket all questions
Veil of Ignorance – everyone is treated as of truth or reality, sot that only the unique pure
equals immediacy of experience remains as content.”
John Searle (b. 1932)
Produced work on the philosophy of language
and is critical of all enthusiastic materialist
theories of mind.
Number-crunching computers are always faster
since they do it mechanically but more stupid
than humans because they have no convincing
grasp of meaning
THE QUEST FOR BEING
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
The question of being called “fundamental
ontology”
Humans are Dasein – being there
Book: Being and Time (1927)
“Why is there anything rather than nothing?”
Das Nichts – nothingness, our own oncoming
death
Our being in this world must be realized by acts
of free choice, giving us authenticity
We are thrown into this world
We are waiting to be “nothing” or to die
“The role we assume makes us inauthentic
because it is not owned by us.”
EXISTENSIALISM – emphasizes the
existence of the individual person as a free and
responsible agent determining their own
development through acts of the will
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Developed existentialism from Descartes,
Hegel, and Husserl
Book: Being and Nothingness (1943)
Existence precedes essence (quality of life you
choose)
“Because there is no god, there is no human
nature.”
Simone de Beauvoir
Book: The Second Sex
“Hindi ka ipinanganak na babae. Magpaka-
babae ka.”
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
A journalist, essayist, and novelist
Book: The Myth of Sisyphus (1943)
“The main question in life is to commit suicide
or not.”
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)
Logic is the foundation of modern philosophy
instead of the “problem of knowledge”
He thought that he could demonstrate the deep
connection between logic and mathematics.
He demystified mathematics by showing that
numbers aren’t objects
“Numbers are the properties of concepts or
useful logical fictions- rather like the fiction of
the average man.”
Founder of modern linguistic philosophy
A word is a sign, it expresses a sense (meaning)
and denotes a reference
“The word table does not refer to this table.”
LOGICAL ATOMISM
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947)
Attempted to prove how even the simplest
mathematics had logical foundations
Book: Principia Mathematica
Russell’s solutions to linguistic puzzles is to
break the ordinary sentence into its logical
components
LOGICAL POSITIVISTS
Vienna Circle – social and physical scientists
rather than philosophers
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Otto Neurath
(1882-1945), and Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)
All philosophy, especially Hegelian idealism, is
metaphysical nonsense
A.J. Ayer (1910-1989)
Book: Language, Truth, and Logic
Dismissed both religion and ethical language as
nonsense which shocked some members of
British establishment
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Books:
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1992)
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Language Games – language is a series of
different games with different purposes and
goals
“Meaning is in the use, you won’t find it
elsewhere.”
Private Thoughts – language is a social product
and therefore consciousness cannot be private
“Thinking occurs because of using words.
There are no private thoughts since words are
public.”
ORDIANRY LANGUAGE PHILOSPHY
J.L. Austin (1911-1960)
Performative Speech-Acts – we do not only say
something, there is also an action
INDUCTION METHOD – a scientific method
based on observations
Countered by Hume, pointing that induction
offers only probability and not certainty
“Any science based on induction will never be
certain”
FALSIFICATION THEORY – a counter- A SYSTEM OF SIGNS
example can falsify a general claim Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Founder of structuralism and semiology
Karl Popper (1902-1994) Luminary on Language
Falsification theory would be a more sensible
way of thinking about scientific procedure “The relation of language to the world is
arbitrary (agreed upon). It does not signify
“Falsification is a reliable gate-keeping test reality.”
which will distinguish real science from
pseudo-sciences.” Jacques Derrida (b. 1930)
Deconstruction – not a “method” but more like
Max Planck (1958-1947) a therapy according to Wittgenstein.
Quantum physics began when his mathematical It does not seek a true meaning but reveals
discovery which seemed to violate sacrosanct multiple unconsciously at war with each other
Second Law of Dynamics What are exposed as “unconscious” are the
binary polarities which underpin metaphysical
THE THREE BIG “IFS” OF assumptions
POSTMODERNISM One element in any binary opposition is always
Should not be called “ifs”, they are axioms (not “privileged” over the other
questionable)
“You can’t experience the dark without
1. Human thoughts can no longer be knowing the light”
guaranteed as “ours”.
2. The language we think cannot meaningfully
refer to the world outside itself.
3. The meaning of autonomous linguistic signs
are constantly shifting.
LANGUAGE AND REALITY
Heidegger: as human beings, we can never
separate language and reality
Wittgenstein: there are only localized “language
games”.
Derrida: we use language to think and
communicate with
INEXISTENT SELF
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
The self is a fiction, a private and unique
identity is only a useful illusion that provides us
with a sense of security and makes some unified
sense of our shifting experiences
Vedas (Advaita) – a sacred living in extant that
came 1000 years before the Bible
“Where I think – I think therefore I am – that is
where I am not.”
THE END OF GRAND NARRATIVES
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998)
Undermined another crucial “foundational”
myth: the idea of progress
Book: The Postmodern Condition (1979)
A WORLD OF HYPER REALITY
Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
The world presented to us by postmodern
thinkers are one of fragmented nightmare
“hyper reality”
Augmented Reality
“We exist in a world of hyper real simulacra –
among signs that bear no relation even to
provisional surface reality.”
 All scientific facts are constructed
through language.
 The observer is the observed – all
observations are theory-laden.
 All human knowledge is a construction
of language.
 Good science is a rigorous and
disciplined study of how nature works.
It is produced by scientists who take
elaborate precautions against self-
deception or prejudice. This is real.

POWER PLAYS
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Power and knowledge are mutually complicit
Philosophy has been an accomplice in this
“power play” of dominating others by
marginalizing them
Borrowed Nietzsche’s concept of “genealogy”
(lineage or bloodline)
Institutionalized Knowledge – in line with
corporate policy; the instrument of power
pathologizes the “mad”, “criminal”, and the
“sexually abnormal”

“Official histories filter, select, prioritize, and

exclude other interpretations.”