Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

story that can be appreciated without some understanding of the circumstances in which thinkers have found themselves.
So ‘Is this right?’ is certainly not the only question we should be thinking about. Still, there is something wrong with refusing altogether to ask whether our philosopher was right, or whether their arguments are convincing, merely because they lived long ago. After all, Plato did not take himself to be writing just for his own time and place. On the contrary, he is constantly trying to direct our attention away from the transient and towards what he believes to be permanent, and it seems deeply condescending (or possibly self-protective?) to dismiss his further ambitions without making any honest attempt to assess them. ‘There, there, designed his own ideal state, has he?—what a clever little fellow.’
I hope that you are now beginning to notice something rather encouraging. The literature of philosophy may be intimidatingly vast, but the number of genuinely distinct philosophical themes is not. It is somewhat too large for the compass of this very short book, admittedly, but it is not enormous. We have already seen links across two thousand years between Epicurus and Mill, Plato and Hobbes, Hume and the author of Milinda. The problem lies not in becoming familiar with the recurrent themes, but in being sensitive to the variations as different thinkers play them again in their own way for their own purposes. And what this means is that one’s understanding of philosophy is cumulative, and accumulates rather quickly. Which must be good news.

Chapter 6 Of ‘isms’
From football to gardening and back via cookery, mountaineering, and population genetics, every subject has its own terminology. Philosophy certainly does, most of it fortunately not nearly as frightening as it looks. In Chapter 4 we saw ‘metaphysics’, meaning the study of (or opinions about) what reality is like in its most general features. In Chapter 5 we encountered ‘consequentialism’, the blanket word for theories that see the value of anything in its consequences rather than in its own nature and its history; then ‘epistemology’, the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, belief, and closely related notions like reasons and justification. Now let’s look at some more words, all of them ending in ‘ism’. This isn’t a matter of swotting up vocabulary—rather of finding out more about philosophy as you learn more of the jargon.
Most philosophical ‘ism’ words are (like ‘consequentialism’) quite broad terms designating a certain general type of doctrine. Their breadth makes them very flexible, and ensures that they are in constant use, but it also brings dangers, principally that of taking them to say more than they really do. Never think that you have got a philosopher sorted out just because you can say what ‘ism’ he represents. The philosophy of George Berkeley (1685–1752) is a form of Idealism, and so is that of Hegel (1770–1831); but I have never heard it suggested that having read either would be any help in understanding the other—their thought is miles apart. Karl Marx (1818–83), on the other hand, certainly wasn’t an Idealist (which is actually a term of abuse in the Marxist vocabulary), but he is in many respects extremely Hegelian, and that a student should get to know something of Hegel before reading Marx seems the most obvious advice imaginable.
With that warning uttered and illustrated, let us begin with dualism. It can be used of any view which recognizes (exactly) two contrasting forces or entities, so that a theology which posits two basic powers in conflict, one good and one evil, is said to be dualistic. But by far its most common meaning is a doctrine according to which reality consists of two very different kinds of thing or stuff, namely mind and matter; a human being consists of a bit of each. Perhaps the most famous exponent of dualism in this sense is the Frenchman René Descartes (some of whose work we shall be looking at in Chapter 7). In fact, some enemies of dualism, and there are plenty of them nowadays, seem to want to blame it all on him. (Far from it—Descartes was merely trying to give cogent proof of a widely held doctrine that is very much older.)
Dualism certainly has its problems, especially if it is to be combined with modern scientific theory. One tricky question is: what does the dualist’s mental stuff actually do? We naturally suppose that what we think, what we feel, what we are aware of, affects our behaviour. If I think that the train leaves in ten minutes, want to catch it, and see a signpost saying ‘Railway Station’, I will go in the direction I believe the signpost points. This means that my (physical) body goes somewhere it wouldn’t otherwise have gone. But doesn’t scientific theory suggest that all physical events have other physical events as their causes? In which case how can there be room for something else, of a non-physical kind, to cause my body to move? Dualists may just have to grit their teeth and say that science is plain wrong about that. For if they agree that science is right on that point, and if they agree (and it would be weird not to) that what we think, feel, etc. affects what we do, then the consequence is that thinking, feeling, awareness, and so on must be physical processes. In which case the question comes round again: what does this non-physical stuff of theirs, this ‘mind’, actually do? But dualists can’t just say that science is wrong about all physical events having physical causes. That won’t convince anyone who wasn’t convinced to start with. They will need some reason for saying that there is something about us which cannot be physical. When we come to Descartes we’ll see something of what a dualist might have to offer on that score.
So, you may be thinking, if dualism is the view that there are two ultimate sorts of stuff, mind and matter, probably we also find a doctrine