Philosophy

All human activities seem to have dramatic, defining, pivotal moments. Take basketball : 1987 Game 5 Celtics v. Pistons. Dennis Rodman rejects Larry Bird with 5 seconds left. Pistons take the ball. All they need to do is inbound the ball and hold it and they take a 3-2 series lead home. Instead, Larry steals Isiah's inbound pass and the Celtics win. Wow. Of course there are many such moments in sports. What are the equivalent moments in Philosophy? What Philosopher, finally, in what paper, knocked down a prevalent theory held for 1,000 years? That kind of thing. Can a few of you contribute your favorite moments in the history of philosophy?

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Descartes ""cogito" ( I think, therefore, I am ) was certainly a walk off home run. It provided the foundation for a new approach to philosophy based purely on the examination of consciousness. This, however, was certainly not an uncontroversial move. Kant's transcendental approach was also a half court shot. That is, the idea of responding to problems in epistemology with the strategy of thinking - what must the cosmos be like in order for knowledge to be possible? There are actually quite a few moments like this in the history of philosophy. But few, I suppose, in which something was established in some incontrovertible fashion.

I have been hoping, and am still hoping, that others might chime in here, because I'm really curious to see everyone else post their own personal favourites. But here are a couple of mine.

Hmm... am I required to think of sporting analogies? Sport is really not my forte. But I do remember a certain goal that a young David Beckham once scored for Manchester United, back in the mid-90s, with a single kick from behind the halfway line. I'd equate that with Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?'. Ever since Plato's Theaetetus, those who had wondered about such things at all had been largely satisfied that the answer was yes. (Ironically, Plato's own answer was no: but, as in many of his dialogues, he never offered a definitive solution at all, and the closest that we actually got to an analysis of the concept of knowledge was given along precisely these lines). No one ever seriously believed that truth, or belief, or justification for such belief, would be enough to establish genuine knowledge by itself: but, putting all three together, few people ever really questioned whether anything further might be required. Not until 1963, when an otherwise undistinguished philosopher named Edmund Gettier published a three-page (!) article, which utterly demolished this analysis. (As it happens, Bertrand Russell had already undermined it rather earlier in the 20th century, only no one really noticed that at the time). Gettier's article provided a couple of hypothetical scenarios in which a hypothetical character would have a belief that was both true and unquestionably justified, but where few readers if any would be inclined to say that the character possessed genuine knowledge of the fact in question. Which pretty conclusively demonstrates that knowledge can't just be the same thing as justified true belief. Back of the net! To save you the trouble of googling the article, I've done it for you: click me.

The other example that comes to my mind is Saul Kripke's book, Naming and Necessity. Here, the lineage of the issue in question might not have gone back quite as far as Plato: but there had been a certain orthodoxy in the subject for at least several decades. The issue was about proper names -- e.g. personal names of individual people or things -- and the orthodox thesis had been that such names were equivalent to 'definite descriptions', capturing certain facts that were uniquely true of those people or things. I shan't get into the technical details here: but, basically, Kripke utterly demolished this thesis, coming at it from several completely different directions at once, with such argumentative force that any one of his numerous arguments might well have been decisive by itself, even in isolation from the others. Although some philosophers might have since tried to salvage a few vestiges of the earlier approach, nobody has been able to ignore Kripke's onslaught, and this work has completely changed the face of the subject. And I would heartily recommend this book, Naming and Necessity, to you. Even though it does get a little bit technical at times, it's also chatty and engaging (which shouldn't be so surprising, given that it's essentially just a transcription of a series of three lectures that Kripke delivered in January, 1970). For my part, I would not hesitate in hailing this as the greatest single philosophical work of the last half century.

David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) contains a discussion of induction that I would like to say qualifies – except I don't know that the position he argues against was going for 1,000 years. In fact, I don't even know if the question he addresses would have been a live one during that time.

Perhaps better, then, would be Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift (1879), which doesn't directly argue against a logical analysis of natural language sentences which I gather had been kicking around for well over 1,000 years but which effectively demolishes it by articulating, elaborating and defending a far more powerful analysis – one which continues to be presented at every university or college in the world that offers a course on formal logic.

This is a great question!! It would be wonderful if as many panelists as possible could respond, not only because I'm as curious as Jasper as to what people think, but also because I think that the responses would reveal much about the respondent's own philosophical temperament and priorities. (In this respect, the question is akin to the philosophical version of Desert Island Discs: which books would you bring to a desert island (excluding, of course, say, any collected works that fit into one volume, such as Plato's dialogues)?)

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals effectively ended centuries of philosophical approaches to morality and ever since its publication has been the subject of attacks and defenses. To this day, introductory ethics courses include consideration of the Groundwork--not bad for a book that Kant himself thought was merely a groundwork, a preliminary to a proper metaphysics of morals. (Kant of course not only wrote a metaphysics of morals; he also wrote a critique of practical reason; but those works, for better or worse, receive much less attention than Kant's Groundwork.)

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