This is a non exhaustive list of things that I learnt doing a 2-year part-time Philosophy MA that I thought were interesting enough to share. There is a mix of very basic and relatively advanced topics and, in each case, I've tried to include both a brief summary and at least one link where you can read more. The summaries are attempts to describe what I took away from studying these topics in a way that's easy to follow, while the links are starting points for what you should read if you want to learn more about them.
One of my reasons for writing a post like this is because people seem genuinely interested to know what I learnt doing my MA. So if you're reading this and want to hear more about what I learnt about any particular topic I'd appreciate it if you let me know.
I'm also keen for feedback on whether I make things too technical to be readable - my hope for some future posts is that I can learn how to write about these things for a general audience. On the other hand, this particular post is possibly not a great source of topics to begin with if you're just starting to study philosophy. The primary audience I had in mind for this post is people weighing up what they'd realistically get from part-time postgraduate philosophy study.
Some interesting concepts I came across or came to better understand
This ended up being the only section of this blog post. I had originally planned to cover new concepts but also new arguments, and new things I came to believe, and how they all relate together but the result was that I nearly ended up writing something closer to a book or a PHD thesis.
The concept of an evaluative gestalt shift. A gestalt shift is the phenomenon where you suddenly experience something in a very different way, in spite of your experience being based on all the same sense data. The famous example is the rabbit/duck illusion. An evaluative gestalt shift similarly is a phenomenon where the way you perceive something can change how you value it. An example might be that a beach loses its natural beauty for you if you find out it was man-made to cover over a strip mine. Or that an art critic might suddenly "get" that a weird sculpture is of a certain category, and have a different response to it as a result. Because of this phenomenon, if you care about value judgements being fact-like, you might think its very important that we find out the right ways to perceive objects of value. If you're interested in describing how people’s everyday values work, its interesting evidence that value judgements cannot be easily decoupled from attention and perception.
The concept of Dirty Hands. "Getting your hands dirty" is a phrase that describes doing something gross that is, at the same time, important and necessary. The ethical concept of dirty hands replaces "gross" with "morally wrong" and "important and necessary" with "morally right". In other words it is the idea that you don't have to believe that the right action to take in a moral dilemma wasn't also wholly and simultaneously a wrong action. To utilitarians and other consequentialists, this just sounds like some kind of confusion between overall good-ness and the kinds of instrumental rules or policies that we use to achieve it. The important point I took away from studying this topic though, is that if you're committed to coming up with a moral theory that makes sense of our moral intuitions you might care to account for emotions like guilt. In very difficult situations we sometimes feel guilty even for doing the right thing. If you think our moral intuitions, including emotions like guilt, should precede our moral theories this points at the possibility of things being simultaneously right and wrong. If you want a utilitarian explanation for why this guilt might be rational it is that, as a policy, feeling guilty when doing the right thing might still maximise utility, but that doesn't somehow make the right thing also wrong in any intrinsic sense. The response that Michael Walzer gives is that, introspectively, utilitarian reasons don't lead us to feel as guilty as we intuitively think we should. I would personally add that anyway the guilt we feel precedes us reflecting on these utilitarian reasons in the first place. Guilt might crop up in anything from very everyday conflicts, like between buying a loved one flowers and giving money to charity, to very rare ones like trading off between conflicting human rights. In such cases the pangs of guilt we feel aren't just a useful tool for maximising utility, they’re telling us something about the things we find intuitively valuable. Depending on the extent to which you think that moral theories are supposed to reflect our moral intuitions you might take this to mean that there are extra non-utilitarian dimensions of ethics to take into account. Michael Stocker writes about how concepts like dirty hands provide one way for thinking about how such non-utilitarian dimensions might work.
Speaking of guilt: Nietzsche's concepts of bad conscience, guilty conscience, and sovereign individuals. These appear in Book II of the Genealogy of morality. I ended up using them as a case study for understanding Nietzsche's view of moral progress for my dissertation, which makes it very hard to summarise everything I want to say about them. The gist of my dissertation was that even if you think that moral psychology evolved in some ancestral environment, and that environment was different to the one we live in today, you might still want to retain a bunch of moral phenomena like conscience and repurpose them for our new environment. You might even think that doing so is unavoidable for us, because of the way these phenomena developed alongside our basic psychological concepts of things like a "person" or an "act". The end of Book II of the Genealogy of Morality is a place where Nietzsche unambiguously says that we (or rather someone of sufficiently free spirit) should try to do this kind of repurposing to the phenomenon of "bad conscience" which (crudely speaking) makes up a large part of the feeling we know of as "guilt". In order to do this in a way that actually works as moral progress however, you will need to deploy these concepts on the terms of current or future environments and not past ones. Otherwise we would just be repeating past moral mistakes. I think this kind of thinking is very relevant for figuring out how we should do moral reasoning starting from our current moral frameworks, but thinking about drastically different future environments that modern technology is bringing about.
And speaking of moral genealogy, and of modern technology bringing about new moral environments: Foucault's concept of biopower. My first take-away from studying this was to notice just how many of the papers discussing it were deeply aware of cybernetics and the relationship between humans, machines, surveillance and statistics. I expected this topic to be furthest from my interests as a computer-scientist and software engineer and it ended up being one of the topics where I was most able to draw on experience from my job. I want to write a whole blog post about this soon so I will indulge in elaborating the basic ideas a bit. Foucault was interested in studying power, not merely as the ability for individual agents to do things they wanted, but as the way in which whole systems of people, machines, ideas, societies and organisations interact and shape one another. If done from first principles this project is almost too ambitious to get off the ground, and Foucault takes a very different, "genealogical" approach that tries to understand how these kinds of complex power relationships evolved from how they were in the 17th century to the undeniably different way they were at the time he was writing in the 20th century. Whether or not you agree with his analysis on historical grounds, he introduces some very interesting concepts to describe the shifts that took place. One way to think about these concepts is as describing important ways that our moral and political environments were changed by technology and the advent of a more interconnected society over that period of about 300 years. The spoiler for the blog post I want to write is that the concepts below are now half a century old, and, given the accelerating rate of technological change we should already be thinking about what new kinds of concepts along the same axes exist now that did not at the time that Foucault was writing, and that might exist in years to come that do not in the present day.
- Positive power. This is as opposed to negative power which is exercised by (either threatening to or actually) doing things like confiscating, executing or restraining. Positive power is about doing things like optimising, reinforcing, organising or otherwise shaping and growing.
- Biopolitics, which describes the exercise of power made possible by the technological and statistical ability to influence and reason about whole populations, or even the whole human species. This brings to attention existentially massive ideas like the possibility of human extinction through war or disease.
- Anatamopolitics, which describes the exercise of power made possible by technological advances in the management and optimisation of individual humans, through a better understanding of psychology, criminology, education or anatomy.
- Biopower, which describes the complex combination of all three phenomena above in the 20th century into a power over “life” itself.
- One of the hallmarks of Foucault's perspective is the way in which it often feels like markets, organisations and machines now control the behaviour of the humans that make them up and not the other way around.
- One thing I took from studying this framing of "power" is the anxiety emerging in the 19th and 20th that organisations, or even a whole society can march on relentlessly towards increasingly non-human ends, with nobody really at the wheel.
Why value human over non-human ends? For me a big reason is that humans are conscious… here are a bunch of related concepts to do with Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, which in spite of understanding separately thanks to my undergrad study, I came to feel much more comfortable thinking clearly about combining. These things always come up (even if not in name) if anyone ever asks me what I think about the problem of consciousness. Thinking about them at a post-graduate level, however, forced me to get much better at communicating precisely about them all at the same time (at least, when the people I’m communicating with are academic philosophers). That's a hard thing to convey without just writing out a paper on the philosophy of mind, so for this blog post I'll just define them all individually as I’ve been doing above. On a personal note, learning about and thinking carefully about how these concepts combine has reliably been the most fun I've had doing analytic philosophy since I started university.
- Qualia. Sometimes you are having a conscious experience of something (for example you are looking at a red apple and so you are conscious of some redness in a vaguely circular shape). Sometimes you are not having a conscious experience of it, (for example you look away and there is no vaguely circular redness you are conscious of). Sometimes you are not having any conscious experience of anything at all (for example you are deeply asleep, or dead). Qualia are the properties of an experience that make it a conscious one. (or in general, the same properties of a mind or mental state).
- Philosophical Zombies Philosophical Zombies are a thought experiment where you imagine a creature just like a human, but which isn’t conscious. It behaves like a human in every situation, if you cut open its brain it has brain cells which are made of molecules and atoms just like a human's brain would be. And in spite of all this, the zombie feels nothing. In other words there is "nothing it is like" to be a philosophical zombie, but that is the only difference between it and us. An important question in metaphysics is whether and in what sense philosophical zombies are possible or impossible. Whatever answer that question has would help understand exactly what kind of thing qualia (which are the properties that would hypothetically differ between us and zombies) are.
- Different kinds of impossibility. Some things are logically impossible (e.g. that something false is true). Some things are mathematically impossible (e.g. that 2+2=5). Some things are "epistemically" impossible, which strictly just means that for a given believer, it’s impossible for them to believe it, but philosophically is used to mean that no rational believer can believe it (for example I cannot rationally believe that a ball’s surface is red all over and blue all over. Some things are nomologically impossible, which means that they cannot exist according to the laws of physics in this world (for example, an object travelling faster than the speed of light). And finally, some things are metaphysically impossible, which means that something about the nature of reality itself makes it impossible, even in possible worlds radically different to ours. You might think that some of these kinds of possibility are just the same thing, while others are genuinely distinct things worth having different names for.
- Supervenience. When you look around the world you notice that things have properties like being round, or being alive. But the more you study sciences like physics or biology the more you realise that properties like roundness, or aliveness depend on other more fundamental properties, like being made up of atoms that are bonded together to create a round surface, or an organism exhibiting the right kinds of biological behaviour. Supervenience is a word for making the relationship between more and less fundamental properties philosophically precise. In general terms, one group of properties supervene on another, more fundamental, group of properties if it’s impossible to have a difference in the less fundamental properties without having a difference in the more fundamental properties. For example you might think that the property "being alive" supervenes on biological properties because it’s impossible to have two biologically identical creatures where one is alive and the other is dead. There are at least as many kinds of supervenience as there are kinds of "possibility".
- Semantic Externalism Semantics is the study of what the things we say or desire or believe actually mean and how that meaning is determined. Semantic externalism is the, at first surprising, claim that the meanings of concepts that make up our beliefs, sentences and desires depend on "external" things like our environments and the community of speakers we interact with and not (or possibly not just) "internal" things like our psychological states, or even the totality of our experiences so far. I think this becomes less surprising when you treat it as the solution to an ancient puzzle: how can we have beliefs about things that we don't have fully-formed psychological concepts of? And if we can't have such beliefs, how are we supposed to learn or inquire after anything we don't already fully understand? For example at the time of writing I might believe that the new iPhone is very expensive, but I haven't yet actually checked when the new iPhone was released, or how much it costs. I might also believe that to find out how much the new iPhone costs I just need to run some google searches. Semantic externalism means I can think and talk about the new iPhone, and make meaningful plans to learn more about it, without having actually yet looked it up. Luckily for me the fact that I literally don't yet know what I'm talking about (when it comes to iPhones) doesn't make my beliefs about the new iPhone are meaningless. This isn’t the same as saying that my beliefs about the new iPhone can’t be false - in fact it’s the opposite: it’s what makes it possible to definitively say whether they are true or false, by using external things about the world to connect my confused and incomplete concept to real things that I can talk about with other people. This is a useful thing to have in mind when thinking about how scientific discoveries work, because most of the time when we're doing science, we're trying to make meaningful statements about things in the world that we don't yet have a fully-formed concept of. What we want to be doing when we do science about these kinds of things is to be studying actual things in the world, and not our half-formed ideas about them.
- Rigid Designators I don't think I've found a short and faithful way to explain this yet, but the intuition is that when we're doing the kind of scientific or philosophical inquiry I described in the iPhone example above, we might want to reason about possible worlds where things might be different, in order to better understand the things we're studying. A rigid designator is a concept like “the new iPhone” which refers to the same thing in all possible worlds (for some definition of possibility). For example I might make a philosophical claim like: "the storage capacity of the new iPhone supervenes on its hardware", when I say this I mean that there is no possible world where the new iPhone has different storage capacity but all the same hardware. I can confidently make a claim like this while still having an incomplete and confused concept of what the new iPhone is like. And part of why this is is that "the new iPhone" picks out the same device in this world and other possible worlds independently of other descriptions of it that might exist in my head (like that it is expensive, or that its available in many colours, or even that in this world, we happen to call it the “iPhone”).
- Phenomenal Concepts Phenomenal concepts are the concepts we make use of when we talk about, form beliefs about, or have desires about qualia. Presumably, because zombies behave the same as we do, they also talk about qualia, and (in their own unconscious ways) form beliefs and desires about them too. An important thing to think about when trying to make sense of consciousness is how the semantics of phenomenal concepts are supposed to differ in the three cases of (1) us talking about our own qualia (2) us talking about a zombie's (lack of) qualia and (3) of zombies talking about their own (non-existent) qualia.
- If you’ve read everything in this section up until here I can now tell you my current view on the metaphysics of consciousness. I think that qualia supervene on a class of properties called “functional properties” which are still in modern literature philosophically very ill-defined. I think of functional properties as computational facts about our universe, many of which are observable to us, or supervene on things which are, but some of which might not be (for example, facts about the computational complexity of the universe). Related to this, I think zombies are nomologically impossible but are metaphysically possible. When we reason about a metaphysically possible world with philosophical zombies, our phenomenal concepts rigidly designate functional properties of our world that are different from the functional properties that a zombie’s phenomenal concepts rigidly designate in the zombie world. This is because I think there can be functional properties which neither affect a system’s behaviour nor are observable about that system. This explains how zombies can have all the same appearance and behaviour as us, down to the atomic level, but differ to us in what they talk about when they talk about experience.
And finally, here some other concepts that take fewer words to describe but are no less interesting for it:
- The concept of recalcitrant emotions. Which is the idea that some emotions, like optical illusions, do not vanish in the face of conflicting beliefs or desires. No matter how much you believe a stick in a cup of water is straight, it does not mean you no longer see it as bent. Similarly, we can be angry at someone because of something they did to us in a dream, but even once we realise that, our anger does not go away. Its a mistake to think of recalcitrant perceptions of optical illusions as "irrational", so why do we think of recalcitrant emotions as "irrational"?
- Moral value pluralism. Which is the view that different moral values cannot be collapsed and graded onto a single spectrum.
- The concept of weak consequentialism which is the view that you can never come up with a perfect set of moral rules such that the consequences of following those rules in a particular situation can never overwrite or overturn those rules. This view is “weak” as opposed to “strong” because, while it says that consequences can always matter enough to overturn any rule you can make, it does not conclude from this that the right thing to do in every situation is to maximise the best consequential outcomes according to some measure of how good they are, or that maximising such outcomes is the only principle which we use to create or evaluate rules.
- Nietzsche's distinction between mere progressus and genuine progress (exact phrasing depending on your translation of Genealogy of Morality, Book 2, Section 12). A mere progressus is what happens if you follow or apply some process, stepping forward down a given path, or towards a given goal. "Progress" involves either a value judgement that the direction you are going is actually making things better, or at least that the process you’re following is the correct one to follow.
- Normative uncertainty as a voting problem. There are loads of conflicting moral frameworks. You might be unsure about which moral framework to apply, but have to take some decision in the face of that uncertainty. This provides a motivation to try to follow several conflicting moral frameworks at once, which requires some way to combine their guidance into individual decisions. An elegant way to do this (assuming a world where moral decisions are just about choosing from a menu of possible actions) is to have each framework rank all your possible actions and then use a voting system, weighted by how much you want to weight each moral theory, to pick the right action to take.
- Ramsey's pragmatism about truth. What is Truth? You might think of it as a property of propositions (a technical term for facts about the world that you can believe or desire). If you can figure out the role that agents’ attitudes towards propositions play in how those agents make decisions about the real world then you can better understand what it means for a belief of theirs to be true. As it turns out, doing this doesn't help you define "truth" in a dictionary sense but it gives you all the knowledge required to explain what we mean in the different cases where we use the word “truth” to communicate to each other, and it also gives us a bunch of tools for thinking clearly about partial or uncertain beliefs.
- Manuel Dries' description of humans in Nietzsche's philosophy as "dynamic, sentient self-systems", for example on page 3 of this paper.. I find this a very useful phrase. Sometimes you want to talk about human-like things without using words like "person" or "agent" which might imply a picture of humans and other beings as a single unified will rather than as a stage on which constantly evolving bundles of messy things like drives, ideas, habits, first person perspectives, goals and beliefs all play out.
- The anomalism of the mental. This is the least well explained part of a theory in the philosophy of mind called anomalous monism defended by Donald Davidson. Basically it is the view that even very basic mental states/events like beliefs, desires and intentional actions (and presumably, therefore more complex things like ethics or psychology) cannot be subject to strict laws - even though they are very definitely instantiated by the strict laws of physics. Anomalous monism, which I studied as an undergraduate does a very good job of defending a claim that these two things are compatible, and very crudely it does this by saying that mental descriptions define types of events and how they are supposed to explain or motivate one another while physical descriptions define specific (token) events and how they cause one another. In this way its possible that the boundaries of which specific sets of physical events count as a specific type of mental event are constantly shifting and being redefined in non-lawlike ways, while, underpinning it all, physics continues to just do its thing, neither perturbed nor undermined. At the time I first studied this as an undergraduate I had never managed to understand why you might want to believe in a hypothesis like the anomalism of the mental in the first place. From what I've come to believe, one reason that Davidson had in mind for this involved the way in which we have to constantly revise our own understanding of our own and each others' mental concepts in light of new evidence. We have to do this when coming up with laws about physics too, but unlike with physics, changing our understanding of mental concepts changes the thing we're ultimately trying to understand - since understanding itself is a part of the web of mental concepts we were trying to make laws about in the first place. A concrete example in my mind is humour, where, to “get” a new joke, we have to implicitly update our understanding of what a joke can be, which changes the conditions for what future jokes can or will be funny. Its not totally clear yet to me why this means you can't have strict mental meta-laws that govern how these changes take place, but it does help me understand why a mental level of description might behave in ways that are divergent with the physical level of description: because they share no stable overlapping way to carve up the world.
Please tell me if any of this looks wrong
I'm likely to change my mind about many of these things (though I can't tell you which). In fact: maybe you will change my mind about many of these things. In general if you know things that would make me change my mind about anything on this blog please let me know.