SUPERSTITION Stuart Vyse
SYMMETRY Ian Stewart
SYNAESTHESIA Julia Simner
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
SYSTEMS BIOLOGY Eberhard O. Voit
TAXATION Stephen Smith
TEETH Peter S. Ungar
TELESCOPES Geoff Cottrell
TERRORISM Charles Townshend
THEATRE Marvin Carlson
THEOLOGY David F. Ford
THINKING AND REASONING Jonathan St B. T. Evans
THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr
THOUGHT Tim Bayne
TIBETAN BUDDHISM Matthew T. Kapstein
TIDES David George Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts
TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield
TOPOLOGY Richard Earl
TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
TRANSLATION Matthew Reynolds
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES Michael S. Neiberg
TRIGONOMETRY Glen Van Brummelen
THE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline
TRUST Katherine Hawley
THE TUDORS John Guy
TWENTIETH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan
TYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna
THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimäki
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES David Palfreyman and Paul Temple
THE U.S. CIVIL WAR Louis P. Masur
THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION David J. Bodenhamer
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT Linda Greenhouse
UTILITARIANISM Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer
UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent
VETERINARY SCIENCE James Yeates
THE VIKINGS Julian D. Richards
VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford
VOLTAIRE Nicholas Cronk
WAR AND TECHNOLOGY Alex Roland
WATER John Finney
WAVES Mike Goldsmith
WEATHER Storm Dunlop
THE WELFARE STATE David Garland
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Stanley Wells
WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill
WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
WORK Stephen Fineman
WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar
WORLD WAR II Gerhard L. Weinberg
WRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson
ZIONISM Michael Stanislawski
Available soon:
AMPHIBIANS T. S. Kemp
ENZYMES Paul Engel
VOLCANOES Michael J. Branney and Jan Zalasiewicz
WAR AND RELIGION Jolyon Mitchell and Joshua Rey
ARBITRATION Thomas Schultz and Thomas Grant
For more information visit our website
www.oup.com/vsi/
Edward CraigPhilosophyA Very Short IntroductionSecond Edition
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Edward Craig 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First published as an Oxford University Press paperback 2002
First published as a Very Short Introduction 2002
Second edition published 2020
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937116
ISBN 978–0–19–886177–5
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–260625–9
Printed in Great Britain by
Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
List of illustrations
1 Philosophy: a very short introduction
2 What should I do? Plato’s Crito
3 How do we know? Hume’s Of Miracles
4 What am I? An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot
5 Some themes
6 Of ‘isms’
7 Some more high spots: a personal selection
8 Freedom of the will
9 What’s in it for whom?
References
Further reading
Index
List of illustrations
1 Boethius listens to the words of the Lady Philosophy
Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
2 Socrates was depicted by Aristophanes as an eccentric in a basket
akg-images.
3 Jacques Louis David’s painting The Death of Socrates (1787)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1931.
4 Hume was smarter than he looked
University of Edinburgh, Corson Collection (CC BY 3.0).
5 The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes
DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/age fotostock.
6 The image of the chariot (1): Arjuna and Krishna
reddees/Shutterstock.com.
7 The image of the chariot (2): Hercules and Athena
Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich. Photo: Renate Kühling.
8 Marble head of Epicurus
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1911.
9 Beyond the family, anything goes
Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto.
10 Every subject talks its own talk
Mike Mosedale/www.CartoonStock.com.
11 Descartes as physiologist
Wellcome Collection (CC BY).
12 Progress through conflict
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
13 Darwin’s message wasn’t to be digested quickly
Wellcome Collection (CC BY).
What to blow up next?
14 Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.
15 René Descartes (1596–1650)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
16 Determinism: all laid down in advance?
totajla/Shutterstock.com.
17 Epicureanism in practice?
© J. King/Art Directors & Trip Photo Library.
18 Hobbes’s Leviathan
British Library (C.175.n.3).
19 The Raja consults his priests
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
20 A professional philosopher
Photograph: Simon Blackburn.
21 Philosophy class
Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto.
Chapter 1Philosophy: a very short introduction
Anyone reading this book is to some extent a philosopher already. Nearly all of us are, because we have some kind of values by which we live our lives (or like to think we do, or feel uncomfortable when we don’t). And most of us favour some very general picture of what the world is like. Perhaps we think there’s a god who made it all, including us; or, on the contrary, we think it’s all a matter of chance and natural selection. Perhaps we believe that people have immortal, non-material parts called souls or spirits; or, quite the opposite, that we are just complicated arrangements of matter that gradually fall to bits after we die. So most of us, even those who don’t think about it at all, have something like answers to the two basic philosophical questions, namely: what should we do? and, what is there? And there’s a third basic question, to which again most of us have some kind of an answer, which kicks in the moment we get self-conscious about either of the first two questions, namely: how do we know, or if we don’t know how should we set about finding out—use our eyes, think, consult an oracle, ask a scientist? Philosophy, thought of as a subject that you can study, be ignorant of, get better at, even be an expert on, simply means
