Philosophy 101 Sample with Jay Dyer! (12 Lecture Course)

ways for about twenty years. So I'm happy to be here, honored to be here. I do have some unique takes that I think will be different than what you would get in a traditional legacy university setting. So hopefully we can get into some of that tonight kicking it off, and we're going to get pretty deep, so you know, jot down your questions. I'm a big fan of open Q and A at the end. You know, we've done

in my discord. I think we have about eight or nine thousand in the discord, and we've been doing these open q and as that go sometimes six ten hours, so I'm totally used to that. Very happy to have people ask you know lengthy end of lecture Q and as, so, be sure and jot down your questions and I will answer them to the best of my abilities. You're not gonna offend me, You're not gonna it's not gonna bother me if you disagree, if you think I'm wrong about

something you know you don't like. UH. We're not gonna be talking a whole lot about theism or any of that tonight. That doesn't really play into tonight's topic. So if you're an anti theist, if you're agnostic, none of that bothers me. It's fine for you to have your positions. I'm not gonna be coming at you or critiquing your positions unless you want that right, So you can request that, Sir, I would like you to request I would like to request a demolished to goet my paradion. I'm happy to

offer that if you want that. Most people don't really want that. But it's gonna just gonna be an introduction. So we're gonna look at what is a philosophy all about. The object of this course will be to take us from this introductory UH situation to a pretty good knowledge of deep knowledge. Hopefully that's what we're gonna shoot for of the history of Western philosophy. Obviously, we have to

pick some starting points. We can't go back and do all of Indo European philosophy, we can't do all the Babylonian, a Syrian philosophy and whatnot. But what's most relevant, I think for us in the West is the history of Western philosophy. And like I said, I've you know, I've had this course at the legacy institutional setting many times over and in many in many in many different ways. So I'm gonna give you a better version of that. And I think again, this is really the way to

do it. Really, Richard is really pioneering when it comes to where education is going. So let's get into philosophy. What is philosophy? Well, hm, you say, I have there a couple of figures that's from actually from a monastery, an Orthodox monastery, where you have five philosophy guys, and you know they don't have halos. So in the Orthodox view, there's not going to be a perception of the philosophers as equivalent to what you would get in divine revelation.

But regardless, some of the things that are going to be present in my lecture is that we're not going to see a strict divide between the various theisms, because we're gonna notice that as we go through the history of philosophy, there's a ton of theisms. So again, no matter what you think about theism, we're going to need to understand these people's positions from their vantage point, all right.

Ariosol has a famous quote attributed to Aristotl that it's a mark of an educated man to understand the opponent's position without adopting it. And we want to keep that in mind as we work, as we work through these various philosophers, because this is crucial to having the upper hand right. And when I say the upper hand, I mean in anything, if you're if you're in business, if you're in debate, if you're in law, right, whatever you're into.

If you want to have the upper hand, if you want a personal advantage, it's always better to know your opponent's position at least as good as they do. Right. Sometimes we can't achieve that, but to have that edge, that's what you want to shoot for. So keep in mind, no matter what your view, what we want to strive for. And I think this is a virtue. We're going to get to what virtue and vice and all that is

later on. We'll get to ethics. I think it's actually a virtue to know the position that you're against, even if you completely hate it and reject it, know it is best you can. That's what we're going to shoot for. And so those are some of the preliminary considerations as we get into this. I want to remind you too that I find it most helpful to break philosophy down into three main branches. Those branches are epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.

Sometimes the phrase or the word esthetics is added to ethics. We will get to that as well. Let's get into it. So I will I did choose source materials. You don't have to get these source materials unless you choose to. I would recommend them because they're going to be what I'm working from. In terms of the text, I will at times refer to these texts for various source material for pages that I think are really, you know, insightful. That will be the famous text from Copplestone, which is

History of Western Philosophy or History Philosophy. I think it's like four or five volumes. We're only going to be early on concern with volume one. In volume two because that covers the ancient and medieval periods, I will be using and sourcing at times the well known text on epistemology. It's very common in a lot of grad courses or

undergrad courses by Lawrence Bonjour epistemology. And there's a three part series that matches up to the classification system that I gave by these guys, and I think they're very good because again they focus on virtue in these in these domains, especially in terms of epistemology and ethics, and that's going to be very crucial for where we go

in this course. You know, I know Richard makes a lot of a great point throughout his talks to talk about ethics and why, you know, having an edge in business, iss, it's necessary to be ethical. We want to be ethical. We want to display not in a showy way, but

we want to have a good reputation. Right, How you're going to have a good business or good business at repertoire if you have a bad rep right, if you're known as the dude that scams everybody in lies and cheets, right, So ethics will definitely play into this, and you're going to see I think that ethics is very important and crucial to philosophy, and that a lot of this is practical, although it may seem early on that a lot of what we're going to talk about is abstract. You know,

how does this relate to my business? We're talking about freaking monads, We're talking about you know, crazy four elements and all this mystical crap that doesn't relate to the practical. I assure you that it will. But if you stick if you stick it out right, you're going to see that. You might not see that early on, but if you stick it out you will. And so I recommend the W. J. Woodbook on Epistemology, the William Hasker text on Metaphysics, and

the Arthur Holmes text on ethics. Now, the three on the right are very easily accessible to people that may not know a lot about philosophy. So if you're new to philosophy, I'm gonna recommend the three on the right there to start with, because the Bonjour Epistemology text is a little advanced and the the Coppleston text is maybe in between. Right, So you might you might see that one. It's kind of in between the other two. And then,

as I said, I didn't put it on screen. But there's also Coppleston's Volume two, which deals with medieval philosophy. So those are our sources. Obviously, there are some other sources that are gonna matter or be referenced here and there for students of philosophy. Everybody should know about the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's very well known in academia. It's commonly referenced as well as I forget which university puts this one out, but it's the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Those will also be sourced at times, uh, you know, just for very various reference references to words, terms, definitions, and so forth. When I refer to Plato. I'll put some of these up later when we do other slides, but we'll be we'll be using various texts from Plato's Republic. I use the Groove translation, and then also the bol Engine series of Plato, which is a collected works of

Plato for some of the dialogues. That'll be the next lecture, though we're not going to be getting into Plato tonight, because one of the things that we want to we want to understand is that philosophy is a centuries long discourse. And just as if you were to walk into a bar right and you were right in the middle of some dirty story right to you know, drunk dudes in the bar, or some wine mom in the bar whining about her ex husband, you wouldn't know the whole story,

would you. You would only know you know what wine mom is saying at this moment. Right. You want to know who's let with who. You want to know where they're from. You want to who's shooting on who? Right, Well, maybe you guys don't. But that's what I'm getting at with knowing the whole story here, is that the way

philosophy works is that it's a centuries long conversation. Basically, the dude that's selling his stuff today is going to be destroyed and demolished by the dude critiquing him tomorrow, and this will go on for basically the last twenty five hundred years. And that's what we're going to be

focusing on in terms of this course. So we need to know, for example, who was saying what before Plato that put Plato into the setting that he was in, right, because there's a bunch of discourse and debate prior to Plato that really you can't really understand Plato without that.

So in other words, we're going to have to step back and understand some of the pre athens philosophy, the pre Socratics or they're sometimes called the Milesians or the Ionian philosophers, and what they were to be, what they were asking, because they really initiate philosophy. In fact, Aerosol himself says that it's the pre Socratics that, and we'll look at this specifically in a moment, that initiate or

begin the process of what is properly philosophy. Now, yeah, you could widen that definition such that any ancient religion or empire had a philosophy, and we're gonna look at a little bit of that too, But for Western philosophy in particular, again, thinking about our threefold division of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, it's going to be the pre Socratics that first initiate this question. And they do it because they begin to move out of the domain of myth and storytelling.

So prior to them. We'll look at in a minute, Homer, Hesiod, these playwrights, these oral tradition storytellers. For them, virtue and vice is essentially known via mythic or mythopoetic storytelling, not primarily known through abstraction. This is gonna be a huge step that a lot of these prestocratics are going to take away from myth towards reason, rationality, abstraction, and stepping away from myth and storytelling. Now this is not to

cast aspersions on myth and storytelling. We're not making judgments either way. We're simply understanding the course of philosophy as it progresses historically. Because again this I have to stress this because a lot of people don't know how to approach philosophy. Right. They just pick up David Hume and start reading him. And you can't understand David Hume if you don't understand the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, right.

Because Hume comes on the scene in the Enlightenment. It says, as a skeptic, right, we need to throw out all the metaphysics that came before. Well, if I don't know what the metaphysics came before, or I don't know what he's talking about. Likewise, I can't understand Kant without understanding David Hume, because Kant's whole philosophy is a reaction to human and we're going to see that throughout the history of Western philosophy. It's a constant position, reaction, interchange. And

sometimes this is referred to as dialectics. Now, dialectics, I'm going to I'll have more definitions later on screen for you guys, but as we get into more of the precise terminology, we don't have to really worry about dialectics tonight, but I do want to bring it up because it's going to be recurring themes. I want you guys to pay attention to themes that will recur throughout this lecture series.

Dialectics will be one of them, because we're going to see, especially in the Greeks and throughout the whole history of Western philosophy, dialectical tension. And remember, dialectics means different things in different contexts. Sometimes dialectics means just the methodology of teaching, to back and forth question asking dialogue right. Sometimes dialectics means something more metaphysical, which in the sense of like actual principles in the world that are intention with one another.

Is there a stark war between determinism and free will? Right? That's a dialectical characterized question. Right. The setting for that is already kind of set up as dialectical. Are you a determinist or do you believe in free will? Well, that assumes that there's not some form of compatilist compatibilism right now. I'm not saying which of those is correct

the wrong. I'm just saying that you can see that a lot of times questions can be framed in a dialectical way, and I want you to pay attention to that, because as we go through a lot of these especially these pre socratics, you're going to notice that they really are operating in a lot of these kinds of assumptions. So we want to pay attention to that. We want

to have some of those things in mind. But before we get to that, after we've looked at some of these course materials rough course syllabus, this is what we're looking at doing here, We're going to do this introductory class. Uh. This is then we're going to move to playto. I'm going to try to squeeze playto into one talk these could ease each of these people, as we know, could easily be an entire course. They're very difficult, especially the

pre Socratics play aristotol, but we're gonna tackle it. I have a lot of friends that are in academia that are also solid people that I think you guys would really like, you guys really benefit from. So I'm gonna have a couple of guests, uh expert lectures come in to also co teach and to do a little Q and A with me on the epistemology class. I'm gonna do the metaphysics class. We're gonna lump aesthetics with ethics. I'll bring a guest expert in as well for that,

probably somebody who's a Renaissance expert. Then we're gonna look at the Stoics and the new Platonists together for the early non Christian philosophy of the meditations of for example, Marcus Aurelius, and we'll look at some of the Roman philosophers. Then we're gonna move to the what's called the Patristic period, which means the Church Fathers. Again, regardless of what you think of Christianity, you know it doesn't I'm not really

here to get into that with you tonight. Unless you guys want to talk about those things, I'm happy to, but that's not really prominently. The focus of this course is not gonna essentially be Christianity. It's just gonna be the history of West and philosophy. However, whatever one thinks of Christianity or religion, we do have to treat this very crucial, very influential period in the history of the West. And we're not going to restrict it to Latin or

Western Church fathers as many college courses do. We're going to look at figures who were crucial and very influential in other civilizations like Byzante, particularly the Cappadocians John Emascus, very famous Patristic church fathers as they're called, who were heavily philosophical. So Augustine, a towering figure obviously in the early Church, had many, many, many thousands of pages of

philosophical writings, and we're going to look at those. And he's crucial as well because he's very influenced by the Neoplatons right, as are the Cappadocian Church fathers Basil Gregory and Gregory. Basil and to Gregory's Basically, we're going to look at them in terms of their metaphysics. Their approach to help the world is structured, and as you can see, I mean this encompasses you know, at least this isn't

even all of them, weir. I've got thirty eight volumes up here, and probably half of these volumes deal with Augustin Cappadocian of John Damasca. So I'm going to compact all of that into one long course. Then we're going to get into medieval philosophy in general, which those guys prepare the way for. And then we have to know this because we're not gonna be able to understand the Enlightenment what it's reacting against unless we understand some of

the medieval scholastic philosophy. So again that'll be compacted. We won't go super deep into all that because that could be its own course, right, people get their PhD in even just one of the thinkers in any of these domains. So we want to shoot for an overview. We like I said, when we get to Descartes and the Enlightenment, we're going to look at that as its reaction to the medieval period. Again, this is not to demolish or destroy all the Enlightenment philosophers. In fact, they're going to

have a lot of good arguments against medieval philosophers. So we want to try to look for good art arguments is another thing to try to train yourself to do in terms of philosophy. We want to look for good arguments irrespective of the man, irrespective of the person making the argument, do they have a good argument? Because guess what, even the worst philosopher, I don't care who you think is the worst, he's probably got one good argument here there.

And it's kind of on a spectrum. Right, I'm not a big fan of Hegel, but I think Hegel has some really interesting insights here and there. Same with Emmanuel Kant. Right,

I'm not a contient. I'm not super into KNT, but I think Kant has some really fascinating insights that we're going to talk to when we get to number eleven there, which is the Enlightenment empiricists and Kant's transcendent idealism that is the human Kant Berkeley Locke period, and then modern collapse of philosophy, And yes, I will argue that it has pretty much collapsed, and by that I mean, what we classically thought of the doing of philosophy as doesn't

really exist anymore. Then. That's not to say that in the academic world or in the academic setting there aren't people doing philosophy. There are, there are, But this is but what we thought of as philosophy in terms of the ancient and medievals has collapsed in the sense that we don't do that anymore. Now. Philosophy has turned into postmodernism, which is essentially an anti philosophical movement. It's actually ironically

reverted back to storytelling. That's the irony here is that what the pre Socratics there in Part one are going

to be reacting to in Homer and Hesiod. Ironically, we're going to notice that the modern collapse of philosophy has basically returned in terms of postmodernism, has returned to myth and storytelling, because of course they will say that really every philosopher and everything is just myth, storytelling or power relations right, power oppressor narratives and so forth, And certainly, you know, we could include marks and so forth in all of these modern figures or this modern era, but

it's just really difficult to put everything into one course, and so, like Richard said, you know, if everything works out, we'll probably just do a second season of covering modern stuff, you know, and then we can do a class on dar when we can do a class on Mark. So we can do a class and you might think, well, Darwin, No, yeah,

you're gonna notice tonight. Just like with what I just said about postmodernism being a return of an ancient view, you're gonna notice quite a few things that are normative popular views today. We're already in the presocratics and in the ancient philosophers. Again, I'm not here to try to convince you either way on these things. I have my views. I'm happy to give my takes. But again, what we want to stress and what we want to really really strive for because this is very difficult for a lot

of people. I don't think this audience will be too difficult. I'm sure you guys are a sharp crowd. I'm sure you're striving to achieve objectivity. That's what we want to do. We want to understand these people no matter what we think, even if we think it's the stupidest thing, right, that is, even I think if that dude is retarded, right, I think if we think, you know, oh, Aristotle is the

most rhetorded of all the philosophers. Right, he was riding the short bust to the Athens Academy, right, right, whatever you think, I at least want you to understand Aristotle and be able to give the basics of what he thought to the to the appeasement of me or anyone else who knows a decent amount about aerosolt Right. If you can do that, then you have achieved what I'm after in this course, which is to give you the ability to speak to these topics fluently, and you're gonna

understand again how it relates to your life. A lot of this, again will seem obscure and weird, but again you're gonna notice some of the most prominent views that people have in the world today that are thought of as new, aren't really new. They're just repackaged, resurfacing, and they kind of represent similar debates, copy and pasted actually almost from twenty five hundred years ago. So what is philosophy? Yeah, obviously,

probably many of you already know this. I won't spend too much time on the basics, but we do need to have just a little bit of an overview of what the basic terms are what they're referring to, because we're going to have some people that are brand new love of wisdom, fly low Sophia, Love of wisdom. Socrates famously said the examined life is the only life worth living. Now technically said the unexamined life is not worth living.

But I'm paraphrasing to say, Look, basically, he's just telling you that if you're just going through through your your emotions day to day, if you've never sat down to contemplay what is life? Who am I? What's the meaning of all this? Is there a point to life? Does the universe have a beginning? Right? If you've never thought about those things, then you're kind of like a boring

ass rock. And literally that's how I think, you know, some of the Greek philosophers would sort of especially the ones who kind of had disdaining for the masses, right, some of these guys would just be like, these people are really no different than rocks. And they're even gonna liken some of the people to rocks because they're weighed down by the cares of this world and the material

possessions and pleasures. Right the base passions or whatnot. They keep people focused not on the here and the now or me, not on the transcendent or on the ideal, or on the true or whatever, but on the here in the now, And so they're kind of like determined in PCs. This is the ancient Greek idea of the NPC.

And I think if we were to think of somebody like Socrates who will be the teacher of Plato, he would definitely resident with the NPC meme, right, He would probably be etching it out on tablets, right and showing it to his fellow philosophy students in his class. And so the idea here is that we want to not just go through the motions, but want to understand the world and not just have knowledge. This is an important distinction that will come up in the early Greek philosophers,

not just having a bunch of data. Right. There's clearly there's a difference between you know, some guy who's just a Spurg and like memorize his sports statistics. Right, what's the dust at Hoffman character rain Man? Right? Would you call rain Man wise? No, he's just this sort of weird savant, you know, Spurg, Right, But what about a situation where you know, take the again, what dover you

think of the Bible the character of Solomon. Solomon in the Bible and Ecclesiastices, Proverbs, he's touted for his wisdom, and certainly he, according to the Bible, well knew a lot of things. But he wasn't just a key figure in history because he knew facts and could list them on a spreadsheet or whatever, right ancient Hebrew spreadsheet, but because he had the application of that knowledge in the right way at the right time. And that's kind of

what we're shooting for for wisdom. So again, not just love of bear knowledge, but love of wisdom, the appropriate virtuous application of that knowledge at the right time and in the right way. Those are going to be some of the key questions that come up for philosophy and what a philosopher is? What so, what are we after here? What do we do? What is a philosopher? What do they do? Some of the basic questions they're going to

be looking at philosophers do things like cross examine. We want to know, is what's being said to me coming from a rational, reasonable place? Is somebody lying to me? Are they trying to scam me? Are they duping me. Am, I watching movies that are full of propaganda, Right, maybe I want to analyze this movie and say, hey, wait a minute, this is a raytheon Boeing trying to sell me on some new Pentagon War that has you know, the face of Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon on it

or whatever. Right, so I'm cross examining a piece of art or piece of propaganda in that case. Right, you're going into law, you're going into business. You want to you want to cross examined to see if this is a good deal. I don't know, is it? So what you might have thought isn't really the domain of philosophy for philosophers, it is philosophy. Right, we're engaged in cross examination. Obviously you could apply the law court. I mean, I

think hopefully the law court example is obvious. There don't have to go into that really, but you know, cross examination could come into anything. It could come into a conversation that you're having at Thanksgiving dinner. Right, you're trying to convince your family members of their their their terrible politics, right, and how they're you know, idiots for believing the normy story of nine to eleven who knows right. So let's say you're having that company and you want to cross exams,

you want to analyze their bad arguments. So something philosophers are interested in. Philosophers are analytical. That means they do analysis. Now, not every philosopher is always engaged in this, but it's certainly part of what philosophers do, and that's obviously very valuable.

It's valuable in today's world. Obviously a lot of what we do, whether it's economics, whether it's the arts, whether it's computer program whatever you're into, you're going to need the skills and tools that allow you to be highly analytical. As we get into modern philosophy, this actually becomes its own branch of philosophy, analytical philosophy, which sometimes contrasted with

continental philosophy in the modern period. It's not exactly what we're talking about here, we're just speaking in a more general sense, but it will actually become its own kind of school, so to speak, of philosophy. So philosophers are definitely engaged in analysis, and primarily we're engaged in analysis of what those three things that we talked about at the beginning, that subdivision epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. That's in philosophy.

But again, this is one of the unique things about philosophy is that philosophy can be a philosophy of anything. That might sound weird at first, but if you think about it, if you think about some of the famous modern philosophers, there is, of course character he does philosophy of Now that seems ridiculous, but that's exactly what z Zek does. He's one of the most famous living philosophers out there today, one of the few existing still explicitly

sort of Marxist philosophers. And z Zek, who you know, recently debated Jordan Peterson for example. No, no, no, z Zech does analysis from a Marxist fantash point of things like toilets. And on the one hand, that's kind of ridiculous, But at the same time, you think, well, toilets are part of our lives, aren't they. We spend quite a bit of our time on the toilet, right, So is it theoretically possible that you could do a analysis of toilet? Sure? Because didn't they say at one point that I don't

know Trump has a golden toilet. I didn't know if that's true. But does Trump have a gold and tool. What does that signify in terms of the figure of Trump Saudi princes with golden, golden toilets. Right, So this is the sort of beautification of a ritual that is very mundane but also sort of you know, base and gross, right, shitting, right, So a philosophy of shitting. Now, I'm being kind of you know, silly here, but I'm also kind of making a point that it really is the case that you

can do a philosophy of anything. For example, in some of my grad classes, we were getting into some of the guys who had done I forget the guy's name, but he's a Semiititian guy who had done a analysis of comedy philosophy of comedy. What is it that makes us laugh? What is it that makes this thing funny versus absurd and not funny? What is it that makes you know, faces funny? You could do a philosophy of anything,

is my point. So it will it's broad in its scope, and that it will range from a philosophy of things in the domain of philosophy, knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, two weird and sort of fanciful figures and characters, and philosophy who do philosophies of anything. We can do the philosophy of literary there, we can do the philosophy of music, do the philosophy of comedy. As I said, so again there's a potentially a philosophy of anything and an analysis of anything.

From this kind of perspective, philosophers are not just analytical, however, they are also intuitive. There's a lot of creativity actually that goes into the process of philosophy. Some mathematicians, for example, I think Roger Penrose, and if you read Paul Davies's book Mind of God, he will talk about how there's actually a creative element that goes into even things like

mathematics and geometry. Right, I mean, some of the great philosophers and thinkers and mathematicians, they have the flashes of insight that don't come from some obvious source. We don't really know where they get these flashes of insight, right, I mean, for example, you know, the story about Nikola Tesla is that he would get a lot of his insights into these you know, elaborate engines that he would build through these just visions that he would sort of

pass out or whatever. That's the story at least, right, So philosophers are intuitive in that we are not just analytical robots. We also have a will and intention of creativity that we bring to the analysis. Again, we can be analyzing anything, it doesn't matter. Philosophers are constructive. In

other words, they don't just focus on the particulars. Now, they may in certain cases if they're doing their dissertation on the particular and that will actually be something very important in philosophy, But generally speaking, the philosopher is not just concerned with that. He also wants to get a big picture. He wants to construct a total picture about what's going on, what's our situation in the world, what does life mean, et cetera? Is their meaning in order

in the world? Does there meaning order to be found? Right? These are the kinds of questions that we're going to be asking. And so philosophers are constructive and that they seek to build a total picture. Now there's limits to that. Obviously, we don't mean it in a literal sense of like I'm going to build a total picture of everything in

reality and everything that exists. Now, some of the technocrats might think that with total information awareness and you know, this kind of internet of things, they might think that. But typically, speaking outside of these sort of maniacal mad scientist positions, like the technocrats, typically philosophers, the people that we're going to be analyzing and looking at are seeking a total picture within some fixed domain or within some

general framework. Okay, they're not looking for or attempting to create omniscience. However, we're going to see in some cases where they actually do try to reach that. Right, We're going to see what for example, deve cart, the cart's going to try to find this indubital and infallible reference point. Hegel will try to find this sort of omniscience or pseudo omniscience within his process philosophy, for example. But typically

that's not what we're doing. However, many of them will try to build world systems right from scratch, and that's something that we want to pay attention to. So you guys want to jot down your questions and just save those for the end, and you can feel free when we get to the end to come back to questions at any point. So just just jot down if you want to that you want to ask a question about sort of stuff early on, but it might be better to wait until we get through some of this preliminary

stuff before we start taking any questions philosophers. Thus, in my and this is sort of this is more so my my approach because some people would disagree with this, But I think that the philosophy and what philosopher's really about is worldview thinking. This is the attempt to characterize and systematize man's knowledge and experience and show how these

things are interrelated. That man's knowledge is not totally fragmentary, it's not totally disconnected discreet from other pieces of knowledge, other facts, and other humans and their experience, but that there is a commonly experienced world, and our experiences and the facts that we experience and the knowledge that we obtain from the world is interrelated. There is a world historical we might say, there is a worldview from which man can build a system and pause it right. Facts

about the world predicate things about the world. And lastly, philosophers are concerned in my view, with presuppositions. Now, this is specifically what the philosopher will be doing as he does philosopher right, as we go through the history philosophy, you're going to notice that each philosopher kind of does this thing where he reads the guy before him, and especially maybe the generation right before him, and he critiques.

Philosophy doesn't have to be relegated to only critique, but critique is going to be crucial to the entire process of philosophy. In the history of the West, each guy will be critiquing the guy before him. Pretty much across the board. There might be a few outliers here and there who try to do different things, and maybe they pop up and you know, they just focus on maybe a literary theory, philosophy of aesthetics or something like that.

But most of the big people that we're going to be focusing on are the ones that are known as the big philosophers. They're typically concerned with critiquing the presuppositions, the basic commitments and assumptions of the guys that came before. So that's what we're going to be doing as well. And keep in mind that a lot of what you see there on that page is also what you, as a philosopher, will begin to do. Now you might think, well,

I'm not a philosopher. I didn't take all these classes. Well, guess what, you have a philosop and you are a philosopher. Even if you don't know it. Even if you know nothing about philosophy, if I ask you simple questions in the domains of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, you might have any know where those words are. But if I ask you basic questions, you're going to have a view on some boys. You're going to have some idea about knowledge.

Even if you think that we can have knowledge. That's still a position, right, that's an agnostic position, but it's still a position in a pistemology, right that you don't believe anybody has knowledge, or you don't have knowledge, or no, we can have knowledge. If I asked you a question about ethics, right, well, I think it's wrong to kill people. Okay, Well, then so now you have a philosophy of ethics, right of virtue and vice right away, whether you know it

or not. So everybody is a philosopher, even if they don't know it. Everybody has a philosophy because they have a worldview, even if it's a commitment to agnosticism, because everybody has basic commitments or believes or presuppositions. When it comes to what are the three branches epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, all right, why one more point here. I'll try to go through this kind of quick because I don't want to spend too much time on This is kind of

a restatement kind of what we talked about. Be for a lot of times people hear about philosophy and they'll say philosophy is useless and impractical word sol And I can't tell you how many times last twenty years, I've heard this and my most off repeated boomer phrase when I chose to study philosophy, Every boomer, Oh, the philosophy corporations hiring around you. They thought that was the greatest show, right. I never thought it was funny that was done the

first time, and I still hear it's still done. But these are common objections that most people have to this whole domain. And that's why, for example, people like Neilagrass Tyson, you know, a couple few years ago, if you guys, remember, basically said don't waste your timehilosophy is a useless enterprise. I wonder why he was so emphatically opposed to philosophy. Well, that might be because he doesn't fare very well when asked philosophical questions, So that might have something to do

with maybe more of a personal motivation. But what are the some of the pros? Then again that what does philosophy help us do? Right? So maybe you're not so interested in what philosophers do. How does it help you? What do I get out of this? Philosophy helps us to think creatively because it makes us better at analysis. As I said, of anything, you're not going to fall for bad arguments. You're not going to fall for fallacy. You're not going to fall for dumb, stupid arguments, for example,

emotional appeals. Now, I know that one of Richard's buds has taught a really excellent logical fallacies course, right, And one of those logical fallacies that comes up all the time, for example, is something like emotional appeal. Right, Oh, you don't want to support the war effort in XYZ country. I guess you hate the kids in those countries, don't you. I guess you want the kids to die? Right? You want Saddam to kill the kids? Right? These are all

ridiculous emotional appeals. Right. In other words, only a person who anols their position cares about kids. Well, that's a fallacy. Right. So understanding philosophy helps us to think critically makes us better at analysis of anything. Doesn't have to be politics. It's going to help you analyze again, business situations, right, business deals. It's going to help you analyze the crypto market right. For example, crypto deals a lot with human

emotions in human psychology. Right. If whales are dumping, you know that people are going to follow the whales and dump. So it's going to make you better at analysis if you know the modus operandi of human operation in markets, for example, and that's involved with that involves philosophical critical thinking, even if we don't know these terms. Philosophy help just think creatively. As we said, we have new approaches and

angles to things. I remember one of my philosophy professors met a good point when I was first coming into to philosophy, and I met with him and I said, you know, I don't know if I should choose this as a profession. I said, because you know, I just don't know if I'll be able to get a job and make money and do this for it. And he said, well, I know a really famous guy who studied a lot of philosophy that you might have heard of. And I said,

who's that? He said, Steve Martin. So Steve Martin used a lot of his philosophy to go on into the world of comedy. So I'm not guaranteeing you you know that I'm going to teach you to be some great comedian if you study philosophy. But he's an example of a person who you studied philosophy, and I don't know if you just did undergrad or if he went further than that, but he utilized that to kind of give

him a unique approach to comedy. And although we look back on Steve Martin as kind of a typical, you know, boomer, a seventies eighties comedian, when Steve and came out in the seventies, he was very unique and very weird and odd in his approach. And I think that, as my professor was arguing, that had to do with his taking of a lot of philosophy classes when he was a younger guy. So philosophy does help us to think creative because it gives us new angles and new ways to

approach questions and things in the world. Philosophy helps us systematize and particularize knowledge. Again, a classic example this is that the taxonomy that we still use today for animals, kingdom, phylum, species, etc. Genera that's from Aristotle. Aristotle, the great philosopher of Greece, the student of Plato, gives us that taxonomy that we still use today.