I say very early in the first marriage and several times there are others who remind me that the it is to raise most possibilities, to raise metaphysics to the level of science. As one would understand, science at the close of the 18th century, namely a systematic body of principles on which you can ground truths that are once universal and necessary. So the question is whether. But this campaign. Oh, I did so while assumptions made.
But he wants to make clear what gets us to being better positioned in the first instance. And I think in the back of his mind, this is just another reminder of how people like you get them selves and the rest of us in trouble.
What gets us to be better physicians in the first instance is that as ordinary recipients going through the lives of ordinary folks and having the most ordinary sorts of experiences, we begin to ask questions about the source of the experience, but they truly experience what it is about our experience that matches up or fails to match up with what others have. Can we trust our senses, what we're supposed to do about these illusory phenomena, etc., etc.?
And so reason begins to raise questions about the nature of experience itself. Before long, you are steeped in conjectures and wild theories and unsupportable, untestable suppositions. You've now introduces the arena of metaphysics to say This is where these conflicts are played out. They have played out on the individual person, and they're played out of schools of philosophy. Now, since you are to Oxford Scholars, you know where the very term metaphysics comes from.
It comes from our Aristotle, but it doesn't come from Aristotle having an idea of metaphysics as of course he had an idea that it was such a wonderful part of it's a little work we call Aristotle's Metaphysics, but in both one, he informs his students. Now, having addressed the major issues in the natural sciences, as we will take up fundamental questions regarding the nature of the subjects.
So what is what he's going to be lecturing on now is something that comes after the treatise on physics and when the first century scholars started of. He started lining up all Aristotle's work and also going from ology. All of this work which came after the physics was simply designated natural time fisica after physics. That was the good old days when we were all very serious about keeping things neat and tidy. We used to tell students that metaphysics had two interdependent branches.
What the constituted metaphysics. One had to do with the question of real being, real existence. So that one ground of metaphysical inquiry was ontology. And there are fundamental questions. And in fact, Aristotle's metaphysics addresses questions of sort all the substances to later, you know, change. If they undergo change, they remain in substance. They work in such and such. But of course, to address a question like that, you have to have some mode of inquiry.
And every mode of inquiry is subject to criticism every quarter. Therefore, it has its limitations. And so in the process of addressing ontological questions, you also have to ask how adequate, how apt the mode of inquiry is that you are using to address the question. And that comes down to us as epistemology.
And so metaphysics in the traditional sense was a combination of the logical and the gist of a logical inquiry designed to answer fundamental questions about real existence of the nature of the relationships that it obtained among greatly existing things. Sometimes Aristotle's metaphysics has lapsed into. You can summarise his position by saying that the number of things we can know is determined by the number of questions we can ask of which minimally and way before does a thing exist?
If it exists, in what degree do success? In what relation does it stand to other things and what is it for? What is it for? The to a logical explanation. So is coming along centuries later is respectful of Aristotle. But he wants to notice that although mathematics and science have come a long way since Aristotle's time, this business of metaphysics doesn't seem to explore it. And the question is why and what might be done to move the ball further down the field?
Will we ever get out of the arena of contests in which one set of projections and speculations does balance another? Meanwhile, close calls the world of high school and science to say about all of this and lens the fact that because metaphysics has gone nowhere, the persons most interested in objective science have a job that will calm calls in different ways. It's sort of a pox on all these metaphysical houses. Why all this? We've got Newton, we've got Galileo.
We've got a jelly. We're doing just fine. Let the philosophers drive themselves crazy and can't understand and correctly understand. But that is not permissible. Science cannot be indifferent as to its most fundamental problem. It cannot be indifferent to the question of what presuppositions make it possible in the first instance. So the metaphysician task is to restore metaphysics to a state of respectability, lest scientists and mathematicians become complacent and thus, of course, error.
So what is it? Well, what is not all of it is the evidence of sense as a way of settling these questions. If you take the systematic science to be something that is parasitic on core universal principles, necessarily true that is foundational for anything one corrects on. The evidence of sense is uniquely inapt. It's shifting subject to error. The most you can claim for this kind of contingent factual truthfulness, but certainly nothing universal.
So what come to make clear is that the nature of this metaphysical inquiry is into those pure aspects of the understanding of what counts as pure. He always means non empirical line instead of pure reason. It's reason stripped of all empirical supports, attributes and conjecture. Pure. Now in the preface to the second edition, we find him scolding anthropologists of today.
We called sociologists and psychologists who both think that you can settle some of these disputes by looking at the peculiarities of the human condition or certain cultural forms of thought, etc. But this is quite a lot of the world today. Of course, a concept of physics doesn't have anything to do with that at all. So in a word, you talk like this in your notes. Culture. Metaphysics is not psychology. It's not psychiatry and therefore it's not neuropsychology.
It's not neurophysiology, it's not brain mechanisms. Just put all that away. Nothing about brain function is universal and necessary and therefore get on to the job that you're looking for. The Centre for the Categorical Imperative. You're working alongside? No, necessarily universal, as you might guess. Aristotle was the one who put the ball in play and he put the ball in play with formal logic.
Formal logic, Aristotelian logic, logistic reasoning, etc., constitute a very rules of thought that apply to all sorts of operations, whether pure or empirical. These are truth saving or truth preserving logical devices. They are not modes of discovery. So although they constitute the formal versions of itself, they are like if they are not intended and cannot reveal the factual nature of the external world. So something in addition to that is going to be required.
So what Aristotle offers then by way of the syllogism card is going to give a is going to establish a noble pledge. This is where he makes the country of distinction between propositions that are analytic and propositions that are sympathetic. Analytic propositions are universally necessarily true, but they're true because total tolerance and an analytic proposition says the meaning of the subject term is contained in the meaning of the predicate, as if all bachelors are married men.
Of course it's true that all bachelors are unmarried men, but it's a definitional truth. It's not the truth. Well, that's something new either about bachelors or about unmarried women by learning that all bachelors are unmarried men. So it's in the nature of the analytic proposition that the truth that preserves can be known a priori. You don't have to run around asking persons, you know, to be bachelors.
Are you married? Would you say that if you're doing that, you don't understand the language? So it's not something that's gained by way of empirical industry. It's something established by the very terms of the proposition. So analytic propositions are universal and thus universally unnecessarily true. And the truth is no operating order before experience, independently of experience.
What about the facts of the world? The facts in the world are contained in what country refers to as synthetic propositions. So one of those terms you wish had been translated in some other way, but synthetic in the sense of pulling together the attributes and properties, is such that you no longer be so synthetic proposition. This contains both metal and glass. This is capable of holding a fluid. This is at least synthetic propositions involved.
They pull them together of sensory data in such a way as to identify something. The typical claim is that the truth of synthetic propositions can only go so old established by experience. So the truth of any synthetic proposition is established a posteriori. In a nutshell. Huge clay sand shield that's always going to be in the background when he's not in the foreground. SHIELDS Clay, is that the truth? OHNO Since that proposition can be established.
Reorg Which is just another way of saying reason cannot unearth the facts of the world by way of its own resources. Just a rationalist project simply fails. If you want to establish the truth of a synthetic proposition, that's going to be based on experience. And here's the bad news as it is based on experience, what you come up with will be contingent. Probabilistic to some extent, subject to the errors to which the senses are thrown. It's going to be specific to a particular species.
Perhaps special circumstances may be dependent on the age of the observer, etc., etc., etc., so that we return to the scandal which refers to the control of dominance. You cannot establish the reality of an external world, do you? You can't have a slam dunk once and for all the proof of anything that comes under the heading of a synthetic proposition. And they think life D because of that. So is that a something short term but plenty of length of sentence?
You wanted to point out the contrast between can't articulate conscious clothing and the truth of no synthetic proposition can be established a priori and conscious, claiming that we can establish a truth of any sort, even one synthetic proposition of where you are. That's insights to children. That's going to be the central. A few of the. First party. Now there are already concerns and a number of synthetic truths.
But no, in fact, mathematics and the physical sciences are riddled with try to give you a synthetic proposition known to be true a priori in mathematics. There's no number so large that one cannot be added to it. That's that's that's true. If you're doing this. Sean Patrick describes the radical empiricist as one who believes the series of positive integers was discovered at one at a time.
So if I tell you that there's no number so large that one cannot be added to it, and you find yourself running out of the fingers and toes, you're very, very much younger than you are. That's a synthetic proposition. What about in the sciences? Can anyone think of a synthetic thing? I can't think how to fix the first. Can you think of a synthetic proposition known to be true in the developed sciences? That will be true across all the sciences. Yes.
Something like Nixon's second war. Yes. Over and over, more generally, every effect has a cause. Every election is now to see. If you want to put it in the form of something granny might have said, nothing will come of it. Well, that was incredibly stupid.
So there's no line so long as you catch the Christmas line, etc. Another question is going to be the metaphysics itself can be can be shown to be based on similar synthetic propositions, the truth of which is necessary and universal and known to be the case. That's one other way of putting it. So. Carter was not the only one who was impatient with the state of the art of physics at the time. In fact, the Prussian Academy of Sciences had a prize competition in 1762.
And if he wanted to enter, this was the question you had to address to win the prize. Listen carefully. This is still quite a question. Quote. Was a metaphysical truce in general, and especially the first principles of natural theology that morals are capable of the same degree of proof as geometrical truths and just they are not capable of such proof. What is the nature of this certainty and to what degree can they achieve it and has such certainty sufficient for conviction?
Metaphysics give us a totally credible account of the creation of religion. How about the insistent demands of morality? Is it really a matter of taste? Merely cultural. So we find some places that, you know, non-vegetarian like like to eat very young and that happens to be their preference. Or is there some way of establishing metaphysically? But there are core moral precepts, the truth of which is necessary and universal if.
And then you have to fill it with a certain kind of life as possible, etc., etc., etc. So there's the price, competition and entry, the manual card entries, the prize competition of 1762 and finishes second. Who? What? And those Moses famines won, in part because he didn't actually answer the question at all. Carter was doing similar things. Much of what's recorded by the competition itself is the Prussian academies, and that is to say, indeed, the the Prussian aristocracy.
The Prussian Kings. Already worried about the relative rising trends now taking place in the Anglo European world. Remember. Now, this is the 1760s speaking French philosopher, so having his heyday against all traditional forms of authority and this is 1762 and 1765. Voltaire publishes. Kind of ridicule play on the claims of likeness. What's the name of the place? What's. And these days afterwards, they learn that love lets you change doctor as well.
And Paton-Walsh has established about how he's established to moral certainty in virtual with his rational calculus that this is the best of all possible worlds. Now it's part of life that's rational philosophy. But yes, there is a distinction to be made between matters of fact and the truth of reason. But this argues that in the end, if we really had a fully developed knowledge, we would understand that all propositions, including all factual propositions, are analytic.
That is everything is what it is. Because necessarily. And if you follow that throughout the order of the argument that of course, one of the conclusions almost trivially true is that this indeed is the best of all possible worlds. And in questions. So. A musical education can teach. Music was written by Leonard Bernstein's. And the book was written by Richard. Little Richard. I'm Dorothy Parker. Whose moral instruction we all should follow. Quote, Do whatever you like, but don't ride horses.
And kindness has wonderful lines given to the line by Dorothy Parker. Richard. At the very end of. Part of the character, which just looks at the audience and says. Any questions? Khalil was very much influenced by Christian verse.
In fact confidence so far as to say that this is can't unchristian was quote he was peculiarly well fitted to raise metaphysics to the dignity of a science if only it had a credible to prepare the ground beforehand by a critique of the organ that is of pure reason itself. He finds in verse this important inside the insight is that we are the passive observers of the external world.
We bring a certain assortment of cognitive and perceptual powers themselves, governed by principles to bear on every factual claim of the matter. And thus it's only by developing our understanding of our elemental apparatus. Though he didn't go so far as to say a thorough, uncritical appraisal of reason itself, but a development of our own mental apparatus so that we can see what it is we're adding to what we take to be the choice of the external world.
I say what was most important? He agitated for a scientific comprehension of the human mind and of a systematic study of cognition. He's also critical of empiricist alternatives. Every time I say empiricist, alternatives always look awfully like Berkeley Jones. But these are the thinkers with whom Carter's going to wrestle most vigorously.
Wolf watched a lot of news and found that, in fact, much of its fans passions and much of the attention paid to violence as teaching came as a result of the influence Christian movement. And the recognition involves providing distillations and supporting essays on identity, philosophy and identity theology.
And one of his most celebrated works, the German metaphysics, says because of that, which, although only by experience, one knows only that it is, but doesn't see how it's connected to other truths. This will be a persistent complaint of the rationalist watching world of what they call when you think on the insides, you end up with a thick and thickening book of observations, but there's nothing there to pull it together.
Remember, how is that possible? How come out of all of these facts, these disparate facts, these merely contingent facts, finally become subsumed under something that is systematic, universal and principled. And the argument against empiricism is that it has no means of doing that and those kind of mechanical associations. My goodness. What sort of systematic world do you get with that? Even in a sense with that, anything would be the cause of anything.
So on the rational side and rationalist side on what is trying to do is render experience intelligible. And on the empiricist side, there is the complaint that every attempt to render the experience intelligible is going to be based on precepts and principles that cannot be rationally ground cannot be rationally validated.
So both. It's clear that empiricism has no means beyond dissociation or something by which the elementary sensations or elementary ideas could possibly comprehend the natural world as still. Now of. Looks as a concern concerning human understanding was was read by its and likens prepared a book like reply to it because it wanted to engage across directly. Productive philosophical controversy and then locked into something entirely unfair. You know what we did? So he died.
So his life was [INAUDIBLE] bent on having a good, robust sort of cafe metaphysics argument with the great British empiricism. And lo and behold, what goes ahead does so long as itself for quite some time. And it finally was published, and it was published under the title New Estates Only Up to standard. In that work. He attributes to lack of a max, which you will find nowhere in the law.
And it's probably a fair attribution, but it's a scholastic maxim, which I say is not anywhere to be found in the books as. Ne il est intellectual quote, known for their courage and sense. Nothing is in the which was not first in the sense. Nothing is in the mind except by way of the sentence. Remember it. It looks as a concern of human understanding, he says. Now comes the mind to be furnished by answering In a world. From experience. So, Neal, this intellectual nothingness.
Quote Prius with the first stop was in the senseless violence is replied to this could actually boil down to two words three words these three intellectuals. It's. Nothing but the intellect itself. So here are the terms of the dispute. Online and inside, there must be an active organising mind. There must be some set of organising principles and precepts such that experiences don't simply become a fad happens.
Rather, they become a coherent whole. They hope here they render the world intelligible, not merely sensible, but intelligible. Well, how much of this prefigures a critique? Here is a good deal of it prefigures what Carter is going to be arguing for, namely precisely what is here, so to speak. The intellect that is responsible for the integration, the synthesis and the rendering intelligible of the this sense. Now of. There can be no synthetic proposition whose truth can be established a priori.
And context. Look at what Kim is claiming in the inquiry. Remember comes another huge treatise, 1739. He had the injury of 1751, which was translated into German. The trade is also translated, but not in terms of common. So here's the shield tells us that he sees on the videotape before him a bullet striking another wall, which then moves forward. And I must of I cannot see some sort of term betwixt. So what you can see, what you has no empirical evidence of is causality.
It's not on the vineyard. So where is it? Well, it must be in shoe. It must be some habit of the mind. Similarly, in the domain of morals, she has us examining this poor thinking. You say the victim of maybe highway robbery sprawled out on the ground. Pocket's energy in a pool of blood. Perhaps I could place this score in your mind. Such a huge challenge for us to find anything in that empirical fact, anything in the picture that is morally wrong. So where is the moral focus? It's not out there.
It's not here. Or perhaps. Or at least in. Here. It has to be something that excites in us, a feeling of revulsion to what is still emotion. I generally feel revulsion right about here. Sometimes, like clockwork, it comes off. I watch the news. Feelings of revulsion or feelings of happiness. That is to say, the moral of scriptures that we make are reflections of how events in the external world affect us affectively.
Emotional, sentimental. He's one of the great thinkers and the British sentimentalist tradition of moral thought. So again, causality is a habit of the mind based on past conjunctions. Morality is a set of sympathetic responses to events. Where does this put the physical sciences? Where does it put all the sciences?
What does it do to the very notion of objectivity and and our comprehension of the objective facts of the external world, which, after all, is the part of the world of knowledge that comes for us. Fatigue is seeking to save from scepticism. Now, I don't want to be guilty of a libel. I don't want to say it's not true. Truth is a defence. I suspect that more than half of this throng has quite a child with human morals. I mean, I'd be very surprised. Do surprised?
If he were prepared to take the position that moral precepts of absolute and universal, that the adequacy of a moral theory is entirely independent of the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of the lives of those who subscribe to the theory that there are truths that are true. Of course, all time such and such, that's pretty old fashioned way of dealing student human rights. After all, they embody morals.
It's just so much the sentimental dispositions that do a kind of rational loss of feelings that we might come out with some place a utilitarian of. Not only does it make me sick to my stomach, but it's, you know, that that's the stock market. But you do realise that if you tell yourself that you are prey to a quite interesting criticism that was advanced but can be found in college and was advanced actually by Judy more people a century ago. Here's the problem. If you try to.
So I know what gives. Rise in me to feelings of revulsion. Split infinitives, for example. The improper use of the joke. But that also means the older I get, the more things come out of that that most of. But I don't quite know what makes like in youth culture. So let's say we go to the highways and byways of the world and we both see that body stretched out and full of pockets empty.
And I go something like, Ooh! And you go something like, you know, I know I did it for lunch, but I have no way of knowing your. Now we walk a little further and there's another body and it's even in worse shape. And then I go, oh, you go, oh, oh. And you look at me and say, That's more important to me than the first ones. And I say, Well, it's more important to me too. But it's, I don't know the magnitude of the oral culture and you don't know the magnitude of my revulsion.
We can't get a moral argument. So there's something counterintuitive about a theory of morals that precludes serious moral disputes. How do you argue with people regarding the two things? We sent a terrible. Stand down very much. That's not project. You said a good journalist. I've got to translate this as, oh, you change you. So there is a counterintuitive consequence. There are answers to all these things. What philosophers show is an answer to everything.
The problem is that there's a natural reaction. If it goes on as we engage in life, counterinsurgent, that's how we'll stop this kind of blood flow that seems to be getting somewhere because our arguments get louder. Well, Sheila, she's been your boss on a table before him. But you understand that space is also not given as a stimulus. When he sees one bold move. And then another four. And you understand The Times is also not given in the stimulus.
All right. There are no sense walk ins for time. There are no sense organs for stress. We've already seen that the dispute regarding space violence has a reasonably good argument that concludes with there's no such thing as absolute space. There's no such thing as action. Because there is no call it a cause. Call it a sufficient reason. There's no calls, nothing.
And if by absence base, you mean something entirely empty, something entirely emptiness and nothingness, and you add cause nothing else. So I suppose I will encounter space. That sounds problematic. But on any given night, I'll just say if you have a live television space, you certainly can say that there's a sensible response. So where is you going to get a better table out there with one thing moving and then another thing moving. So we already begin to see what counts.
Flow is going to be couch ploy his his way again, which goes something like this. You accept Hill's conclusions, but you show that there are presuppositions necessary for those conclusions to be defensible, and the presuppositions turn out to be at variance with the union position in the first instance. What is it? That must be the case for there to be temporarily success in the past? What must be the case for anything to happen in space?
And so one might want to argue, as I show the next week, that Hong Kong's account. The success of Iran's program presupposes the adequacy of concepts, metaphysics, and particularly the adequacy of account of pure time space. So I did say something about photography, about a sister. And I was just joking before class. Thank you. Thanks to. But I do want to say something about current interpretation, because we're now getting to the point in these lectures where interpretation is required.
The interpretation that I shall be offering the ballots in these elections is, shall we say, sympathetic but not fully. And sympathetic in this sense. Carlos, one of the great philosophical minds in the history of philosophical reflections. It gets tires. To see the volume of books and articles so, so contented in establishing how silicon was to claim X or y and how y compulsive of particular argument, how absolutely self-contradictory is.
From page this to that you get a picture of content very much like the picture philosophers of mind giving Descartes that he was some nifty hope, attached himself to some theory or thesis, some theatre of mind, some homunculus theory, according to which we've got to have someone inside looking at what we're looking at in order for us to see it, that, that. But any first year philosophy student can do much better on silly Descartes, for goodness sake, he makes mistakes that 15 year olds for fun.
Michael, I want you to disabuse yourself of that convenience. De Craft was not the class clown and Count did not go through two editions of perhaps the greatest metaphysical treatise ever composed. While proving how wonderful he was at missing the point and contradicting himself. So what I'm going to presuppose in the elections as well and where the text is problematical. There's a stylistic problem, a translation problem. And to some extent, perhaps the problem of comprehension.
You want to begin with the assumption that if you don't get the quote, can't say it could be that you are not getting it. Not necessarily that he isn't saying so. That's what I mean when I say that the lectures will be sympathetic. I will always try to think the articles thinking the first critique, and there's a secondary literature out there that you could build a house with a very large post clip that will make it clear to you how routinely cut gets almost everything wrong.
And I began these lectures with Jonathan Bennett declaring the body of conscious thought to be dead and gone. And the only remaining task is to see if you can find some semblance of life amidst the litter. Yeah, sure. So we.