About time, huh.

So I finally posted a last batch of questions for you guys to answer. Have fun with these :)

Also, a few people have asked about my music, so if you're interested, click here to check it out. I've got another project on the go as well which is more experimental, dj-based stuff, so if you're interested I'll keep you posted as to shows etc.

Have a great summer guys - it's been great getting to know you. Keep me posted as to what you're up to...and if you ever have any philosophy questions, don't hesitate to get in touch.

All the very best of luck!

Clara <3

Question #1: Philosophical Powerrrrrr

If you could combine the best traits of any philosophers you've studied this year (first and second semesters) to make one SUPER-PHILOSOPHER, who/what would you choose? Why?

Question #2: Prof. Soprano...or not?

What can you learn about Freudian philosophy from the Sopranos, or vice-versa?

Question #3: Teacher, teacher...

If you could use any film or television show to demonstrate any idea/concept you've studied this year (both first or second semesters) what would you use and why?

Question #4: Commit it to the flames?

If you could take one book off the reading list (first or second terms) which would it be? Why?

Sartre Notes - From Prof. King's Lecture

A few people had some questions about the role of God in Sartre's theory. I'm going to clarify a bit using what Prof. King talked about in lecture.

For Sartre, there are no objective values. Sartre puts this together with his atheism but he says that to be an existentialist, it’s really not a prerequisite to be an atheist. (Even if God existed, it would make no difference, according to Sartre). Rather, one has to accept that nothing can save one from oneself. Remember how Freud says that the meaning of life stands and falls with the existence of God?

Prof. King drew a distinction: suppose you think life has meaning because it has a purpose. You can think of this either as purpose being an objective thought, or not. One way to claim that you have an objective purpose is by recourse to God. This is objective because you can discover this: you are a made creature, and this has certain consequences. For example, because God gave us life, we can’t suicide because God doesn’t want us to. That is, many religions believe that God has a plan for us.

SO Sartre’s final claim here (That if god existed it would make no difference) shows that for him, there’s something wrong with the big picture: that there is a God who has a purpose for us. But what’s wrong with that picture (that you have purposes given to you in life) is that some other being can impose purposes on you. This is what goes wrong: the only goal, purpose, value we need to recognize are those we accept for ourselves. For example: your parents raised you up, they looked after you – does that mean they can tell you how to live your life? NO! There’s a point where no matter what their expectations are for you, you don’t have to adopt this just because they want you to adopt it. This is called “growing up” – and this is an indication that even if someone raises you, it doesn’t mean they can tell you what to do forever.

Same goes with God. Even if God has a purpose for you doesn’t mean you should accept it. I could accept it, but if I do it’s up to me. Just because someone has a plan in mind for me doesn’t mean I have to agree. Because of this, it doesn’t matter whether you are a theist or atheist – either way, there’s a question why you should take any other being’s purposes for you seriously. There may even be so-called objective purposes – but even this doesn’t settle what you have to do with yourself. This is why you start with the SUBJECT, with the individual person who has to decide what to do.

Ayer Handout

A.J. Ayer:
The most wicked man in Oxford


Little-Known Facts:

He hated the name Alfred and preferred to be called Freddie.

He wrote Language, Truth and Logic when he was 24. It became the principal text of a British school of philosophy which went by the label of `logical positivism'.

When he was asked what he was going to write next, gleefully replied, "There's no next. Philosophy has come to an end. Finished." But it struggled on, and 40 years later, asked about the book's faults, he said: "Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false."

Today, his whole approach is rather passé and is principally employed for purposes of undergraduate target practice.

He once rescued Naomi Campbell from the violent attentions of Mike Tyson: "At a New York party, an elderly Ayer found Tyson forcing himself on the young model, then at the beginning of her career. Ayer ordered Tyson to desist. Tyson: 'Do you know who the f*#k I am? I am the heavyweight champion of the world.' Ayer stood his ground. 'I am the Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.'" Ayer and Tyson began to talk and Naomi slipped out.

He once said that the Pope had done more evil than Stalin.

He alienated both the Church, as well as the Oxford philosophical establishment (`The traditional disputes of philosophers,' he wrote, `are, for the most part, as unwarrantable as they are unfruitful.')

He was befriended by Wittgenstein, who developed a crush on him when the two met in Cambridge.

He was described as "very clever" by Einstein.

He had a large and influential band of admiring disciples.

Talking to him, as one of his wives once noted, was like playing tennis against a brick wall: you could gain a certain useful experience from the process, and you could give up when you felt tired.

He believed that the job of the philosopher was logical analysis, the sorting out of conceptual problems. He insisted that philosophy and life should be kept apart.

He once confessed that he would sacrifice all his friends for the most ephemeral love affair.

He was known as a socialite, a selfish egomaniac and a serial philanderer.

He married four times and was deeply attached to each of his wives. Despite his appalling treatment of them, his children and numerous girlfriends, almost all forgave and remained close to him.

He campaigned for a number of causes including reformation of the laws on abortion and homosexuality.

He's known in England as "football's most famous egghead".

When one old flame asked him what he would say to St Peter, he replied, "I have made a mess of my personal life, but I taught my students to find the truth."


LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC

THE ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS:

All meaningful propositions concern either empirical matters of fact or are analytic. If a putative proposition is neither of these then ‘…I hold that it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false but literally senseless’ (LTL, Preface, p.9).

"Language, Truth and Logic" sought to rid philosophy of the metaphysical waffle that Ayer believed had plagued the subject since Plato. Ayer wished to give philosophy the same epistemic status and certainty as science, which he believed was the greatest achievement of the human intellect. Science was able to answer questions, whereas much of the philosophical enterprise concerning “the meaning of life”, aesthetics, ethics and religion seemed imprecise, indecisive and faintly ludicrous.

CONSEQUENCES:

Mathematics and logic are vacuous (they comprise a body of ‘tautologies’)
Putative propositions regarding extra-empirical issues (e.g. the nature of an
experience transcendent reality) are senseless
This offers ‘solutions of outstanding philosophical disputes'

It was unclear, for Ayer, whether many philosophical dilemmas had, or could ever have, a solution. In order to separate the wheat of meaningful philosophical issues from the chaff of nonsensical ones, Ayer devised the Principle of Verification, which says that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is true by definition or provable by experiment.

HUME and AYER:

Similarities: Like Hume, Ayer wanted to separate facts and values. Only the propositions of science, for him, were a genuine form of knowledge since they could be verified by observation.

But, there are differences:

Hume: "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for
instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or
number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of
fact or real existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain
nothing but sophistry and illusion" (Enquiry)

Ayer: ‘What is this but a rhetorical version of our own thesis that a sentence which does
not express either a formally true proposition or an empirical hypothesis is
devoid of literal significance?’ ( LTL, chapter 3, p.40)

Hume (a psychological empiricist) makes a genetic claim (‘all ideas are derived from sense impressions’). According to Ayer, this is but a contingent generalization in psychology which is vulnerable to counter-examples.

Ayer's claim is not a psychological one, but ‘a criterion of significance’. According to him, propositions which are true by definition are logically necessary truths such as “your mother's mother is your grandmother”. Empirically verifiable statements are ones that are provable by experiment. If one wished to prove whether magnesium burns with a white flame, for instance, there is an empirical procedure to follow in order to find out. The verification principle thus provides clear demarcation criteria to distinguish between sense and nonsense.

THE VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE

‘We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if,
he knows how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, he knows
what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the
proposition as being true or reject it as being false’ (LTL, chapter 1, p.16).

Wittgenstein pointed out the limitations of the verification principle on the basis of the following 2 reasons:

1. There is no way to verify what goes on in 'other minds'
2. A non-verifiiable hypothetical statement about the future might be meaningful.
3. Can the verification principle itself be verified???

What raised the hackles of Ayer's contemporaries was that, according to his methodology, most religious, metaphysical and moral statements were judged factually meaningless. His moral philosophy became known as “emotivism” because it claimed that moral language merely expressed the speaker's emotions or feelings. Thus if I were to say “war is wrong”, I would be giving vent to my personal distaste of war and nothing more. (Opens the door for nihilism, moral relativism...)

Ayer championed epistemology (theory of knowledge), philosophy of language and the philosophy of science as worthwhile disciplines. He explained the proliferation of metaphysics by suggesting that its proponents had made a category mistake. While it is a useful shorthand to assign a catch-all description such as “tree” to a collection of sense experiences, these descriptions do not exist as separate entities in their own right. Discrete sensory phenomena, which have been called the flashcards of experience and atoms of perception, are all there is, and to believe that anything else has a real and separate existence is misguided.

According to Ayer, the role of philosophy was to preside over the work of scientists and assist in matters of categorisation and justification.

GLOSSARY

Philosophy: The 'handmaiden of science', the wholly analytic business of identifying 'definitions in use'.
Definition: In philosophy, a the translation of a statement into an equivalent statement of 'definition in use' to test its veracity; unlike dictionary definitions.
Metaphysics: Meaningless nonsense caused by misunderstandings of grammar.
Verification: The business of determining whether a proposition is meaningful or not. If it could, even if only in theory, be verified by observation then it is meaningful.
Strong Verification: Where a proposition is rendered certain
Weak Verification: Where a proposition is only rendered probable.
Basic Propositions: Information held in the mind about a single experience and therefore incontestably verified.
Deduction: The inference of specific events from known rules.
Induction: The inference of general rules from known events.
Material Things: Logical constructions out of sense-contents.
Empiricism: The belief that all knowledge is derived from experience.
Tautology: Repetition of the same information in such a way as to give the impression that something new has been discovered. Tautologies are necessarily true. Mathematics is a tautological system, but can still be surprising because it deals with such a large system.
A Priori: That which is known to be true, independent of experience.
Emotivism: The utterance of statements indicating the speakers emotional state
Literal Meaning: a property of some item (e.g. sentence) in virtue of which it is
capable of being true or false

Freud Handout

Civilization and Its Discontents

28 July 1929 Freud’s Letter to Lou Andreas Salome

[My book] is about culture, guilt, happiness and similar lofty matters and seems to me...to be superfluous in contrast to my earlier works, that were always attended by a certain urgency. But what should I do? One can't just smoke and play cards all day. I can't really walk for long and most of what there is to read no longer interests me. I wrote and passed the time most pleasantly, and while writing this book, I have rediscovered the most banal truths.

Background

 Written 1929, published 1930. First World War as defining experience for Freud and his contemporaries. WWI as the first technologically advanced war, with the use of tanks, poison gas, etc. Death became anonymous in the trenches, mass killing took place for the first time in this war. This experience generated a new sense of pessimism about the human being and human nature.
 Freud himself represents a profoundly pessimistic point of view in this treatise. He transfers the individual psychic conflict (between ego and id; pleasure principle and reality principle; unconscious and conscious mind; etc.) to the domain of human civilization. Civilization itself comes to be defined as a space of conflict, or as an extension into cultural community of the tensions that stigmatize the individual psyche. In this sense Freud shares in a general cultural pessimism, or anti-modernism, a kind of skepticism about the accomplishments of civilization, that is typical of this period.
 Freud begins Civilization by countering an objection to his book “The Future of an Illusion” made Romain Rolland. Rolland agrees with Freud about the illusory nature of organized religion, but he maintains that humans share a common feeling of innate religiosity. Rolland calls this an "oceanic" feeling in which the individual feels bonded with the entire world and the whole human race. It is a sense of oneness, boundlessness, limitlessness.
 Freud acknowledges the existence of this "oceanic" feeling, but for him it does not bespeak an innate religiosity. Instead, he explains it by turning to psychoanalytic experience:
 Boundlessness, oneness, a sense of union with the entire world Freud identifies with infantile narcissism (lasts from birth - 2 or 3 yrs old). In this stage, the child is pure ego and does not yet distinguish between the subjective self and an objective outside world.
 This state of absolute narcissism, in which the ego subsumes the world in its entirety, is not broken until the infant realizes that it cannot satisfy its own demands—it recognizes its reliance on others and an objective world on the basis of lack or the experience of unfulfillment. The world emerges as an "other," in short, only as a negative experience for the child: as the impossibility of satisfaction, a disruption of the demand for pleasure, as a threat and as something painful. The objective world for Freud is always nothing other than the object of desire, and it makes its presence known by the fact that the ego cannot satisfy its own desire, but that this satisfaction must come from elsewhere, from an other that the ego cannot control.
 Freud interprets the “oceanic” feeling as a psychic remnant of this initial infantile narcissism. He notes that it is not uncommon for such remnants of previous stages of psychic development to remain as part of the psyche even after this stage as such has been superseded. The “oceanic” feeling is just such a psychic remnant of our narcissistic ego.
 Freud concludes that the source of religious feeling is not simply the memory of primary narcissism; rather, for him it derives from the helplessness of the infant, its need for protection by a stronger, more powerful force. Hence religions project their gods typically as father figures, who are allusions to the desire for such a protective figure.

Double-sided nature of the Pleasure Principle:

 In its positive manifestation, the pleasure principle simply names the egoistic drive for the satisfaction of all our demands; it is a drive to gain pleasure.
 But we quickly realize that the external world and the demands of others interfere and prevents the satisfaction of many of our desires—enter the Reality Principle, our awareness that our demands cannot all be met.
 This leads to a second, negative expression of the pleasure principle; the attempt to avoid displeasure as much as possible.
 We thus learn to renounce desires or demands that cannot be met, since this causes us less displeasure than giving in to the desire and having it left unsatisfied.
 Palliative Measures: Strategies that help us avoid life’s miseries:
 Deflections: we re-channel our demands and desires into areas where they can more easily be satisfied. In this category Freud includes scientific activity or other forms of professional achievement (work).
 Substitutive Satisfactions: these are forms of compensation for lack of pleasure elsewhere. Here Freud includes all forms of illusion, including religious fervor, fantasy, escape into art, etc.
 Intoxication: we escape our displeasure by forgetting it, shunting it aside and turning to things like alcohol, drugs, etc. Here we treat the symptoms (our displeasure itself), not the causes (the reasons for our displeasure).
 Typical responses to this need for pleasure and protection from displeasure: 1) retreat, asceticism, life of the "monk"; 2) go on the attack = the person of action, the politician, reformer, etc.; 3) displacement or sublimation = finding pleasure through substitute sources over which one has better control, such as scientific work, scholarship, etc.; 4) escape into illusions = fantasy, religion, drugs, etc.; 5) adopting an "aesthetic" attitude = cultivating a love of beauty (essentially another substitutive satisfaction), art; 6) embracing the world, turning to philanthropy, turning Eros into Caritas (general love and care for humanity).

The Three Sources of Human Suffering

1. The human body: it is feeble, weak; we are mortal; the body causes us pain.
2. The world: the superiority of nature; natural catastrophes; our inability to control nature; nature as necessity.
3. Social relations: society, social legislation, other human beings which all limit the satisfaction of our pleasure

 Of these 3 sources, the first 2 seem unavoidable; we cannot overcome the frailty of our bodies, and we will never control nature completely.
 But the third category, social relations, seems as though it should be under human control. We cannot explain why we cannot dispense with social suffering, why we cannot regulate our social interactions in such a way that they do not avoid the greatest displeasure for all.
 This leads Freud to one of his central hypotheses: The reason why we cannot dispense with social displeasure is because a piece of nature lies behind social conflict In other words, our social contracts are not determined simply by reason, but are also a function and manifestation of our instincts. The conflict that arises for us as social conflict is a reflection of the tensions that structure the human psyche. We cannot escape social conflict because it is merely a repetition on the communal level of the psychic conflicts of the individual. Nature, in short, remains the common denominator of all our sources of pain.
 This will lead Freud to the formulation of a new thesis: the existence of an aggressive instinct that parallels and complements our other primary instinct, the libidinal drive.

Civilization as a Source of Our Unhappiness, Our Malaise or Discontent

 Civilization, although its purpose would seem to be amelioration of human misery and suffering, is actually partially responsible for that suffering, according to Freud. This explains our subliminal hostility toward civilization.
 What is the purpose of civilization?
 It protects humans from nature, provides a line of defense
 It adjusts and regulates the mutual relations among human beings; it establishes conventions for our organization and interaction.
 But aside from these more pragmatic, utilitarian aspects, civilization also promotes things that seems useless: e.g. beauty (art), order, rules of cleanliness, etc. In short, civilization also produces "luxuries." It enhances the "quality of life."
 What are the negative aspects of civilization that cause it to produce unhappiness?
 The power of the individual is sacrificed to the power of the group; strong individuals find that they are marginalized and must make greater concessions.
 Civilization diminishes the liberty and freedom of the individual. We mistakenly believe that social institutions promote and protect our liberties, but they limit them and are the cause of displeasure.
 The conditions of civilization demand that we disobey our instincts; this is the most difficult thing for human beings to do because we are basically egocentric and driven toward the satisfaction of our instincts. Also, suppressing our instincts will come back to haunt us by becoming “pathological”.
 Civilization places limitations on sexuality; it not only dictates what forms of sexual expression are "permissible," and censors all others, but it even places strict restrictions on the forms of sexuality it allows - e.g., society insists on monogamy, faithfulness to a single partner, and limits sexual expression according to gender roles, etc.
Bottom line: When humans enter into social bonds and the strictures of civilization, they sacrifice a portion of their happiness in the interest of greater security. We trade immediate gratification for long-term stability. In other words, we renounce pleasure in one large and intensive "payment" and opt instead for the pleasure on the installment plan, spread out in smaller increments over a longer period of time.
According to Freud, all of this leads to a sense of what he calls "cultural frustration": we feel inhibited, limited by our accession to culture. What civilization and the management of our drives and instincts offers us, in short, is a greater degree of predictability, and this helps compensate for the renunciations we have to make.

How Does Civilization Emerge?

Eros and Ananke, love and necessity, as the parents of civilization.

 The family as germinal unit of society develops out of the wish to remove the element of chance from genital satisfaction; the primitive father demands the constant presence of the mother and compensates her by providing stable satisfaction of her material, existential needs.
 Caritas, or generalized love of humanity at large, emerges as a strategy for avoiding the down-side of exclusive love. Love not only provides us with the greatest satisfactions, but it also makes us more vulnerable than any other emotion. To avoid or minimize this vulnerability, we invest our erotic impulses into multiple objects. Note once again Freud's economic thinking: even in love we hedge our bets, protect ourselves from erotic bankruptcy by, as it were, diversifying our erotic portfolio.
 Civilization also emerges out of totemic culture on the basis of the strategic union of the weaker sons against the power and authority of the father. The banding together of the sons, their subordination of their mutual hostilities for the purpose of a strategic alliance against the father, is one of the first acts of civilization. Note how in this conception civilization emerges from a negative, aggressive impulse; the war of all against all, that constitutes the state of nature, is suspended solely in order to dethrone a mutual and more powerful "enemy."

Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, Affection and Aggression

 Freud revises his theory of the instincts; where he had previously focused primarily on libidinal drives (Eros), he now acknowledges what he calls the "aggressive instinct," which he associates with the god of death, Thanatos. Freud had earlier opposed those who postulated the existence of an aggressive instinct and resisted the acceptance of this notion; in his later writings (after WWI), however, he reluctantly comes to accept this hypothesis.


Eros Interhuman bonding Love and “Caritas” Life Drive for Integration
Thanatos Fragmentation, dissolution of bonds Aggression Death War of all against all.


 Freud conceives of civilization in parallel to his conception of the individual psyche as a product of the struggle between these two fundamental instincts. Civilization itself, thus, is "conflicted," the product of antagonistic drives and impulses. The types of civilization that arise can reflect different blends of these two drives, so that societies themselves, or cultures, might be seen to have a particulaar or peculiar psychologically determined "character."

The Aggressive Instinct and the Generation of the Super-Ego

In the context of the aggressive instinct, Freud discusses three different possible developmental origins of the super-ego whose sole purpose (as conscience) is the discipline and punishment of the ego.
1. The super-ego is the psychic internalization of an external authority figure, especially the father or the parents in general.
2. The super-ego develops as the internalization of those aggressive instincts that one cannot successfully turn outward.
3. The economy of the psyche demands that instincts can never be dispelled but only diverted or re-directed. Since civilization forces us to check and repress our aggressive instinct, those instinctual impulses that are suppressed are turned against the ego itself.
These internally directed aggressions become the basis for the super-ego and its ego-punishment. The more aggression that is diverted inward, the greater the power of the super-ego becomes. That explains why often those who are least inclined to immoral acts are also those who are most severely punished by their own conscience.

The Super-Ego and the Sense of "Guilt".

 Guilt is produced by the super-ego as that internal psychic control mechanism that serves the interests of civilization by suppression our aggressive instincts.
 We feel guilty for the very wish or desire to do evil.
 We must distinguish remorse from guilt. Remorse we feel after committing some unacceptable deed. Guilt does not require action, but merely the thought or intention of carrying out that act. Remorse is after the fact; guilt is before, or in absence of the fact.
 Freud concludes by asking why our dissatisfaction with civilization, which inhibits our instinctual life and ultimately becomes, in the form of the super-ego, our most severe tyrant and taskmaster, expresses itself merely as a vague feeling of malaise.
 His answer: Because it is a form of psychic anxiety, and like all anxiety it is unconscious, not recognized or even recognizable directly, because it is repressed and censored.
 The price of human civilization, according to Freud, is thus that we become civilized at the price of sacrificing a degree of our egoistic happiness and succumbing to a pervasive sense of guilt. This is what constitutes our "discontent" with civilization, despite the obvious benefits it brings us.

GLOSSARY:

Affection: aim-inhibited sexuality. We connect affectionately because we can't spend all our time having sex.

Analysis, the purpose of: to give the ego more control over the repressed id impulses. "Where there is id, there shall ego be."

Culture, two purposes of: to protect us against nature, and to regulate our affairs with each other. To adapt to life in a culture, one must repress one's drives (repress one's sexuality and aggression, displacing the second onto suitable targets outside the culture and sublimating the first into other achievements). "Man is a savage beast," and to repeat a quotation from Plautus which Freud liked, "Homo homini lupus" ("Man is a wolf to man"--written, presumably, by a wolf). So Eros and Ananke (Love and Necessity) are the parents of civilization, and social restrictions on sexuality are unavoidable. Were it not for our need to live with one another, we could allow our drives free play and not be neurotic.
(Translation Note: this term, kultur in German, is often mistranslated civilization, as in Civilization and its Discontents - "Discontents" per Freud should be translated "discomfort" or "malaise").

Defense Mechanism: a maneuver employed by the ego to protect itself against anxiety raised by intolerable impulses. All involve some degree of repression of the unacceptable impulse into unconsciousness. Examples include denial, idealization, splitting (e.g., both loving and hating someone but keeping both emotions entirely separate), reaction formation (e.g., becoming a Scoutmaster to prove to yourself that you don't hate children), undoing (basically, trying to repair an action for which you feel guilty), and an American favorite, intellectualization ("You ask me how I feel, and it seems to me that the relevancy of the issue has more to do with my sublimated urge to..." blah).

Drive: Trieb in German; this word is almost always translated "instinct," incorrectly. By drive Freud meant the bodily demands upon mental life. Freud believed in good materialist fashion that mind arose from drive, ego from id. A drive has a source (bodily needs that arise from the erogenous zones), an impetus, an internal aim (temporary removal of the bodily need), an external aim (the steps taken to reach the final goal of the internal aim), and an object. Drives give rise to the libido-energy that drives all psychological activity. We never experience the drive itself, just its representation or idea in the mind. Drives undergo repression and sublimation when confronted by the real world.

Ego: the "I," a rational, organized agency that distills gradually out of a passionate id that rubs up against reality. Emerging from an undifferentiated mass of sensations (chiefly those emanating from the surface of the body), formed by identifications and abandoned id cathexes, and strengthened by speech, which links auditory and visual memory traces with the conscious life, the ego strives to harmonize inner and outer, drives (which it keeps at bay mainly via repression, sublimation and anticathexes), inhibition, and reality.

Eros: one of the two basic sources of all the drives. Eros, whose name comes from the Greek god of love, is the principle of life; it binds together and is most clearly seen in love. Its drives tend to be more plastic and displaceable than those of its opponent, Thanatos, the death drive. Freud saw psychic life as an interplay of these two ever-interpenetrating forces, Life and Death.

God: an idealized image of a nurturing (and primal) father created to reconcile us to Fate's cruelty, compensate us for the injustices of life, lend social moralities a divine origin, and personify and appease the uncontrollable forces of nature.

Guilt: from either a dread of an external authority or dread of the demands and punishments of the superego, an internalized authority. It is through drive-repressing guilt and the resulting sublimations that civilization arose.
Id: the permanently unconscious motivational cauldron of the mind. From the id (the "it") originate all the drives that impel psychic life. A "residue of countless egos" inherited from prior generations, the id is the amoral beast within us that seeks only its own gratification through tension discharge. It is powered by the bodily instincts and is wholly irrational. Analogous to the job of the imperialist and the industrialist, the job of the ego is to dominate it.

Libido: the psychosexual energy originating in the id. Libido is the electric current of the mechanism of personality. It powers all psychological operations, invests desires, and undergoes ready displacement. It is the basic fuel of the self. Because it is of a relatively fixed quantity, like gasoline in a tank, it obeys laws of psychical "economy" in that a surplus in one system means a loss somewhere else.

Neurosis: a conflict between ego and id that produces symptoms of psychological discomfort.

Pleasure Principle (technically the Pleasure-Pain Principle): our most fundamental striving is toward pleasure and away from pain. Pleasure is what we feel when some kind of tension is relieved.

Reality Principle: the ego's sense of realistic and rational adaptive expectations. This principle evolves from and governs the heedless hedonism of the Pleasure Principle, at least in people who aren't wealthy.

Religion: a childlike yearning for an all-powerful Parent to take away feelings of helplessness that arise from confronting the forces of nature. A collective neurosis. An illusion (not necessarily an error) arising from childish wishes, religion spares many a believer an individual neurosis by reducing him to "psychical infantilism."

Repression: the ego's ridding itself of unacceptable desires and ideas by dumping them into unconsciousness.

Superego: an agency that safeguards society from uncontrolled acting out by giving the person an internalization of all environmental inhibitions, particularly those of the parents. It's a kind of parent-within formed of reaction formations to unconscious sexual wishes; disobeying it creates guilt.

Unconscious: that which is repressed out of awareness. Its core is instinct-representations consisting of wish-impulses. Also, see Id.

Kant Handout

Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
A Beginner’s Guide to Kant’s Moral Philosophy


Part 1: Kant’s Background & Philosophical Powers

Name: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Group Alliances: "Terrible" Transcendental Idealists, "Destructive" Deontologists”

AKA: Hometown Manny; The Punctual Prussian; The Virgin; The Categorical Imperator, I've Fallen and I Kant Get Up, The Greatest Modern Philosopher

Powers: follows rules well, can leap as high as hundreds of times his own height

Weaknesses: sometimes seen as overly critical

Part 2: The Very Short Version

✫ Philosophy may be divided into three fields: physics (the study of the physical world), ethics (the study of morals), and logic (the study of logical principles). These fields may involve either "empirical" study of our experiences, or "pure" analysis of concepts. "Metaphysics" is the study of pure concepts as they relate to moral or physical experience.

✫ People generally presume that moral principles must apply to all rational beings at all places and all times. Moral principles must therefore be based on concepts of reason, as opposed to particularities of culture or personality. The goal of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals is to develop a clearer understanding of moral principles, so that people may better avert distractions.

✫ Several general principles about moral duties may be advanced. First, actions are moral if and only if they are undertaken for the sake of morality alone (without any ulterior motive). Second, the moral quality of an action is judged not according to the action's consequences, but according to the motive that produced it. Third, actions are moral if and only if they are undertaken out of respect for the moral law (as opposed to some other motivation such as a need or desire).

✫ Since specific interests, circumstances, and consequences cannot be considered, the moral "law" must be a general formula that is applicable in all situations. Rather than commanding specific actions, it must express the principle that actions should be undertaken with pure motives, without consideration of consequences, and out of pure reverence for the law. The formula that meets these criteria is the following: we should act in such a way that we could want the maxim (the motivating principle) of our action to become a universal law. People have a decent intuitive sense for this law. Still, it is helpful for philosophy to state the law clearly so that people can keep it in mind.

✫ It is nearly impossible to find examples of pure moral actions. Nearly every action we observe can be attributed to some interest or motivation other than pure morality. Yet this should not discourage us, for moral principles come from reason, not from experience. Indeed, moral principles could not come from experience, for all experiences depend on particular circumstances, whereas moral principles must have absolute validity, independent of all circumstances.

✫ Because it applies in all circumstances, reason's fundamental moral principle may be called the "categorical imperative." The categorical imperative may be expressed according to the same formula as the moral law: act only in such a way that you could want the maxim (the motivating principle) of your action to become a universal law. When people violate the categorical imperative, they apply a different standard to their own behavior than they would want applied to everyone else in the form of a universal law. This is a contradiction that violates principles of reason.

✫ The categorical imperative may also be formulated as a requirement that we must not treat other rational beings as mere means to our own purposes. Rational beings have the capacity to pursue predetermined objectives ("ends") by means of their will, yet in pursuing their goals they never think of themselves as mere means to another purpose; they are themselves the purpose of their actions – they are "ends in themselves. If we treat other rational beings as mere means, we contradict the fact that all rational beings are ends in themselves. In this case, our principles could not be universal laws, and we would violate the categorical imperative.

✫ Another way of stating the point that rational beings are ends in themselves is to say that rational beings are simultaneously the authors and the subjects of the principles they execute through their will. The categorical imperative may also be formulated as a requirement that we act only according to principles that could be laws in a "kingdom of ends" – that is, a legal community in which all rational beings are at once the makers and subjects of all laws.

✫ The argument so far has established what the moral law is, but has not demonstrated why we feel we should be moral. The basis for morality is the concept of freedom. Freedom is the ability to give your own law to your will. When we follow the demands of some need, desire, or circumstance, we are in a state of "heteronomy"; our will is determined by something outside of ourselves. When we follow the categorical imperative and chose maxims that could be universal laws, we are in a state of "autonomy"; we use reason to determine our own law for ourselves. In other words, we are free.

✫ Freedom of the will can never be demonstrated by experience. It is a principle of reason that everything we understand may be explained on the basis of prior conditions. In other words, the world we observe and understand is a world governed by the principle that every event was caused by another event. Yet this world is nothing more than the picture that reason develops in making sense of "appearances." The world of "things in themselves"--the objects underlying appearances--may have different qualities, including freedom of the will. We can have no knowledge of things in themselves. Thus freedom of the will may be neither proven nor disproved. All that we may know is that we have a concept of freedom of the will, and that morality may be based on this concept.

Part 3: The (Slightly) Longer (But Far More Detailed/Helpful) Version [Adapted from Prof. M. O’Neill]

Kant’s Philosophical Project: In both parts of his philosophy (moral and theoretical), Kant saw himself as conducting a revolution in philosophy as fundamental as the ‘Copernican Revolution’ in natural science, which had placed the Sun, instead of the Earth, at the centre of the Solar System. Kant saw his own ‘Copernican Revolution’ as going in roughly the opposite direction – he wanted to place humanity itself at the centre of his philosophy, rather than any ‘external’ rational order.

Kant wanted to argue that this rational order is neither something that we discover through experience (as Empiricists like Locke and Hume believed), nor something which we can know through reason alone (as Rationalists like Descartes believed). Rather, for Kant, this rational order is something that human beings themselves impose on the world – both in the construction of our knowledge (a position he called ‘Transcendental Idealism’) and through our actions (as we see in his moral philosophy).

Some of the central themes of the Groundwork, which have become familiar parts of our modern moral outlook, include the following:

✫ We are all, as human beings, ends in ourselves, and not to be used as mere means by others;
✫ Respect for one’s own humanity involves respect for others;
✫ Morality is itself identical with freedom, and acting immorally involves being enslaved.

It is also well worth keeping in mind that the Groundwork is essentially one long argument, which runs from the beginning to the end of the book.

Two Important Kantian Distinctions:
The first piece of technical language which you’ll come across in the Groundwork is Kant’s use of two kinds of distinctions which apply to our judgements. These are:

1. The Analytic/Synthetic distinction. This concerns what makes a judgement true or false.
a. Analytic statements: true by virtue of the meanings of the words involved (e.g. ‘All dwarves are short of stature’).
b. Synthetic judgements: true in a more substantive sense; judgements which add something new to our knowledge of the subject in hand. Kant thought that, because they had to tell us something substantive, moral judgements had to be synthetic (or else they would tell us only about the meanings of the words which we were using).

2. The A Priori / A Posteriori distinction. This concerns how we come to know of a judgment’s truth. A judgement is known a priori if it is known independently of any particular experience, but is known a posteriori if it is known only through our experience of the world. All analytical truths, it is claimed, are known a priori – e.g. we know that ‘All dwarves are short’ even before we have any experience of dwarves in the world. Most synthetic truths – e.g. ‘Lenny the Giant is the most successful dwarf in his profession’ – are known a posteriori: that is, those judgements come to be synthesized through experience.

Kant thought – and this is a very central aspect of his conception of morality – that all moral judgements must be a priori. That is, he thought that all judgements of morality have to be completely independent of any contingent facts about how the world happens to be, and thus have to be derivable in abstraction from any particular experience, and can instead be derived from pure reason alone. This means that, for Kant, moral judgements have to be of a very particular kind: they have to be synthetic a priori judgements. Kant’s claim was that such judgements were possible, and that the judgements of morality, philosophy, mathematics, and geometry were all of this special kind.

The Preface to the Groundwork:

We here see Kant’s argument as running something like this:

Given that moral judgements deal with how the world ought to be, and not with how it is, it must be the case that they cannot be derived from experience, which can only tell us how things are. Thus, moral judgements must be a priori, as they are independent of how the world happens to be. By the ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, Kant means that collection of knowledge of pure, a priori judgements about morality.

This book is a Groundwork for that ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, in the sense that it sets itself the task of establishing the foundations on which that ‘metaphysics’ will come to rest – that is, Kant is setting himself the task of showing that there is a domain of laws which apply to our behaviour as rational beings, and that (what, for him, follows from this) there is such a thing as morality.
As Kant tells us, the purpose of the book is that of “seeking out and establishing of the supreme principle of morality” (392).

Kant thinks that the principle which tells us that we ought to behave according to moral laws must itself be a synthetic a priori principle, for ethics to exist at all. The Groundwork is thus designed to prove that such a principle – which Kant calls the Categorical Imperative – does exist. For Kant, this is identical to showing that morality, as such, exists.

The Categorical Imperative is, at base, simply the principle that our actions should have the form of moral conduct; which is to say (for Kant) that our actions should be derivable from universal principles.

Section 1: Transition from the ordinary rational knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical:

The purpose of Section 1 is to “proceed analytically from ordinary knowledge to a determination of the supreme principle” (392). Which is to say that Kant intends here to move from our ordinary ways of thinking about morality, analyzing them to discover the principles which lie behind them.

Here, Kant is trying to prove something prior to the fact that we have moral obligations – he is trying to show what it is that he has to establish in order to show that morality is possible.

Kant’s starting point in his argument (he assumes that everyone would agree with this belief) is that a “good will” is the only thing to which we attribute unconditional moral value. What he means is that the ‘good will’ is the only thing which has value completely independently of anything external to it, and which it therefore has in all circumstances, independent of contingent empirical facts.

Kant thinks that we cannot detract from the value of an action done from a good will, even if that actions turns out to be unsuccessful. The value of such an action is independent of “what it effects or accomplishes” (394). Thus, Kant’s project becomes that of “elucidating” the concept of a good will (397): Kant is going to find out what principle the person of good will acts on, in order to establish what the moral law tells us to do.

Kant focuses on actions done from duty. Duty is the good will operating “though with certain subjective restrictions and hindrances, which … far from hiding a good will and making it unrecognizable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shin forth more brightly.” (397). By these ‘subjective hindrances’, Kant has in mind the person who has other motives which would mean that, in the absence of a sense of duty, that person would not be motivated at all to perform the morally right action.

Kant identifies three kinds of motivation for action:
1. Duty – you perform the action because you think that it’s the right thing to do
2. Immediate Inclination – you simply enjoy doing actions of a particular sort
3. Instrumental Inclination – you perform the action because of some independent end which it serves

Kant thinks that right actions performed from duty have a special value which right actions performed from one of the other kinds of motivation lack.
e.g. the ‘prudent merchant’, who acts fairly towards his customers because this will secure his
reputation, but not for its own sake. (The merchant has type-3 motivation).

More controversially, Kant thinks that the actions of the naturally beneficent or sympathetic person, who does not act from duty, but does good because he is naturally inclined towards doing the right thing, and enjoys doing so, also has no moral worth, insofar as it is not action from duty, and hence does not evince a good will. (i.e. type-2 motivation) “I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.” (398).

Kant thinks that, for an action to be morally worthy, it has to be performed for the reason that you think that it is required of you (Duty) – if it is simply the case that it pleases you to do the morally right thing, then that is not enough for moral worth, as your action is not independent of the contingent fact that you happen to have certain preferences which incline you towards performing it.

So, Kant now has an account of what makes morally worthy actions have their special worth. They get their moral worth from the fact that the person who performs them acts from respect for moral law, and not through any reason independent of that moral law.

Section 2: Transition from Popular Moral Philosophy to a Metaphysics of Morals:

Kant’s project in Section 2 is to “present the practical faculty of reason from its universal rules of determination to the point where the concept of duty springs from it.” (412). In other words, Kant wants to lay out a theory of practical reasoning, which shows how the moral law is part of the principles of practical reason.

Kant sees the laws of practical reason as a series of imperatives, telling us what we ought to do. He distinguishes two kinds of imperatives:

✫ Hypothetical Imperatives – tells you what you ought to do, given that you will some end.
✫ Categorical Imperatives – tells you unconditionally what to do.

As we’ve already seen, as Kant thinks that morality must tell us what to do independently of our contingent wills or preferences, it must be governed by a categorical imperative.

The Categorical Imperative tells us to act on principles which are themselves laws. It gets its first formulation at (421), in what is called the Formula of Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”.

This is immediately followed by what is called the Formula of the Law of Nature formulation:

“Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”

Kant thinks that there is a test, derivable from the Categorical Imperative, which will allow us to identify which duties we have, and which actions are morally permissible. In each case, one has to perform a kind of though experiment, to see whether you could will your maxim to be a law of nature in a world in which you yourself were going to be a part.

Taking the example of the person who falsely promises to pay back some borrowed money, we can work through the test like so:

(1) We have to formulate the maxim of the action. A maxim combines an action, with a purpose for which that action is performed, and so has the general form ‘I will do Action-A in order to achieve Purpose-P’. Thus, the maxim in this case might be “I will make a false promise in order to get some ready cash”
(2) We then formulate the corresponding ‘law of nature’, which would be: “Everyone who needs some ready cash makes false promises.”
(3) We then imagine a world in which everyone obeyed this ‘law’.
(4) We then imagine ourselves in that world, attempting to secure some ready cash by way of a false promise.
(5) Finally, we have then to ask whether one could will the state of affairs in (3) at the same time as one tried to will the action in (4). We have then to see whether this would lead to any contradiction.

In this case, Kant thinks, a contradiction directly ensues. As he puts it, “For the universality of a law which says that anyone believing himself to be in difficulty could promise whatever he pleases with the intention of not keeping it would make promising itself and the end to be attained thereby quite impossible, inasmuch as no one would believe what was promised him but would merely laugh at all such utterances as being vain pretences.” (421). Thus, given this contradiction, Kant has taken himself to have shown that giving a false promise is morally impermissible.

Kant thinks that similar thought-experiments work for his examples of (1) suicide, (3) cultivating talents and (4) giving to the poor. (The false promise is example no. 2).

Kant thinks that there are two ways in which such contradictions can arise.
✫ In cases (1) and (2), Kant thinks that there is a contradiction in the very conception of the universalized maxim being a law. In such cases, Kant thinks that this shows that such maxims are in violation of strict or perfect duties.
✫ In cases (3) and (4), Kant thinks that the contradiction comes later, in willing that the given maxim be a universal law. In such cases, Kant thinks that this shows that the maxim is in violation of wide or imperfect duties.

Generally, if a maxim passes the Categorical Imperative test, then that action is morally permissible. If it fails the test, then that action is morally forbidden, and, therefore, the opposite action is morally required.

Another Formulation of the Categorical Imperative:

NB: Kant’s claim is that all of the different formulations of the Categorical Imperative are, in fact, equivalent with one another, and would permit and forbid exactly the same actions.

The Kingdom of Ends Formulation (434)

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another,
always at the same time as an end and never as a means”.

Which is to say that, as human beings are of absolute value, they should not sacrifice themselves or one another for merely relatively valuable ends. This formula enjoins us to respect each other as rational beings.

This is intimately connected with Kant’s notion of autonomy. If we think of ourselves as legislating universal law through our maxims, then Kant would suggest that we should think of moral motivation as autonomous. Kant’s belief was that moral obligation arises from, and can only be traced to, the human capacity for autonomous self-direction.

• Kant now thinks that what it remains for him to show is that we are autonomous beings who are capable of being motivated by a conception of ourselves as legislative citizens in a Kingdom of Ends. He thinks that, if he can show that we are autonomous, then he will have shown that we are bound by the moral law as given by the Categorical Imperative.

Freedom, or autonomy, for Kant is obeying a law which you give to yourself. Thus, if he can show (in section III), that human beings can be genuinely autonomous, then he will have satisfied himself that the demands of morality as mapped out in sections I and II, do apply to rational human agents.

Section 3: Transition from a Metaphysics of Morals to a Critique of Pure Practical Reason:

The Story so Far:

By analyzing our ordinary conception of moral value, and our conception of rational action, we have
arrived at an idea of:

a. what the moral law says (act on a maxim one can will as a universal law)
b. the characteristic in virtue of which a person is governed by the moral law (autonomy of the will).

To complete the argument, Kant has to show that we and all rational beings really have the kind of autonomous wills for which the moral law is authoritative.

Kant starts Section III with a good summary of his view of freedom (446), “The will is a kind of causality belonging to living beings as far as they are rational; freedom would be the property of this causality that makes it effective independent of any determination of alien causes. [That is, independent of any factors extraneous to the will itself, including the merely empirical desires and inclinations of the agent in question.]”.
Insofar as human action meets this condition, it is autonomous. Insofar as it fails to meet this condition, and does find itself under the influence of ‘alien causes’, then it is heteronymous.

Kant thinks that freedom from such ‘alien causes’ is possible only when we act out of duty towards the moral law, as given by the Categorical Imperative. Thus, for Kant, “a free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.” (447). Thus, for Kant, there is an analytical connection between freedom and morality. So, the big question for Kant has to be that of whether we really are free: if we are, then he thinks that he has done enough to show that we must be subject to the moral law of the categorical imperative.

Kant starts his defence of our freedom from what it’s like to be a rational being. When we choose between different options, we think that our choice is free, and that we are not compelled to go for any particular option. Thus, Kant thinks that, insofar as we are rational, we have to act under an idea of freedom. “Now I claim that we must necessarily attribute to every rational being who has a will also the idea of freedom, under which only such a being can act.” “Reason must regard itself as the author of its principles independent of foreign influences.” (448).

Now, Kant acknowledges that there might be a problem with this assumption of freedom, in that our freedom to freely choose between different options might seem to contradict the natural necessity of the laws of science. Kant’s solution here is to say that, whilst this is true of human agents insofar as they are part of the empirical world, it is not true of them when they are considered as rational beings choosing between alternatives in the ‘realm of freedom’.

[This corresponds with Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal realm of things as they appear, and the noumenal realm, of things as they are in themselves. Kant thinks that we can have knowledge only of the phenomenal realm, but that we can think of ourselves as rationally choosing courses of action within the realm of the noumenal (the ‘world of understanding’).]

Kant thinks that there are ‘two standpoints’, corresponding to the two parts of this distinction, from which we can think about ourselves, and that the nature of these two standpoints is such that they are unable to contradict each other. “Therefore a rational being must regard himself qua intelligence (and hence not from the side of his lower powers) as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of understanding. Therefore he has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and know the laws of the use of his powers and hence of all his actions: first, insofar as he belongs to the world of sense subject to laws of nature (heteronomy); secondly, insofar as he belongs to the intelligible world subject to laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but are founded only on reason.” (452).

So, just as there are two ways of viewing this representation of a cube – as either going “into”
or ‘out of’ the page – even though there is only one cube; and just as there is no real ‘contradiction’ between thinking of the cube in these two ways, so too does Kant think that we have two ways to think about human beings, which are essentially in disagreement, but which somehow manage not to contradict one another.

Thus, Kant thinks that, because we inevitably think of ourselves as members of the world of understanding, we must think of ourselves, at the same time, as free and autonomous. And he thinks that this does not come into any conflict with our beliefs that human beings are part of the natural world, and hence subject to the same natural laws as all other matter.

It is important to realize that Kant does not think it is possible to explain how this freedom is possible, as he thinks that we can have no knowledge of the noumenal realm in which we are free. Kant thinks only that (a) we are free and autonomous in the relevant sense and (b) that it is necessarily the case that we will be unable to give an account of quite how this is possible.

If one accepts this Kant’s account of our freedom and autonomy, then, if we have accepted the rest of his argument about morality, we ought to accept that we are governed by the moral law as given by the Categorical Imperative. On the other hand, one might want to argue that, in the end, Kant’s account of human freedom is simply incoherent.

Part 4: A Very Rudimentary Glossary

analytic: A judgement is analytic if the subject concept already contains the predicate.

autonomy: The property of a faculty which is both free and gives the law of its operation to itself.

idea: A concept formed by pure reason which purports to permit cognition of ‘objects’ beyond the limits of possible experience.

intuition: [Anshauung] An immediate presentation of a object in space and time. Pure, a priori intuition is the presentation of the form of space or time itself.

noumenon: thing-in-itself, intelligible, supersensible [Übersinnliche]: That realm of ‘objects’, unexperiencable in principle, which is purported to be the ground of all objects of experience.

Phenomenon/Phenomena: Roughly, ‘phenomenon’ is equivalent to ‘appearance’; ‘phenomena’ to ‘appearances’.

Practical philosophy: That philosophy that deals with human action in general, and with human free (and thus potentially moral) action specifically. For Kant, it is opposed to 'theoretical' or 'speculative' philosophy.
freedom: [Freiheit] The ability of the rational human will to act autonomously.

Synthetic/ synthesis: A ‘synthetic’ judgement is one in which the concept of the object does not already contain the predicate. ‘Synthesis’ is any act of combining or relating together presentations.

Theoretical Philosophy: That branch of philosophy that deals with objects of possible experience, and deals with them as objects of possible knowledge. See 'practical philosophy'.

And you thought I was joking...

As promised, here is the proof for the Monty Python "Holy Grail" witch scene we saw. I told you it works:

The following example in Predicate Logic is based on the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975). Here is an excerpt of the script for scene #5:

VILLAGER #1: We have found a witch. May we burn her?

CROWD: Burn her! Burn! Burn her! Burn her!

BEDEVERE: How do you know she is a witch?

VILLAGER #2: She looks like one.

CROWD: Right! Yeah! Yeah!

BEDEVERE: Bring her forward.

WITCH: I'm not a witch. I'm not a witch.

…

BEDEVERE: What makes you think she is a witch?

VILLAGER #3: Well, she turned me into a newt.

BEDEVERE: A newt?

VILLAGER #3: I got better.

VILLAGER #2: Burn her anyway!

VILLAGER #1: Burn!

CROWD: Burn her! Burn! Burn her!...

BEDEVERE: Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet! There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.

VILLAGER #1: Are there?

VILLAGER #2: Ah?

VILLAGER #1: What are they?

CROWD: Tell us! Tell us!...

BEDEVERE: Tell me. What do you do with witches?

VILLAGER #2: Burn!

VILLAGER #1: Burn!

CROWD: Burn! Burn them up! Burn!...

BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from witches?

VILLAGER #1: More witches!

VILLAGER #3: Shh!

VILLAGER #2: Wood!

BEDEVERE: So, why do witches burn?

[pause]

VILLAGER #3: B--... 'cause they're made of... wood?

BEDEVERE: Good! Heh heh.

CROWD: Oh, yeah. Oh.

BEDEVERE: So, how do we tell whether she is made of wood?

VILLAGER #1: Build a bridge out of her.

BEDEVERE: Ah, but can you not also make bridges out of stone?

VILLAGER #1: Oh, yeah.

RANDOM: Oh, yeah. True. Uhh...

BEDEVERE: Does wood sink in water?

VILLAGER #1: No. No.

VILLAGER #2: No, it floats! It floats!

VILLAGER #1: Throw her into the pond!

CROWD: The pond! Throw her into the pond!

BEDEVERE: What also floats in water?

…

ARTHUR: A duck!

CROWD: Oooh.

BEDEVERE: Exactly. So, logically...

VILLAGER #1: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck,... she's made of wood.

BEDEVERE: And therefore?

VILLAGER #2: A witch!

VILLAGER #1: A witch!

CROWD: A witch! A witch!...

VILLAGER #4: Here is a duck. Use this duck.

[quack quack quack]

BEDEVERE: Very good. We shall use my largest scales.

CROWD: Ohh! Ohh! Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Ahh! Ahh...

BEDEVERE: Right. Remove the supports!

[whop]

[clunk]

[creak]

CROWD: A witch! A witch! A witch!

WITCH: It's a fair cop.

VILLAGER #3: Burn her!

CROWD: Burn her! Burn her! Burn her! Burn! Burn!...

BEDEVERE: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?

ARTHUR: I am Arthur, King of the Britons.

BEDEVERE: My liege!

ARTHUR: Good Sir Knight, will you come with me to Camelot and join us at the Round Table?

BEDEVERE: My liege! I would be honored.

ARTHUR: What is your name?

BEDEVERE: 'Bedevere', my liege.

ARTHUR: Then I dub you 'Sir Bedevere, Knight of the Round Table'.

Here is the logic:

Rule 1

Rule 2

Rule 3

Fact 1

Fact 2

Fact 3

Fact 4

(Note: Polly is the character name of the actress, who played the witch, in another TV show)

Experiment: ? Result: is true.

Since and , we have. (Rule 3)

Since ,, and , we have . (Rule 2)

Since and , we have . (Rule 1)

So it is actually logically correct.

( Thanks to Prof. Leen-Kiat Soh for the proof - originally for his course "Introduction to Discrete Structures".)

If you guys are interested, check out Gary L. Hardcastle's article, "Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python."

C.