Logic and Ethics: The Foundation of Philosophy

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today on the files, I'm bringing you part three of a three-part series answering the question, what is philosophy? All right, well we've come some distance already in these two short lectures that I've already presented to you. This is the culminating lecture and I'm just delighted to be able to share this one with you because I hopefully we've learned something so far. Today is going to be a lot more practical about how we've done philosophy in the past and how we can do philosophy today.

But in order to get there, you guys will recall that we had to define philosophy and I landed that definition as the perspective of the self based upon reason and freedom. But historically as philosophy has worked out its own self-understanding, it's gone through different epochs. You know, the Greeks uh we talked a little bit about their various ways of understanding the nature of philosophy. Then we had the great Christian era of philosophy um in which, you know, theology was first philosophy and philosophy was more of its handmaiden.

And then we got to the era of the modern period, the Enlightenment, where philosophy once again regained its uh uh independence, you might say, but never not not pure independence. It is still marked by the sort of insights of Christian thought, but it re- re- uh appropriates or re-examines philosophy with a new kind of confidence in that period. It's from the period of the Enlightenment really on into the 19th and 20th century that philosophy began to dig its own grave. And now we have to start thinking about philosophy again with the eyes of faith. With the whole notion that you have to adopt other perspectives.

This is what it means to learn and to grow and to be educated, but it also means to be wise in knowing who to trust and so forth. So, in this lecture, now this is a key kind of culminating lecture because I am going to sort of give you guys the secret sauce of philosophy and that's what I call the tree of philosophy. The questions that philosophy continues to ponder, and there are many, but they all fall under what I would call the big questions and typically these are metaphysical questions. When all else fades away, what remains? And this is the topic of metaphysics, but most of the stuff that we hold near and dear as human beings fall into that category.

Things like God, things like love, and justice, um even our own dignity, our own souls fall into the category of the metaphysical. And historically speaking, I'm going to show you this with the tree of philosophy, there's only really been two different ways in which philosophers in the West have approached these questions ontologically, through the question of existence, and epistemically, through the question of knowledge. And um those two approaches, and there's and depending on where you live in the history of ideas and what times you find yourself in, you might approach it with one or the other or some kind of combination of the two. So, I'm going to talk about this in lecture number three.

Those things, those topics, those approaches alone are not sufficient to pursue good philosophy. I'm going to make the argument or suggestion, I guess. There's only so much you can do in a short form. Uh we'll do more of this later in the Firestone files as we extrapolate these definitions and these insights and approach these topics once again later on. But I'm going to make the suggestion here in election lecture three that there are two fields of philosophy that are utterly foundational. Those are logic and ethics. You're not logical, you're never going to get at answers to the big questions. If you're not ethical, you're only going to get answers of your own making.

So, that's coming at you here in this third lecture as we discuss the tree of philosophy and how to go about doing philosophy in the 21st century. All right. Well, that's enough of an introduction. I hope you enjoy. Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Firestone and this is the third lecture, the final lecture addressing the question, what is philosophy? In the previous lectures, we looked at a few of the common approaches to philosophy. We talked about philosophy being the the field of uh no definite answers. I tried to dispel that notion by saying the problem isn't that there's no definite answers, but there's in fact too many answers. That it's a field of deep thinking.

Certainly philosophers are deep thinkers, spend a lot of time thinking about the questions, the big questions of life. And yet they're not unique in that. Uh other other thinkers in other fields do very much the same thing, although they may be a little bit more focused in particular ways. And uh the other one was that philosophy is the field of many questions. And of yes, philosophy does have a lot of questions and so forth, but questions come up in every field. So, there's nothing really unique about that answer. And so, we turned in the first lecture to get some from the ancients, the the the the the Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

We will recall that Socrates argues that the basic question of philosophy is um who am I? Or how to know yourself. He famously famously says that the unexamined life is not worth living. You see, we go through life often times going through the motions, but do we actually self-reflect and so forth? And Socrates thought that that was a a basic part of what the nature of philosophy is and its contribution to living a meaningful life. Plato comes along and says, well, hold on a second. Philosophy is really fundamentally concerned with the nature of ultimate reality. When all else fades away, what remains? And so, the Greeks were acutely aware that life is fleeting, that things are temporary, that things mutate and corrupt.

At the end of the day, what's simple? What remains? And that's the fundamental question of philosophy. And of course, Aristotle arguing for the fact that philosophy is the impulse of wonder, like when we go out and see a starry midnight sky and we realize just how small we are relative to the universe around us. And um And so, that wonder and ignorance that we feel, that's the starting point of philosophy, it's not the ending point. That using reason and careful examination of our world that we can understand its fundamental principles and the causes that gave rise to things as they appear to us. We also looked at a variety of contemporary philosophers and philosophies come a long way.

In fact, in lecture two, we kind of tracked through some of the phases of philosophy historically. For example, in the Patristic period, we had faith seeking understanding culminating in Augustine's view that that there's certain controllable beliefs as as Nicholas Wolterstorff called them that are fundamentally revealed to us in in the Bible, for example. And that philosophy's job is to help extrapolate those, to connect them, to to to give us a means and a method for filling out that worldview. And that happens for quite a long period of time in the Western intellectual tradition. It wasn't until we got to Aquinas where we came to the realization that philosophy, which was the handmaiden of theology for so long, actually has an autonomous sphere in which it can work.

And I suggested to you that that autonomous sphere comes into sharper relief in the philosophy of René Descartes where Descartes basically wipes away all past authorities and traditions and starts philosophy afresh by saying that it's really a careful and critical use of reason. And I made the argument, I mean, I guess I made the claim and tried to make the argument in the second lecture that fundamentally, at its base, philosophy is the perspective of the self based upon reason and freedom. And this is kind of a Cartesian-Kantian understanding of that of that of of of of what philosophy actually is. You see, every person is born into the world, you know, have to be educated and so forth.

And they have to try to figure out who they are and what their place is in the world and what why they're here and not in some other place. And the strangeness, the uniqueness of the space-time continuum in which they find themselves and so forth. And that's a basic uh aspect of what philosophy is. Now, I also argued that philosophy can't rest there. Because if it's just the perspective of the self based upon the reason and freedom, you don't have arguments, you don't have judgments, you don't know who to trust, you don't know you don't really don't have wisdom. And philosophy is the love of wisdom.

And but we have to make those judgments on life's way. We have to determine truth from falsity. Uh moral character from immoral character, beauty from the lack of beauty, and so forth. And these are decisions all every human being has to make. So, every human being is in a sense a philosopher under this definition. But there's two types of philosophy, broadly speaking, and it's a good philosopher and a bad philosopher. The good philosopher makes wise choices about perspectives to trust, to appropriate into their philosophical worldview. Uh I get tried to give an example of that with, for example, the choosing a doctor.

I mean, you can operate on yourself, you can educate yourself, you know, you can use YouTube and see if you can figure it out, but probably wiser is to find an expert, somebody who is better situated to address the question that you're raising. Let's say it's an ailment. Um they have a certain expertise. And it would be wise for you to give yourself over to them. Now, you don't give yourself over willy-nilly, you may get a second opinion. There's all sorts of philosophical things you one would do to make a wise choice. But that you give yourself over to another perspective is really not something that we can question, I don't think.

This happens with your mechanic. It happens with your lawyer. It happens with your prospective spouse. It happens with your friends, and so forth. You have to make the wise determinations about who to trust and whose perspective resonates with the truth, with the good, and with the beautiful. And that really is uh of an important addendum, you might say, to my definition of philosophy as the perspective of the self based upon reason and freedom. Okay. Well, uh philosophy after the modern period, of course, has gone through a number of revol- uh revolutions itself, various perspectives. I talked about logical positivism, existentialism, phenomenology, uh deconstruction, and various other things that have happened in philosophy in the couple hundred years since Immanuel Kant.

And um none of those are really systems of philosophy per se or um things that commend your allegiance in total, but they are perspectives on the truth that are enlightening, that are helpful in a lot of ways, but perhaps are not as ambitious as philosophy in the past or in some ways maybe they're more ambitious because they they purport to go further than they actually do. Um Okay. Well, um there's a lot more that could be said about the contemporary period, but I'm going to kind of leave that be for now um and zero in on doing a little uh you know, anatomy, if you will, of what philosophy is today.

Um I'm going to suggest to you that philosophy has three basic uh areas of inquiry and then two supporting uh areas that and then there's a a whole a whole uh you know, pantheon of other things that philosophy um touches upon as well. Those three Now, I'm going to do the I call this the tree of philosophy. I didn't come up with this metaphor. The first person I have seen historically that actually uses the tree metaphor as René Descartes. Uh he argues that philosophy is like a tree. Contemporary philosopher Stephen Palmquist wrote a book called The Tree of Philosophy as well. And um I'm borrowing a little bit of uh some of their thoughts as well as my own thinking about the history of philosophy. That really there are three major areas.

The primary area is metaphysics. And now you might think be surprised and you know you might think this I thought this guy knew something about Kant and he says metaphysics is the primary place of philosophy. Didn't didn't Kant destroy metaphysics? Well, no, not really. Because metaphysics incorporates all those big questions that reason is supposed to be able to give us some perspective on. Those basic questions about three areas in particular. God, ourselves, and the nature of the world. And metaphysics basically says like Plato, you know, we talked about earlier, what is the essence of those things? What when all else fades away, what remains? What is fundamental to the world?

And you know, we all either explicitly or implicitly have an answer to this. In a sense, we're all metaphysical beings in one way or another. Um what does it mean to be a human being? What is fundamental to the world? And who is God and what is his fundamental nature? And so forth. So those are the basic questions I'd say of metaphysics. Now, getting to answers to those big questions is not easy. And figuring out who to trust may be even tougher. Um but there are two other areas of what I would call starting points for philosophy that drive towards an answer to that question.

Um the question of metaphysics in those those those fundamental questions about God, humanity, and world. And they are ontology and epistemology. Ontology in a sense has been first philosophy for quite a long time prior to the modern period certainly. Ontology is a big world big word with a real simple meaning. Well, is anything really simple in philosophy? Uh ontology asks the question of what does it mean to exist?

What does it mean to stand out? And so when you ask the question of existence, you're basically I mean one way to think about the question of ontology is to ask what's the difference between the idea of something and that something actually existing or standing out. Now you might think to yourself, well that's real and that's a figment. Well, hold on a second. The idea of a piece of chocolate cake that I have in my mind right now has certain properties to it. And now if I had a piece of chocolate cake here, it would have the identical properties to it. The only difference is this one stands out and this one is an idea in the mind.

And so ontology begins with existence, asks the questions of existence. So other philosophies of the 20th century start there sometimes, right? Like existentialism which is about fundamental choices that we make um and uh phenomenology which tries to get to the primordial experience of existence um and so forth. So one way of trying to get to those metaphysical answers is to start with the question of existence. The more common we we live in more of an epistemic age from Descartes to Kant and I think still resonating right on into the 20th 21st centuries is epistemology is first philosophy. Epistemology doesn't focus on existence but rather focuses on knowledge. How do you know? Have you ever has anybody ask you that? How do you know? Uh or how can you be certain?

Uh what's your authority? You know, uh these kinds of basic questions is usually the first question that you'll hear with a contemporary person uh asking these things and it's usually epistemology as first philosophy trying to get at an answer to the questions of God, the world, and humanity. Um and so this is the tree of philosophy and its basic superstructure. You have metaphysics at the top with the basic big questions of life and they have two ways of approaching how to get to answers to basic questions of life, through knowledge or through existence. And um philosophers have taken different tacks on this through the years.

Now, I told you there were two other areas of philosophy that are really fundamental to the philosophical quest to understand yourself, your world, and God. And those two areas are logic and ethics. And of course, these go back to the ancients, you know, Aristotle of course talks explicitly about logic and ethics as being important to the philosophical quest. And I and I don't think he's wrong. You see, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you're not logical, that is if you're not consistent in your approach, if you're not consistent with your words and ideas, one thing we know is true that your system has errors in it.

That is, there are things that are false in your worldview. Cuz inconsistency, according to the law of non-contradiction, A does not equal not A, begets falsehood. And so, logic, especially when it's played out into logical systems of thought, we you know, we have a you know, truth logic, and we have categorical logic, symbolic logic, and so forth. And these are tools that philosophers use to drive towards answers to life's ultimate questions. If you're not logical, then you probably are not going to get to a satisfactory answer to the big questions of life, the metaphysical questions that are at the top of our tree of philosophy. So, logic is really kind of important.

I would argue that the same thing is true of ethics. That if we are not ethical, that is, if we are immoral, then we're only ever going to get to answers of our own making for our own purposes. This is where the postmodern and masters of suspicion philosophers get it right, that if in fact we are all immoral, then we are all power-seeking, logic-chopping people trying to get the most out of this world while we can. And that structures of power and domination are all there really is. Uh I'm not so cynical. Um I think that there is a difference between right and wrong, and that it's not really all that hard to figure out.

Oftentimes when I'm teaching ethics classes, I um I begin with the old Latin proverb basically says that tough cases make bad law. Oftentimes in ethics and in uh legal argumentation and in in in in and in in uh precedent-setting cases and so forth, we are looking at the margins of the moral life. And in those cases, admittedly, it's hard. But if we get our basic morality from the hard cases, we're doing ourselves a disservice. Morality goodness is not all that hard to figure out.

And so, I would suggest to you, I'm not going to argue for an ethical system here, but that logic, the law of non-contradiction, and ethics, let's call that the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or respecting persons, or um you know, being obedient to principles that everybody could act upon and so forth, that these are kind of basic to our moral superstructure. And that the law of non-contradiction and uh categorical thinking um and categorical logic and truth functional logic and the basic principles of logic are fundamental if we're ever going to have an answer to life's big questions.

Same thing is true in philosophy I would suggest with ethics. That if we're unethical, we're only going to get at narratives and at answers and at superstructures of our own making that are not resonant with truth, beauty, and goodness, but that are resonant with some other ends. In other words, we're being conned, or we're conning ourself. Um and so the tree of philosophy has at its root uh has at its as its trunk logic and ethics as the pistons driving us towards answers to life's difficult and big questions.

Then there's a real irony in this, but it's part of the situation in which we find ourselves. That at the roots of the tree of philosophy, the stuff that's grounding the tree, is in fact metaphysics itself. That is logic is based upon axioms, like the law of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle and so forth, or the basic laws of modus ponens or modus tollens or other uh axiomatic sort of uh truths that soon as we look at them, we know they're true, but trying to prove that they're true is difficult, impossible. That's why they're called axioms. We just assume them to be true because they are coming out of reality as such.

They're prima facie true. As soon as we look at them, we know they're true. Um and that's the irony is that metaphysics is the roots and our understanding of metaphysics is at the apex of our quest to understand. I would suggest to you it's the same thing with ethics, that there are some basic ethical principles, let's say the golden rule, or when we look at a situation, we have a a moral inclination that's probably fairly accurate and so forth. It's in the tough cases that we get glitches, right, in our intellectual understanding of the good.

Uh but by and large, there are axiomatic starting points for moral theory that drive us towards answering life's questions with some kind of uh uh meaningfulness, some kind of integrity, and some type of resonance with truth and with goodness and with beauty. And so, um I'm suggesting that philosophy is like a tree, that it has these big questions that have not been answered to the satisfaction of those who have asked them, that is there still human beings who disagree with one another, and that may be the case for some time. Um or it may be the case that we will answer some of them and they'll break off into other sciences and so forth.

Um but uh that is not that that you know, those are the big questions. They are they can be approached through knowledge or through existence and they are driven by the fundamental fields of logic and ethics uh that emerge out of reality as such. Now, philosophy has a variety of other areas. One of the things that got me interested in philosophy in the first place was philosophy of religion. Uh when we ask all the questions like free will and determinism or the problem of the evil, can God be both good and evil exist, and uh and so forth. Um and lots of other questions there.

There's philosophy of science, which asks about the fundamental principles of science and whether or not, you know, our our our our noetic structure and our our senses are trustworthy and um how does quantum physics relate to, you know, standard Newtonian physics and so forth. Um these are all, you you know, really important questions. There's philosophy of aesthetics, which is in particular to the question of beauty and to purposiveness and nature and so forth.

There's uh philosophy has permeated, you know, I've been teaching in the university for a while. I see philosophy of history. I see philosophy of business. And all of them are really trying to understand the roots of those fields and they're trying to press them forward into deeper and more profound understandings of their own self-nature, you know. And that's really what philosophy is about. Okay. Well, hopefully I've been able to convince you that philosophy is the perspective of the self based upon reason and freedom, but it does not stop there. It has to make decisions about who to trust, judgments about uh our own finite situation and what perspectives do we appropriate, do we amend, and do we reject?

And that becomes part of our superstructure of our noetic superstructure and part of our very being uh as we go on life's way. All right. Well, that's it for now. I hope that was helpful to you. Um all the best and I'll look forward to seeing you in in another one of my lectures. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life.

If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.