哲学经典文章总结

PART IKey words and Summaries1. The ApologyKey words: Plato, the unexamined life is not worth living, pursuit of truth, questioning, Socratess death, wisdomSummary: Socrates was accused of corroding the thought of youth (by Mai LITU J). People thought he was spreading rumors everywhere and making people confused with current life. Socrates questioned people around him continuously and tried his best to find those who were knowledgeable, but he found that they finally could not answer his questions. Because of this, he embarrassed many people who seemed to be silly after being questioned and thus some people began to hate him. But for Socrates, he thought he was just seeking the truth. People are always satisfied with the current life and he claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. He is not meant to harm the youth and he argued that if he meant it, he would imagine such a case where he would be accused. In his opinion, the real wisdom is that one knows that he does not know. 2. CritoKey words: Plato, Crito, to escape, law, duty, truth, reason, to repay evil with evilSummary: Crito tried to persuade Socrates to save himself because he didnt want to lose such a friend and people would thought him as ruthless because he could spend money to help him out and escape. But for Socrates, living well is not just living in the world but also leading a just life. Accordingly, he chose to be here if the law didnt regard him as innocent. Even though Socrates thought he isnt guilty, he didnt want repay evil with evil, where people always did opposite side naturally. If Socrates chose to escape, he would break the law and then the divinity of the law would be shadowed. As an individual in the population, if one can do anything casually beyond the law, the city will be finally overthrown. Because of this, Socrates was afraid of doing harm to his motherland. If Socrates chose to escape, he would be detested by his own state and the new law in the place he would arrived at would not be friendly to him. All of these were based on his reasoning. And Crito had nothing more to voice.3. Appearance and realityKey words: Bertrand Russell, appearance and reality, immediate experience, truth, property, knowledgeSummary:In daily life, we assume as certain, many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. To some degree, knowledge can derive from experience but any statement that our immediate experiences make us know is likely to be wrong. Russell took the table as an example. It seems that all of the tables are the same in color, sound produced when be tapped, hardness and so on. But definitely speaking, the table shows different shapes from every perspective. To further our sight, we use microscope to observe the table and we can find hills and valleys, which is different from naked eyes. We cant believe those we get from our sensing organs and those senses are just the appearance. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. 4. The Delusion of Free WillKey words: Robert, heredity and environment, the delusion of free will, reason, choice, determination, trainingSummary: The free will delusion has been a stumbling block in the way of human thought for thousands of years. The free will party claims that man is responsible for his acts, because his will is free to choose between right and wrong. But for the author, the will is not free and that if it were free man could nor know right from wrong until he was taught. When we hesitate in our choice between two acts, it is our temperament that cause us lie in such a situation. When making a choice, why do we choose one side rather than another? This is because we have reasoned ourselves and weighed advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes we are told and trained to do something deep in our minds and besides our minds are determined by the heredity. Blatchford therefore claims that mans choice between good and evil can be and only be taken by reason. 5. No ExitKey words: Jean-Paul Sartre, No exit, existentialist, Cradeau, Estelle, Inez, Hell is other people, existence precedes essenceSummary: This is a play written by Sartre. The subjects in this play are Cradeau, Estelle and Inez. They are enclosed in a room of the hell and all of them are actually dead and sentenced to the hell because all of them had lots of evil things in the past. But all of them tried to behave as a good person and cheat others. There are not mirrors in which they can see themselves. This symbolizes that an individual human being does not know whether they should be defined by others or themselves. In the text, Inez, who is a woman, fell in love with Estelle but Estelle loved Cradeau who ran after Inez. Three painful people seem to be tortured by themselves. Sartre said that Hell is other people. In fact, this does not mean that all the people around us is hell, but when we dont get along well with the people around us, and its difficult to reconcile with them, you can only be in the hell.6. SubstanceKey words: Principles of Philosophy, Ren Descartes, substance, mind, body, mind-body distinction, extension Summary:.That all the objects of our perceptions are to be considered either as things or the affections of the things, or else as eternal truths; and the enumeration of the things.What substance is, and that it is a name we cannot attribute in the same sense to God and to his creatures.Each substance has a principal attribute, and attribute of the mind is thought, while that of body is extension.The perceptions of the senses do not teach us what is really in things, but merely that whereby they are useful or hurtful to mans composite nature.The nature of body consists not in weight, nor in hardness, nor color and so on, but in extension alone. Extension of the world is likewise indefinite.All the variety in matter, or all the diversity of its forms, depends on motion. And motion is in common parlance.7. Skeptical Doubts Concerning the OperationsKey words: David Hume, conceptual truths, reasons, matter of fact, cause and effect, relations of ideas, memory and senses.Summary: All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, which are relations of ideas and matters of fact. For relations of ideas, every affirmation is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. And matters of fact require an empirical investigation to be known for certain. If we are engaged by arguments to trust in the past experience and make it the standard of our future judgment, these arguments must be probably only regarded matter of fact and real of existence. In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we have found to follow from such objects. All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. 8. The Allegory of the caveKey words: Philosophers, reason, shadows of light, prisoners, Plato, senses and experiences, knowledge.Summary:.Philosophers are those who are lovers of the vision of the truth.We will consider people awake if they recognize the existence of absolute beauty and are able to contemplate both the Idea and the objects which participate in it, not mixing objects and Idea.The inhabitants are chained hands and feet, and their heads are in a fixed position so that they can only see the wall in front of them. On the wall shadows appear and the prisoners assume these shadows are reality. The shadows are produced by a fire burning at the caves entrance and they actually reflect objects carried above a wall by people walking by it. As the allegory progresses, Plato asks us to imagine that someone is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains. It would require time and patience before the prisoners eyes adjusted to the light and saw things as they really are. Once that happened, however, the former prisoner would clearly see that what had passed for knowledge was in reality only shadows. Going back into the cave to explain reality to the other prisoners, this person would surely meet resistance. All of them would continue to believe the shadows were real and think their fellow is ridiculous, with his eyes ruined.9. of the Origin of IdeasKey words: David Hume, empiricism, impressions and ideas, humans perceptions, knowledge, bounded ideas, ideas deriving from impressions, force and vivacity.Summary:For empiricism, we get knowledge from experience. But our experience is so changeable that it may not always be true. In this case, as an empiricist, David Hume provides his solutions, where he divides humans perceptions into two kinds according to the force and vivacity. One is impressions, which is more lively and another is thoughts or ideas, respectively. But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination that is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. A blind man can form no notion of colors; a deaf man of sounds. And the author pointed out that actually ideas derive from impressions. But there also exists few contradictions. We can easily find the missing color in a color series descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest. Though this instance is so special that it is scarcely worth our observing we should alter our general maxim.10. What Utilitarianism Is? Key words: John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism, happiness, pleasure, pain, hedonism, producing the greatest amount of happiness for everyoneSummary:The right course of action is the one that creates the greatest amount of happiness. For happiness, From Mills point of view, happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. Thus, accordingly, the best actions are the ones that promote the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. And pleasure and pain can be experienced. We can know therefore, from past experience, which actions predictably promote pleasure, and therefore happiness, and which actions promote pain, and therefore unhappiness. Notice as well that Mill argues that when determining the right thing to do, all of the pleasure and pain produced must be taken into account. Mills utilitarianism holds that the correct action to perform is the one that promotes the best consequences for all, the action produces the greatest amount of happiness for everyone. Those selfish and of no feeling and conscience would consent to be a fool.11. EudaimoniaKey words: Aristotle, eudaimonia, happiness, activity, contemplation, reason, philosopherSummary:A function of a thing is the unique purpose of that thingthe unique work that it does. Once the function of a thing is known, then that thing can be accessed as being either good or bad. If the function of a knife is to cut, a good knife is one that cuts well. For human being, Aristotle says that the unique function of humanity is to reason. If that is our unique function, then a good human will be one that functions well, that is , one that reasons well. Persons have eudaimonia then insofar as they reason well, that is ,insofar as they exhibit rationality throughout their life. To further, the best life is not just a life in which reason and rationality are exhibited throughout; rather, the best life is the life devoted to reason exclusively, that is , the life of studythe life of the philosopher. Happiness is an activity in accordance with the highest virtue, which is the contemplative activity.12. The second sexKey words: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, the other, liberty, equality.Summary: Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex holds that a woman is taken as the other, in other words, the second sex. It is the culture and men that makes women the second sex. In the bosom of the family, woman seems in the eyes of childhood and youth to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult males. The husband and her son can therefore feel that social subordination as between the sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is an equal. But when he is in conflict with him, his theme will be the existing inequality. A woman should recognize that if she wants to liberate herself, she should be an individual being defined by liberty instead of by happiness. Woman shall not permit themselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against them.PART IIComment on The Allegory of the CaveOrdinary life, Plato is telling us, is the life of the cave. Not all of us are philosophers who pursuit the root of wisdom. In my opinion, those philosophers or some scientists who may seem to be strange are actually the prisoners who step out of the cave. Were the prisoners, living in a world which is full of untested assumptions and believing in our senses. Like the prisoners, Plato suggests, we may be mistaking the ordinary world of sense experience and judgments for reality and truth. In other words, what we see may not be what you get. But why we are prisoners, with hands and feet chained? As the allegory suggests, we are satisfied with our current life and more definitely, we are in prison because of our requirements and satisfactory with material life, which is why we lose the freedom. It may not be easy for us to tell the difference between the reality and appearance and its also difficult for us to believe those who are out of the cave. We can imply from the text that we should be careful when such a person appear in front of us in case that we lose the chance to the reality. In this case, we can say we are awake because we dont mix idea and objects. Even though we find someone leading us out of the cave, we may give up half way because the Sun will hurt our eyes. In this case, we should, as Plato suggests as well, show a sense of perseverance and patience. Having got the truth, the prisoner could have chosen not to be back into the cave, but he would rather step back into the cave to enlighten others even though his partners may put him to death because they are accustomed to the existing rules and hostile to those who want to break the rules, which Socrates suffered a lot. In this case, the prisoner, regarded as the philosopher, should enlighten their mind instead of teaching them which is right and which is wrong because as Plato told us, the cave and the outer space exist at the same time, which means unopened truth has been already in their minds, ready to be recovered. Plato is very clear that philosophy cannot be a subject to study from the shadows without motion. Like Socrates, a philosopher must question everythingeven, or maybe especially, those things that seem so obvious, those things everyone agrees about. A life without philosophy is a life of shadows and inside a cave. Our knowledge of shadows may be excellent, but you will be ignorant of the objects that create the shadows. There is only one way to know reality, Plato believes. We must rely on our reason rather than our senses, untested opinions, or feelings. Back to text, were told that the prisoner finally understand that the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed are just illusory reflections of the visible world by comparison and reasoning himself,PART IIIComment on the movie The Oxford MurdersIn this movie, the director tried to persuade us that philosophy is dead, which reflects in daily life. But a student raised an contradiction that mathematics can be regarded as a truth. So in this movie, the following story is meant to provide us a proof that mathematical logic is not worth of relying on and it is not always real. A series of Pythagoras figure symbols the mathematical logic, where in this movie people tried their best to find the law and regard this as the truth which is used by the murder to commit crimes. Innocent people think that if they can discover the truth, they can predict the next crime and put the murderer into prison. But the result in this movie told us that we are all wrong. There isnt any law to obey. People made a mistake of empiricism and tend to believe that we would know who the murderer is and where the next crime is. I also tend to believe. But when I ask myself that how they can predict the next one, firstly I think that it is the flaw of the movie and then I realize that there is no answer.So when we step back to the first screen in this movie, we are asked the question whether we can know the truth. The movie told us we can not get the truth and all of these so-called laws are just for us to comfort our mind that we are born meaningfully. In this case, we can see what a