Alain Stephen - Why We Think the Things We Think

By the same author:

This Book Will Make You Think

The 25 Rules of Grammar

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

Michael OMara Books Limited

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Tremadoc Road

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Copyright Michael OMara Books Limited 2015

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78243-413-9 in hardback print format

ISBN: 978-1-78243-411-5 in ebook format

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For Polly

Contents

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in my bedroom in my parents house bereft of anything in particular to do. The antique train-set, beautifully landscaped and papier-mchd in puce green (it had a tunnel through a mountain and two stations), which was bolted to the wall and took up almost half the room, had broken down. In truth, it was always breaking down, but it was a joy when it worked. I think it was then that I started thinking about how things work, or dont work, at some times but not others. I was not pondering this in the mundane sense, such as of a washing machine breaking down, or of dropping a mobile phone in a toilet, nor even of my train set that had worked perfectly the day before. Instead, I was developing a sense of the fallible nature of things in general.

What is at the core of this transient nature of reality that my six-year-old self was struggling to comprehend? I would hardly call it a eureka moment, but I suddenly realized that I was having a conversation with myself. I was asking questions, analysing, deliberating and, quite frankly, feeling confused. As far back as my memory serves, that seems to be the point when I first started thinking, or was conscious of being able to think, for myself.

Of course, I must have been thinking before that. I must have known not to put my hand in the open fire, or to stand in front of a bus, or to leave my bicycle out in the rain. I must have known what it was like to feel hungry or happy or angry or sad. Was this knowledge a priori (a term many philosophers are particularly keen on), meaning had I acquired this knowledge from my innate capacity for theoretical deduction, as opposed to observation of my own experiences? This voice in my head was starting to ask questions why is there a voice in our heads? Ive used the word known several times in this paragraph, in the present perfect tense most commonly used to denote unfinished time. But what would happen if time suddenly stopped; if it finished? Would every voice in everyones head suddenly stop thinking? It is a pretty fearful thought.

How long I sat thinking under the broken train set in my bedroom I dont know. One thing that has always struck me is how our personal perception of time and space seems to narrow and reduce as we get older. An hour, a day, even a month seems much longer to a six-year-old than to a forty-six-year-old. The summer holidays seem to last an age when you are an adolescent, but these days all I notice is how early the street lights go on in August. I remember returning to my old secondary school a couple of years after I had left and being struck by how small the school hall suddenly seemed. This space, with its imposing wooden stage at one end where the austere headmaster delivered his assemblies, flanked by rows of senior teachers, appeared vast when I was in the first form. It suddenly seemed to have got smaller, its dimensions had shrunk. Unless the school had undertaken radical building work, this wasnt possible. It was simply that my perception of the space or, more pertinently, my experience of myself within that space had changed.

So what relevance does a broken train set or a shrinking school hall have for the subject of philosophy? Both these phenomena represent observations and reflections from experience. How reliable these reflections are when filtered through the prism of memories is open to question. I am attempting, in a roundabout way, to come to some conclusions about what actually constitutes philosophy. Is it thinking and reflecting on the human experience of reality?

The traditional definition of a philosopher (often attributed to Pythagoras) is a lover of wisdom or knowledge. It would follow that philosophy is the study of knowledge. It is interesting to note how philosophy and science as disciplines devoted to understanding the world have separated and diverged over the last few centuries. Science seems to hold the upper hand, since it seems able to prove things. Philosophy is seen in some senses as purely theoretical, adept at asking questions but incapable of providing clear answers. Many of the great philosophers did not distinguish between the importance of disciplines such as mathematics, physics and the natural sciences over the study of ethics, aesthetics or theology. Immanuel Kant once famously asserted that philosophy was the queen of all the sciences he thought that studying thoughts and ideas or, more precisely, how ideas are formed, was of higher importance than doing sums or solving equations. The common clich is that philosophy is comprised of questions of which the answer is invariably more questions. In this light, is it possible to present philosophy in a nutshell?

This book has its work cut out, as it is composed of questions. These questions, it is hoped, will have occurred to most people from time to time, especially during quiet moments of reflection or observation (like my younger self sat under the train set).

I have been necessarily selective in the philosophers I have chosen to elucidate the questions, and have tried, where possible, to provide counter-arguments and perspectives. Fundamental questions such as what is happiness? have been examined by many philosophers and writers through the ages, and to attempt a comprehensive review of all of the literature on the subject would, of course, fill a library. I apologize for any omissions, and hope my summaries will encourage you to further investigate the questions. Many of the key ideas and issues overlap, so I have attempted to signpost where relationships exist. There are undoubtedly many related ideas in the study of ethics, aesthetics and systems of belief. We owe it to ourselves never to stop trying to learn new things or, more importantly, to question why some things are, and other things are not. Maybe the right to examine ideas and thoughts is philosophy in a nutshell.

Alain Stephen

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions concerning the nature of existence and relationships between mind and matter. The word first appears in the works of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384322 BCE ) as metaphusika, meaning after physics. This has led to the common interpretation of metaphysics as the study of things beyond the physical world, or of things that cannot be analysed through scientific experiment, observation or method. There is a theory that Aristotles use of the word can be attributed to the first editor of his collected works, Andronicus of Rhodes. Aristotle wrote treatises on a vast range of subjects and the word metaphusika was Andronicus method of classifying a series of writings that were not concerned with disciplines such as science, mathematics or law.