By Simon Blackburn
A lively introduction to philosophy
Subject
Themes
Philosophy is reframed as "conceptual engineering," the disciplined examination of the structures of thought through which human beings understand themselves and their world. The concepts people live by, about knowledge, freedom, identity, morality, and reality, form a kind of mental housing. Sometimes that housing serves well; sometimes it needs renovation or demolition. The task of philosophy is to inspect the foundations before deciding what to do.
Philosophy is reframed as "conceptual engineering," the disciplined examination of the structures of thought through which human beings understand themselves and their world. The concepts people live by, about knowledge, freedom, identity, morality, and reality, form a kind of mental housing.…
Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, Think arrived at a moment of considerable tension within academic philosophy and intellectual culture more broadly. The so-called "science wars" of the 1990s had brought epistemological questions about objectivity, truth, and the status of scientific…
Philosophy is not a body of doctrines to be memorised but a practice of examining the structures of thought. The metaphor of "conceptual engineering" captures this precisely. Just as a structural engineer studies how the parts of a building bear weight and connect to one another, a philosopher…
A persistent thread running through the entire philosophical tradition is the question of what human beings can know and how far that knowledge extends. Descartes launched the modern version of this inquiry by proposing that the only absolutely certain knowledge is the existence of the thinking…
The question of whether human beings are genuinely free or merely determined by prior causes is not an abstract puzzle confined to philosophy seminars. It bears directly on how people think about moral responsibility, criminal justice, praise, blame, and the entire fabric of social life. If…
Few philosophical questions feel more personal than the question of what the self is. Everyone has an intimate sense of being a particular "I," a unified subject of experience that persists through time and change. Yet when this sense is subjected to philosophical scrutiny, it proves remarkably…
The shift from theoretical to practical philosophy raises a question that every person confronts: how should one live? This is not a technical problem about adapting means to ends. It is a question about which ends are worth pursuing, and on what basis moral judgments can claim authority. The…
On 10 November 1619, in the southern German town of Ulm, Rene Descartes locked himself in a stove-heated room and resolved to demolish everything he thought he knew. His ambition was radical: strip away every belief that could conceivably be false, and rebuild knowledge from whatever survived. The…
Descartes left philosophy with a sharp division between mind and body. The mind is a private, immaterial realm of thoughts and sensations; the body is a physical mechanism governed by the laws of nature. Gilbert Ryle attacked this picture as "the ghost in the machine." Mental language, Ryle argued,…
Lucretius wondered, in ancient Rome, how free will could exist if every motion in the universe follows inevitably from the motions before it. A limerick captures the same anxiety with comic precision: a young man discovers he moves "in predestinate grooves, not even a bus, but a tram." The worry is…
Two lists set the problem. The first contains familiar facts: bodies age, memories fade, cells are replaced every few years. The second contains extraordinary possibilities: surviving bodily death, reincarnation, inhabiting a different body or mind. Various religious traditions take some of these…
Religion might not be about truth claims at all. It could function more like poetry, ritual, or communal practice, serving emotional and social purposes without making factual assertions. A marriage ceremony is neither true nor false; a funeral is not attended in order to hear something accurate.…
Arguments consist of premises and a conclusion, and two distinct things can go wrong with them. A premise can be untrue, or the reasoning from premises to conclusion can be invalid. These are separate faults. An argument can have true premises but invalid reasoning, or valid reasoning from false…
Galileo drew a sharp line between two kinds of qualities. Primary qualities, such as shape, extension, and motion, belong to objects themselves. They are there whether anyone is looking or not. Secondary qualities, such as colour, taste, smell, and sound, are different. They exist only in the…
Much everyday reasoning is technological: given a goal, the problem is how to achieve it. Fixing a refrigerator, growing flowers, building a bridge; these are matters of adapting means to ends that are already set. But the deeper philosophical questions concern the ends themselves. How should…
By Simon Blackburn
Subject
Themes
Philosophy is reframed as "conceptual engineering," the disciplined examination of the structures of thought through which human beings understand themselves and their world. The concepts people live by, about knowledge, freedom, identity, morality, and reality, form a kind of mental housing. Sometimes that housing serves well; sometimes it needs renovation or demolition. The task of philosophy is to inspect the foundations before deciding what to do.