Philosophy
Modified: 2025-02-12 9:10 PM CST
Remember my model for this course. I'm providing you with the essentials of the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science. We must understand those first, at least in broad outline, before we can understand cognitive science itself. This page may appear scary and long but that is a consequence of philosophy's long history. A complete understanding of cognitive science presupposes an understanding of philosophy.
History of Philosophy
- Philosophies
- Milesian School
- Thales 624-546 BCE (first philosopher, one of the 7 sages)
- Anaximander 610-546 BCE (gnomon, geographer, model of the universe
- You can be a living gnomon if you stand in front of Harton Theatre at the Smith Sundial
- Try it and notice that your height makes a difference in the length of shadow you cast.
- Anaximenes 586-526 (physical continuity)
- He proposed conversion links between the Greek elements air to water to earth and then to fire
- These philosophers asked questions about the physical world
- Thus, they were the earliest physicists
- Mathematics and Philosophy
- Pythagoras 570-495 BCE (theorem?, cult leader, reincarnation, afterlife)
- Pythagoras likely brought the theorem named after him back from Egypt
- Some now believe his mathematical prowess was overblown
- Xenophanes 570-475 BCE (Gods?, rainbow, clouds, naturalistic explanations)
- He said that horses would create gods that looked like horses
- "if horses and cattle could draw or sculpt, they would create gods in their own images"
- Heraclitus (535-475 BCE (change, contradiction, unity)
- Life and death, day and night, you never step into the same river twice
- Life and death are bound together as are nighttime and daytime
- Any river is a thing but it an everchanging thing
- Mathematics and philosophy were united early on. Much later (20th century) mathematics became the "language" of natural science
- Geometry preceded algebra which preceded calculus
- The Milesians were natural philosophers and wanted to provide naturalistic, not supernatural explanations about the universe
- Eleatics
- Parmenides circa 515 BCE (rationalist, monist, unchanging and constant universe)
- Opposed Milesian materialism and Heraclitus's doctrine of change
- For him the universe was constant, singular, stationary, and perfect
- Zeno of Elea 495-430 BCE (famous paradoxes, reductio ad absurdum)
- Showed that real world and logic did not map onto each other completely
- The swift warrior Achilles can never catch the turtle who had a head start in a race if Achilles, at each interval, halves the distance between them (logically true but realistically false)
- More about the race
- Notice than in American football a penalty can never result in a touchdown for the defensive team
- Imagine a team on offense incurring several penalties near their own goal line.
- The referee would penalize them half the distance to goal line repeatedly but could never reach the goal line
- Melissus circa 5th Century BCE
- First to posit the notion of nothingness, (the void)
- Think about it, "nothing" is "something"
- The Eleatic philosophers were the first to look to the human mind as the source of all knowledge
- Rationalism: the universe, including physical events, can only be explained by the action of the human mind
- The eleatics were rationalists who believed that everything could be understood by using the human mind.
- Hard to categorize early philosophers
- Empedocles 490-430 BCE (four elements: fire, water, earth, air; love and strife)
- The Greek elements had a history
- He instroduced love and strife as psychological variables
- Think of movies: romcoms vs action adventure vs date movies (those have romance and action)
- Anaxagoras 500-428 (first philosopher to live in Athens)
- Tried to reconcile Milesian materialism and Eleatic rationalism
- First to discuss the concept of mind
- Mind has been part of philosophy ever since
- Banished from Athens because of his teachings against Greek religion
- Democritus 460-370 BCE (atomic theory, theory of perception, no Golden Age)
- His atoms were unlike modern atoms
- He, too, need the void (empty space) for the atoms to move within
- The four elements persisted long into the Middle Ages.
- Materialism is still a major mind-body solution today.
- Definition: materialism is the belief tha everything in the universe must consist of matter, including minds and mental states
- All of the philosophers in this section are each approaching philsophy from a wide variety of viewpoints.
- Sophists and Nihilists
- Protagoras 490-420 BCE(rhetoric, language, retreat from "truth"
- Changed the definition of philosophy
- From search for truth to focus on words and their correct use or rhetoric
- "Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."
- Plato (see below) disagreed with him
- Gorgias 485-380 BCE (orator, nihilist, study of humans and their words, Plato's dialogue Gorgias attacked him
- The sophists substituted successful argument for the search for truth
- Gorgias was famous for spinning the guilt of Helen of Troy and the Trojan war in both directions, pro and anti, and being able to convince his audience in both cases
- The nihilists argued that there was not need for any type of philosophy
- Nihilism: the belief that nothing exists that can be known or communicated
- So if I were a nihilist, I would not teach this class
- If you were a nihilist, you would not enroll in higher education
- In other words, since it is impossible to know anything, why bother?t
- Sophists wanted to use rhetoric as the definition of philosophy.
- Nihilists wanted to dispose of philosophy.
- Socratic Philosophy
- Socrates (Socratic method, gadfly, "know thyself," condemned-hemlock)
- Socratic method
- Ask pointed questions so that student learns and understands
- Socrates and his students, like gadflies, questioned Athenian ideas
- Socrates was condemned and executed for impiety (refusing to honor the Greek gods) and corruption of the youth of Athens
- He could have taken exile instead of death
- Sayings
- Know thyself
- An unexamined life is not worth living
- If I know anything, it is that I know nothing
- Plato
- Socrates' student
- Was present at Socrates's execution
- Later wrote dialogues, with many including Socrates as a literary character
- Founded a school, The Academy
- Searched for absolute truths, the forms
- Goodness, Beauty, Equality, Unity, Sameness, Difference, Change, Changelessness were his forms
- BUT, they could only be found in the PHILOSOPHER'S mind
- Against the Sophists and their relativism
- Allegory of the cave (from the Republic) (video)
- The prisoners are like ordinary people, they cannot perceive the forms that philosophers can "see" inside their minds
- Only philosophers could see the ideal world
- Expanded philosophy to include:
- metaphysics (the study of first principles)
- epistemology (the study of how we come to know things)
- political theory
- language
- art
- mathematics
- science
- religion
- Aristotle
- Plato's most famous student
- Proto-scientist
- Unlike Plato he looked to the world for inspiration and knowledge
- Studied topics in biology and psychology
- Founded his own school, The Lyceum, after being denied leadership of The Academy
- School of Athens (detail) Raphael
- Note the symbolism of Aristotle pointing down and Plato pointing up
- Plato was pointing up to the ideal world in his mind
- Aristotle was pointing down to the real world he was standing on
- The unmoved mover was a place in the universe that was constant. Aristotle required it for his physics
- In the Middle Ages the unmoved mover became God
- His physics lasted until the 1600s
- He put the earth in the center of the universe (e.g., the solar system)
- Galileo (and others) put the sun in the center of the universe (e.g., the solar system)
- Aristotle, single-handedly, created deductive logic
- The BIG THREE of philosophy still loom large today. Law schools still use the Socratic method.
- Plato pioneered the dialogue as an instructional method and pointed to an ideal world inside his mind
- Aristotle was more inclined than Plato to once again study the physical world
- During the Middle Ages the church codified Aristotle's works as dogma and blocked scientific progress for many years.
- Philosophy did not end with the Big Three.
- Later Greek Philosophers
- Philosophy did not end with the Big Three.
- Cynics, Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans followed
- Cynics
- Adopted an ascetic lifestyle
- Pursued virtue in simplicity
- Were respected and tolerated by Athenians
- They questioned authority
- Stoics
- Represent what we now call "pagan" philosophy
- Were the dominant philosophy in the Roman Empire until around 312 CE
- Believed in a rational universe and in honoring the gods
- Embraced the world and accepted its consequences
- Accepted their fate
- Did not have any idea about charity
- The rich were fated to be rich
- The poor were fated to be poor
- Skeptics
- Thought it was premature to accept truths derived from philosophy
- Believed they did not yet possess enough information
- The were against dogmatism
- Definition: dogmatism is the excessively positive belief in the truth of one's convictions.
- Epicureans
- Sought to escape the world in Epicurus's Gardens
- Accepted all into their group including women and slaves
- Were hedonists who believed there was no afterlife
- Did not pursue power, fame, and riches
- Did not believe that the Greek gods interfered in the world of mortals
- These later Greek philosophers had different points of view.
- Western Medieval "Philosophy"
- Many argue that philosophy, as we now know it, was dormant for much of the Middle Ages
- Instead, much of the effort was toward reconciling knowledge with faith
- For example, proving the existence of God
- Christian Philosophers
- Augustine (test for afterlife, predestination, start of Middle Ages)
- City of God-his major book, contrasts sacred and profane
- He created a transcendental, religious philosophy: earth and heaven, move from one to the other (maybe)
- A type of dualism
- World vs Heaven or Hell
- He argued we transcend (move) from the world to heaven or hell
- Anselm (proof of God's existence, first scholasticist)
- First scholastic thinker
- "faith seeking understanding"
- Use reason to confirm mysteries of Christian faith
- Scholasticism: the dominant mode of thought in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages that attempted to reconcile faith and reason using scripture and recovered Aristotelian sources.
- Abelard (Heloise, nominalism vs. realism)
- Used logic to improve upon the truths of revelation
- Platonism and Neo-Platonism (at that time)
- Aristotle's works slowly appearing in translation
- Troubled by universals
(e.g., nominalism vs realism)
- nominalism was new, an invention of medieval logic
- it held that words could apply to single cases as well as to universal ones
- So, "cat" could refer to a particular cat or to all cats
- Albertus Magnus (first to return to empiricism)
- Translated all of Aristotle into Latin
- The works of Aristotle were latecomers to Europe (in translated form)
- One of the first empiricists of his era
- Observed natural phenomena
- Collected specimens
- Was able to do so because of his reputation
- Theology should be separate from natural philosophy (e.g., science)
- First to separate theology from philosophy (in his era, and prominent enough to get away with it)
- Thomas Aquinas (reconciled Aristotle and Christian teachings)
- Saw no conflict between revelation and philosophy
- But, philosophy could never disagree with theology
- Philosophy could not support or confirm theological issues such as the nature of Trinity.
- Some "truths" had to be accepted on faith
- He reconciled Christian faith with Aristotelian logic
- Perverse effect, however: Led to codification of Aristotle, not to science as we know it
- Dogma now included Scripture AND Aristotle!
- William of Ockham (his razor)
- Ockham's Razor
- Basically, Ockham's Razor "cuts away" any unnecessary explanation
- Example: the dog who could tell time. The man's dog always showed up at 4 pm at the factory gate and walked home with him. Could the dog really tell time? Not likely. But, a 3:50 pm, Monday through Friday the factory whistle blew. Maybe the dog had learned to use that cue to walk to the factory
- Helped open the door to secularism
- Eventually, Christianity and philosophy slowly part ways in the Western world
- The Christian Church had little need for Greek philosophy other than to prove the existence of God.
- They, ultimately, adopted Aristotle's physics and disallowed further empirical study.
- Islamic Falsafa
(Arabic for "philosophy")
- Al-Kindi
- Called the "first philosopher" of Arab world (falsafa is Arabic word for philosophy)
- Worked in the House of Knowledge
- Trademarks of falsafa
- Philosophy is systematic whole
- He and the Greek philosophers agreed on cosmos, soul, and first principle (e.g., metaphysics)
- Al-Farabi (wideranging interests, philosophy for philosophers, revelation for the masses)
- Philosophy for philosophers and revelation for the masses
- Meaning, not everyone could be educated
- Philosophers could reconcile the truth found with the revelations in the Qu'ran
- Again notice the conflict between religion and philosophy
- Political scientist: ideal state would be run by Islamic philosophers
- Avicenna (physician, added to five senses)
- Cognition
- Expanded on Aristotle's five senses, adding: interior senses and common sense and instincts
- Linked them to parts of the brain
- The common sense too
- Instinctive faculty: fear, attraction
- Major influence on Western medicine
- Averroës (the Commentator, types of arguments)
- Philosophy and religion saw the same truths
- Only one truth and both the Qu'ran and demonstrative method would yield same result (eventually)
- Especially for those "well founded in knowledge" or in other words: philosophers
- Little influence with Islam
- Islamic philosophy before 1000 AD was far advanced over its Western version
- After 1000 AD, however, it was never able to split itself into a secular version
- Most influential of the Arabic philosophers to Western thinkers
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- Modern Philosophers
- British empiricists
- Thomas Hobbes (social contract, state of nature)
- Social Contract
- The social contract was Hobbes's solution to the state of nature
- People gave up their individual rights to a ruler, who in turn protected them with laws
- Hobbes's version of the social contract was modified by Locke (see below)
- John Locke (tabula rasa, primary and secondary perception)
- Tabula Rasa
- Empirical metaphor
- Graphic: notice how experience fills the slate of the mind

- As one ages, empirical knowledge fills the "blank slate" that is the mind
- George Berkeley (secondary perception only, idealism)
- Wrote: Esse est percipi (to be is to perceive)
- Attacking both Descartes' dualism AND Hobbes' materialism
- All of the primary qualities came from perception
- David Hume (rid philosophy of metaphysics, impressions, resemblance, continuity, passions, cause and effect)
- Goals for his philosophy
- Rid philosophy of metaphysics
- Improve the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley
- Create a science of human nature
- Cause and Effect
- New and different way of looking at it
- It came from perception not from a priori knowledge
- In other words, experience led to cause and effect knowledge
- This is similar to operant conditioning
- a repeated pairing of a response and a reinforcer leads to expectation that reinforcer will follow the response
- Utilitarians
- When something is good for group but not for individual
- A problem for utilitarianism:
- What to do when an action is personally deleterious but good for the group?
- Common theme in art, literature, and film
- Mission to Mars self-sacrifice scene (video). If Blake's character had not killed himself the entire crew would have died trying to save him.
- Jeremy Bentham (when is it utile, no intrinsic moral behaviors, social reformer)
- No intrinsically moral behaviors (they changed in time and place)
- In other words, moral relativism existed. What was moral today might not be so in the future
- Example today: What to do about Confederate monuments
- Social reformer: anti-slavery, pro women's rights
- John Stuart Mill (guilt, search for utility)
- Most influential British philosopher of 19th century
- Divided Bentham's pleasures into categories: higher and lower
- Argued for internal constraints on morality (guilt)
- Mill was an early contributor to clinical and counseling psychology
- Utilitarianism and Evolution
- Led to widespread search for utility:
- function of animal body parts
- universal laws of learning
- Influential in Great Britain
- The British empiricist tradition indirectly led to the USA's Declaration of Independence and its Constitution
- Continental rationalists
- Rene Descartes (analytic geometry, mind-body problem, cogito ergo sum)
- He wrote: Discourse on Method (plus Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry)
- Refraction (air/water)-Snell's law video
- Helped convince Descartes that senses could not be trusted.
- His Rationalism depended on the mind, not observations
- His cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) gave him a foundation for building a rationalist philosophy
- Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (doubly persecuted, pantheist, rationality over passions)
- His pantheistic ideas made him a pariah to both the Jewish and Christian communities
- Pantheism: is the belief that God is in everything
- He believed that rational thought could moderate passion
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (monads, against Cartesian materialism and interaction)
- His Mind-Body solution, pre-established harmony led directly to his notion of monads
- Monads were:
- indivisible
- infinite
- do not occupy space
- God is a monad (the top one)
- Animal monads existed too, but were unable to achieve rational thought
- Monads revealed the same truth, but represented it from two points of view (science represents physical world and philosophy the mental world)
- Represent a circle
- It can be represented geometrically as a figure, algebraically as a formula (x2 + y2 = r2), algorithmically as a procedure (e.g., fix the point of a compass onto a piece of paper and rotate the end holding the pencil 360°), or mentally as an image.
- In every representation, however, it is still a circle
- Notice how this early description of representation fits into Cognitive Science
- One way to understand monads is from the movie The Matrix
- That movie nicely illustrated the pre-established harmony Mind-Body solution
- In the movie most people believe they are living normal lives (the mind)
- In reality, however, they have been imprisoned by machines and are stuck away in a dark place where their bodies are being used for energy (the reality)
- Neo, the hero, makes a choice (swallows the Red Pill--video) to live in the real world and to defeat the machines
- The real world in The Matrix, a pod
- Want more explanation? Click HERE
- Immanuel Kant (against Leibnitz and Hume, moral behavior, a priori innate knowledge)
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Book was against Leibniz's rationalism and Hume's skepticism
- Against Hume he wrote:
- "I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction."
- Against Leibniz he argued that his monads were not required to understand the world
- Kant argued fo a priori innate knowledge (meaning these qualities of mind were innate, not learned)
- Quantity: unity, plurality, totality
- Quality: reality, negation, limitation
- Relation: inherence and subsistence, cause and effect, community
- Modality: possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, necessity, contingency
- Intuitions: space, time
- My easy way to understand Kant: think that space, time, causality are innate
- Oops, later research showed that all of Kant's categories are learned
- Johann Friedrich Herbart (threshold, apperceptive mass)
- Threshold or Limen: important to early psychology
- One of his most original contributions
- Apperceptive Mass
- Extension of Leibniz's apperception
- Sum total of competing ideas
- Imagine a triangle:
- It has three sides
- Now imagine a triangle with four sides, does not make sense, not an apperceptive mass
- Imagine a yardstick
- It has two ends
- Now imagine a yardstick with only one end, does not make sense, not an apperceptive mass
- Psychology and mathematics (mathematical psychologists are rare today)
- threshold or limen-Herbart's conception of a limit below which an idea will be out of consciousness, and conversely, in consciousness when above it.
- The rationalists argued that much of human knowledge existed a priori.
- Romanticists
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Absolute ego)
- Ethical idealism
- Combined Kant's dualisms, understanding and sensibility into one idea:
- Absolute ego
- Humans possesed finite egos that could never reach the absolute ego
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (Absolute idealism)
- Absolute idealism
- Redifined matter itself
- Mind and Body became one living Absolute
- Consciousness was at one end and the simplest animal bodies at the other end
- In other words only complexity separated living things
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Absolute, knowledge historical, dialectic, alienation)
- Highly influential philosopher
- “virtually every major philosophical movement of the twentieth century—existentialism, Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy—grew out of reaction against Hegel” (Beiser, F. (2005). Hegel. New York: Routledge, p.2)
- Kept the Absolute and the historical nature of knowledge
- No one person could know everything (knowledge was historical)
- Dialectic: from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato
- Led to: thesis-antithesis to synthesis as a historical force
- You should watch this video
- Alienation (still a topic in psychology today)
- Knowing that you are not a part of society
- Teen agers
- Racial inequality
- Gender inequality
- Slavery
- Utilitarianism and romanticism influential to rise of the social sciences and to psychology in Germany
- The romanticists argued against Enlightenment ideas and looked for a closer and sensual relationship with the world
Philosophy and Cognitive Science
- Philosophy is the original source of many questions yet of interest to CS
- All modern academic departments, in one way or another, owe a deep debt to philosophy
- The philosophy of cognitive science
- Subdivided into:
- Academic Disciplines
- Psychology, Neuroscience, AI, Linguistics, and more
- Topics
- Explanation, Reduction, Theory Building
- Topics Specific to Cognition
- Mental Representation, Computation, Embodiment, Consciousness, and more
- Areas of Cognition
- Perception, Motor Control, Language, Reasoning, Consciousness, and more
- Part of database PhilPapers
- shows many of the current areas of interest in both disciplines
- "PhilPapers is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. We monitor all sources of research content in philosophy, including journals, books, and open access archives. We also host the largest open access archive in philosophy. Our index currently contains 2,554,360 entries categorized in 5,671 categories. PhilPapers has over 270,000 registered users."
- Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science
(Chapter 1) (Limited free access)
- "The philosophy of cognitive science emerged out of a set of common and overlapping interests among philosophers and scientists who study the mind. We identify five categories of issues that illustrate the best work in this broad field:
(1) traditional philosophical issues about the mind that have been invigorated by research in cognitive science,
(2) issues regarding the practice of cognitive science and its foundational assumptions,
(3) issues regarding the explication and clarification of core concepts in cognitive science,
(4) first-order empirical issues where philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary investigation of particular psychological phenomena,
(5) traditional philosophical issues that aren’t about the mind but that can be informed by a better understanding of how the mind works."
- Why cognitive science needs philosophy and vice versa: Thagard
(2009)
- Abstract
- Contrary to common views that philosophy is extraneous to cognitive science, this paper argues that philosophy has a crucial role to play in cognitive science with respect to generality and normativity.
- General questions include the nature of theories and explanations, the role of computer simulation in cognitive theorizing, and the relations among the different fields of cognitive science.
- Normative questions include whether human thinking should be Bayesian, whether decision making should maximize expected utility, and how norms should be established.
- These kinds of general and normative questions make philosophical reflection an important part of progress in cognitive science. Philosophy operates best, however, not with a priori reasoning or conceptual analysis, but rather with empirically informed reflection on a wide range of findings in cognitive science.
- Keywords: Cognitive science; Philosophy; Generality; Normativity; Theories; Explanations;Computer simulation; Bayesian inference; Decision making
- Comments
- Generality: answering questions beyond disciplinary boundaries
- Normativity: understanding the difference between how things are and how they should be
- Theories and explanations: Both must be defined and researchers should especially attend to the issue of causality. Philosophers, because of their training and long history understand the big picture vis a vis theories and how to apply them across disciplines.
- Computer simulation: theories, models, and computer programs are distinct components for understanding data in cognitive science.
- Recent article (2025)
- Argues that non-flying dinosaurs evolved wing-like forelimbs to flush prey
- Relations of the fields: As we have already seen in Nuñez et al.'s article, the original six fields of cognitive science have not all equally contributed to progress over the years.
- Instead, psychology has become more influential while anthropology and neuroscience have each become less involved.
- In addition, should the field now be called cognitive science or cognitive sciences?
- Normative questions:
- Normative means prescriptive (you should not get a tattoo)
- Whereas descriptive simply reveals observations (you have red hair).
- How should cognitive science distinguish between these two?
- In other words, how should cognitive scientists make decisions that go beyond discoveries and impact on moral questions.
- A current example is facial recognition algorithms.
- Cognitive science invented those, but who should decide how to use them?
- Why philosophy needs cognitive science:
- Some styles of philosophy are not beneficial to cognitive science; they are:
- rationalist approaches (see above),
- analytic approaches,
- postmodernist approaches.
- On the other hand, naturalist approaches are beneficial to cognitive science.
- Conclusions: Ignoring philosophical reflection leads to bad philosophy and to bad science.
- Metaphors for the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science include:
- foundation (Descartes)
- implies that philosophy must come first
- cable or chain (Peirce)
- implies a connection between philosophy and science
- ship (Neurath)
- but, a ship that must only repair itself at sea
- ants, spiders, and bees (Bacon)
- ants are the experimentalists
- spiders's webs are only made from themselves
- bees gather nectar from plants and transform that into honey by their own power
- Bacon, in his own words:
- Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas.
- The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use.
- The reasoners resemble spiders who make cobwebs out of their own substance.
- But the bee takes a middle course. It gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
- Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments, and lay it up in the memory whole as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested.
- Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.
- Bacon's notion best describes the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science (on the test, FYI)
Modern Subfields of Philosophy
- Metaphysics*
- Moral Philosophy*
- Epistemology*
- Esthetics*
- Logic/Language*
- Mind*
- Political
*CS related
If you crave more detail on these subjects and philosopher see my pages on them from the History of Psychology course
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