The Problems of Philosophy

Index
INDEX The interrogations indicate places where a view is discussed, not asserted [To use this index divide the sought page number by the number of pages in the book, 160, and scroll down that fraction. Example: "Phenomenon" is on page 86. 86/160=53%. Scroll down 53% into the file and there you are. (Or just use the search function.)] Absolute idea, 142 Acquaintance, 43 ff., 60, 108, 109, 119, 136 with Self? 50 Act, mental, 41 Analytic, 82 Appearance, 9, 16 A priori, 74-7, 80, 82 ff., 103 ff. mental? 88 Arithmetic, 84 Association, 62 63 65 Being, 100 Belief, 119 ff., instinctive, 24 25 Berkeley, George (Bishop), 12, 13, 15, 16, 36, 38 ff., 73, 95, 97 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, 54-8 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 95 Cantor, Georg, 147 Causality, 63, 69, 83 China, Emperor of, 44, 75 C...

Bibliographic Note
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The student who wishes to acquire an elementary knowledge of philosophy will find it both easier and more profitable to read some of the works of the great philosophers than to attempt to derive an all-round view from handbooks. The following are specially recommended: PLATO: Republic, especially Books VI and VII. DESCARTES: Meditations. SPINOZA: Ethics. LEIBNIZ: The Monadology. BERKELEY: Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. HUME: Inquiry concerning Human Understanding. KANT: Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic.

Chapter 15 : The Value of Philosophy
CHAPTER XV THE VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY HAVING now come to the end of our brief and very incomplete review of the problems of philosophy, it will be well to consider, in conclusion, what is the value of philosophy and why it ought to be studied. It is the more necessary to consider this question, in view of the fact that many men, under the influence of science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hairsplitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible. This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or p...

Chapter 14 : The Limits of Philosophical Knowledge
CHAPTER XIV THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE IN all that we have said hitherto concerning philosophy, we have scarcely touched on many matters that occupy a great space in the writings of most philosophers. Most philosophers -- or, at any rate, very many -- profess to be able to prove, by a priori metaphysical reasoning, such things as the fundamental dogmas of religion, the essential rationality of the universe, the illusoriness of matter, the unreality of all evil, and so on. There can be no doubt that the hope of finding reason to believe such theses as these has been the chief inspiration of many lifelong students of philosophy. This hope, I believe, is vain. It would seem that knowledge concerning the universe as a whole is not to be obtained by metaphysics, and that the proposed proofs that, in virtue of the laws of logic such and such things must exist and such and such others cannot, are not capable of surviving a...

Chapter 13 : On Knowledge, Error, and Probable Opinion
CHAPTER XIII KNOWLEDGE, ERROR, AND PROBABLE OPINION THE question as to what we mean by truth and falsehood, which we considered in the preceding chapter, is of much less interest than the question as to how we can know what is true and what is false. This question will occupy us in the present chapter. There can be no doubt that some of our beliefs are erroneous; thus we are led to inquire what certainty we can ever have that such and such a belief is not erroneous. In other words, can we ever know anything at all, or do we merely sometimes by good luck believe what is true? Before we can attack this question, we must, however, first decide what we mean by 'knowing', and this question is not so easy as might be supposed. At first sight we might imagine that knowledge could be defined as 'true belief'. When what we believe is true, it might be supposed that we had achieved a knowledge of what we believe. But this would...

PREFACE IN the following pages I have confined myself in the main to those problems of philosophy in regard to which I thought it possible to say something positive and constructive, since merely negative criticism seemed out of place. For this reason, theory of knowledge occupies a larger space than metaphysics in the present volume, and some topics much discussed by philosophers are treated very briefly, if at all. I have derived valuable assistance from unpublished writings of G. E. Moore and J. M. Keynes: from the former, as regards the relations of sense-data to physical objects, and from the latter as regards probability and induction. I have also profited greatly by the criticisms and suggestions of Professor Gilbert Murray. 1912...

On Intuitive Knowledge
CHAPTER XI ON INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE THERE is a common impression that everything that we believe ought to be capable of proof, or at least of being shown to be highly probable. It is felt by many that a belief for which no reason can be given is an unreasonable belief. In the main, this view is just. Almost all our common beliefs are either inferred, or capable of being inferred, from other beliefs which may be regarded as giving the reason for them. As a rule, the reason has been forgotten, or has even never been consciously present to our minds. Few of us ever ask ourselves, for example, what reason there is to suppose the food we are just going to eat will not turn out to be poison. Yet we feel, when challenged, that a perfectly good reaso...

How A Priori Knowledge is Possible
CHAPTER VIII HOW A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE IS POSSIBLE IMMANUEL KANT is generally regarded as the greatest of the modern philosophers. Though he lived through the Seven Years War and the French Revolution, he never interrupted his teaching of philosophy at Konigsberg in East Prussia. His most distinctive contribution was the invention of what he called the 'critical' philosophy, which, assuming as a datum that there is knowledge of various kinds, inquired how such knowledge comes to be possible, and deduced, from the answer to this inquiry, many metaphysical results as to the nature of the world. Whether these results were valid may well be doubted. But Kant undoubtedly deserves credit for two things: first, for having perceived that we have a pri...

NOTE TO SEVENTEENTH IMPRESSION WITH reference to certain statements on pages 44, 75, 131, and 132, it should be remarked that this book was written in the early part of 1912 when China was still an Empire, and the name of the then late Prime Minister did begin with the letter B. 1943...

Knowledge by Acquiantance and Knowledge by Description
CHAPTER V KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE AND KNOWLEDGE BY DESCRIPTION IN the preceding chapter we saw that there are two sorts of knowledge: knowledge of things, and knowledge of truths. In this chapter we shall be concerned exclusively with knowledge of things, of which in turn we shall have to distinguish two kinds. Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance, is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths, though it would be rash to assume that human beings ever, in fact, have acquaintance with things without at the same time knowing some truth about them. Knowledge of things by description, on the contrary, always involves, as we shall find in the course...