How to do Philosophy (Intro to Philosophy Coursera Week 1)

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. A continuation of the commentary on Week 1 of Introduction to Philosophy from Coursera. How do we practice philosophy? Classically, we say that philosophy is done by argumentation. Arguments are basically just a set of statements which are divided into the reasons for our belief or premises, and the belief we are trying to reason that is a conclusion.

The idea of arguments are presuppositional in my understanding of the matter. When I do philosophy, I do argue, but I don’t make my arguments explicit as in a proper form of premises and conclusions. I simply state the reason behind my beliefs and let it be in that kind of writing. It is certainly a raw and crude way of philosophy, which I desire to improve in the future. When I say arguments are presuppositional, I mean that the argumentative method is so utterly fundamental to philosophy that there is really no other way around it. You either provide a reason to your beliefs, or you don’t. Without reason, all beliefs are arbitrary and truth is impossible to attain. Yet such is not the case, therefore we must have reason.

What is reason though? Reason is simply the fulfillment of the truth of a particular matter. What I mean by this is that if such and such is true, what makes it true? What element or component of that idea or matter which determines it to be true? In my own system, I would say it this way. In what way is the idea or belief identical to the categorical criterion or criteria of truth such that we can say that the belief belongs within the category we call truth? That is the foundation of the idea of arguments, that all true beliefs and ideas have a property which fulfills the categorical criteria of being truth. This property is what we call reason or premise.

 

For an argument to be valid, the reason for the belief has to actually support the belief. That is, if the reason for the truth of the belief is true, then the belief must be true. However, for an argument to be sound, that is valid and the belief is actually true, then the reasons or premises have to be true as well. So from this description we can infer that beliefs can be supported by other beliefs. We believe something is true because we believe another thing is true. There is another way we can believe in something, that is to say we believe because we have “seen”. To “see” here simply means that we have direct contact with the object of our belief such that we can immediately believe in that object without needing mediation from other beliefs.

This is an additional comment about the mechanism of reasoning by other belief. When we base our beliefs on other beliefs, we recognize that all beliefs are founded in another belief. Even the fundamental belief of awareness comes from itself, it is a self-evident belief. Now beliefs create a system of beliefs which are in general patterns of reality. When we see into reality and try to ascertain how a part of reality fits into our belief system, we observe how it coheres into the patterns. As such, philosophy can be said to be largely about discovering patterns and applying those patterns where applicable. It is to discover an order, a law so to speak. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

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