Lesson 4 Notes PHIL 104: Philosophy and Society

Lecturer: Bonface Nyamweya (0752035439)

Class Slogan: "Let Wisdom Flow Bothways"
Topic: The Philosophical Foundations of the Society
Introduction: what is a society?
➢ Society may be defined as the permanent union of men who
are united by modes of behaviour that are demanded by some
common end, value, or interest.
➢ Its notion differs from that of community in that community
is a form of society in which men are more intimately bound
by specific ends and natural forces.
➢ Society itself is not possible, however, unless based upon
some common moral and legal understanding with social laws
and controls to sustain it; hence some characteristics of the
community are found also in society.
Plato’s concept of society
➢ At the beginning of Book II of the Republic, Glaucon and
Adeimantus ask Socrates to tell them what it is to be just or
unjust, and why a person should be just.
➢ Socrates suggests in reply that they consider first what it is for
a polis to be just or unjust.
➢ A polis/state/society is bigger than an individual, he says, so
its justice should be more readily visible.
➢ He proceeds to add that a society is formed due to the
individual needs and our limitations to satisfy them perfectly
at the individual level.
➢ For example, a carpenter needs a doctor for treatment and
both need a chef to enjoy a nice lunch or a teacher for their
children at school, etc thus we have different skills and we
serve the needs of the society for mutual benefit.
➢ Human beings have a soul that has three parts: The rational
(responsible for reasoning), spirited (responsible for courage)
and appetitive (responsible for desires/pleasures).
➢ Depending on which part of the soul is dominant, the
person’s strata shall be determined.
➢ At the top we have the philosopher king whose rational part
of the soul reigns. This person has gold in the blood to signify
incorruptibility, and has the sole duty of contemplating about
pure ideas on the wellbeing of the state. The philosopher king
is detached from the material wealth etc.
➢ Secondly, we have the soldiers in whom we find the spirited
part of the soul dominant. They have bronze in their blood to
signify fortitude. Their duty is to protect the state from
attacks and to protect thus the boundaries of their nation.
They don’t desire material wealth and anyone who does so is
demolished in the rank to the peasants.
➢ Lastly, we have the peasants whose blood has iron to signify
strength. Their souls are dominated by the appetitive part
hence they desire material wealth etc. They marry and
reproduce.
➢ In the other book by Plato called the Laws, he suggests that a
society is formed as a result of the groupings of primitive
families to form tribes that then combine to form a society.
➢ This definition poses the family as the basic unit of the society.
➢ It also points out the biological origins of the society.
Aristotle’s concept of the society
➢ Aristotle in his Politics says that a state is not merely an
aggregate of individuals; rather, it is largely self-sufficient
community where the community helps to meet the needs of
the individuals therein to attain a good life and happiness.
➢ A society for Aristotle is a natural entity not artificial.
➢ As far as the individual persons are not self-sufficient, human
beings are social animals.
➢ To attain the good life or happiness or a life in accordance
with virtue, individuals need the support of the society.
➢ Antagonism only arises when the state is organised to serve
private ends rather than the common good.
➢ True forms of government include: Monarchy (rule of the
best person), Aristocracy (rule by the few best persons),
polity (rule by many with few best persons).
➢ Aristotle prefers Monarchy and Aristocracy but recommends
Polity because of its high public participation.
➢ These forms of government however fail when they turn into
private interests instead of the common interests of the
people. As such, Monarchy corrupts into tyranny,
Aristocracy corrupts into oligarchy, and Polity corrupts into
democracy.
Thomas Hobbes’ Concept of Society
➢ In his renowned book The Leviathan, Hobbes states that man
is evil/wicked by nature.
➢ Man is egocentric by nature.
➢ As such, in a state of nature where we don’t have rules and
regulations, Hobbes notes that, society becomes a dreadful
place to live.
➢ In such a state, people would act on their own accord without
any responsibility to their community.
➢ Hobbes assumed that people would strive for more wealth
and power in what could be described as a ‘dog eat dog’
society, where he believed, people will do whatever is
required to survive in a state of nature, where rules and laws
are non-existent.
 ➢ This will mean that people will act in wicked ways to survive,
including attacking others before they are attacked
themselves.
➢ With rules in place, people feel protected against such
attacks.
➢ For Hobbes therefore, the solution to the lawlessness and
disorder in the state of nature is to establish a social contract
to protect ourselves from ourselves. The social contract
encrusts all our interests hence protects even the weak. The
rules and laws promise security and safety to all.
➢ People now fear to harm others since crimes are defined plus
the corresponding punishment.
➢ Clearly therefore, the social pact/contract brings order and
protection.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Concept of Society

➢ In his Origins of Human Inequalities, Rousseau faults all the previous
scholars for wrongly attributing pride, hatred, and evil to the
human nature since such, he argues, are things that the society has
corrupted people with.
➢ Man in the state of nature had more food, more land, etc that
nature supplied in abundance and it is not thinkable that man could
exist in the strive postulated by Hobbes.
➢ Man in the state of nature had all his needs easily satisfied by nature
whose supply of them was adequate due to few people existing then
hence no need for individual land ownership or such wrangles.
➢ Briefly, in the state of nature, man was free, good and independent.
➢ In his other work Emile Rousseau states that man is born good and
free but the society corrupts him by training him against nature.
Man, even forces one tree to bear the fruits of another.
➢ Society for example under capitalism trains people to see each
other as competitors and focus on profits alone thus alienates them
from humanity. They lose self-love and the love for their fellow
community members.
➢ Such a person becomes an alienus persona ‘an alienated person’-
estranged from oneself and others since the person has been trained
wrongly by the society against nature.
➢ In his Social Contract, he adds that man was born free but
everywhere he walks in chains.
➢ The social pact/contract is attained when we surrender our
individual will to the general will as sovereigns as we enact rules
and laws to guide our society.
➢ I become constrained/restricted since each time I need to act I
must avoid this and that as guided by the laws.
➢ Following these laws sounds enslaving but it is not because I am
following my will as a sovereign who actually willed these laws and
enacted them in the general will.
➢ I become free by being ‘enslaved’ therefore because the general
will in the laws that I follow is also my personal/individual will.
➢ In summary, Rousseau speaks of man in the state of nature where
man is free, good and independent; man in the society where man
is oppressed and dependent on others; and lastly man under the
social contract where man is ironically free through obligations- he
is only independent through dependence on the laws.
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels’ Concept of the Society
➢ In their notorious book The Communist Manifesto, Marx and
Engels opine that a society is predicated upon the idea of base
and superstructure.
➢ The economic character of a society forms its base upon which
rests all the social institutions and culture as the superstructure.
➢ For Marx, it is the base (economy) that will determine what the
society will look like.
➢ Marx saw conflict in the society as the primary means of change.
➢ Economically, he saw conflict existing between the owners of
the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and the proletariat
(working class/labourers).
➢ Marx maintained that these conflicts appeared consistently
through history during times of social revolution.
➢ These revolutions or class antagonisms were as a result of one
class dominating another.
➢ Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great
hostile camps- into two great classes directly facing each other-
Bourgeoisie and proletariat.
➢ The owners of the means of production exploit constantly the
workers.
➢ Capitalism is a way of organising an economy such that the
means of production like land etc are owned by individuals not
the state.
➢ The owners of the means of production end up exploiting the
workers to the level of alienating them. Four levels of alienation
ensue:
❖ Alienation from the product of one’s labour i.e. the
worker is not mentioned in the product produced but the
company’s name instead.
❖ Alienation from the process of production i.e. one’s
input/creativity is never recognised but the process is
determined by only the owners of the means of
production.
❖ Alienation from others i.e. people are trained to see each
other as competitors thus there is enmity and inhumanity
 cultivated that leads to lose of the human relations with
society members.
❖ Alienation from oneself i.e. the final outcome of
individualism is the loss of connectivity between workers.
At the individual level, the workers do not at all control
even their own life. The holidays, etc are determined by
the owners of the means of production. They are mere
blocks swinging in the workplace at the whims or dictates
of the owners of the means of production. One
becomes thus estranged from oneself.
➢ Taken as a whole then, alienation in modern state means the
individual has no control over their life.
➢ False consciousness is where the beliefs, ideals of a person are not
for the person’s best interests but for the dominant class imposed
upon the proletariat.
➢ This false consciousness Marx contends must be replaced with the
proletariat being aware of their class and existing for their class thus
to stage a revolution as there is nothing to lose except their chains.
Society under the existentialists
➢ Jean-Paul Sartre in his Existentialism is a Humanism postulates that
existence precedes essence and by this he means that we first
find ourselves existing then make our lives meaningful, no
predetermination.
➢ Moreover, the existentialists opine that we are condemned to be
free and as such, we have the ability to make choices, be
committed in those choices and be responsible even for the
consequences accruing from such.
➢ The concept of inter-subjectivity gleams the fact that my
freedom can affect my neighbour’s life project hence I should
always act in good faith while being conscious that I am not alone
 in the society- reciprocity is a guide and here I expect from the
others what I do to them.
➢ Whereas most of the existentialists present man as supreme and
support extreme individualism, contemporary scholars like
Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his books: Brothers Karamazov and Notes
from Underground highlights the dangers of this stance and the
need for freedom to mean humility and ability to coexist, to have
empathy and sympathy with other members not just to be lost
in our private life projects exclusively.
 Lesson 5 Notes PHIL 104: Philosophy and Society
Lecturer: Bonface Nyamweya (0752035439)
Class Slogan: "Let Wisdom Flow Bothways"
Topic: Epistemology
Introduction: what is Epistemology?
➢ Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the study of
the theory of knowledge.
➢ It asks questions like: What can we know? How do we know? How
can we know that we know? How can we know that we know that
we know?
➢ To answer some of these questions, we shall ponder on some of the
steps towards attaining knowledge.
The Path to Knowledge
Knowledge is a justifiable true belief.
There are four phases to attain a justifiable belief.
These include: doxa, aporia, zetesis and episteme.
➢ Doxa- belief/mere opinions
➢ Aporia- we become perplexed/puzzled when we think of the
reality in other possibilities or ramifications and even find it
paradoxical. For example, the likes of Tyco Brahe, Nicolas
Copernicus and Galileo Galilei thought about the earth moving
around the sun and not the other way round as held by everyone
at that epoch. It was a revolutionary. A kind of turning around
the cave if we may use the Platonic allegory of the cave. A
turning away from the average everydayness or common
opinions to deeply become worried of other possibilities e.g.
suppose we have a cake from bananas and millet and sorghum
 and not just wheat? Or, how does it happen that my phone
receives signals from someone far away and we can talk?
➢ Zetesis- Here we develop a critical stance and ask questions
leaving no stone unturned. We seek knowledge without biases
and prejudices. We experiment, compare, contrast, analyse and
present the findings in a logical manner that is justifiable.
➢ Episteme- This is the justifiable true belief attained as we finish
zetesis. It is knowledge itself that we can rely on as it is not
grounded on rumours rather on verified grounds. Here we have
the know-how. We own the knowledge. We can demonstrate
what we know. We can show that we know. We can articulate
ourselves on our ideas not as passive agents but as people who
have actively taken part in their attainment such that they can be
of a pragmatic end in our lives. Our knowledge is no longer alien
to us but something that we hold passionately as ours for our
benefit.
 Lesson 6 Notes PHIL 104: Philosophy and Society
Lecturer: Bonface Nyamweya (0752035439)
Class Slogan: "Let Wisdom Flow Bothways"
Topic: Idealism, Empiricism and Rationalism

Idealism
➢ Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that
mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only
as an appearance to or expression of mind, or as somehow mental
in its inner essence.
➢ However, a philosophy which makes the physical world dependent
upon mind is usually also called idealist even if it postulates some
further hidden, more basic reality behind the mental and physical
scenes (for example, Kant’s things-in-themselves).
➢ There is also a certain tendency to restrict the term ‘idealism’ to
systems for which what is basic is mind of a somewhat lofty nature,
so that ‘spiritual values’ are the ultimate shapers of reality. (An
older and broader use counts as idealist any view for which the
physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more
ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of
value, for example Platonic forms.)
➢ The founding fathers of idealism in Western thought are Berkeley
(theistic idealism), Kant (transcendental idealism) and Hegel
(absolute idealism). Although the precise sense in which Hegel was
an idealist is problematic, his influence on subsequent absolute or
monistic idealism was enormous. In the US and the UK idealism,
especially of the absolute kind, was the dominating philosophy of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, receiving its most
forceful expression with F.H. Bradley. It declined, without dying,
under the influence of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later
 of the logical positivists. Not a few philosophers believe, however,
that it has a future.

Empiricism
➢ Empiricism means dependence upon direct experience for
information. Only information experienced by someone is valued,
not ideas created purely in one's mind.
➢ Empiricism is the belief that knowledge is based on experience.
Empiricists believe this experience can mainly be gained through
the use of the senses.
➢ The concept of empiricism is the idea in philosophy that knowledge
is gained through sensory experience. This means that information
is not innate in humans but is instead learned through experiences
even as a newborn.
➢ Some examples of empiricism are that stone is hard, ice is cold, and
glue is sticky. Until one has experienced these with the senses, this
information will be meaningless. Empiricists would assert there is
no way to understand that stone is hard unless someone
experiences it because otherwise, they would not know what hard
even meant.
➢ Most medieval philosophers after St. Augustine (354–430) took an
empiricist position, at least about concepts, even if they recognized
much substantial but nonempirical knowledge. The standard
formulation of this age was: “There is nothing in the intellect that
was not previously in the senses.”
➢ St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) rejected innate ideas altogether.
Both soul and body participate in perception, and all ideas
are abstracted by the intellect from what is given to the senses.
Human ideas of unseen things, such as angels and demons and even
God, are derived by analogy from the seen.
➢ The empiricism of the 14th-century Franciscan nominalist William
of Ockham was more systematic. All knowledge of what exists in
nature, he held, comes from the senses, though there is, to be sure,
“abstractive knowledge” of necessary truths; but this is
merely hypothetical and does not imply the existence of anything.
His more extreme followers extended his line of reasoning toward
a radical empiricism, in which causation is not a rationally
intelligible connection between events but merely an observed
regularity in their occurrence.
➢ During the 1600s, scientific advancements and discoveries had
changed the way people thought of the world and their place in it.
The Catholic Church had accepted the idea that the sun was at the
center of the solar system, and scientists were developing an early
form of the scientific method.
➢ For thousands of years, scientific claims could be justified through
thought experiments. For example, many principles the Greek
philosopher Aristotle created were based on internal reasoning.
However, by the 1600s, the early scientific method came into use.
In order to support a claim, one had to provide evidence based on
observations made with the senses or scientific instruments.
➢ In response to the developments of the scientific method and
Descartes's rationalism, philosophers in the 1600s and 1700s began
to argue that the world can only be understood via the senses. This
school of thought is known as empiricism and followers believe
that people possess no prior knowledge when they are born.
Instead of having innate understanding of certain concepts,
empiricists believe that a newborn is a tabula rasa, which means
blank slate in Latin. The most famous of these philosophers was
John Locke, who argued that lived experiences are what turn the
blank slate of a person into who they are and sensory experiences
provide people with all the knowledge they ever gain. He opposed
 Descartes's idea that knowledge is possessed upon birth and
thought the senses were the main way to empirically understand
what was true in the world.
➢ The most important defender of empiricism was Francis Bacon,
who, though he did not deny the existence of a priori knowledge,
claimed that, in effect, the only knowledge that is worth having (as
contributing to the relief of the human condition) is empirically
based knowledge of the natural world, which should be pursued by
the systematic—indeed almost mechanical—arrangement of the
findings of observation and is best undertaken in the cooperative
and impersonal style of modern scientific research. Bacon was, in
fact, the first to formulate the principles of scientific induction.
Rationalism
➢ Rationalism, in Western philosophy, the view that
regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge. Holding
that reality itself has an inherently logical structure, the
rationalist asserts that a class of truths exists that the intellect can
grasp directly.
➢ There are, according to the rationalists, certain rational
principles—especially in logic and mathematics, and even
in ethics and metaphysics—that are so fundamental that to deny
them is to fall into contradiction. The rationalists’ confidence in
reason and proof tends, therefore, to detract from their respect for
other ways of knowing.
➢ Rationalism has long been the rival of empiricism, the doctrine that
all knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense
experience. As against this doctrine, rationalism holds reason to be
a faculty that can lay hold of truths beyond the reach of
sense perception, both in certainty and generality.
➢ In stressing the existence of a “natural light,” rationalism has also
been the rival of systems claiming esoteric knowledge, whether
 from mystical experience, revelation, or intuition, and has been
opposed to various irrationalisms that tend to stress the biological,
the emotional or volitional, the unconscious, or the existential at
the expense of the rational.
➢ The first Western philosopher to stress rationalist insight
was Pythagoras, a shadowy figure of the 6th century BCE. Noticing
that, for a right triangle, a square built on its hypotenuse equals the
sum of those on its sides and that the pitches of notes sounded on a
lute bear a mathematical relation to the lengths of the strings,
Pythagoras held that these harmonies reflected the ultimate nature
of reality. He summed up the implied metaphysical rationalism in
the words “All is number.”
➢ Plato so greatly admired the rigorous reasoning of geometry that
he is alleged to have inscribed over the door of his Academy the
phrase “Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here.” His
famous forms are accessible only to reason, not to sense.
➢ Plato’s successor Aristotle (384–322 BCE) conceived of the work
of reason in much the same way, though he did not view the forms
as independent. His chief contribution to rationalism lay in
his syllogistic logic, regarded as the chief instrument of
rational explanation. Humans explain particular facts by bringing
them under general principles. Why does one think Socrates will
die? Because he is human, and humans are mortal. Why should one
accept the general principle itself that all humans are mortal?
➢ In experience such principles have so far held without exception.
But the mind cannot finally rest in this sort of explanation. Humans
never wholly understand a fact or event until they can bring it
under a principle that is self-evident and necessary; they then have
the clearest explanation possible. On this central thesis of
rationalism, the three great Greeks were in accord.
➢ The first modern rationalist was Descartes, an original
mathematician whose ambition was to introduce
into philosophy the rigour and clearness that delighted him
in mathematics.
➢ In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he set out
to doubt everything in the hope of arriving in the end at
something indubitable. This he reached in his famous dictum cogito
ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am” (expressed in the Meditations as
cogito sum, “I think, I am”); for to doubt one’s own doubting
would be absurd.
➢ Here then was a fact of absolute certainty, rendered such by the
clearness and distinctness with which it presented itself to
his reason. His task was to build on this as a foundation, to deduce
from it a series of other propositions, each following with the same
self-evidence. He hoped thus to produce a philosophical system on
which people could agree as completely as they do on
the geometry of Euclid. The main cause of error, he held, lay in the
impulsive desire to believe before the mind is clear. The clearness
and distinctness upon which he insisted was not that
of perception but of conception, the clearness with which the
intellect grasps an abstract idea, such as the number three or its
being greater than two.
➢ How, then, does reason operate and how is it possible to have
knowledge that goes beyond experience? A new answer was given
by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), which, as he
said, involved a Copernican revolution in philosophy.
➢ The reason that logic and mathematics will remain valid for all
experience is simply that their framework lies within the human
mind; they are forms of arrangement imposed from within upon
the raw materials of sensation.
➢ Humans will always find things arranged in certain patterns because
it is they who have unwittingly so arranged them. Kant held,
however, that these certainties were bought at a heavy price. Just
because a priori insights are a reflection of the mind, they cannot
be trusted as a reflection of the world outside the mind. Whether
the rational order in which sensation is arranged—the order, for
example, of time, space, and causality—represents an order
holding among things-in-themselves (German Dinge-an-sich)
cannot be known. Kant’s rationalism was thus the counterpart of a
profound skepticism.