IB Philosophy Paper 2 Prompts

Hiya!  I'm here with Paper 2 prompts, which are in some ways more easy than Paper 1.  There are once again two parts to Paper 2, but 2a is SIGNIFICANTLY more straightforward than 1a.  Mostly because it isn't an essay, but a data dump.

I'm going to use Republic by Plato for this, since I have sample prompts.

Paper 2a:

This is, as I said, a data dump.  The rubric is very lax about it, and does not want any argument.  What you might see here is:

Choose one of the concepts below.  Summarize and discuss its importance within the text.

1) The Allegory of the Cave
2) Simile of the Line
3) Analogy of Kallipolis
4) The three-headed beast.

What do you do?  Well, there are two parts to the question.  Summarize and discuss!  Do it in order, lay it out very clearly so as to make it easy for the graders (never poke the bear, be nice to the graders) and just barf out information.  Not too much, though!  You really want to spend as much time on 2b as possible.  Then, after you spew info, you talk about how it is used in the text to help carry a message.  Easy, right?  It should be.

Paper 2b:

This part is significantly harder.  Here, you are given ONE prompt about all of the prescribed readings.  In your class, you probably went over at most two of them, maybe three.  I suggest that you familiarize yourself with one other just in case.  Anyway, I went over Tao Te Ching and Republic, so those two are the ones I'll be using on the essay.

For HL we studied The Second Sex, too, so here are the prompts we have.

Here are some prompts.

Republic by Plato
1) Explain and discuss the ideal ruler.
2) Explain why the road to tyranny begins in Plato's ideal state where the best person rules.
3) Discuss and critique Plato's views on individual freedom and social obligation.
4) Explain and discuss the nature of belief and knowledge.
5) Discuss the benefits of a guardian sharing his goods.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
1) Discuss how Tao Te Ching views war.
2) Why do you study the Tao if it can never be understood?
3) What is the value of silence?
4) Compare Taoism to other philosophical perspectives.
5) Can someone be closer than another to "The Way?"  If so, how can we ever know?

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
1) Evaluate the relationship of freedom and identity
2) Critically examine the claim that women are doomed to passivity
3) Analyze and evaluate the implications of a woman being "other" or "second"
4) Evaluate how women might overcome the restraints placed on them.
5) Analyze the implications of "she becomes a woman."


That is what I have to say about Paper 2.  Good luck, everyone!

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Ethics: Cultural Relativism

Quite possibly the only ethical subject I don't utterly detest, so naturally, I'll be putting a lot of stuff about it up here.

When two cultures do not agree about the same subject, an ethical issue arises called cultural relativism.  It is something that is the cause of many conflicts, war, and debates, though people do not know it.

Lets say that you live in Spain, where going home to take a nap in the afternoon is perfectly fine- in fact, it's the norm- but in the United States, it is considered very poor form.  Americans live a much faster-paced life than Spaniards, so the afternoon siesta is not good for you if you work.  This is cultural relativism: where one culture says something is morally permissible, but another does not.

This example seems pretty low-key, and can be cleared up with a short conversation.  But imagine that one culture accepts the death penalty, but another finds it ethically wrong.  Someone comes from the country with no death penalty and goes to the other one, and does something that warrants this sort of punishment.  What then?  The country he comes from does not allow the death penalty, but this one does.

The ethics of this are, of course, which one is right.  Neither and both, by a cultural relativist point of view.  Which is why it is so hard to use this one in a case... it doesn't have an answer.

The point is that ethics can change from place to place, and cultural relativism shows how flimsy ethics are, and how there is no ethically right answer to any problem.  There are no universally held moral values.

I don't know why I included this actually.  I just liked the picture.

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Ethics: Utilitarianism

This is probably the biggest thing in ethics.  Enjoy.

Utilitarianism is basically the belief that any action is morally permissible (ok) if and only if it produces as much net happiness as any other available action.  This is an extremely dangerous view, and it can be used in any situation.

Utilitarianism has been around for a pretty long time, but was first introduced in full by a very liberal guy named Jeremy Bentham, who was an advocator of pretty much any kind of right you could think of.  In 1789, he was saying that homosexuality was an A-OK thing.  Good dude.  :)

Let us examine an example.  You're a doctor, and you only have five doses of a very rare, very expensive drug left.  There are six patients who need it.  Here's the dilemma:  One patient needs all five doses, while the other five patients need only one dose.  Doc knows nothing else about these patients.  Now, utilitarianism would have the doctor saving five lives instead of the "needy" sixth patient.  Why?  Saving five lives maximizes happiness.

What is happiness, though?  Up until this point, happiness and unhappiness are the only "currencies" we've been applying to utilitarianism.  But isn't our definition of happiness more like the definition of well-being?

I have another example for you that discusses the problem.

Imagine that Billy the IT guy of a television studio has tripped.  He knocked some very heavy electrical equipment off of a shelf, and it fell on his arm.  This equipment is vital for the broadcast.  In order to save Billy's life, Norman the assistant IT guy has too unplug the equipment to move it.  What should Norman do?

At this point, it is obvious that Norman should unplug the equipment.  Billy's life is more important.  But!  The final of the World Cup is going on, watched by millions of people around the world.  Unplugging the equipment will shut off the broadcast across the board.  Now what should Norman do?

A utilitarian would sigh and say "sucks to be you, Billy," and would let the world be happy, as opposed to poor IT guy.  After all, Norman serves the same purpose as Billy and can easily replace him, and a whole lot of people would be unhappy if Norman saves Billy.

This is because there is a certain dichotomy of happinesses.  Preventing one death (Billy) is all well in good, but if there are two people who'd get severely mutilated, saving Billy is less important that saving the two people.  Likewise, saving three people from minor mutilation is more better than saving Billy.  And so on, until saving an entire planet of people from a big disappointment is better than saving Billy the IT guy.

Why I hate utilitarianism.

But no!  I'm not done yet!  There was another guy called Robert Nozick that imagined a utility monster, who gained ten times more happiness from things than a normal person.  In other words, ten people's happiness is equal to the utility monster.

Lets explore another situation.  Chef Louis is the world's best cook, and he makes a wicked plate of escargot.  Ten people ordered his escargot, but so did Momo the utility monster.  Chef Louis cannot make all eleven servings of escargot at once, so he typically goes with whoever ordered first gets the escargot first.  So the ten people ordered twenty minutes ago, but Momo just walked in and ordered. Momo will be far more happy than the ten people are individually.  Who should Chef Louis serve first?

Now, utilitarianism says that Momo should be served first, because he'll be happier than the ten people.  BUT!  But look at this.  Momo is so used to getting served first, that he'll actually not benefit as much as one of the ten people, who are used to being second to Momo.

That's my lecture on utilitarianism.  Hope you enjoyed.

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Ethics: Overview

I have put this off as long as I could... but ethics are very important, and I absolutely despise them.

This segment will discuss some major terms used in ethics, some ideas behind them, and all of the gross and exciting philosophers (I use the term disparagingly) that decided to devote hours of their lives deciding what morality is.

Can't you see my excited little face?

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IB Philosophy Paper 1 Prompts

I had a giggle when I looked up IB Philo paper prompts and got some seriously hard-core stuff from Cambridge.  Not the same thing.  Not at all.  Though I do feel like I could legitimately answer several of the political philosophy stuff.  XD

Here I will happily post some prompts given to me by my teacher, by some other teachers, by IB, and I'll randomly throw in the Cambridge ones too.  Though I won't tell you which!

Before I start, I'll send you a link to a helpful page for paper 1: Click here!

Paper 1a: What is a Human Being?

Ok.  So Paper 1 is the one where they give you a number of stimuli that you proceed to talk about philosophically.  The question is always "What is a Human Being?" so you can always go in prepared.  My suggestion?  TALK ART.  They always give you a picture and a passage, and if you can argue that art is an integral part of being a human being, you are SET FOR LIFE.  Also, these things frequently have some amount of technology involved, so use that, too.

Here are some pics/passages you can work with if you want.  I will also talk with you about how to organize your mind for this essay, it's not the hardest to write, but it's the easiest to mess up.

Ok, imagine you got this image for your prompt.  What do you do?  I have broken this down into a lovely list for you, because I'm nice! 

1) What issue arises with the picture? another way to think is: what is happening?  What is the message the artist is conveying, or what can you make the artist say?  Clearly, it is saying that humans are as easily tied to their devices as a dog to a post.

2) What can you argue here? You know the message, now what is your take on it?  My advice:  You are not wrong.  You can say that dogs are humans, too.  As long as you can defend it, you can use it.  This is going to eventually be a thesis, so write it down!

3) What philosophies can you use?  Here is the place where most people immediately jump.  They tend to go straight for the philosophies without forming an opinion.  These papers are NOT notes!  Do not treat them as such!  Now, think outside the box on this if you want.  You can also use a few standbyes, like determinism or existentialism (see?  Useful stuff, you can almost always use it on this paper!) but if you feel comfortable with ethics, you can talk about that too.  Ethics are very flexible.

4) What counterarguments can you use?  always think of the counterarguments first.  You can get away with a flimsy counterargument as long as you have some, so while you're in the early thinking stages, get those counters going.  Also, you have a pretty good idea of what your stance is, and counterarguments are good for cleaning up those fuzzy lines a little.  I always find that it is much harder to write a paper if I have no idea what the weaknesses are.

5) Plan your claims.  Yes.  Philosophy papers are a little different than analytical, English papers, but not by much.  An English paper has a 5paragraph format, while Philosophies typically have a 6paragraph structure.  Intro, claim, counterclaim, claim, counterclaim, conclusion.  You should never have a paragraph talking only about the philosophies.  Repeat.  Never have a paragraph talking about the philosophies.  If there isn't an argument, cut it out.

6) Write the paper!  Self-explanatory.  If you take your time planning, you should be FINE here.  

7) Revise.  You do NOT want any spelling or grammatical flaws.  It will instantly make your paper seem crappy.  Also, avoid any and all colloquialisms or clichés.  If you have even one, you aren't making the paper more relatable, you're turning into garbage.

Phew.  That list is actually very good for three of your "papers."  Paper 2a is the exception, since it is a data-dump.  This did not used to be a thing.  I believe that 2a exists so that you DO NOT have to include too much data in 2b.  You do not have to relate 2a to 2b.  They are separate.  More on those later.

Paper 1b: Optional Themes

My least favorite.  You get three optional themes in this section, where any prompt can be thrown at you as long as it is under the umbrella of one of them.  Here are the themes (categories):

1. Aesthetics
2. Epistemology
3. Ethics
4. Philosophy and contemporary society
5. Philosophy of religion
6. Philosophy of science
7. Political philosophy

Good news:  You do not have to commit to one upon going in.  Bad news: you might go in feeling really strong about ethics but the prompt SUCKS.  You only prepared for ethics!  What now?  

Calm down.  Seriously, panicking will only waste time.  You have more important things to worry about.  You have time NOW, get a good grasp on at least two, but do not forget about the others.  I know, the IB thing says SL people only need to know one!  They're lying.  Go in having a basic grasp of three or four so you can pick the prompt you can argue with the best.

Here's a hint:  Pick the genre you do not agree with.  Not which you like the least (Ethics. Ugh!), which you can argue with.  If you don't agree with Locke's tabula rosa, argue with it.  In my notes, I tried to provide you with two very distinct stances on the same subject for this very reason.  (Plato&Machiavelli, Descartes&Locke)

So that is my talk about paper 1.  Prompts?  I'll give you five each for the three I prepare you for: ethics, religion, and epistemology.

Religion
1)Critically discuss the nature and value of religious experience.
2)Analyse and evaluate at least one rational argument that claims to prove the existence of God.
3)“The universe is better with some evil in it than it could be if there were no evil.” Some believers use this argument as a defence for God’s existence when confronted with the presence of evil in the world. Does it successfully eliminate the claim that God does not exist if evil does?
4)In an age of ever growing scientific knowledge and understanding, to what extent can a belief in a life after death be justified?
5)Explain and discuss the impact of religious belief on ethics.


Ethics
1) Critically assess the claim that moral judgements have meaning & value only if they are based on the current trends of the majority
2)When, if ever, is blame justified?

3)Critically assess the view that ethical judgements should be based on natural properties or nature.
4)Critically evaluate the claim that world poverty is an ethical issue.

5)Is it the case that a morally good person is also a happy person? Develop a philosophical response to this question.


Epistemology
1)Can there be non-analytic a priori knowledge? If so, how?
2)Suppose you believe that p. Do practical interests influence whether you also know that p?
3)Explain Plato’s distinction between knowledge, belief and ignorance.
4)Anyone who sees must see something.ʼ Discuss.
5)*Is a brain in a vat justified in believing that it has hands?

 *I like that one :)

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Epistemology: Descartes

I don't know how I managed to avoid this guy until now.  René Descartes is one of the most important NOT Plato in philosophy... dabbling in quite a lot of stuff.  And look at that impressive beard/moustache.  It's impressive.  Ugghhhh I'm so tired I really don't want to do this one, but I really need to.  He's so important...

Descartes was a relatively early philosopher, from around the time of Galileo and Newton.  He had a very distinct way of thinking, and it is called the method of doubts.  This means that if your problem is too vague, you will never know the answer, so you should break it down into smaller chunks.

So his thinking pretty much irritated the french, so he fled to the Dutch Republic (Netherlands & Belgium) where he came up with his pretty clever phrase that is OFTEN attributed (wrongly) to Socrates.  Cogito ergo sum translates roughly to "I think, therefore I am."  This sentence would mean that if he believes he exists, he does.  This is actually true throughout philosophy, in many different branches.  Art is art if someone thinks it is.  This is the best politician if you think he is.  God is good if you think He is.

So why did this mean so much?  Descartes couldn't trust anything.  His sense data can be misleading, he could be real, but he might not be! and other people might not be real, either.  The only thing he can ever truly know for certain is that he's thinking, and since he thinks, he must be real.  He can't be thinking about if he existed or not if he didn't actually exist.  This is more ontology than epistemology, but Descartes is a pretty swell guy, so I thought I'd include this little bit where it ought to go.  Right with René Descartes.

*Fun fact!  Descartes came up with this clever maxim while meditating inside of a stove in the Netherlands.  It was too bloody cold outside.*

How is the stove relevant besides being very amusing?  Well, my dears, odd venues for meditating were not unusual for Descartes, who believed very strongly that truth could only be found through examination of the self.  He attempted to unlock this self by exposing it to different climates.

One of these peculiar instances of Descartes' genius was while he wore his PJs in front of a fireplace.  He stared at his hand and thought of the revolutionary, ground-changing mind-boggling revelation; "This is my hand."  How was this incorrect?  He knew that it was true, but was it?  Descartes determined that one can never know if they are dreaming or not.  Even killing yourself would fail, since you'd never actually know if you succeeded... :\

Along the same line as knowing if you are dreaming or not, Descartes also determined that there was no way to know if god was actually an evil genius.  This evil demon arose when Descartes tried to math his way out of dreamland... and failed.  He had no way to know if the evil genius was real or not, since he had no way of knowing if the laws of math were true or not.  Many darns to you, Descartes, for making my math tests even harder!!

And he keeps thinking (probably not in front of the fire... that would get toasty) and eventually comes up with his cogito ergo sum.  That was actually pretty brief.  I'm done for the day!  YAY!

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Epistemology: Plato's Forms

Hello.  Today, I'll be talking about Plato's Divided Line simile, and what he believes about epistemology.

Plato began his analysis of epistemology with the simple phrase “P knows X.”  (I think P is Plato, but I don’t know X, so I’m gonna say xenophobia)

What must be true to make the sentence true?  Well, in order for Plato to truly know xenophobia, he must believe it exists.  So, in order for “P knows X” to be true, “P believes X” must first be true.  This means that belief is required for knowledge.  

In order for Plato to know xenophobia, xenophobia has to be real.  It has to.  Plato cannot truly know a unicorn if a unicorn isn’t real.  Sorry everyone, unicorns don’t exist.  Or do they?  I’ll get to that, I promise :)

We have right now a tiny list of things that are necessary parts of knowledge.  1.) P believes X.  2.) X is the case.  Are these two sufficient?  Since I’m asking the question, no, they aren’t.  There is another component, where Plato has to describe xenophobia to us.  He has to give us the Logos.  So here is our nice little list again:

1.)  P believes X

2.) X is the case

3.) P can give Logos for X

Let me give you another hint:  This isn’t all of it.  Plato thought of something that condenses all of what I just described to you in a table, and this is the legendary, hated, evil Divided Line Analogy.

You’re welcome.

Now, I will delve into the fascinating four topics that are down there on the line, because you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about with that funky lookin’ thing.

Images/Shadows

Shadows and reflections can only tell us so much, which is why they are the “lowest” and “most basic” way of knowing something.  Imagine a tree.  Good.  That’s all there is to it.  Ha.  

OK, see that picture?  It’s a tree, right? So, it has a shadow.  It looks exactly like the tree, so is it also a tree?  No!  It’s a shadow!  Well, they’re both pictures.  What I’m trying to get across to you is this: a picture does not accurately represent a tree.  We can’t tell what kind of tree it is, and if I rotated the picture slightly, you wouldn’t know which one is the actual tree.  That is why images and shadows are the bottom rung of the divided line ladder, because it is very rudimentary.

Sensible Objects/Things

Take this paper.  You feel it, touch it.  You know it is a paper because you can experience the paper with a sense data.  However, they are not absolutely real since they are fleeting.  This paper will eventually get recycled or thrown away, where it is burned and ceases to be a paper.  At least, not THIS paper.

Let us now teleport ourselves to ancient Greece.  You are Plato, and you’re walking down the street and run into some random dude.  He has a horse, and you ask him what it is, he will probably say “it is a horse.”  You then ask him why the animal is a horse (it’s ancient Greece, such things are normal) and he cannot really answer.   All he is able to say is “it’s a horse because it’s a horse!”

This is not an accurate response because Dude hasn’t given you the Logos to back up his statement.  If he did know, if he gave a whole bunch of super-good reasons why it is most certainly a horse, then he knows on a conceptual level, which I will get to in a second.

An important thing to note about both of these last two rungs of the ladder is that they are both dependent on the sun.  Shadows and pictures cannot be real without light, and if the sun was not in the sky, there would be no people to perceive these things.  They are temporary, visible things, and are not completely real.

Concepts/Mathematical Forms

Things get a lot more difficult from this point on.  These next two bits are of the category "the forms," which is more like a theory.  Let us imagine three things: when a leaf falls into a fire, it catches fire, when you dunk your finger in a cup of coffee, it hurts, and when you put an ice-cube into the sunlight, it melts.  These are three more-or-less different instances, but they follow the same mathematical form:  When a thing touches a much hotter thing, it too, gets hot.  This theory, or law, or form will help us to know something.  It is a rule that can be applied to multiple situations. 

The fact that the laws exist make it not the most perfect form of knowledge, but it still is theoretical and happens in the minds.  This is why it is still in the realm of reason, know perception.  It is something we reason should happen, but not something we can physically, tangibly hold.  We can't look at the laws of physics and say "I would like to buy ten e=mc² please."

 My sister (a physicist) sniffed very primly and said that nothing in philosophy is pure science.  The definition of science in her words are: "A thing that can be performed over and over again with the same results in different situations by different people is a science.  Philosophy is not a science."

Higher Forms

*takes a deep breath*  I must begin this section with a quick little example, because that is the only way we can begin to grasp the FORMS! Imagine you are a poor, dumb stone carver.  You know that if you chip a bit off accidentally, there is no way to put it back together.  So what does the poor dumb stone carver do?  He goes to his boss- the artist, the master of masonry- and he asks for a form.  Usually, these forms (or models) are made of wood, are not to-scale, and are carved by the master.  This way, the artist can chug out lots of artistic stuff and the stone-cutter who is not very smart doesn't have to try and come up with something pretty.  And he knows exactly what to do, because he knows the form.

A form is an ideal situation.  It is what we compare things that we see to in our minds, so we know more about it.  You look at a teapot and know it is a teapot, because it fits the form of a teapot.  It has a spout, a handle, a lid, and might even have tea in it.  We can imagine an ideal teapot, and are able to identify other teapots that we see, and are able to determine that other things are not teapots.



So do you understand the divided line?  There is the other half of it, but its essentially the same thing.

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Epistemology: Locke

Welcome to another episode of Epistemology.  Today, we'll be talking about John Locke.  I skipped him in politics for some reason, but I WILL be talking about him for his empirical epistemology.  So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Locke was the first British Empiricist in modern philosophy.  This fellow introduced a lot of very key terms including tabula rasa, which is the extremely famous BLANK SLATE.  Since it is the basis of his and several other people's philosophies, I will go into excruciating detail about it.

Blank Slate is the idea that all people begin as a blank slate, where their heads are filled with knowledge through their experiences.  Remember, Locke is an empiricist, meaning he believed that all knowledge comes from sense data.

Let us assume that Locke's tabula rasa idea is correct so that you can understand it better.  You're a little itty bitty baby blank slate, who knows nothing.  You first see your mother, and know what a mother is.  When you hear language, you learn language.  You do not inherently know language.  This is OFTEN disputed, this last bit about language acquisition, and I enjoy talking about it so I might go back to it.

Locke studied Descartes (who was into the whole "innate idea" thing) and knew that if hid tabula rasa idea was gonna get published, he had to do some work refuting the rationalist.  He did this with my least favorite thing in philosophy (besides ethics): Ockham's Razor.  Ugh.  I shudder just thinking about it.

The basis of the razor is that more is less and less is more.  Simplify.  If you have a single thought that works, you do not need to go deeper, and you should cut it out.  This is because the simpler ideas are more empirical, and are closer to the original thought.  Descartes would say that these "simpler" ideas are more innate than their more complex brothers, and are therefore more accurate.

So why did Locke use the razor as a way to support tabula rosa idea?  He went from the statement "simpler ideas are more empirical" to "an absence of idea is entirely empirical."  After all, Ockham cuts out any complex idea to simply them.  Why not cut out ideas entirely?  Would that not be the most simple, and therefore the most accurate form?

Additionally, Locke's tabula rosa is simpler than Descartes in its essence, so it supposedly refutes it.  Except.... he forgot about substance.  He pretty much figured out innate ideas, but has absolutely no way to deal with anything tangible.  Uh oh.  Enter a second philosophizer!

George Berkeley was the guy that really started talking about sense data.  He looked at Locke's talk, which explained how innate ideas are bunk and everyone is born as a blank slate (I'm sorry I didn't delve into that bit more, I don't really understand it and I don't want to confuse you), and he understood the issues with substances.  He came up with a solution that worked well with tabula rosa.

Berkeley agrees with the blank slate, but he added to it by saying that yes, we are born with nothing and gather information through experience.  But our knowledge of the tangible world is acquired through our sense data.

In other words, you experience stuff, but you don't know about it until you can experience it through your sense data.  This is similar to his work with linguistics.

Most languages in the world do in fact have similar grammatical structures: there are action words, stuff words, and descriptive words.  The way these words are presented tend to differ slightly from lingo to lingo, but there are still three basic categories with a fourth thrown in.  These are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and time modifiers (time modifiers are sometimes separate words as with Mandarin, or they can be modifiers tacked onto the end of verbs or adjectives).

There is an easily refuted theory that states that language is innate because of the four basic categories being largely uniform across the world.  However, this is totally bunk since a baby isn't instantly able to babble in Swahili as soon as it's born, and must be able to acquire language over a period of time.  Also, humans find it very tough to learn new languages.

Since I am on a time crunch :( I'll cut this section here for now.  See you later...

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Religion: Eastern Religion/Philosophy

This section will discuss Tao Te Ching, with a few notes about Confucianism too.  Enjoy, guys.  I think Eastern Philosophy is the most logical of all of them, so THERE!

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is the "religious" text of the Taoist philosophy, and is used as a guide, not as law.  It is also, incidentally, a text one can use in their IB Paper 2.  Yes.  So let us break the Tao down as much as we can.

First and foremost, everything I try to say about the Tao is wrong, since you can NEVER learn the Tao.  There is no right or wrong answer to anything I say here.  You must dance around the Way with metaphors (usually relating to water or rocks) and with examples of it.  The Tao is not a list of mantras, it is a list of things you ought to do, written down by a dude.

There are a number of frequently occurring things in the Tao, but water is by far the most common metaphor.  When you are in a sticky situation, you must look to water, and do as water would do.  Is there an obstacle in your life?  Do not fight it, passively find a way around it.  You must be strong but flexible.  You must be pure, but also muddy.  You must be life-giving and also deadly.  You must be like water.

An HL person in my Philosophy class disagreed with this, claiming stubbornly that you must be more like Rock in order to follow the Tao.  You must be able to be shaped, be strong, be useful, be old and wise, be observant and utterly passive.  I don't know if this is more accurate than water, but one can never truly know.

I, for one, prefer the analogy of emptiness.  A text that I suggest referring to is The Tao of Pooh, where Winnie the Pooh is the greatest Master of the Tao of all time due to his measured passivity.

WILL CONTINUE!!

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Religion: Atheism

Atheism: the belief that all other religions are wrong and God does not exist.  We'll be talking BRIEFLY about how this goes.

The God exist/not exist argument goes all the way back to the Middle Ages.  It was a time when the Pope had a lot of hold over much of Europe, so it was logical for many anti-religion movements to spring up.  Around this time, a number of arguments were proposed, some more ridiculous than others.

1) God's omniscience is incompatible with human freedom.  If he is all-knowing and perfect, why would he give freedom to things he knew would abuse it? 2) God cannot create a rock that he cannot lift.  This is self-contradicting (unless he can do things at once- please refer to my essay) 3) His omnibenevolence interferes with the problem of evil.

I introduced in that previous paragraph something very important to know about, and that is the problem of evil.  How can evil exist in a world where God is omnibenevolent/all good?  I really don't want to push my opinion on the matter, but this is a common argument against God.  A perfect being that is all-powerful should be able to, theoretically, prevent evil from existing.  If God is all good, why doesn't he do this?  Good question.

A religious person would say that the only way that a perfect world could exist is if people have problems that they can solve.  Alternatively, the only way a perfect world could exist is if good and bad both exist simultaneously.  A Western philosopher would say that this perfect balance is necessary, so there is no such thing as a possible world without evil.  Let us examine this deeper.

Imagine two schools.  One is in the slums, where people pick fights daily.  Also, imagine the other school has no fights ever.  When comparing the two schools, the more "perfect" one is the one without fights, so the slummy school is altered so that no fights exist.  Now, they are both perfect!  However, they both have cheating problems.  Erase the cheating problems, now we have people failing tests.  Erase the failing tests, we have people getting up to use the bathrooms too frequently.  See my point?

I don't know if this has a name, but the purpose of our two school example is that when you take away one major problem, a smaller problem then takes its place as the main focus.  One can never have a perfect world.  In order for a world to be perfect, people must be content with both good and evil existing.  More on that in my Western Philosophy section.

Let us now go to something called Religion of Man, presented by Ludwig Feuerbach and his student/disciple: Karl Marx.

Feuerbach was a socialist kind of guy and did not really adore the idea of one person having more power than his neighbor.  He didn't much care for religion, so his Religion of Man was really more of a "religion is stupid" type of argument, not so much a "God doesn't exist" argument.  He was inclined to prove that religion was a manifestation of humanity's confusion about the purpose of existence.  Not unlike an existential crisis...  We'll get to that.

He used the story of Job as an example of how religion is stupid.  If you don't know it from memory, I strongly suggest you refresh yourself on it, because if you don't, you won't understand the argument completely.
Now, Feuerbach would stare at it with an eyebrow raised and would say that people must be resigned to misery, never question God, and whatever happens is ok.  His point is that "if God is everything, Human is nothing."

Because of his socialist ideas, Feuerbach believed that the only perfect world was one where man helped out man.  He thought the only thing standing in the way of perfection was religion.

Marx was impressed by Feuerbach's teachings, but he was not committed to all of them.  He called Feuerbach an "idealist" (which was a pretty terrible insult coming from Marx, I'll have you know!) so he set out to improve upon them.

Marx concedes that religion alienates some things, but the solution was not to outright critique religion as a whole.  He says that religion is not the cause of "the disease" that plagues humanity, it is a symptom.  He thinks that the problem is the holy family idea.  With someone at the head of the house, religion will exist and problems will occur.  The way to cure the disease is to dissolve the parameters of family: make man, woman and chile equal to one another.  When this occurs, religion will vanish naturally.

I don't get it either, really.  I do advise you to remember this guy wrote The Communist Manifesto.  He did not like one person overpowering another at all.

That should be it, I think...  I could include Freud but I probably won't.

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Religion: Proofs

One of the central issues in religious philosophy is whether or not God exists.  It is a subject that a lot of philosophers feel extremely passionate about, so no definitive answer can ever be presented.  I for one enjoy this subject a lot, so that's why I've included it in its own page.

Right.  I'll present proofs in favor for god first, paired with their counter-arguments.  Lets start with my favorite:  The Teleological Proof.

This is sometimes called the watchmaker proof, or even the Babel Fish argument.  The gist of this argument is that a watch is so complex it had to have been made by a watchmaker- it couldn't have manifested by nature- which is similar to how the universe is so complex it, too, had to have been made by a watchmaker.  This secondary watchmaker is, of course, God.

This argument is pretty simple, and there are a number of flaws in the logic.  Let's examine the most famous ones.  Darwin- the evolution guy- states the main flaw with the Teleological Proof is that design and order are two very different things.  But the universe was not necessarily designed, it is orderly.  Order is a natural state, like how pebbles layer themselves from heaviest on the bottom to lightest on the top. The pebbles were not designed, they just happened.

The other big argument is Hume's.  This fellow blatantly stated that the analogy of watchmaker to creator of the universe is downright STUPID.  He says that a watch and a watchmaker have an empirical relation (based purely on observation with sense data).  We can infer that a watchmaker made the watch because we already knew that watchmakers make watches even before we saw the watch.

The second of Hume's arguments is related to a sandpile.  If you look at a pile of sand, you'd see it as random, but the way the particles of sand are organised is actually very orderly.  Not only do the heaviest particles go to the bottom, the pile is in a triangle shape because that is how thing naturally go.  Orderly is in the eye of the beholder.  The Teleological guy would say that the Universe is very orderly, so it had to have been made by someone, but a different dude would say that everything is random and unpredictable.  So there.

As for why this is called the Babel Fish argument.... Have you ever read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?  I invite you to watch the  video on the left, there are a lot of similarities.

Fun fact!  I wrote my Philosophy IA on how the Babel Fish both proves and denies the existence of God simultaneously.  Once I'm done with this year, maybe I'll post it.

Woot!  Done with the teleological argument!  It's kinda like pulling teeth, isn't it?

Next on my list of proofs to discuss is my LEAST favorite of the proofs, the Cosmological Proof.

The main guy to remember with the cosmological argument is good old Thomas Aquinas.  The proof is relatively simple, it goes after God with a posteriori standpoint.  Here it is:
Every event is caused by something prior to it.  Either the series of causes is infinite or every cause goes back to the first cause, which is uncaused.  An infinite series of causes is impossible, though, so the first cause had to be God.

As with the Teleological Proof, this is a slightly flawed argument.  Sorry, Aquinas.  Hume once again argued the snot out of this, because why not?  He criticized the causal nature of the universe by saying that we can never know if an infinite amount of causes is impossible or not.  It might be, it might not be.  He claims that humans constantly have a need to impose a "start" to everything, even though there might not be one.  An infinite series of causes is not a self-contradicting statement.

Then we get into a "Which God are we talking about here?" when discussing Hume's rebuttal.  Is it Aristotle's Narcissistic God or the Christian God we think Aquinas is referring to?  Relatively pointless details, though, so we'll move on.

The last proof is the Ontological Proof.  This tends to be the most popular one.

A commonly accepted definition of God as that of a perfect being.  God is a perfect, omnipotent, omnipowerful being that has NO FLAWS.  The Ontological Argument is where we might concoct a perfect being in our minds, but it is still not perfect, because it doesn’t exist in the physical world.  Therefore, in order to be perfect, God must exist, because stating that “God does not exist” is self-contradicting.  Thinking of God as not-existing is to think of an imperfect being, which would not be God.


Again, Hume found flaws with this argument. Something about how definitions are just words and are pretty imperfect anyway and have nothing to do with God whatsoever. Yes.... I don't actually understand it at all. Kant also argued with this, saying that something a hundred real dollars has not a penny more than a hundred possible dollars. I always found the conflicts with the Ontological Proof to be wickedly confusing, so I try to avoid this argument entirely and stick with the other two.

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Political Philosophy: Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes is one of the most prominent political theorists of all time.  While not hated as much as Machiavelli, he is still not widely loved, except in one case.  Of course, this would be Calvin's stuffed tiger, Hobbes.  Wait, Hobbes is stuffed?  Shut up.

Anyway, he was known primarily for the novel The Leviathan, which was inspired by the English Civil War.  Disagreeing with the political theory in place at the time- Locke's Social Contract, he would think a lot and create a new set of ideas that forms this beautiful book.  Hobbes was a very peaceful man, and any amount of bloodshed distressed him.  This explains why his novel's main premise is that people should obey leaders of any sort, in order to avoid conflict. 

This seems like a pretty logical thought, right?  People are against anarchy by nature, so a leader will always rise to put a stop to the anarchy.  Hobbes' claim that following a leader will avoid war is true to some extent, primarily, it stops internal conflict.  But that's beside the point.  The problem with his theory is that if there is a bad leader, why would obeying him be better than following one's own ideals?

We'll get back to that.  Now, Hobbes brings in a very distinct and widely used situation called The State of Nature.  This is a theoretical where humans exist, but no society is formed.  It is an animalistic place, without even a caveman congregation or anything.  The State of Nature is, of course, a crummy place, since without rulers or rules, the savage humans would descend into even more savage brutes until we kill each other off or get killed.

The State of Nature would be very short-lived, since we really don't want to die.  As a Social Contract theorist would say, savage humans would quickly form a government of some kind, which will ensure the survival of the species.  Hobbes would agree with this, too.

Once the government is established, the person in charge will likely be an aristocrat.  The people have a right to follow everything he says, or there will be conflict.  The only time people are allowed to revolt is if the aristocrat directly threatens their lives.

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Political Philosophy: Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli was an interesting dude, and he naturally leads the Italian team in Philosopher’s Football (which happens every March!).

This dude did a lot of stuff.  Seriously.  He was mostly a political philosopher, but he dabbled in a lesser-known field called Historical Philosophy.  I, for one, am very fond of historical philosophy, so I am actually going to address that, since it can easily be incorporated into politics.

Machiavelli is typically unloved by most liberal people, and also, most not-rich dudes.  Why?  Well, this fellow was, according to Plato, a person concerned with money.  Now, don't think he was as bad as people say, Machiavelli was very smart.  He knew the way a lot of people view society, and told them what they didn't want to hear.  This made him unpopular.

One of these unpopular truths is from his book, The Prince.  In it, he says that people say what they ought to do, but very rarely do.  Machiavelli draws a line between reality and a theoretical world, and this is not something philosophers like hearing.  If he was around today,  Machiavelli would be in advertising, because he knows how to use this idea to make money.  You do not want to advertise what people don't do, because they'll never buy.  If you sell something people actually do, you will be more successful.

This idea doesn't just apply to marketing, though.  What made Machiavelli so unpopular was how he applied it to politics.  He says that a politician makes claims that the people support in order to boost their popularity, even if that isn't actually what they stand for.  Why can't we have politicians?  Because the people don't actually want an honest politician, they want someone to stand for what they believe in.  Sound familiar?  *cough*Trump*cough*

The next thing Machiavelli says is that a politician can never be honest nor good.  Golly gee, no wonder this guy was unpopular.  He was right, though.  The claim here is that a successful politician lies.  They can never be honest, because people don't want to hear the grim and gruesome truth, they want a savior.  Pretend our country is in the bucket, and two politicians present their ideas.  Politician 1 says that "If we work together, we can bring ourselves out of poverty!" while Politician 2 says "I will single-handedly make this country great again if you vote for me, and I will lift everyone out of poverty and give out free ponies."
Politician 2 will obviously get the vote because of two reasons: 1.) People are LAZY, and 2.) People want someone who voices what they want.  Even if a free pony for everyone is unrealistic, it is what people want.  They don't want to work to get themselves out of poverty- if they did, they wouldn't be in poverty!!

Machiavelli continues this by claiming that while politicians can never be honest or good, they have to appear as though they are.  This is because a person who openly expresses how sucky they are is obviously sucky.  A voter will never support a politician who beats puppies in their free time.  They will, however, support a hypocrite that preaches saving homeless dogs, even if they don't actually practise what they preach.
Additionally, a philanthropist who donates enormous sums of their money to Animal Rescue will glean more votes than if someone exposes how they got their money: through running countless other people out of business.  But it doesn't matter, because they're saving innocent puppies!

Adding to this idea of appearances, Machiavelli claims that opposition must be crushed in order for the politician to be successful.  This is because an opposer can shake off a few scuffs and bruises to their reputations and return to the running, but they can never recover if they are publicly humiliated and shamed.  It cannot be done.

This next one is a little tricky to explain.  He says that a successful politician must delegate the unpopular tasks to others and keep the popular ones for himself.  This means that if, say, the politician wanted every brown-haired child killed, he would send an army to do it, not himself.  But that isn't enough!  The populous would not like the army, would they?  No.  So the politician would then destroy the army, and offer support to the populous.  The people would be rid of the unpopular army, and it was all thanks to the politician.  This strategy gets the dirty job done, and also boosts popularity to the politician.

This book receives so much hate, for good reason.  It explains horrible truths that people are terrified to admit are true, it describes a cruel and unforgiving world where the populous is played like a game of risk.  Luckily, Machiavelli did not believe what he wrote was the best form of politics.  It was simply an observation made by him of how a politician can be successful.

I did promise to talk about historical recurrence, so here is the quick little spiel on that .
Machiavelli described history as something that happens over in over in patterns.  This can be applied to politics, of course.  Do you remember Plato?  If not, I highly suggest reading about the decline of the regimes section in Plato's tab, because this next bit won't make sense without first reading that.

So, lets use Hobbes' State of Nature.  (see hobbes for more info)  You have your animalistic group of savage humans, and they deign to make a society.  Only the smartest savage human will see the benefits of government, so the wise-seeking aristocrat will create something where a single smart dude rules over the others.  The world thrives and stuff until a democracy, ruled by a justice-seeking individual or set of individuals- will eventually collapse into a bit of chaos.  Then a firm hand will rise and take it, turning into a tyranny.

Plato would have it all end there.  But not Machiavelli!  His historical recurrence idea would say that the people get so sick of having a dumb guy ruling, they'd want a smart guy in power, so they would elect/force/nominate an aristocratic person to rule.  Thus the cycle continues.

That's my quick thing on Historical Recurrence, and I will be using it for my IB Exam, actually.  Relating the Republic to Machiavelli's The Prince, comparing/contrasting.  If you want to, though, you'll need more info.  Yes.  Bye!

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Political Philosophy: Plato

So you want to read Plato's Republic, eh?  Why would you do that?  

Before we start this, I have my routine terminology dump.  Ok.  The four virtues of the state are wisdom(of the leaders), courage(of the warriors), temperance(self control of the people), and justice.

Quick overview:  Socrates is drinking at a party with his pals, and some dude comes in, is happy, and dies.    In typical Socratic fashion, the philosophers begin debating what justice is.  

Socrates is the superior philosopher here, and also the main character.  He begins by deciding what a “just” person is.  Here begins the first and main point that he makes:

A person’s soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite.  Socrates sees reasonable as being the most best with appetitive as the worst.  So he sets out to construct a political system that reflects the three parts of the soul.

A theoretical city, Kallipolis, is created that is supposedly the perfect system.  (Sorry, Clu fans, there is no glowing disk wars here)  In it, the populous is split into three groups, where the leaders of the city are philosophers.  The reasoning behind putting philosophers in charge is not because Socrates is a philosopher, but because they are driven primarily by the reasonable part of the soul.  The second class is that of the warriors.  These are driven by the spirited part of the soul.  The last group is the merchant-class.  They are appetitive.  

There is a lot of other stuff rolling around within these early chapters, like forced sterilization, a breeding-lottery, and gender equality.  But that isn’t political philosophy, that’s ethics, and we might talk about that with ethics later.

The next thing to talk about is Plato’s “decline of the regimes”.  This discusses what would eventually happen to a country if left to govern itself, and it’s shockingly accurate. o.o  Let’s start with the top and work our way down, shall we?

Aristocracy is the beginning, and if you don’t know what that is, I’ll rephrase it.  Monarchy.  Most European countries began with a monarchy, so let’s examine England.  It had one person take control, with a gentry, and it works alright for a little while.  Decline as people stop seeking knowledge.

Timocracy is similar to aristocracy, but the rulers are not driven by knowledge, they are driven by honor.  This is not a commonly used system, but it must be included.  The aristocratic man is one that is essentially a philosopher, while the timocratic man is essentially a warrior.  Decline as honor is not enough.

Oligarchy is a dangerous toy to play with, and it is related to timocracy, except that an oligarchical man is driven by greed and is basically a merchant.  Plato likes to repeat himself.  Throughout a whole book.  Uuuugghhh,  Decline as oligarchy ends in ruin.

Democracy is the system we know, and here things actually get tricky.  People do not want a country that is driven by people who want money, they want one driven by justice.  However, without the philosopher-king, people do not know what justice actually is.  They just want rights, man.  Decline as justice is abused and anarchy is born.

Tyranny is the absence of justice, temperance, courage, or wisdom.  There is so much anarchy that people beg for any amount of order to come around, so a person, a tyrannical person, steps into power and all sorts of disaster ensues.  

Of course, the decline of the regimes should be called the cycle of the regimes.  With a tyrant in power, people notice how dumb the leader is, and they seek a wise man to lead them.... hence.... returning to the aristocracy, where a philosopher-king exists.

Why did I go into so much detail there?  We’ll actually connect to The Prince when we move on to Machiavelli in... 3... 2.... 1...

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Political Philosophy: Overview

Political philosophy is some dense, difficult, and dreadful stuff.  Most of the time, PP is just people arguing about why one particular political system is the best, and it drags on throughout an entire book.  This can make it difficult to read, boring for most of the time, and repetitive.

This compilation of Political Philosophy information will include the teachings of five philosophers.  For one of these, you can analyze the novels on the IB exam!!  Please read them first, though.  Please.

The philosophers and their books are as follows:
Plato's *Republic
Machiavelli's The Prince
Hobbes' The Leviathan

*book can be used on IB Exam

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Religious Philosophy

Ahhhh, religion.  The most difficult thing for a lot of people to to talk about in philosophy.  Well, don't worry, kay?  I'm going to break down religion for you here.  Why does it exist?  What are the main ideas behind it?  I'll also be providing a little bit of Confucius and a lot of Tao Te Ching in here, too.

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Epistemology: Overview

The first thing that is gonna be described here is the grand philosophy of epistemology.  Also known as the Theory of Knowledge, epistemology is a good place to start off SNARKnotes: Philosophy.  Why?  Because we’re proving that we know nothing.

What is knowing?  We use the verb “to know” frequently, in all sorts of situations, but does it mean what we think it means?  When we say that “I know what a cat is” we mean that we understand the qualities of a cat, and we believe what we think.  But do we KNOW what a cat is?

Well, this question has been around for a while, and epistemology has branched off into a few schools of thought.  Rationalists see the primary source of knowledge to be reason.  Empiricists see the primary source of knowledge to be sense data.  This second group implements something called the “blank slate”, and we’ll get into that in a little while.

There are two more terms to dump in this little prologue, and one of them is priori knowledge-knowledge that is independent of sense data- and posteriori knowledge, which comes ONLY from sense data.

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Who's Who?

Who’s Who? In Philosophy, it is vital to know who the main philosophers are, and what they philosophized about. I have compiled a list of the big ones, some small ones, and a couple of philosophies they are particularly known for. Some of the big ones, like Plato and Descartes, dabbled in a bit of everything, but I’ll list only the main philosophies. They aren’t in any order yet, I’ll alphabetize them eventually.

Philosopher Name	Philosophies
Socrates	Kallipolis, Socratic Ignorance, Innate Ideas
Plato	Allegory of the Cave, Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, Theory of Forms, Platonic Love, Politics, Essentialism, Platonic Realism
Aristotle	Logic, (Virtue) Ethics, Metaphysics, Utilitarianism
René Descartes	Rationalism, Skepticism, Epistemology, Rationalism, Dualism, Religion
Friedrich Nietzsche	Nihilism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism, Atheism, Ethics, Utilitarianism
John Locke	Politics, Epistemology (empiricism)
Søren Kierkegaard	Existentialism, Ethics, Religion
David Hume	Rationalism, Logical Positivism, Empiricism, Religion, Epistemology, Politics, Determinism
Anselm	Ontological Proof
George Berkeley	Empiricism, Immaterialism
Georg Hegel	Politics
Immanuel Kant	Epistemology, Ethics (deontological), Metaphysics
Niccolò Machiavelli	Politics
Jean-Paul Sartre	Existentialism
Henry Thoreau	Transcendentalism, Individualism
Gottfried Leibniz	Rationalism, Problem of Evil, Logic
Baruch Spinoza	Rationalism, Ethics, Monism

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