Philosophy

An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing

Michael Boylan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429977961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction features a unique, engaging approach to introduce students to philosophy. It combines traditional readings and exercises with fictive narratives starring central figures in the history of the field from Plato to Martin Luther King, Jr. The book makes innovative use of compelling short stories from two writers who have prominently combined philosophy and fiction in their work. These narratives illuminate pivotal aspects of the carefully selected classic readings that follow. This gives students two ways to understand the philosophical positions: through indirect argument in fiction and through direct, deductive presentations. Study questions and writing exercises accompany each set of readings and help students grasp the material and create their own arguments.

PART 1

DIRECT AND INDIRECT DISCOURSE IN PHILOSOPHY

■ Chapter 1 Direct and Indirect Discourse in Philosophy

■ Chapter 2 How Can I Respond to Claims Using Direct Logical Discourse?

■ Chapter 3 How Can I Respond to Claims Using Indirect Fictive-Narrative Discourse?

CHAPTER ONE

Direct and Indirect Discourse in Philosophy

Consider the following facts and conclusion:

Fact 1: Two planes have just crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing many hundreds of civilians in the towers and on the planes.

Fact 2: The passenger manifests and bodies from the wreckage show that known members of terrorist organizations were on board the planes.

Fact 3: A radical extremist, Osama bin Laden, leader of a terrorist group named al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the attack on the World Trade Center.

Fact 4: Under international law, the killing of civilians (noncombatants) is wrong in situations of war and non-war alike; it is murder.

Conclusion 1: Osama bin Laden and all who helped him are murderers and should receive the strictest sentence under the law (life in prison under international law).

But consider also how the situation might change with the addition of another fact:

Fact 5: Some of the terrorists (perhaps including even the leader) have motivations—personal stories—for their acts that might mitigate our judgment of them.

Conclusion 2: Using judicial discretion that takes into account the context of the crime and other mitigating factors, we might decide the punishment of at least some of the terrorists should amount to something less than life in prison.

Conclusions 1 and 2 differ significantly. Why is this? The first case focuses upon the empirical facts of the crime at hand. The reasoning is cut-and-dried, leading directly from agreed-on facts to a (seemingly) necessary conclusion: civilians were killed, terrorists killed them, it was al-Qaeda terrorists in particular who killed the civilians, and the killing of civilians is murder; therefore, the responsible members of al-Qaeda are murderers and should be punished severely as such. In situations in which the facts are widely agreed upon or might at least be tested and proven, a particular conclusion is commonly best presented by marshalling the facts that lead compellingly to that conclusion.

The straightforward method of presentation—choosing and arranging the facts that lead to a given conclusion—is direct logical discourse. It is discourse because it is communication of thoughts. It is logical because it arrays facts and assertions (that are structured as simple declarative sentences with truth-value, that is, propositions) in such a way that the collection of these propositions according to certain rules will yield conclusions that cannot be doubted: philosophers say that such conclusions are “necessarily accepted.” Facts are justifications of propositions that indicate that the speaker and her audience are in accord about states of affairs. Assertions are justifications of propositions that indicate that the force for accepting the proposition is merely the say-so of the speaker. In direct discourse, propositions (in the context of an argument, they are called premises) are set together to compel a conclusion that follows reasonably from the premises. And it is direct because a given proposition builds on the previous facts, and the chain of facts leads straight to the conclusion. The force of the presentation is necessary because it cannot be logically doubted.

In the case of Conclusion 2, however, the facts are less agreed upon; they are certainly less testable. They carry a stronger tinge of uncertainty. Once the terrorists’ individual motivations became known to us, we might (or might not) admit that those particular motivations mitigated our view of their actions, and we might (or might not) conclude that the appropriate punishment for the terrorists (if they were caught) should be less severe than life in prison, at least for certain of the individuals, if not in all of them. In such an instance, our understanding of the facts (and the conclusions that we base upon those facts) depends less on a simple chain of direct logical reasoning and more on a multifaceted sense of nuanced and possibly complicated factors. In turn, our appreciation of those factors and contingencies depends not just on a series of logically connected statements but on the life experiences and the personal values with which we respond to the situation at hand.

In practical terms, such nuance—such weighing of complicating and mitigating factors—is often difficult or impossible to distill into direct discourse. It is at that point that indirect discourse can step in. Indirect discourse is a way of making claims that are persuasive but not necessary. They amount to the “best account available.” As such they can generate belief but not knowledge (where knowledge is the necessary acceptance of a claim). There can be several subcategories of indirect discourse: from variants of the deductive argument such as reductio ad absurdum to the argument from remainders. Other subcategories include inductive argument (which creates probable or cogent conclusions based on empirical data that are interpreted according to the rules of scientific inquiry) and fictive-narrative philosophy. The following list helps us quickly put this classification scheme into context.

The Contrast Between Direct and Indirect Discourse in Philosophy

Direct-Discourse Philosophy

• In deductive logical argument, the speaker proves his claim to his audience by mustering simple declarative sentences with truth-value (propositions) that are individually justified as fact, assertion, or inference (these act like subconclusions). The conclusion is derived by inference from the premises and is necessarily true if the mechanics of the argument are handled correctly and the premises are all true.

Indirect-Discourse Philosophy

• Reductio ad absurdum is a variant of direct logical argument and refers to taking the proposition of the objector (antithesis) as a starting point for examination and then showing that the antithesis leads to an absurdity (this is how Socrates argued in the early Platonic dialogues).

• Argument from remainders is a hybrid of direct logical argument and inductive logical argument and begins by asserting that the number of outcomes is finite—say A, B, and C. When A and B are eliminated, then C is said to be the result.

• Inductive logical argument is a category unto itself. It refers to arguments that are generally based on empirical (sense-derived) data that are systematized via the scientific method to generalizations or specific conclusions that are highly probable but not necessary.

• Fictive-narrative philosophy makes claims differently. Rather than relying on a narrow series of propositions and facts to make a point or establish a claim, as direct logical discourse and the other forms of indirect discourse do, indirect discourse ideally makes vibrant, “ah-ha” connections to the reader or audience’s wider experiences and values (also know as the worldview of the audience).

Storytelling, or fictive-narrative discourse, is one form of indirect discourse. In this sense, the indirect discourse is a narrative because it is a story, and it is fictive because the story is made up for the occasion, rather than purporting to relate something that actually happened. This sort of discourse becomes philosophy when it also makes a claim. Think, for example, of Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise, in which the slow but persistent tortoise finishes the race ahead of the fleet, but inconsistently attentive, hare. The conclusion to the fable is spelled out in the moral, to the effect that “slow and steady wins the race,” but that conclusion is not derived from a set of tightly linked, mutually supportive facts and propositions, as a direct-discourse conclusion would be. Rather, it is implicit in the actions and results of the story. Readers can accept the conclusion to the degree that they can identify with the events and characters of the story. Readers might, for example, recall situations in their own lives in which they were more tortoiselike or more harelike and remember how they came out ahead or behind in certain instances. They might extrapolate “slow and steady” to situations beyond mere physical exertion, such as running in a race, to other kinds of effort and achievement, such as solving a difficult problem at work. According to their own experiences, then, they might accept the moral to a greater or lesser degree. (For example, one might take to heart the validity of the fable’s moral in general, while also maintaining that “fast and steady”—combining the best traits of both the hare and the tortoise—would be an even better formula for winning a race.)

Or consider another story, Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan (in Luke 10:25–37):

And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up and asked Jesus, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus said unto him, “What is written in the law? How readest thou?”

And the lawyer, answering, said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and love thy neighbor as thyself.”

And Jesus said unto him, “Thou hast answered right. This do, and thou shalt live.”

But the lawyer, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

And Jesus, answering, said, “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his garments, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side of the road. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where the man was, and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own donkey, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence and gave them to the host, and said unto him, ‘Take care of him, and whatsoever thou spendest more when I come again, I will repay thee.’ Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?”

And the lawyer said, “He that showed mercy on him.”

Then said Jesus unto him, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Notice how this is a double narrative, a story within a story. The first is a framing story, written down by Saint Luke, in which Jesus induces a questioning lawyer to recite a version of the Golden Rule (“love thy neighbor as thyself,” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) as an answer to the lawyer’s own question about how to achieve eternal life. The lawyer’s statement, which he has memorized from older scriptures (“the law”), is a true one, according to Jesus. But simply having accurately memorized a religious truth does not satisfy the lawyer’s need to internalize—to truly understand—the key to salvation. So the lawyer presses Jesus for further elaboration. In response, Jesus does not recite additional religious precepts. Instead, he tells the lawyer a parable (the story within Luke’s story) about a traveler beaten by thieves, then rescued by a passing Samaritan.

From his own experiences of life in ancient Judaea, the lawyer would be keenly aware of the parable’s nuances. He would understand immediately the considerable risk of assault and robbery that anyone of the time took when traveling alone. He would sense instinctively the helplessness of stricken travelers in an age before 911 calls, highway patrols, and ambulances. And he would be struck by the fact that it is the distressed man’s ostensibly religious fellow Jews (the priest and the Levite) who ignore him, but it is a Samaritan (a traditional enemy of the Jews) who goes out of his way to come to the beaten man’s aid.

Note, then, that Jesus himself does not directly express the lesson to be drawn from the parable. Rather, the situations and characters in the story resonate with the lawyer in such a way that he can then, on his own, extract from the story the essential point that the person who shows mercy and compassion for others, regardless of their condition or social status, is one who loves his neighbors as himself—and is therefore eligible for eternal life. Jesus’s story brings to life for the lawyer the holy, but otherwise sterile, admonition to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” That is the purpose of fictive narratives in philosophy: to make connections with readers through their life experiences and their deeply held values and to lead them to draw conclusions from the story accordingly.

This introduction to philosophy wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Part 1 Direct and Indirect Discourse in Philosophy
• Part 2 Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
• Part 3 Modern and Contemporary Philosophy
• Appendix: Some Philosophy Games
• Credits
• About the Authors
• Index