The Metaphysics of Philosophy, Knowledge and Morality Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The biggest flops in the history of philosophy

Whereas ordinary people do not hesistate to rely on their intution when responding to the challenges of everyday life, philosophers often find it beneath their dignity to do so. They boldly try to transcend the "ordinary" ways of responding to challenges and flop big time.

Socrates non-plussed all his comtemporaries with his piercingly accurate questions, only to be sentenced to death for debauching young boys, i.e. homosexual paedophilia, and a host of other less serious crimes.

A student of Socrates', Plato convinced himself that ideas were truer and nobler than the physical perception of things. It never occurred to him that ideas cannot possibly dwell outside the mind. He left a legacy of dreaming idealism that is as stubborn as it is blatantly inaccurate.

A student of Plato's, Aristotle realised that his master had got the wrong end of the stick and devoted his career to the study of the perceived physical world. He had the engenuous insight that the fundamental rules of science cannot be proved on their own but need to be accepted in a package. He was a prolific writer. In fact, we owe most of what we know about science, knowledge and logic to Aristotle. Yet, inconsistently with some of his own conclusions, he firmly believed that gaining ultimate knowledge about things as they are was possible.

Spinoza intuited that the nature of physical reality was the same as that of metaphysical reality (i.e. reality beyond the physical realm). Though this belief was very much in line with the religious thinking of his age, he never made a career as a philosopher, he polished expensive optical systems for a living. Ironically, his optics helped scientists to conclude that there actually is no such thing as metaphysics in the outside world.

Descartes coined the famous phrase "I think, therefore I am" as an aside in one of his sentences, but insisted that the metaphysical world was separate from the physical, without any passage to connect them.

Kant correctly established that the term "metaphysical" can only refer to the structure of our brain, i.e. how we are compelled to make sense of the world in terms of space, time and causality. But then inconsistently, he stumbled on to try and outline a metaphysical "foundation" for morality, only to arrive at an ethic focussed solely on intention motivating an act and completely ignoring its outcome.

Schopenhauer correctly established that there is no firm foundation to morality, but he intuited that sympathy with fellow humans was as solid a foundation as you could ever find. He caused a scandal and never got recognition for this partial insight.

Since Kant, no philosopher has ever attempted to establish a complete philosophical system, which is a flop in itself. Mine is a first-after-Kant attempt at establishing a complete and consistent framework for all human thinking, knowledge and morality.