Philosophy: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners chained all their lives watch shadows on a wall and take them for the whole of reality. When one is freed and sees the sun, he realises the shadows were only copies, but on his return the others mock him.

The allegory opens Book VII of Plato's Republic, written around 375 BC, as a conversation between Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. The prisoners face the back wall of a cave; behind them a fire burns, and people carry objects past it, so the prisoners see only moving shadows and hear echoes. The freed prisoner is at first dazzled and in pain, and only slowly learns to see real things and, at last, the sun. Plato uses the sun to stand for the Form of the Good, the highest truth in his theory that perfect, unchanging Forms lie behind the changing world we see. Back in the dark, the returning prisoner stumbles, and the others say the journey ruined his eyes; they would even kill anyone who tried to free them, a clear echo of Socrates' own execution.

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In 343 BC King Philip II of Macedon hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. For two or three years Aristotle taught him at Mieza, in what is now northern Greece.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) had close ties to the Macedonian court: his father, Nicomachus, had been physician to Philip's father, King Amyntas III. At Mieza he taught Alexander ethics, politics and literature, and young nobles such as Ptolemy, later king of Egypt, sometimes joined the lessons. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, Alexander kept a copy of Homer's Iliad annotated by Aristotle under his pillow on campaign, next to his dagger. The lessons ended when Alexander, at 16, was left to govern Macedon in his father's absence. He became king in 336 BC and in thirteen years built an empire stretching from Greece to India. Aristotle returned to Athens and in 335 BC founded his own school, the Lyceum. In later years the two men grew apart.

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When Alexander the Great met the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (today's Sinop in Turkey) in Corinth and asked what he could do for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Stand a little out of my sun.'

Diogenes (about 412–323 BC) left Sinope, a Greek city on the Black Sea coast, after a scandal over debased coins, and settled in Athens. He lived by begging, slept in a large storage jar and walked through the market in daylight with a lit lamp, saying he was looking for a human being. He was the best-known Cynic, from the Greek word for 'dog-like', a name that mocked his shameless way of life and that he wore with pride. The meeting with Alexander is told by Plutarch and by Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote about the lives of the philosophers, both centuries later, so its details may have been polished. Plutarch adds that Alexander said: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Sinop honours him with a statue, put up in 2006, showing him with his lamp and a dog.

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The Stoics drew a sharp line between what is up to us (our own judgements, intentions and choices) and what is not, such as health, wealth, reputation and other people's actions. Peace of mind, they taught, comes from putting our effort into the first.

Stoicism was founded in Athens around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who taught at the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, which gave the school its name. The clearest statement of this line comes from Epictetus (about AD 50–135), who was born enslaved in Hierapolis, today's Pamukkale in Turkey, was later freed, and taught philosophy in Rome and then in Greece. His student Arrian wrote down his teaching, and the Enchiridion, or Handbook, opens with exactly this division. Epictetus did not ask people to stop caring about results, only not to let their peace of mind depend on things they cannot command. Marcus Aurelius drew on him, and in the 20th century Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, pioneers of cognitive behavioural therapy, took up his idea that we are upset less by events than by our judgements about them.

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When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote 'God is dead' in The Gay Science (1882), he was not celebrating. He meant that belief in God no longer held European culture together, and that the morals built on it would lose their footing too.

Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and the son of a Protestant pastor. He put the famous line in the mouth of a madman who runs into a marketplace with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for God. The unbelievers standing around laugh at him, and he tells them that 'we have killed him': modern science and ways of thinking had made the old faith hard to hold. The danger he saw was nihilism, the sense that nothing has value once its old foundation has gone. His answer, developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), was that people would have to create new values for themselves, an ideal he called the Übermensch, or 'overhuman'. The line became one of the most quoted in modern philosophy, and thinkers from Heidegger to the theologians of the 1960s argued over its meaning.

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Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.

Confucius (551–479 BC) was a teacher and official in the state of Lu, in today's Shandong, China. In Analects 15.24 his disciple Zigong asks whether one word could guide a whole life. Confucius answers shu, 'reciprocity' or 'consideration', and explains it with this line. The Analects, sayings gathered by his followers, were studied for China's civil service exams until 1905. This 'do not' form is sometimes called the Silver Rule, beside the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated.

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The Ship of Theseus is an ancient puzzle: if every plank of a ship is replaced, one by one, over the years, is it still the same ship? Philosophers use it to ask what makes anything stay itself over time.

The story comes from the Greek writer Plutarch, around AD 100. Theseus, the legendary king of Athens who killed the Minotaur on Crete, sailed home in a 30-oared ship, and the Athenians preserved it for centuries, until about 300 BC, replacing rotten timbers with new ones. Plutarch says philosophers already argued over whether it was still the same ship. In 1655 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes added a twist: if someone kept the old planks and rebuilt them into a ship, which one would be the real Ship of Theseus? Everyday versions include 'grandfather's axe', with a new head and a new handle, and Trigger's broom in the British sitcom Only Fools and Horses. The question matters for restored ships and buildings, and for how we think about people who change over a lifetime.

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One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

These are the closing words of The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1942 essay by Albert Camus (1913–1960), the Algerian-born French writer. Camus calls the clash between our hunger for meaning and a world that offers none 'the absurd'. In Greek myth Sisyphus, king of Corinth, cheated death and was condemned for ever to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down. Camus pictures him walking back to the rock, fully aware of his fate and refusing false hope. For Camus that clear-eyed persistence is a form of revolt.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), closing line: 'Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.' English and Turkish rendered from the FrenchRead card

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Sartre's phrase “existence precedes essence” means we aren't born with a fixed purpose: we exist first, then make ourselves through what we choose to do.

Sartre (1905–1980) was the leading French philosopher of existentialism, a movement centred on freedom and personal responsibility. He gave the idea its best-known form in a public talk in Paris on 29 October 1945, published in 1946 as Existentialism Is a Humanism. He explained it with a paper knife: its maker has a plan for it before it exists, so its essence, what it is for, comes first. Since Sartre held that there is no God to design human nature, people have no such plan: we first exist, and then define ourselves through our actions. That is why he said we are 'condemned to be free': we cannot avoid choosing, and we answer for what we choose. Sartre later distanced himself from the talk as too simple, and in 1964 he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Occam's razor, named after the 14th-century English friar William of Ockham, advises that when two explanations fit the evidence equally well, the one that needs fewer assumptions is the better place to start.

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) was an English Franciscan friar and one of the leading logicians of the Middle Ages. He used the principle so often and so effectively that it became tied to his name, although he did not invent it: Aristotle had argued something similar. The famous Latin wording, “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, does not appear in his surviving writings; an Irish friar, John Punch, put it that way in 1639. The “razor” is the image of shaving away assumptions an explanation does not need. The rule is a guide, not a proof, and sometimes the truth really is complicated. Medical students learn a version of it: when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.

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Epicurus, who taught in Athens around 300 BC, held that happiness comes from modest pleasures, friendship and freedom from fear, not from excess.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) was born on the island of Samos and around 306 BC bought a house with a garden in Athens, where he founded his school. It became known simply as the Garden, and unusually for the time it welcomed women. He taught that pleasure is the goal of life, but by pleasure he meant the absence of pain in the body and of anxiety in the mind, a calm he called ataraxia. Simple food, friendship and clear thinking about death and the gods were the way there. In a letter he wrote that bread and water give the greatest pleasure to someone who is hungry, and he once asked a friend for a small pot of cheese so that he could have a feast. Later critics caricatured his followers as pleasure-seekers, and in English an epicure came to mean a lover of fine food.

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In The Second Sex (1949), the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued that becoming a woman is shaped not only by biology but by upbringing, social roles and institutions.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher and novelist and a leading figure of existentialism, the philosophy that people are not born with a fixed nature but make themselves through their choices. She wrote The Second Sex in about 14 months and published it in two volumes in 1949. Its best-known line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, sums up her argument: society treats man as the norm and woman as the “Other”, defined only in relation to him, and education, myth, law and work then teach girls that role. The book sold some 22,000 copies in its first week, was placed on the Vatican's list of forbidden books and became a founding text of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Hannah Arendt coined “the banality of evil” after reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi organiser of the Holocaust. She was struck by how he described enormous crimes in stock bureaucratic phrases, as if they were routine office work.

Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-Jewish political thinker who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and reached the United States in 1941. Eichmann had managed the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and death camps; after the war he escaped to Argentina, where Israeli agents captured him in 1960. Arendt covered his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker, and her reports became the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. By “banality” she did not mean the crimes were ordinary. She meant that Eichmann seemed neither a monster nor a fanatic, but a careerist who had stopped thinking about what his work meant. The book caused a storm, and later historians, using recordings Eichmann made in Argentina, showed he was a committed antisemite. He was executed in 1962.

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The trolley problem asks whether you would pull a lever to divert a runaway trolley away from five people on the track, knowing it will then kill one person on a side track.

The English philosopher Philippa Foot described a version of the dilemma in 1967, in an article on abortion and the ethics of harming some people to save others. The American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson named it “the trolley problem” in 1976 and later made a harder variant famous: instead of pulling a lever, you could stop the trolley by pushing a large man off a footbridge. The numbers are the same, yet most people who would pull the lever refuse to push. In one large online survey about nine in ten people said diverting the trolley was acceptable, and brain-scan studies since 2001 suggest the pushing version engages emotion far more strongly. The puzzle now shapes debates on self-driving cars: MIT's Moral Machine website gathered about 40 million decisions from 233 countries and territories and found clear differences between them.

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The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

This is proposition 5.6 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophy book Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) published in his lifetime. The Vienna-born thinker drafted it in notebooks while serving as a soldier in the First World War; it appeared in German in 1921 and in English in 1922. The book is a chain of short numbered statements. Its central idea is that a meaningful sentence works like a picture of a possible fact. What cannot be pictured in this way, such as ethics or the meaning of life, cannot be said, only shown. So the line is not about the size of one's vocabulary: the edges of what I can meaningfully say are the edges of the world as I can think it. Wittgenstein later rejected much of the book in his Philosophical Investigations, published after his death in 1953.

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Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BC, argued that motion is impossible: to cross a room you must first cover half the distance, then half of what remains, and so on for ever.

Zeno (c. 490–430 BC) came from Elea, a Greek city in southern Italy, and was a follower of Parmenides, who taught that reality is one and unchanging and that motion is an illusion. Zeno's paradoxes were meant to show that believing in motion leads to even stranger conclusions. His own book is lost; we know the arguments mainly through Plato and through Aristotle, who discusses them in his Physics. The most famous says that swift Achilles can never overtake a tortoise with a head start, because each time he reaches the spot where it was, it has moved on. Mathematics later showed that infinitely many steps can add up to a finite distance: a half plus a quarter plus an eighth, and so on, comes to exactly one. This was put on a rigorous footing only in the 19th century, with the idea of a limit.

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Pascal's wager, set out by the 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal, argues that believing in God is the rational bet: if God exists the believer gains infinitely, and if not, little is lost.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a mathematician and physicist who, with Pierre de Fermat, laid the foundations of probability theory; he also built one of the first mechanical calculators. In later life he turned to religion and began notes for a defence of Christianity. He died before finishing it, and the notes were published in 1670 as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). The wager is not a proof that God exists. It is a decision argument: when reason cannot settle a question, weigh the possible gains and losses of each choice. For that reason it is often described as the first use of decision theory. Critics objected that many religions make similar promises, so the bet does not say which god to back, and that belief cannot simply be chosen. Pascal's answer was to act as believers do until belief follows.

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Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, filled private notebooks with Stoic reflections, written in Greek and never meant for publication. We know them today as the Meditations.

Stoicism was a Greek school of philosophy that taught people to focus on what is in their power, their own judgements and actions, and to accept calmly what is not. Marcus had studied it since his youth. He wrote much of the Meditations in the 170s, while leading campaigns against Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier; notes in the text place the first book in the land of the Quadi and the second at Carnuntum, a Roman fort in today's Austria. He gave the work no title. The Greek manuscripts call it Ta eis heauton, “To himself”. The notes survived in Byzantine copies and were first printed in Zurich in 1558 or 1559, and they have since become one of the most widely read books of philosophy.

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Amor fati is Latin for “love of fate”. Friedrich Nietzsche made the phrase famous in 1882: it means not only putting up with what happens, hardship included, but embracing it as a necessary part of your life. The Stoics had taught a similar acceptance nearly two thousand years earlier.

Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher, first used the phrase in The Gay Science (1882), in a passage written for the new year. There he resolves to learn to see what is necessary in things as beautiful, and one day to be only a yes-sayer. In Ecce Homo, written in 1888, he called amor fati his formula for greatness in a human being: wanting nothing in one's life to be otherwise, in the past, the future or for all eternity. The Latin words do not appear in the ancient Stoics, but the idea is close to theirs. The Greek Stoic teacher Epictetus advised his students not to wish that events would happen as they want, but to want them to happen as they do. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius urged himself in his Meditations to love only what fate brings him.

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Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die”. For centuries the phrase has reminded people that their time is limited: Stoic philosophers turned it into a regular practice, and painters filled their pictures with skulls, hourglasses and burnt-down candles to make the same point.

The idea is older than the Latin phrase. The Stoic philosopher Seneca filled his letters with advice to reflect on death. Epictetus told his students that when they kissed a child or a friend they should remember that person was mortal, just as, he said, someone stood behind a Roman general during his triumph to remind him that he too was mortal. From the Middle Ages the theme ran through European art and tomb sculpture, from the Dance of Death, which showed skeletons leading people of every rank, to the Dutch vanitas still lifes of the 1600s, where skulls, wilting flowers and soap bubbles sit among fine objects. Psychologists have tested whether thinking about death makes life feel more precious: in a 2011 study, people who vividly imagined their own death for a few minutes afterwards reported more gratitude than a comparison group.

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In A Theory of Justice (1971), the American philosopher John Rawls asked what rules for society you would choose from behind a “veil of ignorance”: not knowing whether you would be rich or poor, talented or not, healthy or sick, or even what you would believe.

Rawls (1921–2002) taught at Harvard, and A Theory of Justice is among the most influential works of political philosophy of the 20th century. He called this imagined starting point the “original position”. Because no one behind the veil knows who they will turn out to be, no one can tilt the rules in their own favour, so whatever is agreed there is fair to everyone. Rawls argued that people in that position would choose two principles: equal basic liberties for all, and inequalities of wealth or power allowed only if positions are open to everyone and the arrangement benefits the least advantaged members of society. He called the second part the difference principle. Critics replied that people might prefer to gamble, and the economist John Harsanyi argued that they would choose whatever raises average welfare.

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In his Nicomachean Ethics, written in the 4th century BC, Aristotle argued that each virtue sits between two vices, one of too little and one of too much. Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness; generosity lies between meanness and extravagance.

The Greek word Aristotle used is mesotēs, the mean or middle. He stressed that it is not an arithmetical halfway point but a mean “relative to us”: a trainer would not give every athlete the same amount of food, since what suits a champion wrestler is too much for a beginner. The right response depends on the situation, and virtue means feeling and acting at the right time, towards the right people, for the right reason and in the right way. Nor is the mean always in the exact centre: courage lies closer to recklessness than to cowardice. Some acts, such as theft or murder, have no mean at all. Other traditions reached similar ideas: the Confucian classic known in English as The Doctrine of the Mean praises balance, and a Turkish proverb says that a little of everything is right, and too much of it is harm.

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The unexamined life is not worth living.

In 399 BC Socrates, then about 70, stood trial in Athens accused of impiety, meaning disrespect for the city's gods, and of corrupting the young. A jury of about 500 citizens found him guilty, probably by around 280 votes to 220. Athenian law then let him propose his own penalty. Provocatively, instead of a penalty he asked for free meals at public expense for life, and explained why he could not simply go into exile and keep quiet: talking every day about virtue and questioning himself and others was the greatest good, and a life without such examination was not worth living. He was sentenced to death and drank hemlock, a poison. His pupil Plato, who was at the trial, recorded the speech in the Apology, from the Greek apologia, 'defence'.

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Stoic philosophers such as Seneca advised imagining setbacks in advance, like losing money, falling ill or being sent into exile, so that if they came they could be faced calmly and with a plan rather than with shock.

Seneca, the Roman statesman and Stoic writer who had tutored the emperor Nero, returns to the idea in his Letters to Lucilius. In one letter, written after fire destroyed the Roman city of Lugdunum, today's Lyon, in a single night, he argues that nothing should take us wholly by surprise if we have thought it through beforehand. The idea is older: the Roman orator Cicero traced it to earlier Greek thinkers and called it praemeditatio futurorum malorum, 'thinking ahead about future evils'. In his Meditations, the emperor Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in the morning that he will meet rude and ungrateful people that day. Modern writers call the practice negative visualisation, and managers use a relative of it, the pre-mortem, in which a team imagines that a project has already failed and asks why.

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