2014-08-18
14 分钟This is philosophy bites with me, Nigel.
Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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If a murderer is at your door and asks for the whereabouts of a potential victim whom you're sheltering, are you permitted to lie to him?
You might recognise the example from Immanuel Kant.
But why does Kant use the example in the first place?
Why do any philosophers use examples rather than just deploy pure abstract reasoning?
Here's Tamar Gendler.
Tamar Gendler, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you so much.
It's a delight to be here.
The topic we're going to focus on is why philosophers use examples.
That's a really interesting question.
Why do philosophers use examples?
So, one of the most striking things, when you pick up one of the works in the ancient greek philosophical tradition, takes something like Plato's republic, is that on the one hand, it's full of all sorts of abstract argument, and on the other hand, it's full of all sorts of vivid cases.
And I think Plato gives a clue to why it is that the works, the dialogues, include these two sorts of things when he talks about the human as having a multi part soul.
So Plato says famously in the republic and in several of the other dialogues, that human beings are composed on the one hand of a part that he calls reason or rationality, and on the other of two other parts that he calls spirit and appetite.
And this distinction that human beings, on the one hand, have a capacity that gauges and understands the world in terms of reason and argumentation, and on the other hand, have aspects of themselves that understand the world in other ways, is actually a central theme both in the western philosophical and eastern philosophical traditions.
And the role of examples is to talk to the other parts of the soul.