The Big Questions of Philosophy

Exploring the kinds of problems that philosophy addresses, the way philosophy works and the distinction between philosophy and opinion.

Identifying the categories of fallacious reasoning; investigating examples of gut-thinking, confirmation bias, appealing to ignorance, the correlation fallacy, begging the question and equivocation; how to check one's reasoning for flaws.

Avoiding fallacious reasoning; studying the rules of deduction and induction; Aristotle's three axioms of logic; the difference between truth and validity; common mistakes in logical arguments; why practically all scientific arguments are inductive.

Exploring the power of abduction, a form of induction that is used not only by philosophers, but also by doctors to make medical diagnoses and scientists to construct theories; Sherlock Holmes, the master of deduction, practices abductive inference.

Exploring the question of what knowledge is; the problem of defining truth; investigating three philosophical theories that attempt to pin down this concept, which are pragmatism, coherentism and the correspondence theory.

Plato's thoughts on the pursuit of knowledge; Rene Descartes' strengths and weaknesses of his position.

Putting empiricism to the test as the best way to acquire knowledge; the ideas of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume; the response of Immanuel Kant; settling on the most effective route to understanding the world as it is.

Addressing a problem posed by philosopher Edmund Gettier about the nature of knowledge; using different thought experiments to test the traditional definition of knowledge; the bafflement and enlightenment that comes from doing philosophy.

Asking the question of whether religious belief can be justified; Hume's argument that testimony can never justify a belief that a miracle has occurred; analyzing the flaws in Hume's reasoning; thinking about whether his conclusion still holds.

The phenomenon of religious experiences; whether such events justify belief; practically all religions have religious experiences; the beliefs they lead to can be radically different; whether "feeling the touch of God" can justify religious belief.

Whether faith can ever be considered rational; learning that everyone unconsciously behaves as if it is; the grounds for doing so; how this applies to religious faith; famous arguments by Blaise Pascal, William Clifford and William James.

Addressing the question of whether God exists; the most popular proofs appeal to God's existence as the best explanation for the universe's existence and nature; testing the cosmological and teleological arguments using philosophy and physics.

If God exists, God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent; how these three attributes are likely inconsistent with each other; the difficulties with St. Anselm's argument for a perfect God; modern proposals for redefining God's conception.

Considering arguments against God's existence, the most common being the problem of evil; exploring theological solutions that account for why God allows certain evils; whether God has reasons one cannot understand; the flaws in this argument.

It is one thing for God to grant humans the freedom to do evil, but it is harder to understand the existence of natural evils such as earthquakes; evaluating approaches to this problem; the suggestion that God exists but did not create the universe.

A close study of omnitemporalism, the idea that the future already exists and that God necessarily has foreknowledge of it.

Looking at the problem of free will from the point of view of the soul, the conjectured seat of mentality that exists apart from the body; neuroscience suggests that the soul does not exist; it also casts doubt on the concept of free will.

Compatibilists argue that if one understands free will correctly, the idea that humans are free becomes defensible; evaluating this stance; considering the consequences of conceding that people do not have free will in the traditional sense.

The question of whether there could be an afterlife; what defines a person; how personal identity is preserved over time; discovering that many proposed answers fail, including the notion that personal identity is preserved by the soul.

Exploring the possibility that personal identity is preserved by memory, as Locke contended, or by psychological continuity; testing these ideas in thought experiments involving the transporter from Star Trek and other scenarios.

Whether one is the same person over time because they have the same body over time; the implications of this view, which traces to the Judeo-Christian concept of the resurrection of the body in the afterlife; considering biological objections.

New ways of defining personhood; perdurantism states that a person is the sum total of their life experiences and cannot be isolated to a time and place; questioning the concept of a person, which may rule out the possibility of an afterlife.

Pondering the nature of the mind; starting with the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is how the brain produces the mind; investigating two possible answers; exploring why many philosophers consider both to be problematic.

Examine three theories of the mind—property dualism, epiphenomenalism, and eliminative materialism—discovering that each has shortcomings.

Looking at functionalism, which suggests that anything that functions like the brain has mentality; the implication that, in principle, machines can think; studying some responses to this theory, including John Searle's Chinese Room experiment.

What is morally right and wrong; inquiring what establishes the truth of ethical statements; a look at emotivism, which holds that emotions say what is right; focusing on divine command theory, which considers God to be the source of moral truth.

Studying the objections of the view that the happiness or absence of pain that results from an action defines whether it is good.

Kant suggests that reason determines what is moral or immoral; studying his categorical imperative, which is a set of obligatory moral rules guided by reason; how Kant's rules go far beyond the Golden Rule; the categorical imperative's shortcomings.

Taking up virtue ethics, which suggests that one should concentrate less on resolving the morality of actions and instead focus on cultivating virtue; the complexities of this quest; the need to use practical wisdom; its ultimate goal of eudaimonia.

The question of why to bother being good; exploring this issue with Plato, whose dialogue, "The Republic", is a description of a highly regulated, virtuous society; Plato contends that the individual achieves virtue in an analogous way.

How society should be organized; performing a thought experiment that casts into doubt the moral justification of government; probing the view of philosophical anarchism, which has a spectrum of positions from benign to violent.

Whether government arises naturally from a state of anarchy; whether this fact morally justifies it; Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau see different factors driving individuals to enter the social contract; comparing their views.

Exploring three theories on the proper size of government; Adam Smith sees a minimal role; Karl Marx envisions total control; John Maynard Keynes believes that major government intervention is necessary under certain conditions.

Deepening the study of the role of government; examining Mill's arguments in his 1859 treatise, "On Liberty"; applying his reasoning to the question of to what extent marijuana, gay marriage and offensive and inflammatory speech should be legal.

John Rawls and Robert Nozick reach different conclusions about what constitutes a just society; a thought experiment based on the movie, "Interstellar"; pondering how one might start civilization from scratch in the fairest possible way.

Professor Johnson poses the last big question of whether one can answer the ultimate question; drawing on many insights and the experience of thinking philosophically; probing the meaning of life from several points of view.