The Thinkers : Today (2)

"Four doctors went duck hunting together. Together in the duck blind, they decided that instead of all shooting away at the same time, they would take turns as each duck came by. The first to have a shot would be the general practitioner, next would be the internist, then the surgeon, and finally the pathologist.When the first bird flew over, the general practitioner lifted his shotgun, but never fired, saying, 'I’m not sure that was a duck.'

The second bird was the internist’s. He aimed and followed the bird in his sights, saying, 'It looks like a duck, it flies like a duck, it sounds like a duck. ..,' but then the bird was out of range and the internist didn’t take a shot.

As soon as the third bird appeared, flying up out of the water only a few feet from the blind, the surgeon blasted away bang-bang-bang, emptying his pump gun and blowing the bird to smithereens. Turning to the pathologist, the surgeon said, 'Go, see whether that was a duck?!'

"Does Truth lie only on the eye of the beholder? Is Perception everything?" Swara carried on, "The early Greek sage, Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 575–ca. 490 BC), says Rescher, is known to posterity only through a small handful of brief quotations. The following stands prominent among them, 'If oxen and horses and lions had hands and would use them to produce works of art as we men do, then horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and would make their bodies in the image of their own different kinds.' This little story has many instructive aspects. It marks the introduction of a new conceptual device—a new thought tool—into the realm of philosophical deliberation. For the reasonings at issue here proceed not by a characterization of the real with its descriptive account of facts but rather, in terms of the purely speculative projection of an entirely conjectural hypothesis. It is a prime instance of a mode of challenge that has become strikingly prominent in philosophy, 'What would you say if ... ?

For another thing, Xenophanes’s supposition inaugurates the doctrine of relativism: the position that the truth about things, lies in the eyes of the beholder or, to be more accurate about it, the types of beholders at issue.

The pivotal idea here is that differently situated viewers will see things from their own point of view. The idea was further elaborated by Xenophanes’s younger countryman Protagoras (ca. 490–ca. 420 BC) who taught that 'man is the measure of all things, of that which is that it is, and of that which is not that it is not.' This again proceeds at the species level, but later more dogmatic thinkers stretched this species relativism to a more distinctively personal relativism that sees every individual as the arbiter of 'their own truth.'

And of course at that point, the very conception of impersonal factuality vanishes into thin air, and we are left with what is often described as the 'sophomore relativism' of the declaration 'that’s just what you think.'

Knowledge begins in wonder, says Aristotle, and in this spirit, it is often said that all knowledge issues from questioning. The inverse thesis that questions always issue from beliefs—that every question has some prepositional presupposition—is also in prospect. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps, the British historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) maintained that 'Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.'

But he also went on to maintain that 'Every question involves a presupposition,' seeing that, after all, it cannot but presuppose—among other things—that it indeed has a meaningful and true answer.

The Socrates of Plato's dialogue, Theaetetus, considered the theory that to know something is defined by two requirements: (1) that the claim at issue be true, and (2) that its putative knower be able to provide an account for how this is so. Socrates proceeds to reject this theory by embarking on a course of reasoning marked by the following exchanges:

SOCRATES [to THEAETETUS]: [You hold that having] a true belief with the addition of an account is knowledge?

THEAETETUS: Precisely.

SOCRATES: Can it be, Theaetetus, that, all in a moment, we have found out today what so many wise men have grown old in seeking and have not found?

THEAETETUS: I, at any rate, am satisfied with our present statement, Socrates.

SOCRATES: Yes, the statement just in itself may well be satisfactory; for how can there ever be knowledge without an account and right conception? Yet there is one point in the theory as stated that does not find favour with me.

THEAETETUS: What is that?

SOCRATES: What might be considered its most ingenious feature: it says that the ultimate elements [like the axioms of geometry] are unknowable, whereas whatever is complex [like the geometric theorems] can be known.

THEAETETUS: Is that not right?

SOCRATES: We must find out.

Socrates now proceeds to argue that it cannot be right because if every instance of knowing requires an account—which of course must itself consist of known truth—then nothing whatsoever could ever be known because we would be caught up in an infinite regress.

This sort of reasoning—to the effect that an obviously untenable result follows from a projected thesis—has come to be known as a reductio ad absurdum, a 'reduction to absurdity.' It is an ingenious mode of refutatory reasoning that was common among the philosophers and mathematicians of ancient Greece.

Socrates proceeds to exploit this refutation to argue that it cannot be that all knowledge is 'discursive' by being grounded in further knowledge. Rather, there must also be knowledge that is 'immediate,' being grounded in experience rather than mediated by other, prior knowledge. For if knowledge always had to come from knowledge, and always required substantiating preknowledge, its actual acquisition could never get under way.

A further telling objection to the Theaetetus theory of knowing, to the effect that knowledge must always be based on validating reasons, was provided by the English philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). The Theaetetus theory is thus clearly flawed. Knowledge is more than believed truth, it is appropriately believed truth. To count as knowledge a belief must not only be true, its possessor must have an appropriate basis for believing so.

In recent discussion this point has been driven home by a widely cited proposal by the American philosopher Edward Gettie. His counterexample is along the lines of the seaman who (correctly) believes that the distant island he is approaching is inhabited, but he believes so only because he mistakes some large shrubs for people. He believes truly and actually has grounds for his belief, but the two are spoilingly disconnected.

The point that emerges from this range of deliberations is that the view that knowledge is true and justified belief is inadequate. For if the considerations that ground the belief in question are out of sync with the facts that ensure the truth of this belief—it no longer makes any sense to speak of knowledge. Knowing is not just a matter of having some grounds or reasons for accepting a truth: it requires appropriate grounds, and knowledge is not merely belief that is true and justifiably accepted but rather a true belief that is justifiably accepted as such.

In implementing the idea of equating knowledge with justified true belief, one cannot and must not treat justification and truth as separate and separable factors. For the correlation will not work if its equivocal stipulation is construed as 'believed to be true with some justification.' It must instead be construed as 'believed to be true with adequate justification.'

For the justification at issue cannot lie merely in the eyes of the knower as a subjective impression; it must obtain objectively in a way that holds not just for the knower but for everyone. The critical distinction between 'He merely thinks he knows it' and 'He actually does know it' cannot be bypassed. If you permit any separation between justification and truth in that formula, the paradox of Plato-Russell-Gettier becomes unavoidable. Knowledge is not just a matter of belief that is justified and accepted as true; it is a matter of what is justifiably and correctly accepted as true.

And now, let us see some philosophers as 'Today's Philosophers' according to our contributors.

Julia Kristeva, born 1941, into a middle-class family in Bulgaria. Challenging and provocative, Kristeva has been a prominent voice in philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, politics, feminism, and psychoanalysis since the 1980s, and has received widespread acclaim for her work. She graduated with a degree in linguistics from the University of Sofia, then won a scholarship to pursue doctoral research in France on the application of psychoanalytic theory to language and literature. Kristeva is perhaps best known for the concept of intertextuality, an idea built upon the work of the theorists Ferdinand de Saussure and, especially, Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristeva’s idea of abjection has been used in the analysis of texts and movies, such as Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Her rise to prominence began in 1980 with Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse, translated in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, in which she elaborates on the concept of 'intertextuality'.

In 1980, Kristeva published Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection), in which she explores what gives rise to feelings of horror and disgust in humans. As well as numerous honorary degrees, she has received the Vaclav Havel Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and France’s Commander of the Legion of Honor for her work.

Martha Nussbaum, born in 1947 to a prosperous family in New York City. Nussbaum’s philosophy focuses in particular on human emotions. She is also a passionate advocate of the positive role that philosophy can play within public life in the modern world. Nussbaum has written more than two dozen books. Her latest, Monarchy of Fear (2018), is critical of the philosophical tradition that minimizes the role of emotion in our response to the world. Public engagement is central to Nussbaum’s practice of philosophy. One of Nussbaum’s significant philosophical influences was the British philosopher Bernard Williams (1929–2003).

Nussbaum envisions human beings as 'plantlike'—soft and vulnerable, but also capable of tremendous growth and able to survive considerable hardship. Nussbaum claims that anger however justified it may seem to be—is almost always a wholly inadequate response to life’s problems. She cites Nelson Mandela as someone who was able to look beyond anger. For Nussbaum, Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) is an example of a public figure who managed to overcome anger in pursuit of building a better future. Imprisoned on Robben Island for 27 years under South Africa’s apartheid regime, Mandela wrote about his own struggles with anger.

While he was in prison, he read the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius and trained himself to move beyond rage, seeing that there could be no possibility for nation-building when resentment was rife. Mandela’s overcoming of anger was not an attempt to overlook the wrongs of the past, but instead was a positive attempt to move to a brighter future.

In 2017, Nussbaum was invited to give the Jefferson Lecture by the National Endowment for the Humanities, one of the highest honors in US academia.

Slavoj Zižek, was born in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, in 1949, and grew up in a period of gradual liberalization and relatively high prosperity. After World War II, Slovenia was a part of communist Yugoslavia under the leadership of Josip Broz, known as Tito, the 'benign dictator,' who allowed greater freedom and a more relaxed attitude to Western culture than was permitted in other communist states. Slavoj’s father was an economist and civil servant, and his mother was an accountant in a state-owned company.

Hailed as one of the most brilliant philosophers of his generation, Zižek has used his prominent media profile to present a complex mixture of high and popular culture, philosophy, psychology, and politics.

In 1989, he gained international recognition for his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology. In 1993, he published a study of German Idealism, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Zižek worked with British director Sophie Fiennes on the 2012 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which explored prevailing ideologies through popular film.

Gloria Jean Watkins, born in a rural, racially segregated town in Kentucky in 1952. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother was a part-time maid in white households. She later took her great-grandmother’s name, Bell Hooks, as a pen name—but using lowercase to prioritize her message over her personality. A feminist, scholar, social critic, and activist, hooks is one of the US’s leading intellectuals and a powerful and important commentator on race, gender, and class. Black American women were instrumental in establishing Black Lives Matter, a movement that campaigns against racism and racial inequality. bell hooks has engaged with the issue of how such social activism can be channeled to create lasting change.

Judith Butler, born 1956, in Cleveland, Ohio. She is active in gender politics, human rights, and anti-war campaigns and is currently serving on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights

in New York. Butler is a radical cultural theorist who has been at the forefront of feminist and LGBTQ+ issues since 1990. Butler was one of the earliest theorists of queer theory, Butler’s theories and activism have brought questions of gender into the heart of US national debate and have also sparked a broader awakening of identity politics.

There are some names can be mentioned,

Jürgen Habermas, one of the foremost philosophers and social theorists of the modern age;

Alasdair MacIntyre, is one of the modern world’s most influential thinkers on community, moral philosophy, and 'virtue ethics' (which places character and virtue above duty).

Carol Gilligan, a feminist and psychologist, is famous for her work on the moral development of women and girls and for offering new perspectives on gender, education, and mental health.

Judith Jarvis Thomson, whose work focuses primarily on moral theory and metaphysic.

Alain Badiou, the communist philosopher, has written on a wide range of topics, from Marxism, ontology, psychoanalysis, and mathematics to literature and love.

Thomas Nagel, a prominent philosopher and professor of law.

Robert Nozick, launches a powerful defense of libertarianism, advocating minimal intervention by the state in the citizen’s right to life, liberty, and property.

Saul Kripke, is considered by many to be a modern genius. He is the world’s leading philosopher of modal logic and arguably best known for developing Kripke semantics, the standard semantics for modal logic. He has also made outstanding contributions to the philosophy of language, theories of truth, and the work of Wittgenstein.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, known for her radical, 'interventionist' readings of literary and other texts, in which she presents formidable challenges to colonial and patriarchal discourse.

Patricia Churchland, most recent book, Touching a Nerve, examines issues of identity, free will, and consciousness.

Susan Haack's contribution to philosophy has been wide-ranging and includes legal philosophy, the philosophy of ogic and language, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, pragmatism, feminism, social philosophy, the law of evidence, and the philosophy of literature.

Michael Sandel, a moral and political philosopher.

Cornel West, one of the US’s most powerful voices in civil rights, race, gender, and class.

Scientific advances set new philosophical agendas, but so too do rising dissatisfactions and anxieties. Where hope binds people together in cooperation and trust, fear splits them apart in suspicion and mistrust. Perhaps we have entered an age in which people fear apocalypse rather than hope for nirvana. Yet difficult times are hospitable to philosophy. Whenever old blueprints for the conduct of life begin to fade and lose their authority, there is no finding new ones except through the hard philosophical work of confronting ourselves and our world with truth and reason.

The men and women we've mentioned, have had very different understandings of the world, of ourselves, and of the wisest ways of conducting our lives. They have constructed systems of thought, some of which endure, and some of which have suffered at the hands of time, or in the light of new experience, or further reasoning. However, they all shared a conviction of the importance of the task. Even sceptics who doubted the very possibility of philosophical understanding, found it important to persuade people to live their lives aware of the void this leaves. And Allah know best."

It's time to go and slowly Swara vanished in chanting,

Wise man said just walk this way

To the dawn of the light

Wind will blow into your face

As the years pass you by

Hear this voice from deep inside

It's the call of your heart

Close your eyes and you will find

Passage out of the dark

Here I am

Will you send me an angel?

Here I am

In the land of the morning star *)

Citations & References:
- DK London, Philosophers - Their Lives and Works, Cobaltid
- Nicholas Rescher, A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes, University of Pittsburgh Press
*) "Send Me an Angel" written by Rudolf Schenker & Klaus Meine.
[Part 1]

Bahasa