What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy

The nine problems we'll consider are these:

Knowledge of the world beyond our minds Knowledge of minds other than our own The relation between mind and brain How language is possible Whether we have free will The basis of morality What inequalities are unjust The nature of death The meaning of life They are only a selection: there are many, many others.

What I say will reflect my own view of these problems and will not necessarily represent what most philosophers think. There probably isn't anything that most philosophers think about these questions anyway: philosophers disagree, and there are more than two sides to every philosophical question. My personal opinion is that most of these problems have not been solved, and that perhaps some of them never will be. But the object here is not to give answers -- not even answers that I myself may think are right -- but to introduce you to the problems in a very preliminary way so that you can worry about them yourself.

The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What is time?" A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, "What is a number?" A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes a word mean anything?" Anyone can ask whether it's wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes an action right or wrong?"