Suppose that over the years, a certain ship was rebuilt, board by board, until every bit of it has been replaced. Is the ship at the end of the process the ship that started the process? Now suppose that we take all those rotten, replaced boards and reassemble them into a ship. Is this ship the original ship?

Pocket watch example:

I have a pocket watch that has been passed down for generations. It’s parts have been replaced to the extent that ALL original parts are no longer part of the watch. Is the watch still the same watch? The question contends with the following:

• Numerical Identity
• Qualitative Identity
• Transitive relationships

This argument can be best understood from Sartre's example of the pen-knife:

It has been made by a craftsman who has a clear understanding of the pen-knife’s purpose and builds accordingly. It must be built of the correct materials, easy to hold and sharp enough to cut paper. It isn’t intended to cut a steak or anything else beyond its purpose. The craftsman knows what the pen-knife will be used for, before it is created. The pen-knife’s essence is known before its existence.

Sartre’s is saying that humans are the opposite. There is no human essence or purpose. He says: A human materialises in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself’

In order to understand how Schopenhauer comes to the conclusion on what the self is, we first need to look at how he defines the will. The will, for Schopenhauer, is defined as desire, drive, a ‘blind’ striving to be alive. The will is shared by other living creatures such as animals and plants: both want to live, to grow and continue surviving.

The will is arational, it has nothing to do with our ability to reason or understand but our will does interact with our intellect. From this, Schopenhauer suggests 2 ways in which the self comes to be:

• It comes directly from the will, that is to say, it is centered on fulfilling our desires and drives to be a human.
• The will interacts with the intellect and harvests the self. Reason and understanding cultivates self-hood

In his bleak conclusion, Schopenhauer takes the nature of our will and, therefore, our self-hood and says it is ultimately absurd just as the world is around us. None of us can be in control of our nature, we just have a blind urge to exist which gives way to accepting the illusion that being a human is worthwhile. The world is a meaningless struggle that is better off not existing.

Key Points

• Schopenhauer’s world is neither rational nor good, but rather is an absurd, polymorphous, hungry thing that lacerates itself without end and suffers in each of its parts.
• At best we might see our way through the absurdity, and achieve some sort of quasi-Nirvanic peace by denying the Will and the futile desires that are its most immediate manifestations . no matter what meaning and brief satisfaction we might find in life, it was essentially absurd
• All true philosophy is idealistic but the correct starting point is to follow the footsteps of Descartes and discuss the individual subjective consciousness

A man sits in a room with a set of instructions on how to reply to Chinese characters. In his room he receives Chinese characters from a slot on one side of the room. He examines the characters, checks his instructions on how to respond and writes his response down. He then delivers the response into a slot on the other side of the room. Those reading the response on the other side, believe that whatever produced this, clearly understands Chinese.

So does the man in the room understand Chinese? John Searle says no. This thought experiment is an analogy on how computers work and it is ultimately demonstrating that a computer appears to understand language but cannot produce real understanding.

Phenomenology is a field of philosophy that tries to describe what our experience of the world is, from our perspective. It comes up with theories on how our consciousness interacts with the world. By understanding our relationship with the world, we can get closer to understanding things like our existence, what knowledge is, what ethics we should live by and so on.

So to answer questions about knowledge and ethics, some phenomenologists believe that we need to understand our existence first, some believe that we need to understand consciousness itself and some believe that we must acknowledge our freedom before we begin to understand anything else.

Levinas believes that these starting points are incorrect, because they are self-centered; looking to the self is an insufficient starting point in trying to understand how we interact with the world. What he instead suggests is looking at our relationship with others, as a starting point for developing any branch of philosophy. It’s the ethical responsibility towards the other that is the first philosophy to adopt.

So why this ethical responsibility?

When we encounter the other person, it is the most fundamental experience. There’s something that stirs deep inside when we look at the face of another, an ethical demand to be responsible, to not harm that person. This feeling is inherent, it’s automatic, it comes before any philosophical theory.

Before we come up with any theory of knowledge, the relationship between humans comes first.