50 Philosophy Ideas

This is my first book report to Rui & Ben:

Overall the book is easy to digest (I asked for an intro book on philosophy where I didn't need to look up terms) and broad in exposure (but then again I don't know what I don't know). Perhaps essential in a person's general education?

The following quotations stood out to me:

According to Hume’s own account of moral action, all humans are naturally moved by a ‘moral sense’ or ‘sympathy’, which is essentially a capacity to share the feelings of happiness or misery of others; and it is this sentiment, rather than reason, that provided the motive for our moral actions. Reason is essential in understanding the consequences of our actions and in rationally planning how to achieve our moral aims, but it is itself inert and unable to prove any impetus to action.

The section on moral luck is very interesting but a little too long to summarize (“the condensed idea” is “does fortune favour the good?”)

On virtue ethics, the approach does appeal to me especially after reading all the tangles in morality:

“...being a good person and knowing right from wrong is not primarily a matter of understanding and applying certain moral rules and principles. Rather, it is a question of being or becoming the kind of person who, by acquiring wisdom through proper practice and training, will habitually behave in appropriate ways in the appropriate circumstances.

This approach is totally news to me and also appeals to me for similar reasons of elegance:

Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions [...] was founded on the belief that painstaking analysis of language and its underlying logic is the surest route - perhaps the only route - to knowledge of the world that can be described using language.

The clearest explanation of modern art I've ever read (tho not that I read about such subject):

The idea of art as representation and it’s close association with beauty held sway well into the modern period. In reaction to this, a number of 20th-century thinkers proposed a “formalist” approach to art, in which line, color and other formal qualities were regarded as paramount and all other considerations, including representational aspects, were downplayed or excluded. This form was elevated over content, paving the way for the abstractionism that came to play a more dominant role in Western art. In another influential departure from representation, expressionism renounced anything resembling close observation of the external world in favour of exaggeration and distortion, usually bold unnatural colors to express the inner feelings of the artist. Instinctive and consciously non-naturalistic, such expressions of the artists subjective emotions and experience were regarded as the hallmark of true works of art.

On Ludwig Wottgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance”: 

In short, there is no hidden depth or essential meaning: our understanding of the word is no more or less than our capacity to use it appropriately in a wide range of contexts.