The 7 Greatest Philosophical Debates
Can a debate change the way what do we understand the world? The answer is “Yes, sometimes it is enough for two people to meet sit in front of each other to discuss really, to put into play what they think, what they believe and let them ideas collide like stones that are taken out sparks.”
When two great thinkers they face, something it happens. This video, I clarify, is not a fight collection intellectuals. It is an invitation to know seven encounters, some public, other written and others almost mythical ones in which thought He returned body to body. We will talk about debates about God, about language, about power, about truth, about If we are free or determined and whether science progresses or reinvents itself.
Each debate is a double portrait of two minds and the world they had to think about. If you ever wanted to enter the philosophy but you didn’t know where, this It’s a great opportunity. Number seven, Donald Davidson versus Billard von Orman Who. Can we really translate what someone else thinks or we are always guessing, projecting or inventing what What do we think we understand? We give few things as taken for granted as language.
The we use it all day without thinking too much in how it works, but in philosophy the language became a field of battle and in that field Quin and Davidson They fought one of the most important arguments subtle and most important of the 20th century. The incredible thing is that a good part of the arguments were recorded in video. It all starts with a problem.
How do we know that what someone says has the same meaning as what us do we understand? Let’s imagine that we travel to a distant island and we meet a tribe that speaks a language totally unknown. Let’s imagine that they point to a rabbit and say an expression like “gabagay.” What does that mean? Rabbit, animal? thing that happens, appearance fugitive We don’t know.
We only see that they say that when the rabbit appears. But there is no translation exact, definitive or objective. This is what Quin called interdetermination of the translation. According to this theory, not There is only one correct way to interpret what another says, especially if it is another language. The Language is full of ambiguity and What we think we understand many times is just one interpretation among many possible.
Davidson, who admired Quine, he took that idea and stretched it. he said, “Of course, there is no perfect translation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t communicate.” In fact, for Davidson, The key is to assume that the other, in You are generally right about what he states. What he proposed was something more radical.
When we play someone, We do it under a principle of charity. That is, we assume that what it says it makes sense, it is coherent, it does not He’s crazy, not even playing with language. Only then could we understand, and that is not a defect, but a condition for the language works. In short, Quen distrust He says that the translation is uncertain, that language never fits at all and Davidson responds precisely that is why we trust This all revolves around a same discussion, around the real weaknesses of empiricism.
and of In fact, this happens not because in the case of language always a person has reason because we start from a trust, but really if it were not like that it would never We would understand nothing from anyone. This debate It’s not just philosophical, it’s human. what we do every time we listen to someone who thinks differently? Do we translate in good faith or do we look for error in the expressions of others? we listen to understand or to correct.
what started as a technical problem on the translation ended up being a reflection profound about dialogue, empathy and the limits of shared knowledge. And maybe in the end we are left with this he asks. How much truth is there in What does the other say? And how much is there us in what we believe we have understood? Number six, Michelle Foucault versus Noam Chomsky.
Is there universal justice or everything we believe Just is it just the product of power? In 1971, in front of the cameras Dutch television found two of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Michelle Foucault and Noam Chamsy. The conversation started with courtesy, but deep down it was like seeing to two worlds that did not speak the same language at all, not because of the lack of understanding, but because each one I was thinking from the bottom up totally different, from an idea opposite about what it means to be a human being. Chomsky, linguist, philosopher of language and perhaps one of the most important intellectuals of the lately, he defended an idea strong that the human being is born with a common mental structure, a grammar universal and it didn’t matter if you spoke Spanish, Japanese or Chinese, there is a way to think, to construct meaning that It is shared with all of us.
And not only That, there is also a moral way universal, a kind of intuition internal about what is right and what It’s wrong. That is why Chomsky defended the justice, rights, equality and not as social constructions, but as deep truths that transcend culture and are within the mental structures of the being human.
Foucault was not at all agreement. For him, the human being has no nothing of fixed essence, it is not born with no internal structure or much less universal. Everything we believe natural, language, truth, justice, even the subject himself, is the result of power relations that They operate in every era. What today We call it normal, centuries ago it would have been considered totally abnormal.
what today we defend as fair, tomorrow may become a form of violence. The most Foucault’s radical idea is that he said that truth is not the opposite of power, but your most effective product. where there is power, there are speeches and those speeches define what we believe to be true, rational, fair and humane.
So when Chomsky he asked Foucault directly if I didn’t believe in some universal form of justice, Fou smiled silently and responded with something like, “What Do you understand justice? I don’t I trust that word because it has always been used by those in power.” Iconic phrase of this debate. There was the total break. Chomsky saw justice as something that can guide political action.
Fouola I saw it as an already contaminated idea, used and already appropriate. One believed in internal structures of the mind, in change the other in relationships external between people. one left of language as natural code and the another saw it as a surveillance network and control over the centuries.
Without However, both were looking for something similar to Finally, understand why the world is like is and how it could be different. It interesting thing about this debate was not that will face, which in itself is something wonderful. The valuable thing was seeing them speak without shouting and without the need to wishing to be completely right, letting the differences will breathe.
This debate is still current. When someone says that justice is objective and the other Answer that it depends on the context, there There are Choms Hifuko. And in the middle one question that still has no answer. Does the Is justice discovered or constructed? Number five, Slavooy Sisek versus Jordan Peterson.
Who has the story more compelling about the chaos of the world modern? In 2019, in a crowded room In Toronto, two of the best-known intellectuals and more caricatures of our time, Slavoy Jek and Jordan Peterson. It was a event full of global expectation. if sold like the shock of marxism against capitalism, from the left against the right and chaos against the order.
And although the result was something very strange, very different from this, from In fact, the bottom of the debate touched a very real fiber. How to understand this world where everything seems to fall apart and redefine yourself at the same time? Jordan Peterson a clinical psychologist and although many reduce him to an author of self-help, your ideas really have a lot of background Peterson believes in importance of responsibility personal, order, myth, hierarchy as something natural.
For him, the chaos of postmodernity, the loss of meaning, fragmentation, moral disorientation, it is combated with discipline, structure and a return to the values traditional. See in Marxism and in what he calls cultural neo-Marxism a threat to social balance. That’s why your speech often becomes a called to restore certain order lost symbolic.
That doesn’t take away the fact that Peterson has a skill extraordinary to be able to articulate his arguments. Sisekc, on the other hand, is a Slovenian philosopher difficult to classify. Use jokes, movies, psychoanalysis, obsenities and surreal anecdotes to dismantle what we take for granted. He calls himself a Marxist, but not defends classical Marxism.
Criticize the globalization, to liberal ideology, to consumerism, but also laughs at the political correctness. In this debate, Surprisingly, he spent much of the time criticizing capitalism so much like Marxism and looking for a way to think human suffering without reduce it to easy recipes. and what happened between them? Peterson came prepared to attack a version of Marxism that JS did not defend and Jisek came more interested in talking about philosophy deeply and densely, culture too and the psychological defects of neoliberalism. After a while it seemed that they spoke in parallel, but in some moments they found a concern shared by the spiritual emptiness of our time. Peterson saw that emptiness and responded with structures. Siseek it saw and responded with ironic analysis, with criticism of the system, with the attempt to think the unthinkable.
And although many They came out disappointed because in the end It wasn’t a fight and in the end I think neither of them expected what the other I was going to say, the value of this debate is elsewhere, in seeing two ways very different from approaching the same contemporary unrest. One looks at it from tradition and order and the other from paradox and contradiction, In addition to the philosophical density of Tikek.
The amount of left-wing authors, philosophers, Marxists, among others, that he mentioned. I’m pretty sure Peterson might not. I knew most of them. In a world full of speeches that want to give you a Immediate response, see these two thinkers fail to convince themselves mutually, but try everyone modes.
It is a very philosophical act interesting. Number four, Thomas Kon versus Car Popper. Science progresses correcting herself or completely reinventing itself from time to time. When we think about science, we usually imagine a kind of steady march towards the truth. Theories that are refined or errors that are corrected, experiments that bring us little by little closer to seeing really how things are.
That was more or less the vision of Carl Popper, the science as a rational process and rigorous where ideas survive not because they are confirmed, but because They resist attempts to refute it. Popper believed that a scientific theory It is valid if it can be falsified, it is That is, if you can imagine an observation that contradicts it.
If your theory cannot never be denied, it is not science. That It is your thesis. But then Thomas arrived Kun and proposed an idea that messed up everything. Kun studied the real history of the science, that is, from the point of historical view, and realized something quite interesting. Scientists do not They work like Car Popper suggests.
Of In fact, most scientists they work within what he called paradigms. Great theoretical frameworks that They tell them what to observe, how interpret it and what questions are worth worth doing. During the periods historical events that Kun studied, the science I was not questioning its foundations or falsifying anything.
He is solving puzzles within a framework accepted by all within a certain area. The problem or the wonder of this is that Sometimes the paradigm no longer holds up. Accumulates anomaly, strange results and unanswered questions and then I don’t know adjusts it, but replaces it with another. A scientific revolution. The transition from Newton to Einstein, by example, or from classical physics to quantum physics, ancient biology to Darwinian biology.
Kun said that These changes were neither cumulative nor rational as Popper thought. They were breakups, lens changes, to say like this. after a revolution scientific, the world of what was no longer seen same way. Popper criticized all this theory very strongly, saying that Kun was turning science too similar to politics or fashion.
For him it was not about paradigms, but of theories that face reality and win or they lose. But what makes it fascinating this debate is that they both said something true. Popper was right when he said that criticism is vital, but Kun had right in showing that scientists, of In fact, they do not do what philosophers believe and are always willing to abandon your beliefs easily if it is that paradigms change.
science She is human, she has routines, loyalties, power structures, faith in methods, even professional pride. That’s why this discussion is still alive. When a scientist presents an idea completely new and the system reject, is the idea bad or does it challenge a paradigm that no one wants to touch anymore? Do we advance as Popper thought or do we We reinvent as Kun believed.
Maybe the The truth is that science is so rational as well as brave and as creative like conflictive. Number three, Bertrand Russell versus Frederick Cblestone. Does it make rational sense to believe in God? or It is an idea that no longer resists contemporary thought. In 1948, the BBC organized a radio debate between two figures extraordinary, Bertrand Russell, mathematician, logician and secular thinker, and in front of him, Frederick Cppleston, Jesuit priest, historian of the philosophy, perhaps the best of the 20th century, sober, intelligent and profound believer In their debate there were no shouts, no insults, no disqualifications intellectual or moral. There were two adult and older men, talking to rigor and respect of one of the questions more difficult than human beings can be done. The theme is clear. Do they exist Valid reasons to believe in God? Coplestone proposed the argument of contingency.
That is, everything that exists seems to depend on something. Nothing is explains itself. A chair exists because someone made it and the wood came of a tree and the tree because it germinated and so successively. If we follow that chain, Cblestone said, we must reach a being necessary, something that does not depend on anything more and that exists on its own nature. And that’s what God is for.
Of In fact, he is following everyone’s line the theistic philosophers of history. Russell did not accept the argument, rather He replied that he didn’t see why he had than accepting an idea of a being necessary. For him, the universe it simply exists. You don’t need one cause beyond. The existence of universe is a brute fact, said in the debate.
Furthermore, he questioned the logic same of the argument. Why assume that the chain of causes must have a first link? Why not think that the universe with all its causes and effects simply is and that’s it? That was the Russell’s conclusion. The interesting thing about This debate was not about one winning, fact you can’t talk about a winner, was that they both reached the bottom of their positions without necessarily seeking convince, but clarify their arguments.
Cpplestone did not hide behind the faith, explaining why he rationally believed in God. And Russell He did not resort to cynicism. He explained why I didn’t see the need for that idea. So, between calm phrases and good arguments positions and silences well used, They offered one of the most conversations clean and the deepest debates that modern philosophy has given.
believe in God is a rational position or is it a irrational posture. It is legitimate way of thinking like this in the foundation of the world and if there is no God, what holds all this? And if there is, how Is it that it remains hidden? That day none of those questions was resolved, but yes It was clear that things can be discussed of this size, without losing his head, nor respect, nor depth and intellectual rigor.
And that in itself It is already the lesson that is worth it hear about this debate. Number two, Martin Heidegger versus Jean-Paul Sartre. We are absolute freedom or we are openness to something we cannot control. Although They never faced each other in person, Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre they staged one of the most powerful and silenced of the 20th century.
It was not mediated, nor was it televised, It was more of a crossing of visions. Sartre published his famous text The Existentialism is a humanism, in which who claimed that Martin Heidegger was a atheist existentialist Heidegger He responded with a gesture that said more than 1000 reviews. wrote an essay titled Letters on Humanism responding to Sartre.
an answer without names, but with all the weight of a profound and radical disagreement. For Sartre, human existence begins without prior meaning. Nobody created us with a purpose. There is no human essence given in advance. We are simply thrown, as he said, into the world. And that is not a disgrace. For He is a radicality of freedom.
Each of us is responsible for construct your own meaning. The Existence comes first, essence comes build later. There are no excuses and no there is destiny. There is also no God who define and that is for Sartre the existentialism, the human being as condemned to be free. Heidegger, in Instead, I saw from another place.
Your concern was not really ethical nor politics. First of all, it was ontological. He wondered about being with a capital letter, not for our lessons morals. For Heidegger, the human being or Daign in his work is not simply a free subject that acts on the world. He is an open being, someone who found thrown, yes, but also called by something greater, something that is not can control or define.
And although He never says it explicitly. Heidegger there is a kind of silent religiosity, especially at the end of his work. such a reverence before being, such great respect for mystery that sustains all that is, that one could not speak of a religion organized as such, but in no way way is nothing sartana.
It is something that is hidden, that allows to be. In fact, Heidegger constantly refers to the given from this being. It’s something we don’t choose, but without which we could not choose nothing, not even being. When Heidegger read Sartre, he felt that existentialism had become one more form of modern humanism, one atheistic vision that continued to put the being human at the center of everything.
but Heidegger didn’t want to do that. Your philosophy does not revolve around man, but to the openness towards what exceeds to the man. That is why Heidegger wrote in his essay, “Humanism does not think quite high.” And here is the attention. Sartre spoke to us about autonomy and decision and commitment, while Heidegger listens and of a truth that does not It is created, but received.
In the In essence, this debate is not merely intellectual. The way I see it, it is purely existential and one of the more important debates than we can say defined everything after. two men, two ways of looking into the abyss. One says, “Choose, even if there is no meaning.” And the other says, because there is something that calls although you don’t understand it.
And that difference today divides us. we are who wrote the story or who We learn to read it. Number one, Ludpig Widgenstein versus Carl Popper. The philosophy must solve the great problems or demonstrate that many of they don’t they exist. On October 25, 1946, in a room at Kings College in Cambridge several of the England’s most brilliant philosophers.
Among them, two figures with opposite temperaments and visions philosophical ones that could hardly live together Widgenstein, the master of his house, and Carl Popper, a visitor guest. Popper was already known for his falsification theory, the idea that the scientific statement only has value if it can in principle be refuted.
That idea applied to general thought was a scream against all dogmatism. If you can’t say that would make your idea false, then you are not thinking or you are repeating a dogma. For Popper, philosophy should seek clarity, method and progress rational. Witgenstein, on the other hand, already had taken a profound turn in his own philosophy.
In his youth he had believed that language could capture the logical structure of the world, but in its In his mature years his vision was different. The Most philosophical problems are not They were real questions, but misunderstandings created by the misuse of language. For him, the role of philosophy was not finding truths huge and fully structured within systems, but rather show the limits of language and dissolving the confusions.
At the same time, he believed that the mystical, the aesthetic and the ethical were ineffable and exceeded the capacity of language to capture the truth. The scene is almost theatrical. Popper exposes your ideas. Someone mentions an example of moral problem and Wittgenstein standing as it used to be during the arguments, with a fireplace poker in the hand.
Interrupts forcefully against Popper and asks again and again, “Give me an example of a philosophical problem real.” Pope replies, “Yes, the problem of morality.” Widgenstein gets very upset more and according to some present he shakes the poker strongly in the direction of Popper. Popper, without blinking, responds, “you will not threaten your guests with a poker.” Widgenstein, furious, threw the poker to the ground, shook his head and He came out slamming the door.
exaggeration, perhaps the versions differ, but It is true that there two faced each other ways to see what a person should do philosopher. For Popper there are problems real and we must face them. For Wittgenstein we often believe there is a problem, but but in In reality it is not possible for language, no matter how logical it may seem, it may solve it.
Today that tension continues alive, while there are people who They consider that poetry and metaphors They have a much more vivid value and deep. Others consider that the language, as expressed from logic, can precisely catch the truths of the world. Widgenstein was almost a mystic and Popper, a kind of philosopher scientist.
And I believe that this debate continues to be discussed even today in day. We think to find the truth or to find out what the limits are the truth is that we can know We have reached the end of our top. Actually, except for First, I consider that these debates are not They were fights, they were encounters, sometimes tense or sometimes unexpected, but always revealing.
Thinking is not having only reason, but to dare to ask better. And it is clear that after all the best ideas usually born from disagreement. If the video I liked it, I would like you to help me commenting and sharing this video. I really thank you from the bottom of my heart. That would help me a lot to be able to continue making these videos.
This has been Bast. A huge hug to all and until next time.
