Knowledge, Reality, and Value

A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy

By: Michael Huemer

Narrated by: Nathan Nguyen

The world's best introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value explains basic philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, such as: How can we know about the world outside our minds? Is there a God? Do we have free will? Are there objective values? What distinguishes right actions from wrong actions? The text clearly explains the most important arguments about these things, and it does so a lot less boringly than most books written by professors.

“My work is all a series of footnotes to Mike Huemer.” –Plato

“This book is way better than my lecture notes.” –Aristotle

“When I have a little money, I buy [Mike Huemer’s] books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” –Erasmus

Contents
Preface
Part I: Preliminaries
1. What Is Philosophy?
2. Logic
3. Critical Thinking, 1: Intellectual Virtue
4. Critical Thinking, 2: Fallacies
5. Absolute Truth
Part II: Epistemology
6. Skepticism About the External World
7. Global Skepticism vs. Foundationalism
8. Defining “Knowledge”
Part III: Metaphysics
9. Arguments for Theism
10. Arguments for Atheism
11. Free Will
12. Personal Identity
Part IV: Ethics
13. Metaethics
14. Ethical Theory, 1: Utilitarianism
15. Ethical Theory, 2: Deontology
16. Applied Ethics, 1: The Duty of Charity
17. Applied Ethics, 2: Animal Ethics
18. Concluding Thoughts
Appendix: A Guide to Writing
Glossary

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, where he has taught since the dawn of time. He is the author of a nearly infinite number of articles in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, in addition to seven other amazing and brilliant books that you should immediately buy.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2021 Michael Huemer (P)2022 Michael Huemer

Decent book, speculative field

The author presents some philosophical issues that he considers important in his field and provided a relatively clear introduction to them. He stresses that - against the views of some - philosophie did evolve, and that many issues debated in today's philosophy were not debated some centuries ago. Whilst this is true, my feeling - after having lestened to the audiobook - is that the process of producing philosophical thinking did not change: using logic alone. Let me give an example: to study the issue of the existence or non-existence of God, logical arguments are used, and the result - as the author sees is - is that the issue can neither be proved nor disproved. This is the ways things were centuries ago, although with different - or similar - arguments. There is no mention in the book of the huge advances of the history of religions: based on documentary and archaeological evidence - amongst many other fields - the history of religions describes how religious ideas evolved through time and space, and by slow accumulation of evidence it becomes clear that the idea of a God or divinity is a human product (see for instance "Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses" by Mircea Eliade).

Regarding the issue of determinism we have to differentiate between physical objects and biological ones. The study of physics was once part of philosophy (in Ancient Greece); this is no longer the case. Physics is a specialized field of which the standard philosopher knows little and it would be fair not to take the views of the philosophers on the subject any seriously. When we talk about determinism for biological beings, part of the field is tackled by evolutionary biology and its mathematical description, whilst the part relative to us today mainly comes from religious sources (free will against an all-mighty God). Since the history of religious has already solved the issue of the non-existence of God, this issue of determinism applied to the human will decays.

The last reduct where philosophy may still breathe is the field of Ethics. Even here, there are subfields that are emerging with scientific methods (history of ethics, objective relationships between societies and the ethical beliefs they hold, etc). To me, what is miore interesting is to understant how we get the equilibria within societies between the different factions that hold different views about ethics, than get involved in the opinions of each of the factions participating in these equilibria. This said, it seems unavoidable that some debate will arise and that some arguments will have to be presented by these different factions; so it seems that philosophy still have some room in modern society.

Narration was entirely too fast

The book itself was a good overview of the current state of philosophy, with a fair grounding in foundational principles of logic and key definitions explained. While the author offers some conclusions that I believe are founded on flawed propositions—pace, Huemer, especially regarding the nature individual identity—the candid writing style and careful explanations makes this a good selection for a layperson's introductory philosophy textbook.

However the narration for this book was conducted at a pace incompatible with its information density. I wound up slowing the playback speed—and just accepting the occasional skipping that came along with that—for the entire book, up to .75% of the original speed for some especially challenging passages, and I would often have to back up and listen again to entire logical chains because I had been whisked through them too quickly. Listener, be advised: this recording is not the 11-hour experience implied by the raw playback time.