Snow

I have just realized the psychological impact having all these windows in my office has on me when it is snowing out. It makes me tired! Imagine watching a little (comparatively) screen and trying to type when behind it there are three and one half huge windows looking out over Eagle River and the whole view is full of snow falling falling falling.

Introduction to Humanities II

Have you slain your Jabberwock? Today the theory we discussed was Feminism and I used my lecture notes from a presentation I did in 2000. But things have changed and Feminism is even more out of vogue today than it was in 2000 when I said Feminism is Dead. The art to investigate through the eyes of the feminist was Northern Renaissance. This felt like a dull thud in class since there seems to be little to critique. There ought to be but what? So instead we talked about the Tim Burton movie Coraline, Alice in Wonderland, and even a bit on the movie Brave, all of which demonstrate that female characters are taught to control their own lives. But I did discuss Jane Austen also, and it is intriguing that she recommends women act stupid around men if they want to control the situation. How does that work?

History of Philosophy II

More on Hegel - it is hard to move on past Hegel since he is still so significant almost everything can be viewed as a reaction to Hegel one way or the other. Kierkegaard to the one direction, Marx to the other, both rebelling against a view of Hegel they received by studying with Frederick Schelling - who has quite a history of friendship and enmity with Hegel. Soren Kierkegaard stresses the individual, Marx stresses the social. But we especially see Hegelianism in our own contemporary arguments over what a person is. But then we moved a bit into an analysis of Schopenhauer who was a student of Hegel - and another rebel against Hegel himself. In this case, it seems his work is somewhat pre-Kantian since he argues that the Will is the thing in itself. This is essentially something like fate and a great way to view the impact of his ideas here on culture is to see the work of Wagner. The quiz question was to review the story of the Ring of the Niebelungen and describe what you think of the story.

Introduction to Philosophy

Today we finished up a few things with regard to Aquinas before mentioning William of Occam and John Duns Scotus. The end result was Scholasticism which was criticized by D'Israeli as arguing over such things as "How many angels could dance on the head of a pin?" Which question I made the first quiz question. I also mentioned Frances Bacon who was Thomas Hobbes' teacher. We started reading Descartes' Meditations remembering the reference to Augustine's reply to the skeptics in our texts. (Was this the model Descartes used for the Meditations?) We discussed the answer to his Cartesian doubt - Cogito ergo sum. Which, apart from the problem of the nature of the res cogitans moved on to a version of the Ontological Argument that then led to concluding that what is clear and distinct must be true. That is, mathematics is the new model for scientific knowledge. With this the modern period begins and intellectuals cast off the faith in the Church authorities. Which brings up the issue of the Reformation(s). We briefly discussed Martin Luther and his 95 theses, the impact on this through John Knox on the Scottish Enlightenment and eventually the Whig political ideas that resulted in the Revolution against Britain and the founding of the United States. Also note the Gutenberg press which made the Bible more affordable, and the translations into the languages of the people added to that, with the emphasis in Protestantism that everyone should be a good Christian, not just the clergy. Descartes also was a friend of Galileo who famously gives us the conflict over the Cosmological models - solar centered model instead of the earth centered. (I argue a contemporary position called Modeling that views each model as a tool and useful as long as it works for the purpose intended. So the only mistake is thinking that since one model is true the others must be false. They are not! We can accept multiple models realizing the apparent conflicts are not an issue. With regard to the earth centered model, I also mentioned solar centered, Einstein Light Cone, Brian Greene Fabric of the Cosmos, and the galactic model which views the solar system as moving around the galactic center. The second quiz question was does the earth go around the sun or does the sun go around the earth? Hobbes was next and we read some of the text to emphasize how amazing he was for his day.

Logic

The first forty minutes of class was spent taking test 1. Syllogisms. Following the test we began looking at symbolic logic. This is where we will pick up again next Friday.

Introduction to Humanities II

Thursday we talked about Marxist theory and how it might analyse art. The art we were examining was Italian Renaissance and so I picked the Medici Palazzo but after going over the economic situation of Europe that seems to have precipitated into Marx's theory, Charles Dickens (Hardtimes - and look at Thomas Malthus, and Oliver Twist), John Stewart Mill and Utilitarianism, and the unions in Great Britain - see also the Great Exhibition England avoided the Communist threat. The Communist Revolution in Russia was not in accordance with Marxian theory since the country was Feudal and not industrial. Hence, the name Marxist-Leninism. Lenin basically argued that the capitalist period could be skipped. The end result was not communism but a corrupt totalitarian government that made everything worse than it was. But even today we see totalitarian corruption such as Viktor Yanukovych and his Villa in Ukraine.

Notes on my visit to Gruening Middle School today

It was wonderful visiting an eighth grade class at Gruening Middle School today that were each reading various philosophers. The questions showed that they were understanding what they were reading and very interested in the topics. I look forward to the day when, I expect four years or so from now, some of those young people will be taking Philosophy at UAA!