History of Philosophy II

Today we finished up talking about Leibniz (Microsoft seems to insist that is how to spell his name) by talking about his concept of the Monad (which Microsoft doesn't think is a word.) I mostly compared it to contemporary physics (what I know about it) mentioning Brian Greene and the standard model My argument is that Leibniz was way ahead of his time and his positions are very close to much of contemporary thought. While Newton was a proponent of the steady state universe - I suppose it seems called the static universe instead Leibniz was of the opinion that it was a relative universe (much closer to Einstein's conception.) Following this I moved in on a brief discussion of Berkeley and his dialog between Matter and Love of Mind. I argued that Berkeley's position is more likely in tune with that of Leibniz who he corresponded with than the traditional interpretation of his position. Usually he is considered an Idealist and a British Empiricist which seems incoherent. But if we think that his argument is that Spirit is what we mean by Energy today, and Matter is what we mean by Mass, then his argument that matter does not exist, only spirit does, is just like Leibniz - essentially the contemporary point of view. I also mentioned Jonathan Edwards and used this as a point to enter some comments about the colonies in the New World. The quiz question today was what do you think of as a miracle? And if they exist, what are they?

Intro to Philosophy

Today we reviewed some of the text from the beginning to emphasize the importance of the material we have been reviewing. Since I usually lecture about the text or ideas developed in the text most of the onus is on the student to follow the text and read ahead to follow this connection but today we spent time going over the highlights to make those connections. Then we continued on with Aristotle to discuss the conception of the soul as the activity of the body. This being the case, the nature of ethics changes to be that of how to live the good life while the body has life. While Aristotle follows his teacher Plato's psychology in most respects dividing the classes of people up into three main groups, it would be easier to find nurture much more important for Aristotle than nature so that quality of life is best for those who are born in a good family in a good society than Plato's position that each person is essentially born with the character they will have. I mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs and it is easy to see how this ties in with Aristotle. Moving on to the Ethics a first quiz question was who was Nicomachus? I consider this a trick question since as you will see there are two individuals of that name in Aristotle's life and it makes me wonder which might be so honored. Most consider his father as the honoree, but it makes more sense to me if it is both or his son, since we may think of the book as written to instruct the young. Since there is a lack of physical things if you love physical pleasures then your happiness is not under your control and you will most likely often be unhappy. The same situation applies to social pleasures since social status, honor, and love are not really easy to come by! But knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone is something that you can gain and keep and there is plenty to go around if you have the wealth to spend the time learning. With the death of Alexander the Great Aristotle famously had to flee lest Athens sin twice against philosophy. But two years later he died and following that much of his thought ended up being lost to the west (saved in the east until the reintroduction about the time of the Crusades and the rebirth of Western interest in Greek culture - the Renaissance.) (You know, the very brief way I describe all of this is easily so shallow that digging deeper can lead someone to finding it is misleading or even false!) The Post-Aristotelians are next and I like to put the various choices across the board starting with the Cynics on the right, (no special reason) followed by the Epicureans, then the Skeptics, then the Stoics, and then the Neo-Platonists. The Cynics prime example is Diogenes and I told several stories about him. Living a homeless carefree life is the main characteristic of the Dog philosophy. In the text we have Epicurus who gives us the answer that the best life is one of avoiding stresses up to a point, self sufficiency is his aim. I suggest that the Bush life style fits this philosophy pretty well. The Skeptics are not represented in the text but is the position that arguing over these issues itself is a source of great stress and that the questions can never be answered due to the nature of the questions, so accepting the apoiretic nature of these issues is a best way to avoid the stress and have a good life. Epictetus is our example of a stoic and the duty of a stoic is to the society. If you want to live the good life, someone has to make sure the society is good and functioning. But how do you remain happy while doing so many things for the good of other people? You maintain an internal intellectual removal from the stress so that in your heart you are at peace regardless of what is going on around you. The second quiz question of the day was which of these philosophical positions best fits your own thinking today? Next week we will look at the Neoplatonists and the success of the Christian philosophy / theology.

Logic

We ended this evening with a survey of Conversion, Obversion, and Contraposition. I started by finishing up a point from chapter three concerning the difference between sufficient and necessary conditions. Everyone seemed pretty fine with those. So we went on to Informal Fallacies using the Nizkor site I have a link to in the syllabus and the text. We went through these pretty quickly but they are good to be familiar with because psychologically they are traditionally powerful ways of getting people to do what you want them to do, or to believe what you want them to believe. But they are not examples of good reasoning and should be avoided if you want to be a good critical thinker. I did some things to relate fallacies to jokes and mentioned Daniel Dennett's book Inside Jokes and explained the basic thesis that jokes and humor are universal in humans because they reward debugging problems. After the break we went on to look again at Categorical Reasoning - chapter 5. Much of this was a review of the standard categorical statement forms A, E, I, O and the square of opposition. This seemed fun. Part of the class was testing true and false statements to see if they do in fact fit this theory. One type of statements that do not clearly fit are referred to as relational predicates. The quiz question had nothing to do with any of this but was sure to be interesting: what does it mean to you to be a Seawolf?

Humanities II

I picked up with the problem of empiricism and then discussed Kant's revolutionary approach that argues each of us are the center of our universe and our consciousness creates and orders the time and space that structures our perceptions. Phenomena are categorized by the rational mind in the same ways and so humans have a shared understanding of the universe. On that note we looked at primal music, Indian raga music (and Celtic music) but then the change with Greek music after Pythagoras and the invention of the octave. We talked about how music influences the mood of a person through the waves effects on the brain. The quiz question was, does the Doberhuahua strike your intuition as completely unnatural?

History of Philosophy II

Today we went over the difference between primary qualities and secondary qualities of things according to John Locke. This is the official academic start of the problem of empiricism. I touched on Berkeley a bit too since he will be the next British Empiricist - even though he is also considered an Idealist - and the first quiz question is really more associated with Bishop Berkeley than Locke and that is: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound? We will do more with Berkeley next class. I then went on to Leibniz covering some of the reasons he was so incredible. His scholarship, his calculator, his System of the Calculus, binary code, his universal language translation project, his military plans for Egypt and the canal, his visits to England and the Netherlands, and then we began to think about his Monadology by talking about Euclid first. The second quiz question was, how can a point have no parts? See Euclid definition of a point. Compare the definition of a monad with Euclid's point. Interesting!

Humanities II

Today the goal was to review theories up to and including Kant and then use that to apply it to art - primarily Islamic. Since Kant only makes sense when you see what his philosophy was in response to I did a quick review starting with Plato and Aristotle (in the classic interpretation of Plato as an Idealist and Aristotle as an Empiricist. I stressed that Augustine was the essential developer of Christian dogma and was Platonist. Then when Aristotle was reintroduced to the west during the Crusades the impact forced a change in the dogma which was achieved by Aquinas (and we looked at Article 1 of the Summa Theologica.) While Aquinas solved the problem it was a very complex philosophical point of view and opened the way for Descartes who wanted to establish knowledge on a firm basis - cogito ergo sum. Then I skipped to Locke who develops what is called the problem of empiricism regarding what we can know of the empirical world since we cannot trust our senses. Primary and secondary qualities are fairly common sense today. Quiz one for today was what is your favorite sense! But how do we know if the real world (the primary qualities of a thing) are anything like the secondary qualities of a thing? This brings up Berkeley and the famous question of the tree falling in the forest. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it does it make a sound? So in short, we never got to Kant today. So we should pick up there on Thursday because you can't go on without doing Kant.

History of Philosophy II

Finishing up with Spinoza we talked a bit about Pantheism - aka Spinozaism - and I also argued in his Ethics his conclusion that God must be everything to satisfy the Scholastic definition of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought seems to be successful. But what exactly does that mean for us? How should that change our life? For Spinoza it would be to argue that the Enlightenment - science and reason - should be the religion - and is the true religion. Plus, all other religions and great religious leaders were essentially doing science. All religions are essentially trying to improve the quality of life of mankind, and so there should be mutual toleration for all religions. It seems clear his assumption was that as science progressed, within a generation or two science would know everything and religions would go away and be replaced by science. John Locke is influenced by both Hobbes and Spinoza and so we see elements of both in his thought. He continues the view that government is legitimized by a social contract among the members of the contract but disagrees with Hobbes on the state of nature that drives the impulse to form a government. Instead of fear, the problem is society becomes too complex and we have to form government to deal with that. Further, if the government does not abide by the laws people have the right to rebel. Ownership of property is discussed and especially regarding the nature of slavery. We left off talking about the tabula rasa and our senses. The quiz question was what is your favorite sense?