Thursday continued

Regarding Heidegger and Sartre note that both philosophers have been recorded and you can find videos of them on the Internet so you can get a sense of what they were like. Notice both only spoke in those videos in their native language so Sartre in French and Heidegger in German but many of the videos have subtitles in English. Heidegger's main work was Being and Time, Sartre's main work was in response to that book and was titled Being and Nothingness. I ahve some notes on this whole chain of European thought I posted here. The quiz question for Early Modern Philosophy was do you think the continental European more poetic language is nonsense? In Introduction to Philosophy we discussed Hume and his version of philosophical skepticism. As the last logical sequence in British Empiricism he concluded the only thing anyone can know for sure is the phenomena they are experiencing at the moment. He called that phenomena impressions - ideas are also a type of impression, the difference is only a matter of degree. Ideas are less lively than impressions I am having of my surroundings at each moment. We talked a little here about contemporary brain science in this regard that seems to go along with Hume on this (even though he died in 1776 - which date we can all remember pretty easily!) I showed a bit of a TED talk with Antonio Damazio who is famous today for his work using brain scans. I also mentioned Hume's thesis that you cannot experience your own self as an object of experience since it is always the subject of experience. Damazio also talked about that in the same TED. Notice also Thomas Metzinger in his book Being No One refers to our selves as not something like an object but instead a set of ongoing processes. YOu might think of that as a computer program installed in our brain computer etc. The quiz question was do you have a self?