Tuesday Classes

Do you have a private language? That is the quiz question for History of Philosophy - following Wittgenstein. You may need to take the link to see what it is about since we didn't discuss it much. For Introduction to Philosophy the quiz question was would you push the fat man off the bridge? Here is a questionnaire you could take to participate I guess.

Logic Monday

Note that the next test will not be on Wednesday since we are not ready for it yet. Perhaps Monday. The homework / quiz this evening is problem 2 page 408.

Thursday Classes

For Introduction to Philosophy the quiz question was do you think God has a consciousness? In History of Philosophy the quiz question was describe your phenomenal experience while watching a movie or reading a book.

Wednesday Logic

The quiz question / homework for today was to do problem number 8 on page 373. This is a word problem that you translate into symbols and then use the four rules to prove valid.

Tuesday Classes

The quiz question for Introduction to Philosophy concerned the death of a young woman in Detroit and your hypothetical reaction to it had you been there 1: what do you think your categorical imperative would have been? 2: what do you think you might actually have done? For History of Philosophy the quiz question was can you invent new grammar? (Was that the right question?) No! While we discussed that question and your responses would be interesting, I framed another question that would be the quiz question: Florescent lights operate on the same frequencies as the human brain. Do you think this correlation has anything to do with the migraines we sometimes get when bright lights are shown on us for long periods of time?

Monday Logic

The quiz question / homework this evening was to do problem 7 on page 367.

Lera Boroditsky

This video interview with Lera is from 2010 but I find it exciting none the less because she emphasizes that the current thinking on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis has swung back to the pro side. But a recent discussion led me to wonder if Aristotelian Categorical Statements are the Western requirement for true / false statements being identifiable as true or false (That is the A, E, I, O statement forms) and those categorical statements require the linguistic copula for their structure, but then if a language like Chinese does not have a copula, how do languages like Chinese interpret true and false? A second issue I think similar to the first concerns the human universality of music as a language. Would Beethoven being almost universally appreciated - except perhaps in countries were music is illegal - haram!, does that mean .... what regarding Sapir-Whorf?