Mid-Term Blog Post Mason Schoonover

 

Mason: Hello my name is Mason Schoonover.

Baggini: Hello Mason.

Mason: First today I am going to start with you. We are going to focus on things like how Philosophy can help us respect truths, reality, and one another.

The first question I will ask you is how can we as humans learn to comprehend and understand the world and respect facts and truths we are told.

Baggini: One of the biggest things I can tell you is something called Secular Reason. Have you ever heard of it?

Mason: No I have not.

Baggnin: “Secular Reason is what almost all schools in modern western Philosophy endorse, implicitly or explicitly, and it unites them more profoundly than their differences divide us”(How the World Thinks 71). It is basically a way of thinking where science is the almighty and can be used to understand almost anything. One thing that was a huge symbol in the Greek world was the Pantheon. “Under the Pantheon a Greek architect named Soufflot tied a ball on a string and swung it back and forth. Over the course of the day it moved to different angles in a perfect circle to represent the Earth’s rotation”(How The World Thinks 69).

Mason: Can you think of any other examples where science has helped humans respect truth, facts and reality.

Baggnin: “Scientists have mapped out the entire DNA and Brain”(How The World Thinks 71). Science can be used in philosophy in order for people to respect the facts and how the world actually works. Sciences is the basis of our beliefs because we can explicitly prove it with experiments and data that has been recovered by valid sources. Most of the time science can be physically done right in front of somebody in order for them to respects facts on an idea.

Mason: That makes a lot of since. Using real data and facts seems to be one of the biggest things that phosphors back in Greek and Roman times did and still do today in order to get people to understand logic and ideas.

Next, I would like to talk to you Kurt Andersen. As Americans, we grow up and kind of think that America is the greatest country in the world and we have always done everything right. However, this is not true and I want to hear your take on our history and how we can reject the falsehoods we have been told and are being told each day on the media.

Andersen: That is a very good question and something that cannot be answered explicitly. One big event in American history where the public was deliberately being lied to in America was the cold war. “I like to call the cold war, if it actually turned into a real war, a war of mutual destruction”(Andersen 210).

Mason: How do you think the people were getting lied to?

Andersen. The government told the people we were so much better than the Soviets that if they attacked us they would get blown off the earth. That is however not close to being true. It would have been close the end of humankind if both sides launched its nuclear warheads at each other and across the world.

Mason: How do we see this today and how do we reject these sources?

Andersen: Today is extremely technologically advanced compared to the Cold War. Today we have an endless amount of information at our finger tips that is almost always politically derived. As humans, being able to do your own research and come up with conclusions on your past experiences , our history, and fact checking everything we come up with, we can then begin to reject the falsehoods we have been told by the people we look up to in our government.

Mason: That is very interesting and seems like something everyone should look into to practicing more.

Mason: Lastly, Nigel Warburton I would like to talk to you.

As humans, how do we know what we believe and how do we know what is right and wrong based on religion, nationality, and race.

Warburton: That is a very hard question to ask and almost impossible to answer. “I believe that no one knows anything, and you shouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. Everything can be questioned and everything can be doubted” (A Little History of Philosophy 15). In our world, there is an alternate way of thinking for everything that can be talked about. A human grows and is told things by people they look up to. They then believe the same way as these people which makes them a biased source. One can always question what they believe in because it is impossible to tell what is right and wrong.

Mason: Can you expand a little more and what may you call this?

Warburton: “I call this being a skeptic” (A Little History of Philosophy 15). One many think they know everything when really, they know nothing. Being able to look at all sides and experience all sides is something we must strive to do in order to make strong decisions for each other and ourselves.

Mason: To end it I am going to try and answer the question from William James who asked, what is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" 

               I think the world is going through a very big decision-making process. We have two options. We can change our ways and become a world that works together and countries that work together to make advancements to further make the human race successful. Or we can continue the path we are on and we can riot and develop more unrest in the human race. We have incapable leaders in office all over the world and corruption only gets worse. People have become extremely greedy and we need to go back on our roots and advance our race to make the world better.