1. Reading whose autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God? OR, What did he see as the logical problem with the First Cause Argument? Do you agree with Russell about this?
2. The idea of a barber who shaves all who don't shave themselves is a logical ______, a seeming contradiction that is both true and false. Another example of the same thing would be a statement like "This sentence is ___." Do these examples show a deep problem with language and its ability to accurately portray reality?3. A.J. Ayer's ______ Principle, stated in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, was part of the movement known as _____ ______. Is unverifiability the same thing as meaninglessness?
4. Humans don't have an _____, said Jean Paul Sartre, and are in "bad faith" like the ____ who thinks of himself as completely defined by his work. Is it possible to avoid bad faith in every situation?
5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? Should he have said something else?
6. When Simone de Beauvoir said women are not born that way, she meant that they tend to accept what? Are any essential identities conferred by birth?
7. Which Greek myth did Albert Camus use to illustrate human absurdity, as he saw it? Do you ever feel that way? Do you worry that someday you might, in work or relationships or something else?
Weiner ch 13
- What is an "unrealizable"? Can you imagine yourself at age 60+?
- What did Cicero say old age does to personality? Do you think that's inevitable?
- What was Sartre's metaphor for what to do instead of trying to "find" yourself? What metaphor for life is implied by de Beauvoir's early declaration that her life would be an improvised "beautiful story"? Do you like either or both?
- How does the "balance shift" as we age? When do you think the shift will begin for you?
- What is "bad faith"? How does Sartre's example of the waiter illustrate it? Can you think of another example?
- What does the latest happiness research confirm? Do you think this will matter more to you later?
- What did Camus say is "enough..."? Is he right, do you think, about absurdity and its overcoming?
- What wasBertrand Russell's advice? Do you know any older people who've followed it? Are they role-models for you?
HWT
- What do you think of the Japanese sensitivity to nature and the seasons? 293
- What do you think of Shinto's "no clear-cut separation between the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious"? 294
- What do you think it means to think without concepts? 295
- Do you agree with what "the enlightened [Buddhist] declares"? 296
- Is time more a feeling than a concept? 296 What would Kant say?
- What do you think of Hume's "is/ought gap"? 297
- What can tea teach us? 299
- What is wabi-sabi? 300
- Was Kravinsky crazy? 301 How about Peter Singer? 302
- Should we consider the welfare of distant strangers as much as of kith and kin? 303
- Are Mozi and Mill saying the same thing? 304
- Kant's categorical imperative, again: any comment? 309
- Do you like Rawls' veil of ignorance idea? 309
- Do you agree with the key principles of the Enlightenment? 310
- Is Owen Flanagan right about "no sensible person"? 312
- Is the mixing desk a good metaphor for moral pluralism? Do you agree that it's not the same as laissez-faire relativism? 314-15
Discussion Questions
- Reading Mill's autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God. Do you agree or disagree with his reasoning? Why? 185
I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day at the age of eighteen I read _____'s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. Why I Am Not a Christian
- Should it bother us that logical paradoxes that seem to be true AND false can be formulated in grammatically correct statements? Does this show something important about the limits of language, thought, and (thus) philosophy? 186
- Were young A.J. Ayer and the Positivists on the right track with their Verification Principle? Or was the older, post-Near Death Experience Ayer wiser about beliefs that cannot be conclusively verified? 190, 194
- Do you agree with Sartre that humans, unlike inanimate objects such as inkwells, don't have an essential nature? Is our common biology, DNA etc. not essential to our species identity? 197
- If you become deeply involved in your work (or seem to, like Sartre's Waiter) are you in "bad faith"? 198
- What do you think of Sartre's advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? 199
- Do you agree with Simone de Beauvoir about accepting a gender identity based on men's judgments? 200
- Is life a Sisyphean struggle? Is it "absurd"? Do you agree with Camus that Sisyphus must be happy? Why or why not? 201
FL
- Do you see any parallels between 1962 (as reflected in the SDS Manifesto, for instance) and today? 212
- What's your opinion of "Gun nuts"? And what should we do about the epidemic of gun violence in America? 218
- Do you think of The Force (in Star Wars) as a "spiritual fantasy" or does it name something you consider real? 222
- Was the sudden and widespread availability of contraception (The Pill) in the '60s a positive development, all things considered? 230
- Is the fantasy of perpetual youth an infantilizing force in America? 233 (Compare with our next read, Why Grow Up)
- Are we becoming "fake humans"? 234
==
Bertrand Russell's River of Life, message to future generations, and why he was not a Christian
‘An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and – in the end – without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man or woman who, in old age, can see his or her life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things they care for will continue.’ Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQJ3sqkdCRE
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment....
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists?
...
Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth -
a graphic novel featuring Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Podcasts-Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Arendt, Popper, Ordinary Language, Trolley Problems
In Our Time
Simone de Beauvoir. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.
Camus. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Algerian-French writer and Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a powerful sports car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man. Camus was 46. Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus became a working class hero and icon of the French Resistance. His friendship with Sartre has been well documented, as has their falling out; and although Camus has been dubbed both an Absurdist and Existentialist philosopher, he denied he was even a philosopher at all, preferring to think of himself as a writer who expressed the realities of human existence. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus’ legacy is a rich one, as an author of plays, novels and essays, and as a political thinker who desperately sought a peaceful solution to the War for Independence in his native Algeria.
Ordinary Language Philosophy. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such 'ordinary language' were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and JL Austin.
Hannah Arendt. In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She developed many of her ideas in response to the rise of totalitarianism in the C20th, partly informed by her own experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany before her escape to France and then America. She wanted to understand how politics had taken such a disastrous turn and, drawing on ideas of Greek philosophers as well as her peers, what might be done to create a better political life. Often unsettling, she wrote of 'the banality of evil' when covering the trial of Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust.
Karl Popper. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true. Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America. So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?
The Scientific Method. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the evolution of the Scientific Method, the systematic and analytical approach to scientific thought. In 1620 the great philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum, a work outlining a new system of thought which he believed should inform all enquiry into the laws of nature. Philosophers before him had given their attention to the reasoning that underlies scientific enquiry; but Bacon's emphasis on observation and experience is often seen today as giving rise to a new phenomenon: the scientific method.The scientific method, and the logical processes on which it is based, became a topic of intense debate in the seventeenth century, and thinkers including Isaac Newton, Thomas Huxley and Karl Popper all made important contributions. Some of the greatest discoveries of the modern age were informed by their work, although even today the term 'scientific method' remains difficult to define.
The Meaning of Life According to AJ Ayer. What was an English philosopher doing at a New York party, saving the young model Naomi Campbell from a rather pushy boxing heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson? The philosopher was Alfred Jules Ayer, who was just as at home mixing with the glitterati as he was with Oxford dons. On the one hand he was an academic, on the other a celebrity and bon viveur.
The Philosopher's ArmsSeries 4 Episode 2 of 4
Pints and Philosophical Problems with Matthew Sweet. This week, trolleyology: how should you decide between two morally troubling courses of action? This is a question which affects both soldiers in the heat of action and decision-makers in the NHS. Matthew is joined in the snug by philosopher David Edmonds.
Sartre. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jean-Paul Sartre, the French novelist, playwright, and philosopher who became the king of intellectual Paris and a focus of post war politics and morals. Sartre's own life was coloured by jazz, affairs, Simone de Beauvoir and the intellectual camaraderie of Left Bank cafes. He maintained an extraordinary output of plays, novels, biographies, and philosophical treatises as well as membership of the communist party and a role in many political controversies. He produced some wonderful statements: "my heart is on the left, like everyone else's", and "a human person is what he is not, not what he is", and, most famously "we are condemned to be free". Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how Sartre's novels and plays express his ideas and what light Sartre's life brings to bear on his philosophy and his philosphy on his life.
Simone de Beauvoir. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," she wrote in her best known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it. Many male critics felt men came out of it rather badly. Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a high bourgeois family and it was perhaps her good fortune that her father lost his money when she was a girl. With no dowry, she pursued her education in Paris to get work and in a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, came second only to Jean Paul Sartre. He was retaking. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy; Beauvoir explored that, and existentialist ethics, plus the novel and, increasingly in the decades up to her death in 1986, the situation of women in the world.
Camus. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Algerian-French writer and Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. Shortly after the new year of 1960, a powerful sports car crashed in the French town of Villeblevin in Burgundy, killing two of its occupants. One was the publisher Michel Gallimard; the other was the writer Albert Camus. In Camus’ pocket was an unused train ticket and in the boot of the car his unfinished autobiography The First Man. Camus was 46. Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus became a working class hero and icon of the French Resistance. His friendship with Sartre has been well documented, as has their falling out; and although Camus has been dubbed both an Absurdist and Existentialist philosopher, he denied he was even a philosopher at all, preferring to think of himself as a writer who expressed the realities of human existence. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus’ legacy is a rich one, as an author of plays, novels and essays, and as a political thinker who desperately sought a peaceful solution to the War for Independence in his native Algeria.
Bertrand Russell. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Born in 1872 into an aristocratic family, Russell is widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytic philosophy, which is today the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world. In his important book The Principles of Mathematics, he sought to reduce mathematics to logic. Its revolutionary ideas include Russell's Paradox, a problem which inspired Ludwig Wittgenstein to pursue philosophy. Russell's most significant and famous idea, the theory of descriptions, had profound consequences for the discipline.
In addition to his academic work, Russell played an active role in many social and political campaigns. He supported women's suffrage, was imprisoned for his pacifism during World War I and was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote a number of books aimed at the general public, including The History of Western Philosophy which became enormously popular, and in 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Russell's many appearances on the BBC also helped to promote the public understanding of ideas.
In addition to his academic work, Russell played an active role in many social and political campaigns. He supported women's suffrage, was imprisoned for his pacifism during World War I and was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote a number of books aimed at the general public, including The History of Western Philosophy which became enormously popular, and in 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Russell's many appearances on the BBC also helped to promote the public understanding of ideas.
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, work and legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is little doubt that he was a towering figure of the twentieth century; on his return to Cambridge in 1929 Maynard Keynes wrote, “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”.Wittgenstein is credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one but two philosophies for his descendents to argue over: The early Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my mind [language] mean the limits of my world”; the later Wittgenstein replied, “If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of”. Language was at the heart of both. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was to finally free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all. As he put it, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”.How did he think language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would?With Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton and author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius; Barry Smith, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Marie McGinn, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York.
Ordinary Language Philosophy. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought which emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II. With its roots in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such 'ordinary language' were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear. Philosophers associated with the school include some of the most distinguished British thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Gilbert Ryle and JL Austin.
Hannah Arendt. In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She developed many of her ideas in response to the rise of totalitarianism in the C20th, partly informed by her own experience as a Jew in Nazi Germany before her escape to France and then America. She wanted to understand how politics had taken such a disastrous turn and, drawing on ideas of Greek philosophers as well as her peers, what might be done to create a better political life. Often unsettling, she wrote of 'the banality of evil' when covering the trial of Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust.
Karl Popper. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists' theories could be proved true. Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn't be tested. His debunking of such ideologies led some to describe him as the “murderer of Freud and Marx”. He went on to apply his ideas to politics, advocating an Open Society. His ideas influenced a wide range of politicians, from those close to Margaret Thatcher, to thinkers in the Eastern Communist bloc and South America. So how did Karl Popper change our approach to the philosophy of science? How have scientists and philosophers made use of his ideas? And how are his theories viewed today? Are we any closer to proving scientific principles are “true”?
==
The Scientific Method. Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the evolution of the Scientific Method, the systematic and analytical approach to scientific thought. In 1620 the great philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon published the Novum Organum, a work outlining a new system of thought which he believed should inform all enquiry into the laws of nature. Philosophers before him had given their attention to the reasoning that underlies scientific enquiry; but Bacon's emphasis on observation and experience is often seen today as giving rise to a new phenomenon: the scientific method.The scientific method, and the logical processes on which it is based, became a topic of intense debate in the seventeenth century, and thinkers including Isaac Newton, Thomas Huxley and Karl Popper all made important contributions. Some of the greatest discoveries of the modern age were informed by their work, although even today the term 'scientific method' remains difficult to define.
The Meaning of Life According to AJ Ayer. What was an English philosopher doing at a New York party, saving the young model Naomi Campbell from a rather pushy boxing heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson? The philosopher was Alfred Jules Ayer, who was just as at home mixing with the glitterati as he was with Oxford dons. On the one hand he was an academic, on the other a celebrity and bon viveur.
So what does this logician have to say about the meaning of life?
In 1988, a year before his death, he gave a lecture at the Conway Hall in which he set out his notion of existence. By this time, ‘Freddie’ Ayer was one of the UK’s most prominent public intellectuals, with regular television and radio appearances, discussing the moral issues of the day.
Ayer’s former student at Oxford, philosopher AC Grayling, remembers the tutor that became his friend. He explores the man of contradictions – the atheist who almost recanted after a near-death incident; the deep thinker with a weakness for mistresses and Tottenham Hotspur. What was his contribution to philosophy? How did it inform the way he lived his life? What, if anything, can we learn from Freddie’s view on the big question?
The Philosopher's ArmsSeries 4 Episode 2 of 4
Pints and Philosophical Problems with Matthew Sweet. This week, trolleyology: how should you decide between two morally troubling courses of action? This is a question which affects both soldiers in the heat of action and decision-makers in the NHS. Matthew is joined in the snug by philosopher David Edmonds.
==
Philosophy Bites
Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith
Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness is sometimes described as the bible of existentialism. At its core is the notion of Bad Faith. For this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Sebastian Gardner, author of a recent book about Bei...
Kate Manne on Misogyny and Male Entitlement
Cornell philosopher Kate Manne discusses misognyn, male entitlement, together with the notion of 'himpathy', a term she coined, in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Manne is the author of two recent highly influential books, ...
Ray Monk on Philosophy and Biography
Ray Monk discusses the relationship between philosophy and a philosopher's life in this interview with Nigel Warburton for the Philosophy Bites podcast. Can understanding the biographical context of a philosopher and the type of person t...
David Edmonds on Wittgenstein's Poker
For this second special lockdown episode of Philosophy Bites, Nigel Warburton interviewed David Edmonds about his bestseller Wittgenstein's Poker, which he wrote with John Eidinow. This brilliant book is an exploration of an event that...
Melissa Lane on Plato and Totalitarianism
Was Plato's ideal state a totalitarian one? Karl Popper, thought so, and made his case in The Open Society and Its Enemies. Melissa Lane, author of Plato's Progeny discusses Popper's critique of Plato in this episode of Philosophy Bites....
David Edmonds on Trolley Problems
Is it ever morally acceptable to kill one person to save five? Most people think that it can be. But are we consistent in this? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Nigel Warburton interviews David Edmonds (co-creator of Philo...
Julian Baggini on Thought Experiments
Philosophers often use elaborate thought experiments in their writing. Are these anything more than rhetorical flourishes? Or do they reveal important aspects of the questions under discussion. Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers'...
==
Sartre - existence precedes essence
"...there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?
...
--Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
--Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
LHP 1-3
ReplyDelete1. Bertrand Russell rejected God after reading John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. The logical problem for the First Cause argument he identified was "what caused God?" He thought that if everything has a cause, but nothing caused God, then nothing could actually be caused by God unless God was caused by something. This was a very interesting thought experiment. Quite honestly, I would put this in the category of things I would like to think about more deeply but am not sure how. The logic makes sense in my mind, but I truly do not know where to take it from that.
2. Paradox, false. I have always enjoyed thinking about paradoxes and trying to come up with new ones. I think of it like this: reality rules above all, language is away to explain reality and communicate it. If language twists or distorts reality, it is not doing its job. I would have to say there is a bit of an issue when language seems to go against reality, but I could be very wrong! It should be noted that I also believe reality is subjective between people to some extent, which further complicates things to a point that I cannot explain.
3. Verification Principle, logical positivism. Is something that is unverifiable meaningless? I would say yes and no. I believe it is only meaningless if it does not positively or negatively affect anyone whatsoever. For those that believe that everything affects others in some way, I would question them if they declared something to be "meaningless." However, the second a "meaningless" unverifiable thing affects something else, negatively or positively, I believe it is no longer meaningless. A meaningless thing cannot affect people, but an unverifiable thing can. I do not think either label is set in stone, and both have room for interpretation. That is the distinction that makes sense to me.
Section #1
DeleteThe first question reminded me of the chicken and egg idea. What came first? And if the chicken wasn't caused by something, how could it produce the egg? It's just a huge circular argument that can't really be answered.
Section #1
ReplyDeleteLHP
5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? Should he have said something else?
He was free and should choose for himself. I am 50 50 on his decision. On one hand that is what he taught that oneself should make decisions, but on the other he reflected the responsibility of the decision that was requested of him. I lean more on that he should have given real advice rather than just tell him to figure it out on his own. Given that it was his student I am assuming this student was young. Usually when a younger person seeks advice from an older more experienced individual it is expected that the more experienced person offers their insight and not just tells the younger to figure it out on their own.
7. Which Greek myth did Albert Camus use to illustrate human absurdity, as he saw it? Do you ever feel that way? Do you worry that someday you might, in work or relationships or something else?
The Greek myth of Sisyphus. Both in the way that he is happy and that I'm completing tasks just to do more later with no end in sight, yes. Happy, when I'm in the middle of a task, progressing well, when I am just about complete, and/or don't have any future tasks on the horizon. Despair, when I am struggling with the current task and know I have more tasks of similar difficulty.
Weiner
1.What is an "unrealizable"? Can you imagine yourself at age 60+?
A state of being we inhabit but never fully internalize; only others do. I can't imagine myself above 60 after I read that chapter. Aspects of my personality weren't things that ever came to mind when considering aging. I also never really thought I could feasibly know what I'd look like when I'm older. Sure I could look at my parents but I am a mix of my parents I can't know which aspects of aging will affect me more.
Section #1
DeleteI agree that there is a sense of accomplishment when you've completed a task. I also experience that, especially with college work. I try to not submit lazy work just to complete an assignment, because then it feels monotonous and I know it's not beneficial to me. Though, finishing the same job every day (like work or going to school) feels so draining sometimes. Like, it's exhausting to push the boulder back up the hill over and over again.
I understand your point about unending tasks leading to frustration. Personally, I experienced this during our break. Because I had a huge paper due on Sunday, I stressed about that until it was submitted. From Monday onwards, I was preparing for Thursday's classes and spring registration.
DeleteIt raises an interesting question about the nature of rest: is it the absence of worry or of tasks?
Mackenzie Harris, Section 2
ReplyDeleteLHP:
1. John Stuart Mills autobiography had led him to reject God. His logical problem with the First Cause argument was that if one thing didn't have a cause then you can't say everything does. I agree with him because if you are believing that everything in this world has a cause then you find one or more things that don't that rules out that everything does.
2. Paradox, False
3. Verification, logical positivism.
5. His advice was that he was free, and it was his choice. I think while yes, this advice is technically correct it is not really advice. If someone comes to you asking for your opinion between two colors, and you say "I don't care whichever you like" then it defeats the purpose in asking in the first place.
Antonella Comaschi section 3
DeleteI agree with number 5 because its not actually advice. He's telling them he has freedom and he make decisions for himself. I guess if he was trying to enforce being independent to his students his statement would be some sort of advice. But agree that it defeats the purpose of asking in the first place.
LHP 5.
ReplyDeleteHuman beings don't have an essence. They are in bad faith like the waiter. I think I agree with Sartre that almost everything is a mindset, so with most things you can escape this bad faith by just thinking about it in the right way. I think the exception comes when freedom is literally removed. Pretty hard not to think you can't do anything with your life when you literally cannot.
5. He told the student that he is free to do whatever he wants to do, and that he should do that. I think the student obviously knows this already, and was looking for someone to persuade him one way or the other. He should have said something else.
6. She says that women are not born women, and that they tend to pick up and become how men view women. Hard question. I think that race, sex, and age are the identities bestowed at birth. Everything else: religion, political affiliation, gender, etc. are things that are revealed later.
Section #1
DeleteWhile I agree that his advice wasn't really advice, I also understand from his point of view how important a decision that was. If the man was wanting his opinion to persuade him, then I feel like he wouldn't truly be thinking for himself. He would be deferring to an authoritative figure or role model. I think Sartre wanted the man to evaluate his own values. Country over family? I don't think he was wrong or daft in not giving the man an either/or answer.
I think the barber example from chapter 31 is a convincing argument for why language cannot capture reality in SOME cases. Something that I've observed is that many philosophers choose to focus on very binary sentences and words to dwell upon. Many sentences spoken today, however, convey a lot of nuance that would send the philosophers into a never-ending loop of philosophical debate. I think the difference in language being able to and being unable to capture reality is the perception of the person. Prior experience and common knowledge change the way language is used, so much so that many words with a positive or negative connotation now may have carried the opposite connotation in the past.
ReplyDeleteCorbin Medley - Section 3
DeleteI absolutely agree that language sometimes falls short in it's capacity to encapsulate the truth of reality, but I more so agree that these examples of rationales provided by philosophers to further their arguments are very binary and roughly simplified into a statement with little or no understanding of nuance. It is like they are put into perspectives of absolutes with no space for specification, like the barber DOES cut the hair of everyone who does not cut their own, but only in the aspect that everyone means everyone that isn't himself. If you just specify what you mean in your statement, language is much better at explaining reality than he gave merit. That does not mean he was entirely wrong, just a bit far with his rationality.
I agree. Using the correct language requires specificity. Yes, the statement might be inferred, but it can often be missed. Like the barber, it makes sense when you take everyone as anyone but himself, but it doesn't when you take it at face value.
DeleteAyer's verification principle was a convincing argument to read to me. I think it sums up a general rule—obviously with some exceptions but this is to be expected. I definitely think that Ayer had a good system of criticizing fellow philosophers' assertions with the verification principle. The addition of logical arguments is a welcome change to me, the rise of logical positivism will make for more interesting and founded conversation.
ReplyDeleteCorbin Medley - Section 3
DeleteI think Ayer's verification principle is a uniquely valuable concept in association with the validity of logical thought. Things that we want to consider true have to be in some capacity, empirically valid, or true in definition; but this mindset is rather extreme when it considers all that is not in their entirety either of these as completely pointless. Social constructs are not entirely true or entirely verifiable, but they are foundations for our understanding of ourselves, of society, and of reality. Just because a concept is abstract does not consign it to a pointless existence, even the abstract has purpose in the guidance of humanity.
HWT 6-8
ReplyDelete6. Hume’s “is/ought gap” shows that facts alone can’t tell us what we should do.
7. "Tea teaches" mindfulness and harmony through everyday ritual
8. "Wabi-sabi" celebrates the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.
Corbin Medley, Section 3
ReplyDelete1. Reading whose autobiography led young Bertrand Russell to reject God? OR, What did he see as the logical problem with the First Cause Argument? Do you agree with Russell about this?
John Stuart Mill's. The logical problem with the First Cause Argument is that there is one thing that doesn't have a cause, which is God, so how can it be true? To me, I don't understand why the First Cause has to be God rather than a natural cosmic event like the Big Bang. If there has to be single beginning why do we need to extend that to a metaphysical entity? Why does the Big Bang need a cause if God does not? I know the answer is God being the single omnipotent Creator of all but I have difficulty seeing that as an answer over alternatives.
3. A.J. Ayer's ______ Principle, stated in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, was part of the movement known as _____ ______. Is unverifiability the same thing as meaninglessness?
The Verification Principle part of the Logical Positivism movement. Things that cannot be verified are absolutely not meaningless. Science is what is praised in logical positivism, and in science, theories that cannot truly be proven are the foundation of our understanding of our reality. The theory of evolution cannot truly be proven but there is overwhelming evidence that pushes it to a point of irrefutability.
4. Humans don't have an _____, said Jean Paul Sartre, and are in "bad faith" like the ____ who thinks of himself as completely defined by his work. Is it possible to avoid bad faith in every situation?
Essence, The waiter who thinks of himself as defined by his role as a waiter is in bad faith with his freedom. He believes humans are condemned to freedom, meaning we have it whether we like it or not and all things in our lives are a result of our own decisions. I believe it is largely possible to avoid bad faith with the conscious awareness that you have total freedom over yourself. The problems that this concept runs into are the social construction of hurdles through systemic injustice and institutional oppression. Sometimes we do not have total freedom of choice, as some choices do not lead to an outcome that is reasonable enough to consider it a choice. If you have to decide between something and death/imprisonment, that is an ultimatum, not a choice.
5. What was Sartre's frustrating advice to the student who didn't know whether to join the Resistance? Should he have said something else?
That he was free and he had to make the choice himself, even with advice he must choose to follow it. I believe he gave a non-answer that held merit to it. Ultimately it was up to him, but that does not help him rationalize which decision would be better. I do not know whether he should have told him something else as a decision with such gravity is not one I can easily answer. Maybe I don't know would have been the best answer.
I agree with your point on number 5. In the end, it was the student's choice to join the Resistance. At most, Sartre could have given the pros and cons to both sides. Even if Sartre just straight-up said "no" or "yes," it would have still been the student's choice. So I think telling him that he was free to make the choice himself was a pretty good answer.
DeleteSection 2
ReplyDelete2. The idea of a barber who shaves all who don't shave themselves is a logical ______, a seeming contradiction that is both true and false. Another example of the same thing would be a statement like "This sentence is ___." Do these examples show a deep problem with language and its ability to accurately portray reality?
“Paradox” and “False” are the blanks.
Do these examples show how language struggles to accurately portray reality? Yes, I believe so. Do I see such a struggle as a “deep problem”? No, in fact I see it as both beautiful and probably inevitable. I am a skeptic first and foremost, and even beyond that much of the following subject matter is outside of my full understanding, so proceed as I do with a healthy amount of salt. In my experience both as a human and through externally observing and hearing of the experience of other humans, I have presently concluded that the human mind has evolved to curate a far simpler and perhaps very misleading view of the world than potentially exists (assuming there is any sense to be made of the universe stripped of experience, anyways). An excellent example of this is examining the basic role of any medium of perception, such as the eye and vision. It takes in countless, sporadic, and individual photons and processes this cacophony of information into large, distinct and recognizable colors. It quite literally simplifies the world around us into something more useful for interpretation. If we did not have mechanisms to group photons by wavelength and amount, we might see the world as a mess of static noise that would, at best, consume much more energy than efficient to decipher in any impactful way. I think similar principles of simplification apply to the mind and thought. For example, we are obsessed as a species with categorization. We love giving discrete and encompassing labels to the matter around us so that we can better comprehend and interpret it. A way this categorization manifests is in language, especially nouns. Because of the simplicity of our labels, we actually end up losing information in the process of reduction, whereby the processed stimuli is not only more comprehensible to us, but also missing characteristics which were and are present physically within the portion of reality we are attempting to perceive/interpret. This naturally results in the poor ability for not only language to accurately reflect reality, but also perhaps human logic itself.
[Continued in replies]
We tend to commend logic as the pinnacle of truth and the undeniably knowable (Bertrand Russel certainly thought so), but I think that it is worth applying scrutiny even to this assertion. Obviously, something hardwired to believe that 2+2=4 is always true will, when prompted and telling the truth, always answer that the statement 2+2=4 is correct (or so it seems to me, which is an application of logic again and therefore open to questioning itself). It seems plausible to me that there could be aspects of our logic that are not based upon the laws of the universe but which are foundational to our mental processes to the point where they become a blind spot for us that we may never truly overcome without requiring our own brains. Returning to the 2+2 statement and specifically the parenthetical, this poses a very interesting logical predicament: it is a logical paradox to reason, through logic, that said logic could be flawed. It becomes weirder, however, when you also note that such a statement would perhaps cease to be a paradox under certain specificities of its outcome. If the logic in question is foolproof, it is a paradox and false. If the logic in question is false, but there still exists external logic in the universe which is different from the prior logic, it is still a paradox (assuming the true logic can have paradoxes at all) but at least partially true (excluding the reasoning for its truth, since it used flawed logic to arrive at such a conclusion). If the logic is false, but only the portion of logic being debated (in this case, 2+2 always = 4), then it ceases to be a paradox and is simply true. Finally, if the logic is false but the universe contains no actual logic at all, it is now not a paradox, since paradoxes only exist so long as logic does, but is still partially incorrect for using reasoning at all to conclude such an outcome. Likewise, any of these statements are equally likely candidates for logical scrutiny now. Ultimately we may never be able to recognize such a blind spot, but the possibility to me is never zero that it exists.
DeleteIt's interesting, the question of if language is a true representation of reality. I agree with you, it can't be completely.
Delete5. While his advice was correct and made sense, I don't think it was very informative advice for the student. In all likelihood, the student was well aware that only he could make the decision and only he himself could determine the correct course of action. If I was in the student's situation, I would probably not be satisfied with Sartre's advice.
ReplyDeleteI like the myth of Sisyphus. It makes me feel like no matter what I am doing, there is something to find appreciation for, even if I have to search for it. I'm not sure if that was the intention of Camus's proposal but that's the way that I've come to see it.
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