notes by Brendan
Today we started in the shop and finished our class with a visit from Professor Gideon Rosen to discuss our ZAMM reading.
This discussion was focused on themes within the chapters of ZAMM but not necessarily direct relation to the narrator and Phaedrus.
-What is philosophy?
– The love of wisdom. The attempt to say how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together. Aims to give a comprehensive picture of the world at a fundamental level. The description of philosophy sounds like the description of physics.
-Hume and Kant.
– When you look at the world you see a constantly changing barrage of colored shapes. The melting ice cube at first you see a cubical solid and over time you see a change of shape. What starts off as cold is no longer cold. From moment to moment there is nothing constant about the melting ice cube, but something has remained the same. It has just changed form. Appearances are constantly changing but there is a single persistent constant.
o How do you know?
o Where do you get the idea that there might be something consistent despite the changing?
- Modern day philosophers are reacting against Descartes idea. Descartes says things are innate ideas from god. You can reason without experience based on these innate ideas. Example: Geometry. Because god wouldn’t lie you’re accessing this knowledge that was given to you by a benevolent god.
- Even if you originally learned about the Pythagorean theorem from your 6thgrade teacher, when it comes to math you can run through the proof yourself. Teacher is a short cut according to Descartes.
– With Hume and Kant god plays no role.
o Hume is a radical empiricist. Thinks all ideas come from experience. No innate idea. Hume is confused about where we get the idea of the thing that remains constant. He says we have no such idea. You can say the water was there at the beginning and at the end but you’re just “feigning or pretending” that there was something there. Verbal fiction.
o Kant thinks its obvious you do not just see an array of colored shapes unless you’re “tripping.” You see things undergoing change. Kant says there’s a raw matter of experience. The mind imposes structure on it. The mind constructs a world of persisting things that interact with physical laws. The world we experience is constituted by the mind. Kant’s Copernican revolution.
Think of your idea of what a motorcycle is. You conjure up a fuzzy picture of a motorcycle from a certain angle. But it’d be a mystery to match up a motorcycle from head on as opposed to sideways. Thoughts aren’t a stream of pictures. Concepts are not pictures, more like descriptions. Not matching experience with a picture, but if it satisfies some description. It would even be abstract.
-Eastern vs Western Philosophy
– There is eastern thought. Chinese word for philosophy had to be invented when translating western philosophy. Not from the basis of authority. Indian philosophy is more similar to western philosophy than Chinese or Japanese for cultural reasons.
– Eastern and romantic link is from western romanticism from rational strands. People took for granted the aim of philosophy. They disagreed about what the fundamental bits of philosophy were
-Electrons trajectory.
– Kant built his philosophy off the idea of innate ideas. Quickly was proven false.
– Empirical measurement based on result. Polarized sunglasses at 45 degrees experiment shows how measurement changes the environment.
-Socrates and universities as churches
– Church that is now a bar considered sacrilegious. Equated to university threatened to losing accreditation. The rebuttal being i t’s not about accreditation, its about the search for truth.
– Saying what a university is. You could be describing what all universities have in common or you could be saying what you think a university should be.
– What is worth preserving in universities?
o Creation of new knowledge and education for leadership.
– Mission should be to produce more educated people.
Assignment for Thursday 8 March 2018:
Read chapters 14 and 15 of ZAMM.
Other things of note:
20 Chrome parts were taken to the plater.