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21st Century Philosophy - September 15

... this professor is a total hipster. >n< 

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Theory Of Knowledge - September 15

Is knowing an infallible state of mind?

When we use the expression infallible, what we mean is ‘that of which we cannot be wrong’. When we say that we know something infallibly, we mean that it is not possible that we are wrong.

Contradiction: I know X, but X isn’t true.

Contradiction: I know that X, but I might be wrong.

To know that X, X must be true.

What is it to know that something is the case?

Condition 1 – it must be true

Is this enough? Why or why not?

WE MUST BE CERTAIN THAT IT IS TRUE.

Is this enough? Why or why not?

Ayer says we must be entitled to be certain.

People can be justified in belief in false propositions

If S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q. 

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Contemporary British and American Philosophy - September 13

Contemporary British and American philosophy - September 13 Sellars: The goal of philosophy is to know the way around knowledge, to just know. Says that someone could have a great deal of knowledge but not have relevant know how. For example someone could know the way to drive a car, but not truly know how to drive a car. If you know how to do something, you must have relevant know that. If you have duties you must have knowledge of ethics. This is one of the things that applies the above concept. What is the ontological status of fingersnaps? Do they exist? More that as a child you practice until you can do it, and then you suddenly know how. Manifest image is a type of science. If I were to see smoke on the horizon, I might postulate that there was a fire somewhere over on the same horizon. Ohholyshitthisclass......... Zzzzz.

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21st Century Philosophy - September 13

This class is poorly organized. I'm going to try to note whatever I can get down.

Noumenal: Is anything of the senses. A smell is noumenal, as is a sight, as is something that you feel. This all ties in to the philosophers below, who have opinions on what is the real, as per the senses, and the noumenal.

Phenomenology: The study of what is given to human consciousness. There is no real universal intersubjected way in which we experience the same things. (Nothing that smells like something will smell the exact same way to someone else, though they can identify it as the same smell. Perception.)

Kant: There is probably a real, we just cannot access it.

Hegel: The gap between being and thought is the real.

Nietzche: There is no real, there is no real truth, there is just perspective. What is true, is just a matter of what wins out in our power relations.

Pragmatism: a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Important positions characteristic of pragmatism include instrumentalism, radical empiricism, verificationism, conceptual relativity, a denial of the fact-value distinction, a high regard for science, and fallibilism.

Deleuze: was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by some scholars to be his magnum opus.[2]

Psychoanalysis: is a questionably scientific[1][2][3][4][5] psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis expanded, criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, and later by neo-Freudians such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan.

The basic tenets of psychoanalysis include the following:

human behavior and thinking are largely determined by irrational drives;

those drives are largely not conscious;

attempt to bring those drives into awareness meets defense (resistance) in many different forms;

beside the inherited constitution of personality, one's development is determined by events in early childhood;

conflicts between conscious view of reality and unconscious (repressed) material can result in mental disturbances such as neurosis, neurotic traits, anxiety, depression etc.;

the liberation from the effects of the unconscious material is achieved through bringing this material into the consciousness (via e.g. skilled guidance).[6]

Existentialism: The branch of philosophy concerned with existing, and what it means to be.

French Feminism: Self Explanatory.

Deconstruction: is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading.[1] Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.[2] Derrida opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than violence.[1] The term "deconstructionism" is sometimes applied as a title for Derrida's school of thought, but Derrida is more often classified as a post-structuralist. Derrida's work can be reduced to ontological politics.[3]

Logical Positivism: (also known as logical empiricism, scientific philosophy, and neo-positivism) is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology. It may be considered as a type of analytic philosophy.[1]

Foucault: Discipline and Punish

Bertrand Russell: led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 1900s. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians.[2] He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy."[5] His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

John Rawls: His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."[1] His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism,[2] takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."[1] Rawls employs a number of thought experiments-including the famous veil of ignorance-to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice.[1] He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty: was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx,[1] Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (who later stated he had been "converted" to Marxism by Merleau-Ponty[2]) and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics, and politics. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement his writings have become influential in the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Sartre: was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary and philosophical existentialism. His work continues to influence fields such as Marxist philosophy, sociology, critical theory and literary studies. Sartre was also noted for his long polyamorous relationship with the feminist author and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it.

Freud: was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst.

Freud postulated that sexual drives were the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

Derida: Phenomonoligist. Interested in destabilizing texts. The world is a text that is constantly undermining itself.

Absurdism: In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean "logically impossible," but rather "humanly impossible."[1] The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information, including the vast unknown, makes certainty impossible. As a philosophy, absurdism also explores the fundamental nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious of the Absurd, should react to it.

Camus: was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton. 

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Theory of Knowledge - September 13

Theory of Knowledge - September 13 What is an argument? -A conclusion based on premises. An argument is a conclusion that is supported by the facts presented. -It is an attempt to offer good reasons in support of your conclusion; reasons that all parties in the dispute can accept. -Arguments can have generally any combination of truth values, but a valid argument cannot have all true premises followed by a false conclusion. Defnitions: Valid: Deductively valid. An argument is valid as long as the conclusion must be true if the premises of the argument are true. Invalid: an invalid argument is one that in it, it is possible to have all true premises with a false conclusion. Sound: a sound argument is an argument in which it is not only valid, but has all true premises. Kinds of Knowledge. There are many different uses of 'knowledge' and 'know'. 3 Basic kinds: Knowing how to do something, which is how competent you are, or a type procedural knowledge of competency. Knowing someone, which is knowledge by acquaintance. Knowing something, as in knowing that Stephen Harper is the prime minister, which is propositional knowledge. You cannot know something unless it is true, and you cannot have knowledge without truth. Knowledge = justified and true belief. The first two conditions are the easy ones. S knows that p if and only if. Truth condition: p is true Belief condition: s believes that p. Truth condition: Can't know that Phil Kessel plays for the leafs unless he actually does play for the leafs. Belief: used in the most general and broad sense. Think of it as a kind ofnpropositional attitude; an attitude that it cognitively contentful.