the categories

Couldn't help but think of Kant a little bit when I read this article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2214940


Dederer's quote:

"In other words, the girl tries to be normal. She tries to define her experience through the accepted language of emotion. But Gaitskill is never interested in accepted language. She rejects the usual psychological readings of the self. What we call emotional reality, Gaitskill calls categories." (Page 2 of the article, italics mine).



Kant's got a lot of stuff about the categories. It's almost strikingly similar to what Gaitskill is trying to achieve. Moreover, Gaitskill is a critic of Rand, who was a critic of Kant. So there's a neat little circle there, too.

Easiest and Hardest

Woke up this morning early at 7:00AM. Hit the snoozy a couple of times and then I got breakfast a little while later. Caught up with the food at the cafeteria. Saw Bette outside smoking a cigarette. She said that cigarette prices are going up tomorrow for the start of the new month.

I saw Nikita's friend Kasie in the cafeteria. She was wearing a Guiness hat with Toucan's flying on it. The birds were flying up and to my left with black glasses of beer on them. I don't remember what shirt she was wearing. She was making a lot of hand gestures. She said her birthday is January 2nd. We talked about a lot of different stuff. She is a biology major. I kept getting goose bumps. We were talking about how the day is off to a great start. We kept on making jokes. There was a lot of energy to it. I had my rhetoric book. She was looking for one of her friends who was supposed to go over her genetics homework. I had my big blue red and purple rhetoric book with me. It's called "Reading Rhetorical Theory" by Barry Brummett.

What's the easiest part about all of this? What's the hardest part? What can I control? What's out of my control? What do I need to work on? What should I work on? How can I focus more? How can I be happier? How can I have fun with what I'm doing? How can I bring fun to what I'm doing?

Book Report: The Centaur

Just read Updike's 1963 The Centaur, about a boy and his dad. Here's the link to Wikipedia, which gives a decent rundown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centaur

Can't help but thinking of this one Death Cab for Cutie song:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=face+that+launched+1000+shits&hl=en&client=firefox-a&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=face+that+launched+1000+shit#


The idea between the song and The Centaur is that both use a comparison of contemporary times to give extra meaning. By making these times symbolic of some mythology these themes hitch their stories to some greater thing.

The book takes on three or four different modes of presentation, which sometimes confuse the reader and other times make for interesting reading. One of these is a changing viewpoint between 3rd person omniscient narrative and 1st person narrative. Another mode was the way Updike interspersed mythology into scenes, sometimes wildly going off of the scene (wait, they're a bunch of talking Gods on Olympus, but they were two students eating lunch). I struggled for a time with whether or not George Caldwell would die or not.

Therefore, one problem is certainly the ambiguity, which Updike uses purposefully enough. Explaining this, I feel like I've already told you how this can get boring. There were a couple of times where I would put down the book just for the sake of putting down the book. It sometimes reads like a short story that Updike just kept on writing. Likewise, all of the classic Updike overly-sentimental metaphoric scenes are here.

The one chapter that affected me the most was the emotional climax of the book. This was directly after there was an obituary talking about Caldwell's death. The book is obscure enough that when I read it, I didn't have to believe it, but when the scenes blur and Updike talks the slightest bit about Caldwell walking the slightest bit ahead of the son, I felt as if the whole world were ending. In short, the gimmicks worked.

Studying is hard

Everything is on my mind. My mind is going like a million beats per minute. I just had a vitamin water (kiwi-focus) and so I'm sure that's not going to help. Facadesaside: stupid vitamin waters never give you the magic powers that you want. I read on Mike Gordon's old website that children who play with marbles have a correlation with growing up and doing woodworking. This was weird when one time at the Difede's, when I was talking to their next door neighbor, he said that he used to play with marbles. His profession before he retired? Wood working.

The religions that I tend to like these days are the most peaceful ones. I also like ones where you watch the mindflow. It's such a basic thing that we all kind of forget it. I feel like there are a lot of Western Religions who do not emphasize this enough.

So when I say studying is hard, the title of this entry, I'm telling you the truth. I am interested in just about anything and I think that I am willing to work at what I love. I want to be serious about my ideas, like Kasser says to be (see earlier in the blog). I do not want to bs myself. I do not want anyone to bs me either. I have to be honest with myself.

It is crazy because all of this seems connected to me. For example, people talk about getting freedom. I say "Freedom from what?" I feel like you cannot be free unless you are free from your mind first.


I'm shooting for a mere 200 words a day, so if these blogs start to look and sound the same, that's why.

furthermore, Kant

Kant made a big contribution to Cosmology, which surprises no one who is familiar with his philosophy.

His whole Critique of Pure Reason was intended to pull off a Copernican Hypothesis within humans.

Note on the Moderns

The big deal in the 1600-1700's for philosophy was to 1) show stuff could be known and how it could be known and 2) know it.

So for example you could say that Descartes showed things could be known with his system of doubt, which reveals a basic foundation of knowledge.

He then busted out all of what he found in physics, geometry, math, and biology.

For Spinoza, he was also considered a foundationalist, but it had more to do with careful assessment rather than a system of doubt. For example, Spinoza might have said, of course, we all know 2+2 = 4 because of logic. He then proceeded to write his entire system based on this. He dabbled in optics and the physics of optics. Although he only wrote one or two papers on the subject, he did work as a lens grinder (reading-glasses-maker).

John Locke thought he was just working off of Newton, and there's a pretty good quote like this by Locke. Newton can be considered a philosopher, because everyone has to defend their science, and Newton certainly did. Locke hated the idea that Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes thought that you could know something before you experience it. While the rest of us are like, "duh," it was a really crazy thing for all of them to say back then.

Locke's major contributions are known to most high schoolers as Political Science, but he had some all right ones in science, too.

Hobbes died happily thinking that he had squared the circle. (His last words were still philosophical, he said, "A great leap in the dark!" and kicked the bucket).

I just wrote about Leibniz's contributions. As a philosopher of science, Leibniz did something really cool by integrating the sciences.

Berkeley wrote a weird philosophical/scientific treatise on the chemical creation of tar and its uses as a medicine, while Hume was first and foremost a historian.

Writing this about Hume, and I'll explain why I feel this way in a bit, I think it's so cool that it's hard to separate the sciences and philosophies from the person. While mathematics seems about as remote from a person as anything, you can see how these philosopher's (ahem) philosophies shine through. Even without the Hume example I haven't provided, you can sort of see the mathematical rigor of both Spinoza's theory of knowledge and his ventures into optics. You can see how Berkeley wanted to help people by writing a medicine piece on tar between works on how the soul is immortal and God is the only thing that's real. Cool stuff abounds!

The Moderns! continued (Part II)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz (1 July 1646 [OS: 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was one of the greats because of his integration of sciences, not to mention his white knuckle ability for work.

Over the course of his years he invented binary, which every computer in the world uses in the present day. He also pretty much single handedly invented Library Sciences, and it was his integration of maths that led him to invent the Calculus independently and before Newton. Americans still use Leibnizian notation.

Leibniz worked nonstop over the course of his life, often travelling as he did it. Various other contributions to sciences such as politics, geometry, geology, engineering, and even poetry were all pretty abundant. He invented one of the first calculators.

Working more than probably anyone else of his era, the extent of Leibniz's works have still not been assessed and translated 400 years later. It is possible that Leibniz has other ideas as good as some of his computer solutions lost in his papers.

As for his philosophical contributions, Leibniz re-systemized logic. This paved the way for analytic truth ventures. His Principle of Identity and Principle of Sufficient Reason are really cool. He also made some pretty good cases for Free Will being Compatible with rigid Scientific Organization, or Determinism if you will.

A tremendous leader in so many fields, Leibniz established some of the first German academies of sciences, which would forge Germany into a world power in the 19th and 20th centuries.

If I may speak freely here, I might say that Leibniz was really angry about people being unable to recognize the wonders of this world. He put the problem out there as noumena versus phenomena, whereupon we could know the real essences of things. His theory of Pre-established harmony reminded people that things happen for a reason and we can trust those reasons.

Sometimes when I walk around by myself I think, "Every Jew is a Civil Rights Activist. Every American is a Civil Rights Activist."

"The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jew more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer."

Julius Rosenwald, CEO of Sears Roebuck and benefactor of Booker T. Washington

RIP John Hope Franklin

Today the historian John Hope Franklin died. He was 94 years old.

Here are some resources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7964747.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hope_Franklin

The Moderns!

Modern Philosophy began actually with Descartes(31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650 (who's name literally means "Some Maps" or "These Cards" if you took French, but reallly has the name from some land his family owned or something).

First off, Descartes rejected idiocy, which was basically the standard at the time. Of course things get more complicated then that, mainly when you're talking about the Roman Catholic Churh's monopoly on information, which meant systemized idiocy to some extent.

The Roman Catholic Church is an excellent bridge to Spinoza, but we'll get to that in a second.

The problem of Modern Philosophy that exists today, but to a lesser extent, was how things could be known. Descartes said to keep a firm foundation. In order to show that he knew stuff he made contributions to math (the coordinate graph and Snell's law) and biology, and basic-level physics. He had his hand in a couple of other puddings, too, but this is a good, albeit *very* rough sketch of the guy. The foundation business means that he had to subject everything to doubt.

Spinoza (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) will be remembered as his own philosophy, truly, but also as a reaction to Descartes' doubt disaster, among other things. The method of doubt looks a lot like not knowing anything, when you get right down to that.

Spinoza was a foundationalist (read: believer (ist) in foundations (foundation). He thought that it was a big deal to react to religion, as well, because his family had been kicked out of Spain in a religion-based ethnic cleansing known as The Inquisition (the questioning until you get really annoyed). Other members of Spinoza's family were lucky enough to feel Roman Catholicism's "mercy" getting tortured, beaten, and murdered. It's cool though, Spinoza's distaste with religion eventually lead him to be rejected from Judaism, too.

Sam's judgment

Was talking to "Sam" (true name not displayed for politeness) a few minutes ago. He said that he memorizes people's walks. I knew where he was going with this and I asked if you could tell traits about a person from their walk. He said yes.

I asked him what his impression of me was from my walk, and he said something to the effect of "not necessarily the most dominant person in the world, but someone who's got enough confidence to do what works. Kinda goofy." I then wrote this down. When I asked him if I could write this down and started to, he said, "Everyone's kind of goofy."

More on this later.

Kant's Second Analogy Part II

{Part II on blogspot}

The temporal sequence is accordingly the only empirical criterion of the effect in relation to the causality of the cause that precedes it . The glass is the cause of the rise in of the water above its horizontal plane, though both appearances are simultaneous. For as soon as I draw the water into the glass from a larger vessel, something follows, namely the alteration of he horizontal state which the water had there into a concave state that it assumes in the glass.
This causality leads to the concept of action, this to the concept of force, and thereby to the concept of substance. Since I will not crowd my critical project, which concerns solely the sources of synthetic a priori cognition, with analyses that addresses merely the elucidation (not the amplification) of concepts, I leave the detailed discussion of these concepts to a future system of pure reason – especially since one can already find such an analysis in rich measure even in the familiar textbooks of this sort. Yet I cannot leave untouched the empirical criterion of a substance, insofar as it seems to manifest itself better and more readily through action than through the persistence of the appearance.
Where there is action, consequently activity and force, there is also substance, and in this alone must the seat of this fruitful source of appearances be sought. That is quite well said; but if one would explain what one understands by substance, and in so doing avoid a vicious circle, then the question is not so easily answered. How will one infer directly from the action to the persistence of that which acts, which is yet such an essential and singular characteristic of the substance (phaenomenon)? Yet given what we have already said, the solution of the question is not subject to such a difficulty, though after the usual fashion (proceeding merely analytically with its concepts) it would be entirely insoluble. Action already signifies the relation of the subject of causality to the effect. Now since all effect consists in wthat which happens, consequently in the changeable, which indicates succession in time, the ultimate subject of the changeable is therefore that which persists, as the substratum of everything that chagnes, i.e., the substance. For according to the principle of causality actions are always the primary ground of all change of appearances, and therefore cannot lie in a subject that itself changes, since otherwise furhter actions and another subject, which determines this chagne, would be required. Now on this account action, as a sufficient empirical criterion, proves substantiality without it being necessary for me ifrt to seek out its persistence through compared perceptions, a way in which the completeness that is requisite for the quantity and strict universality of the concept could not be attained. For that the primary subject of the causality of all arising and perishing cannot itself arise and perish in the field of appearances) sis a certain inference, which ladsd to empriical necessity and persistence in existence, consequently to the concept of a substance as appearance.
If something happens, the mere arising, without regard to that which comes to be, is already in itself an object of investigation. It is already necessary to investigate the transition from the non-being of a state to this state, assuming that this state contained no quality in the appearance. This arising concerns, as was shown in section A, not the substance (for that does not arise), but its state. It is therefore merely alteration, and not an origination out of nothing. If this origination is regarded as the effect of a foreign cause, then it is called creation, which cannot be admitted as an occurrence among the appearances, for its possibility alone would already undermine the unity of experience, though if I consider all things not as phenomena but rather as things in themselves and as objects of mere understanding, then, though they are substances, they can be regarded as dependent for their existence on a foreign cause; which, however, would introduce entirely new meanings for the words and would not apply to appearances as possible objects of experience.
Now how in general anything can be altered, how it is possible that upon a state in one point of time an opposite one could follow in the next – of these we have a priori not the least concept. For this acquaintance with actual forces is required, which can only be given empirically, e.g., acquaintance with moving forces, or, what comes to be the same thing, with certain successive appearances (as motions) which indicate such forces. But the form of such an alteration, the condition under which alone it, as the arising of another state, can occur (whatever the content, i.e., the state, that is altered might be), consequently the succession of the states itself (that which has happened), can still be considered a priori according to the law of causality and the conditions of time.
If a substance passes out of a state a into another state b, then the point in time of the latter is different from the point in time of the first state and follows it. Likewise the second state as a reality (in the appearance) is also distinguished from the first, in which it did not yet exist, as b is distinguished from zero; i.e., if the state b differs from the state a even only in magnitude, then the alteration would be arising of b-a, which did not exist in the prior state, and with regard to which the latter = o.
The question therefore arises, how a thing passes from one state = a into another one = b. Between two instants there is always a time, and between two states in those instances there is always a difference that has a magnitude (for all parts of appearances are always in turn magnitudes). Thus every transition from one state into another happens in a time that is contained between two instants, of which the former detemines the state from which the thing proceeds and the second the state at which it arrives. Both are therefore boundaries of the time of an alteration, consequently of the intermedeiate state between two states, and as such they belong to the whole alteration. Now every alteration has a caues, which manifests its causality in the entire time during which the alteration proceeds. Thus this cause does not produce its alteration suddenly (all at once or in an instant), but rather in a time, so that as the time increases from the initial instant a to its completion in b, the magnitude of the reality (b-a) is also generated through all the smaller degrees that are contained between the first and the last. All alteration is therefore possible only through a continuous action of causality, which, insofar as it is uniform, is called a moment. The alteration does not consist of these moments, but it is generated through them as their effect.
That is, now, the law of continuity of all alteration, the ground of which is this: That neither time nor appearance in time consists of smallest parts, and that nevertheless in its alteration the state of the thing passes through all these parts, as elements, to its second state. No difference of the real in appearance is the smallest, just as no difference in the magnitude of times is, and thus the new state of reality grows out of the first, in which it did not exist, thorugh all the infinite degrees of reality, the idfferences between which are all smaller than tat between o and a.
What utility this proposition may have in research into nature does not concern us here. But how such a proposition, which seems to amplify our cognition of nature so much, is possible completely a priori, very much requires our scrutiny, even though it is obvious that it is real and correct, and one might therefore believe oneself to be relieved of the question how it is possible. For there are so many unfounded presumptions of the amplification of our cognition thoruhg pure reason that it must be adopted as a general principle to be distrustful of them all and not to believe and accept even the clearest dogmatic proof of this sort of proposition without documents that could provide a well-grounded deduction.
All growth of empirical cognitions and every advance in perception is nothing but an ampliifcation of the determination of inner sense, ie.e, a progress in time, whatever the objects may be, either apperaances or pure intuitions. This progress in time determines everything, and is not itself determined by anything further: i.e., its parts are only in time, and given through the synthesiss of it, but they are not given before it. For this reason eveyr transition in perception to something that follows in time is a determination of time thorugh the generation of this perception and, since that is always and in all its parts a magnitiude, the generation of a perception as a magnitude through all degrees, of which note is the smallest, from zero to its determinate degree. It is from this that the possibility of cognizing a priori a law concerning the form of alterations becomes obvious. We anticipate only our own apprehension, the formal condition of which, since it is present in us prior to all given appearance, must surely be able to be cognized a priori.
In the same way, then, that time is the a priori sensible condition of the possibiloiyt of a contiuous progress of that which exists to that which follows it, the understanding, by means of the unity of apperception, is the a prior condition of the possibility of a continuous determination of all positions for the appearances in this time, through the series of causes and effects, the former of which inevitably draw the existence of the latter after them and thereby make the empriical cognition of temporal relations (universally) valid for all time, thus objectively valid.

facadesaside: real talk

My friend Devin, who is a professional rapper and master of all things hip hop, used to preface just about anything he said with, "Yo real talk..." and then whatever was on his mind.

It sounds better than "Yo facadesaside..."

Jeff Kasser's farewell to Colby Speech: The Speech itself

In the beginning, there was Bassett. And, at the rate he's going, in the end there will be Bassett. As many of you know, Charlie is rather like Michael Jordan or the Rolling Stones; he's a serial retirer. Like many a term paper or senior thesis, Bassett has that quality of being never-quite-finished.
Bassett's initial alleged retirement occurred at the end of my first year here at Colby. It was the first week of May, 1999, and most of you were seniors of the high school variety. I was a new instructor here, and I had heard plenty of stories about Bassett's teaching. I was impressed (of course) and jealous (of course) but I was also suspicious.
Many teachers really are a bit suspicious about our colleagues who are popular with students. Deep down, we suspect that well-liked instructors are entertainers first and teachers only second. For the most part, suspicions like the ones I entertained about Charlie stem from ordinary jealousy and insecurity. But I think that something much more important than the petty jealousies of the overeducated lurks behind these suspicions, and I think that philosophers may be the best people to appreciate this fact. This is because we all more-or-less want to be Socrates when we grow up, and Socrates more-or-less tells us that if you do philosophy right, people should want to kill you. Philosophers like to say that they want to be gadflies, but it's almost blackfly season here in Maine, and you know (or soon will) that nobody could seriously model herself after a biting fly and expect to be popular.
None of this is especially peculiar to philosophy. Any kind of teaching, if it's done intensely, involves bothering the hell out of students. Hopefully it involves support and encouragement as well, but a good teacher has to be able to get her students actively annoyed about ideas. That's because thinking, if it's to be done intensely, requires letting ideas get under your skin, letting them have a real impact on you. Ideas can itch, they can sting and they can hit. Hard. Sometimes we whack you upside the head with ideas, and sometimes we just try to infect you with them and let them reproduce themselves inside you. Socrates was a little too cheerful, I think, when he said that "philosophy begins in wonder." I favor Peirce's rather darker vision, according to which philosophy begins in disturbance. And your teachers do go around trying to disturb and to provoke you. "Provocation" is Emerson's word for the teacher's central task, and it's my favorite.
It's not enough that we leave you with intellectual lacerations and contusions. We then make you write papers about your search for the cure. And this can be damn hard, in deceptive ways as well as in the obvious ways. Intellectual work is supposed to be work after all, and real work requires real exertion. [As many of you now realize, looking for work is even more stressful and demanding than doing work is, but I promise not to bring up unemployment again.]
The strains of intellectual work can be underestimated because the exertion is largely invisible. Real thinking certainly involves more than furrowing your brow and waiting for something to happen. This means, among other things, that we can fool other people and even ourselves about how much intellectual work we've done, or even about how much we've tried to do. How many times have you sincerely felt like you'd been working quite hard on a project, only to know deep down that you put a lot more of yourself into socializing, Snood or South Park than you did into the task at hand? If ideas haven't impacted us, we often manipulate them without really engaging them. We move ideas around without thinking them through. As wise old seniors, you probably know by now that you can write a halfway decent paper without doing very much in the way of real thinking (but please don't tell the underclassmen).
Real intellectual work is also humbling and personal and scary. "Thinking at its most" (this phrase is ungrammatical, but I like it) involves trying to get right with something you care about. And it's humbling and maddening to find your thoughts inadequate to their object, even after you've struggled to get things right. If we're the kind of teachers we sometimes like to think we are, then we ask a hell of a lot of you. And appreciation on top of it seems like too much to expect. And yet, if the Senior Exit Interviews are to be believed, we get appreciated for inducing so much frustration in you. Wow.
I haven't been entirely careful or accurate, but I hope I've made a case that there's something a bit weird about you folks liking your professors as much as you say you do. What could be the explanation for this?
Putting aside collective masochism as an explanation, the most natural theory is one that's also supported by a lot of independent facts. This is that, as a group, you welcome being challenged, you are energetic and expect to exert yourselves, you are modest and flexible, and self-possessed enough to allow people like me to try to disturb you. There is an awful lot of truth to everything I've just said. And it's not only true, it's enormously important. Many people in this country and in this world are unable to tolerate, much less welcome, annoying gadflies like me and my colleagues. I've seen these virtues demonstrated in your volunteer work, in your political activism and in your accomplishments in athletics and the arts as well as in the classroom.
If you're inclined to dismiss this as flattery, I'll probably be able to convince you in a moment that I'm not here to flatter you. But first let me continue appreciating you. I owe to your classmate Richard Thomas my awareness of what the Bassett Award signifies. It is given to the faculty member who best exemplifies the values of the Senior Class. If I thought I was chosen for embodying such values as Natty Light at cheap prices, I would be much less flattered than I in fact am. As it is, because of my beliefs about the values of the Class of 2003, I can honestly say that this award means enormously more to me than any recognition I have ever received.
I hope you understand why I can't stop here; why I can't just compliment you and thank you and let you go. I'm enormously fond of my students here, but compliments tend not to bother people very much and so they tend not to produce much in the way of good thinking. Though I've put a couple of ideas in front of you, I haven't yet tried to really make you think. I've so far tried to be an entertainer as much as a teacher, and so I've been supporting the suspicion I articulated a few moments ago. I'd like to spend the last couple of minutes I have trying to teach, by which I mean to provoke genuine thought, and that means I'm not going to make being nice a priority. Of course, teaching is no excuse for being a jerk, so I hope to avoid that as well.
I hope you'll ask yourself whether this sort of difficult teaching is what you've wanted from Colby and whether it's what you've gotten from Colby. I hope for a favorable answer to that question, but I do not assume one.
Let me first note that I said that thinking requires letting yourself be bothered by ideas, I didn't say that it consists in letting yourself be bothered by ideas. If it did, the Student Digest of General Announcements would be one of the world's great repositories of wisdom. But it's not the Digests that really bother me. People can be self-important when they vent about ideas, but I don't think that they mistake the venting for the thinking.
Here's an example of something worse. Many letters to the editor, in The Echo or in any other paper, present themselves as calm and dispassionate statements of pure reason. But they often reflect a (sometimes comic, sometimes tragic) refusal to engage the other side of the question. Ideas bounce off of or whiz past such people, they don't stick under the skin. And yet such people feel a deep-seated need to pay lip-service to thinking. My objection tonight isn't to non-thinking so much as it is to fake thinking. For my purposes tonight, I don't care how much thinking you came to Colby to do, I only care that you not pretend to be doing more of it than you do or to caring more about it than you do. Let's be honest with ourselves and with each other in our last weeks together.
I fear that, to some extent, those of us who get worked up about teaching are implicated in a good bit of fake thinking. When we were kids, the harder my brother tried to punch me, the happier I was, because he would always miss when he swung too hard. Similarly, does all of our apparent intensity about teaching make it possible, does it even make it seductive, for you to pretend (to other people, but mainly to yourselves) that we're a lot more serious about thinking around here than we really are? By the "we" here I mean all of us, not just students.
But tonight I'm talking mostly about you. Do you like your teachers in part because we go through all the motions of challenging you and thereby help you fool yourselves? Has Colby "discomforted" you enough? Have we let you down? How seriously do you tell your relatives about all the "critical thinking" you've learned to do at Colby? How well do you understand those words and how seriously do you mean them?
Again, I'm not accusing you of anything, but only hoping that you'll accept a challenge to face some difficult questions. The way to answer this question is to look at how well what you tell yourself meshes with what you do. You aren't automatically much of an "authority" [Cartman voice] about yourself. For instance, Colby students report very high levels of satisfaction with their college experience. It's striking, of course, that such satisfaction is quite unevenly distributed across such things as ethnicity and sexual orientation, but it's otherwise a very impressive record of satisfaction.
I'm also impressed, however, by the tone of the Digest announcements and the amount of dorm damage and allied belligerence around here. People seem to express a whole lot more anger than they report. It's quite possible, I think, that many people here feel happier than they are. The moral of the story is that you can't just look within if you want to understand yourself. You have to look at what you find yourself doing, not just at what you feel or think that you're doing.
How often have you lingered over the comments on a paper in ways that don't have anything to do with your grade? How often have you found yourself muttering about what "those queers" or "those hippies" or "those Republicans" are "going on about"? Is this because you've already let yourself be bothered by these ideas or because you're bothered that people are trying to bother you about these ideas? How much of your own do you have to say about whatever these people are "going on about", or do you mostly repeat things your friends or professors have to say? You have no obligation to take every issue seriously. You do, though, at least have an obligation not to pretend to have taken things more seriously than you have.
Let me return now to Bassett's Retirement, the Prequel. An amazing thing happened 5 years ago this Friday. Dozens of former students and alumni descended upon his (alleged) final class. They brought beer and champagne to celebrate the impact Charlie had had on their lives. It was an astonishing display of appreciation for outstanding teaching, and it was just the sort of thing that, in some sense, is supposed to happen at a small liberal arts college. You can almost picture people walking backwards in front of Lovejoy 100 telling this story to prospective students and their parents. Bassett, as you might imagine, was overcome with anger.
I didn't yet know him well, but I saw Charlie soon after all this happened, and that's when I knew I liked him. It's also when I knew that my suspicions about the kind of teacher he is were unfounded and that he was in fact the kind of teacher I wanted to be. I think it's fair to say that Bassett is not morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol and also that, like all of us, he enjoys being liked and appreciated. But the last day of his class was about John O'Hara, not about Charlie Bassett, and I think it mystified Charlie that people who claimed to enjoy his teaching wanted to turn his final lecture into a party. A good teacher doesn't let anything interfere with The Mission.
The moral of this story is: let's be honest with ourselves about what we're celebrating. There is much to celebrate about Colby. But let's make sure that we've really valued what we're toasting to. I stress this because I believe that if you ask yourselves hard questions and give yourselves honest answers, you will certainly turn out to be extraordinary people, and I hope that you will at least sometimes impose that challenge upon yourselves. I don't think you should avoid the questions I've asked, because I hope and believe you can answer them with your head held high. But be made uncomfortable enough to answer them honestly (to yourselves, if not to your relatives).
This is an amazing place, and it will be hard to leave. I will leave a year or two after you do, and I already find it emotionally difficult to envision moving on. But before you depart with your accumulated wisdom, put down your rose-colored glasses and put those highly-touted critical thinking skills to work. Figure out what you think and what you feel about this special place and care enough to make the people who stay here uncomfortable.
I thank you for letting me try to discomfort you for these past four years, and I thank the remarkable people at my table from whom I've learned so much about how to do it. I wish you well.

Jeff Kasser's farewell to Colby Speech

I might have to take this down, but it is available through Colby College regardless so I do not see so much harm. One damaging thing is the stalker-ness of this. Professor Kasser was my adviser for Philosophy when I first came to NC State. He did an okay job as adviser but he really didn't teach me anything. In a creepy moment, I researched him and this is what I came up with. Kasser transferred out to another job by the end of the semester. In a way, I feel this man owes me for what he did not give me, but that's all side drama. It's a good window for some thought, which is what he says he wanted from this speech.

That said, what does this have to do with anything? Well for one it's from a philosophy professor. For another it's about being honest with oneself. I'm also interested in the damaging effects of bro culture, that is, popular culture of mainstream males who seem to be unconcerned with the future. Kasser brings up two specific and eery incidents of drama. In one, students vandalize the school in a rage, which shouldn't happen in a "satisfied" small rich liberal arts school. In another, students bring beer to a professor's last day of classes. Kasser says to look at what we do in order to gauge what is important to us. Students went in to celebrate, but Kasser implies that they went in to celebrate more for the sake of celebration. The Professor who was teaching was outraged and eventually went back to work. Kasser says we have an obligation to be honest with ourselves about what we care for, and we have an obligation to not say that we take things seriously when we don't. His cry to ask students to work hard, or at least be more honest to themselves about the amount of work that they are doing is especially endearing.

I'll post more on this if I think of anything later.

The Second Analogy itself

B. Second Analogy



[In the first edition]

Everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule.

[In the second edition:]


Proof

<(That all appearances of the temporal sequence are her words, through collectively only alterations, i.e., a successive being and not-being of the determinations of the substance that persists there, consequently that the being of the substance itself, which succeeds its not-being, or its not-being, which succeeds its being, in other words, that the arising or perishing of the substance does not occur, the previous principle has shown. This could also have been expressed thus: All change (succession) of appearances is only alteration; for the arising or perishing of substance are not alterations of it, since the concept of alteration presupposes one and the same subject as existing with two opposed determinations , ad thus as persisting. -After this preliminary reminder of the proof follows.)
I perceive that appearances succeed one another=, i.e., that a state of things exists at one time the opposite of which existed in the previous state. Thu I really connect two perceptions in time. Now connection is not the work of mere sense and intuition, but is here rather the product of a synthetic faculty of the imagination, but is here rather the product of a synthetic faculty of the imagination, which determines inner sense with regard to temporal relations. This, however, can combine the two states in question in two different ways, so that either one or the other precedes in time; for time cannot be perceived in itself, nor can what precedes and what follows in objects be as it were empirically determined in relation to it. I am therefore only conscious that my imagination places one state before and the other after, not that the one state precedes the other in the object; or, in other words, through the mere perception the objective relation of the appearances that are succeeding one another remains undetermined. Now in order for this to be cognized as determined, the relation between the two states must be thought in such a way that it is thereby necessarily determined which of them must be placed before and which after rather than vice versa. The concept,, that carries a necessity of synthetic unity with it can only be azure concept of understand in, which does not lie in the perception, and that is here the concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequence, and not as something that could merely precede in the imagination (or not even be perceived at all). Therefore it is only because we subject the sequence of the appearances and thus all alteration to the law of causality that experience itself, i.e., empirical cognition of them, is possible; consequently they themselves, as object of experience, are possible only in accordance with this law.>
The apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive. The representations of the parts succeed one another. Whether they also succeed in the object is a second point for reflection, which is not contained in the first. Now one can, to be sure, call everything, and even every representations, insofar as one is conscious of it, an object; only what this word is to mean in the case of appearances, not insofar as they are (as representations) objects, but rather only insofar as they designate an object, requires a deeper investigation. Insofar as they are, merely as representations, at the same time objects of consciousness, they do not differ from their apprehension, i.e, from their being taken up into the synthesis of the imagination, and one must therefore say that the manifold of appearances is always successively generated in the mind. If appearances were things in themselves, then no human being would be able to assess form the succession of representations how the manifold is combined in the object. For we have to do only with our representations; how things in themselves may be (without regard to representations through which they affect us) is entirely beyond our cognitive sphere. Now although the appearances are not things in themselves, and nevertheless are the only thing that can be given to us for cognition, I still have to show what sort of combination in time pertains to the manifold in the appearances itself even though the representational of it in apprehension is always successive. Thus, e.g, the apprehension of the manifold in the appearance of a house that stands before me is successive. Now the question is whether the manifold of this house itself is also successive, which certainly no one will concede. Now, however, as soon as I raise my concept of an object to transcendental significance, the house is not a thing in itself at all but only an appearance, i.e., a representation, the transcendental object of which is unknown; therefore what do I understand by the question, how the manifold may be combined in the appearance itself (which is yet nothing in itself)? Here that which lies in the successive apprehension is considered as representation, but the appearance that is given to me, in spite of the fact that it is nothing more than a sum of these representations, is considered as their object, with which my concept, which I draw from the representations of apprehension, is to agree. One quickly sees that, since the agreement of cognition with the object is truth, only the formal conditions of empirical truth can be inquired after here, and appearance, in contradistinction to the are presentations of apprehension, and makes one way of combining the manifold necessary. That in the appearance contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension is the object.
Now let us proceed to our problem. That something happens, i.e., that something or a state comes to be that previously was not, cannot be empirically perceived except where an appearance precedes that does not contain this state in itself; for a reality that would follow on an empty time, thus an arising not preceded by any state of things, can be apprehended just as little as empty time itself. Every apprehension of an occurrence is therefore a perception that follows another one. Since this is the case in all synthesis of apprehension, however, as I have shown above in the case of the appearance of a house, the apprehension of an occurrence is not yet thereby distinguished from any other. Yet I also note that, if in the case of an appearance that contains a happening I call the preceding state of perception A and the following one B, then B can only follow A in apprehension, but the perception A cannot follow but only precede B. E.g., I see a ship driven downstream. My perception of its position downstream follows the perception of its position upstream, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance of the ship should first be perceived downstream and afterwards upstream. The order in the sequence of the perceptions in apprehension is therefore here determined, and the apprehension is bound to it. In the previous example of a house my perceptions could have begun at its rooftop and ended at the ground, but could also have begun below and ended above; likewise I could have apprehended the manifold of empirical intuition from the right or from the left. In the series of these perceptions there was therefore no determinate order that made it necessary when I had to begin in the apprehension in order to combine the manifold empirically. But this rule is always to be found in the perception of hat which happens, and it makes the order of perceptions that follow one another (in the apprehension of this appearance) necessary.
In our case I must therefore derive the subjective sequence of apprehension from the objective sequence of appearances, for otherwise the former would be entirely undetermined and no appearance would be distinguished from any other. The former alone proves nothing about the connection of the manifold in the object, because it is entirely arbitrary. This connection must therefore consist in the order of the manifold of appearance in accordance with which the apprehension of one thing (that which happens) follows that of the other (which precedes) in accordance with a rule. Only thereby can I be justified in saying of the appearance itself, and not merely of my apprehension, that a sequences to be encountered in it, which is to say as much as that I cannot arrange the apprehension otherwise than in exactly this sequence.
In accordance with such a rule there must therefore lie in that which in general precedes an occurrence the condition for a rule, in accordance with which this occurrence always and necessarily follows; conversely, however, I cannot go back from the occurrence and determine (through apprehension) what precedes. For no appearance goes back from the following point of time to the preceding one, but it is related merely to some preceding point or other; on the contrary, the progress from a given time to the determinately following one is necessary. Hence, since there is still something that follows, I must necessarily relate it to something else in general that precedes, and on which it follows in accordance with a rule, i.e., necessarily, so that the occurrences the conditioned, yields, a secure indication of some condition, but it is the latter that determines the occurrence.
If one were to suppose that nothing preceded an occurrence that it must follow in accordance with a rule, then all sequence of perception would be determined solely in apprehension, i.e, merely subjectively, but it would not thereby be objectively determined which of the perceptions must really be the preceding one and which the succeeding one. In this way we would have only a play of representations that would not be related to any object at all, i.e., by means of our perception no appearance would be distinguished from any other as far as the temporal relation is concerned, since the succession in the apprehending is always the same, and there is therefore nothing in the appearance that determines it so that a certain sequence is thereby made necessary as objective. I would therefore not say that in appearance two states follow one another, but rather only that one apprehension follows the other, which is something merely subjective, and determines no object, and thus cannot count as the cognition of any object (not even in the appearance).
If, therefore, we experience that something happens, then we always presuppose that something else precedes it, which it follows in accordance with a rule. For without this I would not say of the object that it follows, since the mere sequence in my apprehension, if it is not, by means of a rule, determined in relation to something preceding, does not justify any sequence in the object. Therefore I always make my subjective synthesis (of apprehension) objective with respect to a rule in accordance with which the appearances in their sequence, i.e., as they occur, are determined through the preceding state, and only under this presupposition alone is the experience of something that happens even possible.
To be sure, it seems as if this contradicts everything that has always been said about the course of the use of our understanding, according to which it is only through the perception and comparison of sequences of many occurrences on preceding appearances teat we are led to discover a rule, in accordance with which certain occurrences always follow certain appearances, and are thereby first prompted to form the concept of cause. On such a footing this concept would be merely empirical, and the rule that it supplies, that everything that happens has a cause, would be just as contingent as the experience itself: its universality and necessity would then be merely feigned, and would have no true universal validity, since they would not be grounded a priori but only on induction. But the case is the same here as with other pure a priori representations (e.g. space and time) that we can extract as clear concepts from experience only because we have put them into experience, and experience Is hence first brought about through them. For rouse the logical clarity of this representations of a rule determining the series of occurrences, as that of a concept of cause, is only possible if we have made use of it in experience, but a consideration of it,. As the condition of the synthetic unity of the appearances in time, was nevertheless the ground of experience itself, and therefore preceded it a priori.
It is therefore important to show by an example that even in experience we never ascribe sequence of an occurrence, in which something happens that previously did not exist) to the object, and distinguish it from the subjective sequence of our apprehension, except when a rule is the ground that necessitates us to obeserve this order of the perceptions rather than another, indeed that it is realy this necessitation that first makes possible the representation of a successsion in the object.
We have representations in us, wof which we can also become conscious. But let this consciousness reacha s far and be as exact and precise as one wants, still there always remain only representations, i.e., inner determinations of our mind in this or that temporal relation. Now how do we come to posit an object for these representations, or ascribe to their subjective reality, as modifications, some sort of objective reality? Objective significance cannot consist in the relation to another representation (of that which one would call the object), for that woulod simply raise anew the question: How does this representation in turn go beyond itself and acquire objective significance in addition to the subjective significance that is proper to it as a determination of the state of mind? If we investigate what new characteristic is given to our representations by the relation to an object, and what is the dignity that they thereby receive, we find that it does nothing beond making the combination of represeentations necessary in a certain way, and subjecting them to a rule; and conversely that objective significance is conferred on our representations only insofar as a certain order in tehir temporal relation is necessary.
In the synthesis of the appearnce s the manifold representations always follow wone aanother. Now by this means no object at all is rpersented; since through this sequence, which is common to all apprehensions, nothing is distinguished form anythign else. But as soon as I perceive or anticipate that there is in this seuqence a relation to the precedingin state, from which the represetnation follows in accordance with a rule, I represent somehting as an occurrence, or as something that happens, ie.e., I cognize tan ojbect tha I must place in time in a determinate position, which, after the preceding state, cannot beotherwsise assigned to it. Thus if I perceive that something happens, then the first thing conatinaed in this representation is that something precedes, for it is just in relation to this that the apperance acquires its temproal relation, that, namely, of existing after a preceding time in which it did not. But it can only acuquire its determinate temproal position in this relation through somehting being presupposed in the preceding stateon which it always follows, i.e., follows in accordance with a rule: from which it results, first, that I cannot reverse ths eries and place that which happens prior to that which it follows; and, second, that if the state that precedes is posited, then this determinate occurrence inevitably and necessarily follows. Thereby does it come about htat there is an order among our representations, in which the present one (insofar as it ihas come to be) points to some preceding state as a correlate, tob be sure still undetermined, of this event that is given, which is, however, determinately related to the latter, as its consequence, and necessarily connected with it in the temporal series.
Now if it is a necessary law of our sensibility, thus a formal condition of all perceptions, that the preceding time necessarily determines the follwonign time (in that I cannot arrive at the following time exept by passing through the preceding one), then it is also ian indispensiable law of the empirical representation of the temporal series that the apperanaces of the psat time determine every existence in the following time, and that these, as occurrences, do not take place except insofar as the former determine their existence in time, I,.e., establish it in oaccordance with a rule. For only in the appearances can we empirically cognize this continuity in the connection of times.
Understanding belongs to all experience and its possibility, and the first thing that it does for this is not to make the representation of the objects distinct, but rather to make the representation of an object possible at all. Now this happens through its conferring temporal order on the apperaances and their existence by assigning to each of these, as a consequence, a place in tiem determined a priori in regard to the precedeing apperaacnes, without which it would not agree with time itself, which determines the position of all its parts a priori. Now this determination of position cannot be borrowed from the relation of the apperanaceds to absolute time (for that is not anaobject of perception), but, conversely, the appearances themselves must determine their position in time for each other, and make this determination in the temporal order necessary, i.e., that which follows or happens must succeeded that which was contained in the preveious state in accoradance with a general rule from which arises a series of apepraances, in which by meanas of the understanding the very same order and constant connection in the series of possible perceptions ins produced and made necessary as would be encountered a priori in the form of inner experience (time), in which all perceptions would have to have their place.
That something happens, therefore, is a perception that belongs to a possible experience, which becomes actual if I regard the position of the appearance as determined in time, thus if I regard it as an object that can always be found in the connection of perceptions in accordance with a rule. This rule for determining something with respect to its temporal sequence, however, is that in what precedes, the condition is to be encountered under which the occurrence always (i.e. necessarily) follows. Thus the principle of sufficient reason is the ground of possible experience, namely the objective cognition of appearances with regard to their relation in the successive series of time.
The ground of proof of this proposition, however, rests solely on the following moments. To all empirical cognition there belongs the synthesis of the manifold through the imagination, which is always successive; i.e., the representations always follow each other in it. But the order of the sequence (what must precede and what must follow) is not determined in the imagination at all, and the series of successive representations can be taken backwards just as well as forwards. But if this synthesis is a synthesis of apprehension (of the manifold of a given appearance), then the order in the object is determined, or, to speak more precisely, there is therein an order of the successive synthesis that determines an object, in accordance with which something would necessarily have to precede and, if this is posited, the other would necessarily have to follow. If, therefore, my perception is to contain the cognition of an occurrence, namely that something actually happens, then it must be an empirical judgment in which one thinks that the sequence is determined, i.e., that it presupposes another appearance in time which it follows necessarily or in accordance with a rule. Contrariwise, if I were to posit that which precedes and the occurrence did not follow it ncesssarily then I would have to hold it to be only a subjective play of my imaginings, and if I still represented something objective by it I would have to call it a mere dream. Thus the relation of apperances (as possible perceptions) in accordance with which the existence of that which succeeds (what happens) is determined in time necessarily and in accordance with a rule by something that precedes it, consequently the relation of cause to effect, is the condition of the objective validity of our empirical judgments with regard to the series of perceptions, thus of their empirical truth, and therefore of experience. Hence the principle of the causal relation in the sequence of appearancses is valid for all objects of experience (under the conditions of succession), since it is itself the gournd of the possibility of such an experience.
Here, however, there is a reservation that must be resolved. The principle of causal connection among apperances is, in our formula, limited to the succession of them, although in the use of the is principle it turns out that it is also applies to their accompaniment, and cause and effect can be simultaneous. E.g., there is a warmth in a room that is not to be encountered in the outside air. I look around for the cause, and find a heated stove. Now this, as the cause, is simultaneous with its effect, the warmth of the chamber; thus here there is no successsion in tiem between cause and effect, rather they are simultaneous, yet the law still holds. The majority of efficient causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects, and the temporal sequence of the latter is occasioned only by the fact that the cause cannot achieve its entire effect in one instant. But in the instant in which the effect first arises, it is always simultaneous with the causality of its cause, since if the cause had ceased to be an instant before then the effect would never have arisen. Here one must note that it is the order of tiem and not its lapse that is taken account of; the relation remains even if no time has elapsed. The time between the causality to f the cause and its immediate effect can be vanishing (they can therefore be simultaneous), but the temporal relation of the one to the other still remains determinable. If I consider a ball that lies on a stuffed pillow and makes a dent in it as a cause, it is simulatneous with its effect. Yet I still distinguish the two by means of the temporal relation of the dynamical connection. For if I lay the ball ofn the pillow the dent follows its previously smooth shape; but if (for whatever reason) the pillow has a dent, a leaden ball does not follow it.

Paper on the Kant's Second Analogy

Summary and Explication of the Second Analogy

Kant believes that humans might know objective happenings, and this is the conclusion to the argument that he makes as his Second Analogy. Here, subjective happenings are where Kant says, “I would therefore not say that in appearance two states follow one another, but rather only that one apprehension follows the other, which is something merely subjective, and determines no object, and thus cannot count as the cognition of any object (not even in the appearance)” (A195). Thus Kant thinks that subjective happenings are when the mind is given an occurrence without access to a network of causes and effects, which reason determines1. Before he said this, Kant identified, “In our case I must therefore derive the subjective sequence of apprehension from the objective sequence of appearance” (A193). That is, the objective nature of the sequence is that it is identified in a particular place in time.
This Analogy can be seen as a counterargument to Hume's criticism that there is no way to know causation, only very close correlation. By arguing that one may have in his possession a network of causality, Kant believes one can know a succession of a happening, and therefore that one thing causes another. The example of succession is the example of a ship moving (A192) is given to elaborate this point. Kant believes that “Insofar as they are, merely as representations, at the same time objects of consciousness, they do not differ from their apprehension, i.e., from their being taken up into the synthesis of the imagination, and one must therefore say that the manifold of appearances is always successively generated in the mind” (A190). This is indicative of my interpretation of Kant because in this sentence, Kant explains that our a priori synthesis of a given cause and effect is what posits a cause and effect relation in the first place, which means that reason is put on to causes and not vice versa. In addition to this, Kant says, “Therefore I always make my subjective synthesis (of apprehension) objective with respect to a rule in accordance with which the appearances in their sequence, i.e., as they occur, are determined through the preceding state, and only under this presupposition alone is the experience of something that happens even possible” (CPR 308). That is, Kant says that our subjective synthesis of apprehension is applied to the happening, and not the other way around, which is what nullifies Hume's problem of causation [please see footnote for additional commentary].2 Hume's argument that causation cannot be known ignores the fact that causes happen in the spanse of a causal network which means that it is unreasonable for certain absurdities to arise. In this way, it seems absurd that a pillow could cause a bowling ball to dent, because there is an intricate web of causes that lead us to think that this is absurd.
One place where he talks about the causal network I speak of is when he says that it is an exclusive act to represent an occurrence in a specific place because “the representation follows in accordance with a rule, I represent something as an occurrence, or as something that happens, i.e., I cognize an object that I must place in time in a determinate position, which, after the preceding state, cannot be otherwise assigned to it” (A198-199, B244). That is, once one places a cause and effect happening as an occurrence in a specific place in time, the causal network says that this could not be anywhere else. Kant's argument is that the application of this causal network means “this synthesis is a synthesis of apprehension...then the order in the object is determined, or, to speak more precisely, there is therein an order to the successive synthesis that determines an object, in accordance with which something would necessarily have to precede and, if this is posited, the other would necessarily have to follow” (B246-247).It's important to note that this causal network relies on succession, but not necessarily lapse of time. “Here one must note that it is the order of time and not is lapse that is taken account of; the relation remains even if no time has elapsed” (A203). It seems like the nature of reason poses random shifts to not apply. Kant's lead ball example (B249), says that “if I lay the ball on the pillow the dent follows its previously smooth shape; but if (for whatever reason) the pillow has a dent, a leaden ball does not follow it” (italics mine). There is no way that the lead ball would be caused by the dent in the pillow. It's implied that the nature of reason, the causal network I identify and that Kant implies, is what keeps an agent from believing that the bowling ball is caused by the dent. This absurdity says it is not causality but the nature of reason that makes this the case (and not the other way around).


Critical Material

Kant's Second Analogy stands as indicative of the general position that Kant makes in the entire critical project. This is because Kant wants to take rationality out of nature and put it into reason itself, hence the title of the work, The Critique of Pure Reason. This fact is essential to understanding the Second Analogy because the nature of causation for Kant rests on reason itself. For this reason, the Second Analogy works as an excellent counterargument to Hume's general problem with causality. There seems to be an implicit fluidity to Kant's version from his account of moments. Kant's realization is that no cause and effect pair, if they are identified as occurring in a specific time, are truly so isolated that one could dismiss their causality.
What did Kant get right in this argument? I think this is a pretty accessible argument, given the nature of most of Kant. The philosopher is reacting to an implicit enemy, Hume, and I think this is a pretty good counterargument to Hume. Kant's argument implicitly relies on appearances in that the relation between cause and effect is based on what agents are given. Just because Kant is not mentioning the thesis that we cannot know things in and of themselves, does not mean he is not doing it. One criticism would be to pose the question of what would happen if one could know what noumena are. It is conceivable to think of a noumena-realizing machine, for the purposes of discussion. I think that Kant's Second Analogy has room for this. That is, even if one found out noumena by the noumena-realizing machine, I think Kant's Second Analogy would still stand because of its description of causality. If noumena were somehow perceptible, the nature of these relations would not change. In this way, this supports my claim that Kant's Second Analogy is accessible because even if one does not accept the phenomena versus noumena distinction, he might oblige the Second Analogy.

Falling Asleep to Philosophy

Earlier this week, my friend Diane said that she made up a conversation to herself right before she went to bed. One person was her, and the other was me. She pretended that she told me something about her daily life and she pretended that I responded to her with some philosophical take on the subject. She said it knocked her right out and she slept very well. Evidently it's so much of a habit of mine that people are doing it without me around as a tool to fall asleep. Would you be offended? Right, me neither.

In the same way, I was talking to my friend Kevin from a big tourist trip. He came over to sit down next to me on the bus, and said that we should have a deep conversation. Well I hit him with just about all the Spinoza anecdotes I had learned in the past year. "Spinoza believed in an immanent God, not a transitive one!" I said. I was overjoyed that someone cared about all of this stuff. I looked over and he had fallen asleep. Whatever, I was basically talking to myself anyway.

One problem in philosophy is loneliness. Maybe that's just a problem with some philosophical connotations. Dialectic, where two people speak, is a little bit more fun. Still, it's lonely in the matrix! It's lonely being a brain in the vat!

Thirdly, in 2008 around may or june, I was reading to my brother about Spinoza before bed. He fell asleep, too!

Frankfurt describes a relief about the realization of the truth in On Truth. He says that there are certain math problems or epiphanies where we are just relieved.

But on the other hand, taking someone's word for it means that we can go on with our lives. Or, in my case, people trusting me that I can handle stuff means they can go to sleep.

Bullshit versus Philosophy

Of the many hats that philosophy (greek: philo (wisdom) sophia (lover)), including integration of sciences, theories of knowledge, regulation of sciences, regulation of art, integration of art and science, ethics, adn so on, philosophy is also concerned with the truth.

In this way, my friend Carter was sitting at the dinner table last semester with me and some friends and he said, "A lot of my friends say that Philosophy is a lot of bullshit."

Well, I think in one way that that statement is correct. Philosophy chases its own tail a lot. By being concerned with the truth, it is as if you have to differentiate between what is true and everything else. This includes falsity (literally not-truth) but also bullshit.

Okay so 'I'm a human' is true. But there are some cool applications of 'I'm not a human' being false. More on that when I have more to say on that.

But bullshit, which Frankfurt describes in his work of pop philosophy On Bullshit, is more like words that have a disregard for truth. In this way, in order for something to be false, it has to at least work off of truth. Bullshit does not do such a thing.

In a similar way, last week, when Cramer was on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart said that he considered Mad Money and the Daily Show to be snake oil, but that the Daily Show at least called itself snake oil.

Running with this a bit, studying philosophy and doing philosophy is kind of like being in a snake oil market. You get to be so analytic of just about anything that in order to find out what is true you have to call everything bullshit to start with in order to get that one bottle of real medicine. Which of it is good and which of it is bad is something I've got to cover later, because I'm not there yet, myself.

It's incredibly wacky. In my last post I described how science had to become less and less dependent upon outside events and more on reason in order to make sense of it. This culminated in this blog's namesake, with Immanuel Kant's theory that rationality has to be applied to science and not the other way around.

It is a really weird thing that by creating a theory of Knowldege meant that Kant had to surrender to the worst skepticism. He laid down all claims about knowledge in order to see what was real. I think this is pretty cool.

I don't like this. Facade?

http://www.slate.com/id/2214447/



Here, Farhad Manjoo argues that just because you say you don't like it doesn't mean that you are not going to like it, or that this layout isn't going to, well, have people get used to it.


For our purposes, consider how modern philosophy's response to skepticism lead to greater and greater idealism. That is, Kant believes that appearances are reality, but that we should understand these appearances using logic.

Okay, here it is a different way. 1) Remember in kindergarten when they said you could trust everything and you believed them?

2) Remember in middle school when they told you that you can't trust only perception when you make a scientific judgment? For example, many students found out that we use rulers and measuring utensils to verify our findings. In order to figure out a Newtonian equation, you use mathematics, but less and less you were using outside information in the way that you think. It was the math applied to nature and not the other way around.

3) Well it turns out that all of this is subject to doubt if you do it without the math. Yes, even those rulers and measuring cups. You have to remove yourself 1 more time in order to really grasp Kant's final argument, which is basically using reason only in order to understand science. This is because nothing exists outside of your perception of existence, what translations of Kant call appearances, what I might call facades for the sake of this blog. Knowledge very much depends on reason and how we know that reason exists outside of nature.

How does all of this relate back to Farhad Manjoo and his argument? Facebook recently redesigned itself. By doing so it made a number of people, Manjoo quotes 1 million or 94% of those surveyed, very annoyed. Zuckerberg has an unpolitic office memo that says users don't know what they're talking about. Zuckerberg thinks that people do not know what they want. In this way, theory is separate from nature. Theory is reasoned and then applied to what happens.

This is not to say that the facade, that people really are annoyed is not happening. Indeed, I think in some way it is unrefutable that they are. Rather, the nature of the connection between being annoyed and stopping the use of the program was not as it appears.

Nine Inch Nails is sweet

Listen to Right where it belongs:

http://music.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=music.artistalbums&artistid=7788701&ap=0&albumid=15690

See the animal in it's cage that you built
Are you sure what side you're on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it's all
Right where it belongs

[Chorus:]
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you wanted to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks?
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

What if all the world's inside of your head
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your gods
All the living and the dead
And you really are alone
You can live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can't find the woods
While you're hiding in the trees

[Chorus:]
What if everything around you
Isn't quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection
Is it all you wanted to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks
Would you find yourself
Find yourself afraid to see?

Technology For Granted?

Gretchin Rubin made this post today:


Louis CK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

This isn't what it looks like!

"It's not what it looks like, I swear!" Don't you feel like this is the kind of thing that the television-movie-allegory-archetypal-classic character says when he gets caught cheating on his wife?

Here's a thought: if it's obvious, why would they say it, as if to cover it up?

Lying, as Franken says at the end of his book on the political aspect of the subject, causes the liars to believe in their own lies.

With this critical lens, I enter this: in some bizarre twist, I think the idiot who gets caught cheating really believes this when he says it. At least, he believes it to the extent that he says it out loud in outright absurdity. In this regard, this man is to be pitied. He believes the wrong set of appearances.

Facadesaside: And...Scene

And...scene. In order to end a scene, a thespian might say, "And...scene." Then they would stop rolling the cameras and hopefully cut that last sentence out.

My sister has done this as of recently. I don't know if she's cool with me putting this in with her name, so I'm not going to name her. She does it with her friend and mine, but same goes with her citation.

When they do it, it can be in the middle of a conversation, as in when a particular subject ends, or a particular part of the conversation.

It's done with a sort of reverse-flowering motion. Open your palm facing yourself, then bring your fingers and thumb together from all the way apart. Pull down chest-level as you complete this.

That said, the act of making a point, for me at least, changes depending upon who I'm talking to. Usually this is unintentional. So then it gets to be that we might make an aside, that is talk to someone about our talking to someone.

For example, if I intimate or tell someone personal experience, their reactions to my experience might be something else to react to, or the entire interaction as a whole might cause something or someone to reveal something.

This could happen between more than two people, two people, and I guess it could happen by our lonesome.

My friend Liz (last name left blank for same reason as above) says, "whatever"just about all of the time. Turns out that this is what is called a thought-terminating cliche. People do this by themselves, too. Think about not thinking about it. I just lost the game.

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9


And....scene. [reverse-flowering motion from hand]

asides

From time to time, if I see someone, something, or some character breaking character or role, I intend on posting that. Furthermore, I intend on posting asides that I see in culture. I'm thinking specifically about movie characters like Woody Allen or Frankie Muniz from Malcolm in the Middle, but also Shakespearean dramas.

The fact of it is that the very act of making an aside implies that someone is getting the real truth.

Today at lunch, when I told her about Goldman's barn example, Danielle told me in the Antebellum South, they would put up facades on plantations to make the house look more richer than it was, even though behind the facade it was just a shanty house.

Citations: Facade?

Here's something interesting: Some of my friends who write blogs always put down ideas as if they had them for themselves. It's strange because I always want to cite stuff. It's part of the creative process to learn as much as possible and then enter that in as a synthesis, a syllogism, or a synergy. On the other hand, there's some things that I would like to say using people's stuff that people would never want to be caught dead using. Furthermore, if a fact is a fact (which I philosophically believe is true), then it really does not matter how we "post" or "use" such a fact, it's just common knowledge. There seems to be a finder's fee though. We want to honor the people who get something for us, even if it is just information.

For example, when telling a joke, it is important to start some kind of rhythm so that there is what people call "comedic timing." This can, however, make the joke really a pain in the ass.

Opposing this of course is most any academic paper, whereupon sources have to be cited, hopefully on a works' cited page. Come to think of it right now, though, this whole work of citations can be a real pain, too. It just breaks (reading) rhythm (with words) so (see sidenote) that (see footnote) you (see endnote) can't (you know what I'm talking about) get through the thing without getting bored, really pissed off, or at least a little bit deterred.

This is the problem with Spinoza's masterpiece, The Ethics, which strives to cite every arguments' logical order using axioms and proofs. People are so tired by the end of reading it that they usually just take his word for it. Argument point goes to Spinoza.

The problems with this are immense. So there's a balance between citing and not citing, especially when it's right and when it's wrong. No one should take anyone else's stuff. One thing that happened when I was reading one of my friends' blogs was that I increasingly saw that the advice I was giving her...she was using it as her own ideas!!! It's free conversation, her argument went implicitly. But those were my words! It was as if she liked the idea enough to write it out, but she couldn't write me in.

Writing this complaint, however, I can't help but think that I'm almost doing the same thing. I'm doing this to preserve anonymity of the person I'm complaining about, but truly you could do all this in order to intentionally obscure or make ambiguous. Like Spinoza's readers, people just kind of take your word for it. Franken makes a point like this in Lies and the Lying Liars Who tell Them.

Facades: Goldman's Barn Example

In theory of knowledge last semester, we did Goldman's famous barn example.


It goes: suppose John and Dina are driving in the middle of Graceland, Tennessee, and John spots out a number of barns. They are all barns, except for one, which is only a movie-set prop of a barn front, or facade. In this way, it looks like a barn, but because he can only see the front, he does not know that it's not a barn.

He does know that there are other barns around (they are not facades). He points to the facade and, even though it is not a barn says, "Look at that barn."

Does John know that this a barn?

The example certainly implies no.

facadesaside

Hi.

This is my first post. This blog is called facadesaside because I'm learning about a great philosopher named Immanuel Kant. His great achievement was how he asserted that although we can only know appearances, there are ways in which we can trust these appearances.
The word facade is a French word. Dictionary.com says:

Facade
 /fəˈsɑd, fæ-/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [fuh-sahd, fa-] Show IPA

–noun

1.	Architecture. a. the front of a building, esp. an imposing or decorative one. b. any side of a building facing a public way or space and finished accordingly.

2.	a superficial appearance or illusion of something: They managed somehow to maintain a facade of wealth.

Also, fa⋅çade.

So I am trying to get down to what is real, what is worthwhile, and what is true. The acknowledgment of facades means that I know appearances are part of reality, but I know that there is always more to learn and build in order to progress.

Then again, dictionary.com says aside means:

a⋅side

–adverb

1.	on or to one side; to or at a short distance apart; away from some position or direction: to turn aside; to move the chair aside.

2.	away from one's thoughts or consideration: to put one's cares aside.

3.	in reserve; in a separate place, as for safekeeping; apart; away: to put some money aside for a rainy day.

4.	away from a present group, esp. for reasons of privacy; off to another part, as of a room; into or to a separate place: He took him aside and talked business.

5.	in spite of; put apart; notwithstanding: all kidding aside; unusual circumstances aside.

–noun

6.	a part of an actor's lines supposedly not heard by others on the stage and intended only for the audience.

7.	words spoken so as not to be heard by others present.

8.	a temporary departure from a main theme or topic, esp. a parenthetical comment or remark; short digression.

—Idiom

9.	aside from, a. apart from; besides; excluding: Aside from her salary, she receives money from investments. b. except for: They had no more food, aside from a few stale rolls.

---

Origin:
1350–1400; ME; see a- ¹ , side ¹

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.

So to put facades aside means to reveal truth in a fun double entendre. I think the alliteration and assonance of the words is also fun. The other pun going on here is that in drama, plays and literature, an aside is breaking down the fourth wall to tell the audience what the character who is making the comment is thinking or doing. In this way, I am telling you all, people who may or may not be in my life "directly" (aside: whatever that means), some of my thoughts and so on.