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.

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.

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.