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Laurent P

"Taking Notes on Philosophical Texts" - 0 views

  • make your question explicit in your notes.
  • Making your conjectures explicit in your notes can be as beneficial as making your questions explicit
  • Don't limit yourself to what you know. Write down what you don't understand but hope to understand. Write down your questions and your conjectures. Put your finger on interpretation problems, not just on interpretation results. Make note of passages to reread.
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  • shouldn't merely record the results of your understanding, but should become part of the process of understanding.
  • John Newman method. Let the top of page 10 be 10.1, the bottom 10.9, and the middle 10.5, and so on for other intermediate positions on the page
  • Take notes on the similarities and differences between the author you are now reading and authors you have previously read.
  • I use my initials to label my own intrusions on the author's position.
  • If your notes on a book are generally thorough, but your notes for a particular chapter are skimpy, then jot an explicit warning to yourself about the skimpy coverage of that chapter
  • Consider keeping a philosophical journal. This is not a diary about daily events or a notebook for reading and class notes. It's a laboratory where your own thoughts can grow. It will help your note-taking in many ways. First, it will give you an outlet for thoughts that might not belong among your reading notes. Second, it will give you practice in articulation and analysis that will pay off in your note-taking and all your other writing. Third, it will raise your consciousness about issues that you might well encounter in your reading.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Some Moral Dilemmas - 0 views

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    Situations posed, with no arguments offered for resolution. Let's try one: "You are an inmate in a concentration camp. A sadistic guard is about to hang your son who tried to escape and wants you to pull the chair from underneath him. He says that if you don't he will not only kill your son but some other innocent inmate as well. You don't have any doubt that he means what he says. What should you do?" How about: nothing? By complying with the guard's request, one reinforces the expectation that such a cruel effort to get the inmates to harm their own loved ones will succeed, encouraging the next such guard to hear of the idea to try it himself; the victim we don't know about remains a victim nevertheless. Let the father deny the guard his satisfaction in this.
thinkahol *

What Is Reality? | Watch Free Documentary Online - 1 views

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    There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses.The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories.Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos.It may be that that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe. Or that we exist in an infinity of parallel worlds. Your reality may never look quite the same again.
thinkahol *

The Blog : How Rich is Too Rich? : Sam Harris - 0 views

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    I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll
Laurent P

Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists - 0 views

  • A key concept in Jaspers philosophizing is The Encompassing, particularly in terms of "modes", which forms our awareness of being, underlying our scientific and common-sense knowledge, given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. There are three modes to the encompassing: existence (Dasein), consciousness-in-general, and spirit. Existence, consciousness in general, and spirit, along with the worlds corresponding to them, comprise the immanent modes of the encompassing. Additionally, there are the transcendent modes of Existenz and Transcendence.
  • Jaspers is a key thinker in the existentialist movement of the 20th century. He's particularly influenced by Kierkegaard and Kant, with notable terminology borrowed from Hegel and Heidegger.
  • Dear God this is difficult. This is one of the most inscrutable, esoteric works of philosophy I've ever encountered. I'll start to give up on understanding it, and right then, as my mind recoils from it, there's a transcendent moment where I get it. Which I think may be his point. I think what he's saying is that only when you realize that you can't know truth or reality do you catch a glimpse of it. And even then not really. There's a lot of stuff about transcendence and Existenz. And being. And unity. And how all being is unity and as humans we experience it through Existenz. What is Existenz? Well, it's the transcendent mode of the Encompassing of Subjectivity. The raw Being of your selfhood.
Amira .

The Future History of Individualism Pt1 by Wildcat, Aug 2010 - 0 views

  • The idea I am exploring is that the very concept of individualism, a signifier of uniqueness and particularity, lacks the basics of mindfulness needed to comprehend itself in a virtual mind universe. The thesis is that the transformation of the concept of individualism will allow a transformation of the meta-narrative of our modern civilization as we proceed to undo and eliminate the restrictions imposed pell-mell by natural selection.
  • “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” (A. Camus)
  • Our current civilization with all its defaults and pitfalls has given us a world unlike any other in our short history, and though our minds are still Neolithic in their conceptualization we are in fact in a better state of affairs than ever before.
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  • “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.” (Thomas Szazz)
  • Our epistemic profile or the structure of the epistemic phase space we call our own can be described as the actual architecture of the concept of individualism, in which and by which we self define. We have inherited a sort of continuum of existential times all coagulated under the same name and signified by the same body, a coagulation of habits both of thought and of action, behavior and attitudes. We presently regard ourselves as self-contained systems, decision makers and value assessors, as if in some unfathomable way we are or became somehow separated from the larger entities of the biosphere and the noosphere.
  • “Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.” Roland Barthes
  • . The modern individual is everywhere at once In the modern world we inhabit, we play a multiplicity of roles, simultaneously and consecutively; we operate a rapid succession of selves and identities on multiple platforms all correlated by the infocology we have co-created. The platforms we use however carry a new role, a role that once was relegated to our brains only and now extends into the infosphere. I speak of course of our memories, some of which as of now reside with Google, or FB, or Myspace or any other platform of what is rapidly becoming a real life streaming process having its core online. These memories, embedded as photos or comments, blog posts or clicks of like, or tweet and retweets, have a very large impact on our conceptualization of individuation. The reason for that is that whilst a few years back, not being online meant that my existence is mine alone and therefore the self reflection on myself as an individual was fairly simple, at present not being online does in no way diminish the access of others to me. In other words, part of me, let us call it the disembodied infosphere me, keeps on thriving automatically and without my conscious awareness.
  • This has tremendous ramifications. For it implies that the modern concept of the individual is everywhere and at once. This I call: ‘simultaneous everywhereness’ a new state of affairs we have never before found ourselves in. The apparent ‘simultaneous everywhereness’ of our individuality is actually a reflection of the manner by which our minds operate, it is the narrative of self-representation extended across times and spaces. Constructing maps within maps, interacting with other maps, continuously update and evolve our meta-narratives.
  • “Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)”
  • What all these terms have in common is one particular mode of thought that runs contrary to the common thought of hierarchy and stability. What these terms imply is that our very own neuron network combines and recombines, forms and reforms, fashions and refashions, the structure of the brain and by consequence the mind.
  • It is clear that our individualism is a work in progress, ever expanding and ever increasing in both complexity and narrative. We operate as a multiplicity in a multiplicity, and this very multiplicity of our world requires of us to operate on the basis of multiple selves. We have multiple networks inside our brains extending into multiple external networks mediated by electronics. Multiple networks in multiple networks, nested and co-evolving, mutually and inter-subjectively co-adapting to allow a multiple form of individuation process in which eventually no particular point of reference will be the original nexus of beingness. To describe such a situation, new in our civilizations evolution, we need reformulate the concept of the individual so as to better be adapted to the world we actually inhabit.
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