philosophy 101 trocchia jmu exam final

philosophical question

a demand for meaning of what we are saying, different than a question of fact

science

meaning is assumed

-- demand for fact

--shared meaning behind basic terms

--agreement of meaning necessary to establish facts

--need ability to verify, what WE verify

philosophy

demand for meaning

--dig up meaning for terms like right or wrong, good or evil, metaphysics

(ex. what is meant by ___? how is ___ used?)

metaphysics

Area of Philosophy

reality and appearance, being and existence, time and change

Schopenhauer

Metaphysics

he said that human beings are the only beings that marvel at our existence

-- animals aren't capable of marveling at each other.. they just act instinctively

-- humans can step back and think about things (there is a human need for metaphysics)

philosophy of religion

Area of Philosophy

concerned with god(s), divine power and knowledge, providence, good and evil, faith, revelation

existentialism

Area of Philosophy

human being/condition, life and death, freedom and choice, self and authenticity, nothingness

philosophy of art and aesthetics, philosophy of literature and poetry

Two areas of Philosophy

focused on beauty and expression, value and perception, form and analogy, metaphor and clarity

--art is perception of value

ethics

Area of Philosophy

right and wrong, good/evil, virtue/vice, character/conduct, value

philosophy of science

Area of Philosophy

space, distance, law, hypothesis, fact, verification

ontology

area of metaphysics that studies being, the kinds of beings that there are, and the forms or modes of being

ontological argument

argument dealing with the being of God

Borges

he said that metaphysics lurks in the very origins of language.

-- language takes us to the past or future with tenses

Wittgenstein

he said philosophical problems have deep roots in us and significance

Durant

he said things about philosophy and science

--philosophy seeks to understand significance and unify various areas of our knowledge and insight

epistemology

Area of Philosophy

--studies how we know what we know, into what we can know and what we can never know

--studies the nature of knowlegde

--a theory of knowledge which includes its limits, its source...

wisdom, knowledge

philosophy gives us ________, science gives us ________

lover of wisdom

meaning of philosopher

presocratics

movement of understanding the world beyond mythological accounts of gods, not restricting explanations of nature and reality to myths

--new dynamic between logos (reason) and mythos (tale, narrative)

Thales

said that water is the fundamental thing

Empedocles

he said there were four fundamental elements (earth, water, air, fire)

--they're unified by love and torn apart by strife

love, strife

Empedocles believed there were four fundamental elements and that they were unified by _______ and torn apart by _________

anthropomorphism

representation of gods or nature or non-human animals as having human thoughts and intentions

Heraclitus

obscure and weeping philosopher, believes language covers reality rather than captures it(doesn't trust language)

emperialism- trust in sensory

Heraclitus

beleives reality is always changing and everything is in radical flux

--nothing stays the same.. all things change constantly

harrington

he said that language rests on permanence of meaning so it will always misrepresent a world without permanence

fire

Heraclitus believes that ____ expresses the general order of reality (logos)

empiricist

Hoy said an ____________ puts trust in sense perception (Heraclitus is this)

rationalist

a ________ puts trust in deliverance of reason without reliance on sense perception (Parmenides is this)

always present

____ _______ is the venue of change according to hoy/heraclitus

logos

heraclitus's __________ or principle of reality is that everything is changing. this itself is the only thing that does not change

fixed past, open future, identity

three things that the heraclitean view is hard to reconcile with

reason

(harrington/parmenides) this demonstrates that the world of appearance is self contradictory, we experience this world but it's not the true world

eleatic idealism

this is the view that some apparent feature of the world is merely present in our consciousness of the world, not present in the world independently of our minds

metaphysical monism

the view that the entire universe (or all of reality) is fundamentally one thing

(ex. Thales believing everything is water)

metaphysical pluralism

the view that the entire universe (or all of reality) is fundamentally more than one thing

Parmenidean motion

motionless, changeless

Parmenides three fundamental of change

1. something that does not exist, being to exist (birth)

--- can't get something from nothing

2. something that does exist, ceases to exist (death)

-- for words to have meaning it must refer to something that exist

3. The same thing either being to possess features that it previously lacked, or loss features that it previous possessed(leaves falling off tree)

--a hot object becoming it would violate his other two views

dualism

view that mind and matter are ontologically separate

Bertrand Russell

On Philosophy and Science

-- The sciences are it's "daughters"

-- Philosophy questions/problems are not treatable with the methods of science

-- Philosophy concerns itself with whats possible and necessary (of the world and of us)

Borges

-believed metaphysics lurks in the very origins of language

-Tense is woven into our words

sensible/phenomenal world

world as it appears or is experience through sense- perception

a priori truth

are known independently of experience

-- does NOT require experience

(ex. a bachelor is an unmarried adult male who isnt in a relationship)

a posteriori truth

DOES REQUIRE experience with the subject

-- truth arrived at, experience is needed

(ex. water is H2O)

intuition

an a priori structure that imposes form an all experience whatsoever.

Things we believe

HOY

- Determinate past and an open future

- We can influence future

- Same objects can be in past present and future

- Future closer to us or we closer to them

- There are eternal truths about temporal world

- Talk about sequence of events- tenseless

Things we say

HARRIS

"A day has passed." "A year has passed" "5 minutes has passed"

-Units of measurement help us cut up time

-All come back to the idea that time passes

The length of time

HARRIS

-Harris suggests memory preserves experience

-Whatever content of experience, memory impresses on our mind

- "We regard premature death as a disaster while long life is considered good."

Lightman

-People higher in mountains spend too much of their lives worrying about being old

-The fatal error: quantity over quality... it is the quality of life that matters over the quantity

Empiricist

Trust in the deliverances of sense perception

-- our senses deliver the truth

--senses are our most reliable source of knowledge of the world

Heraclitus is this

Epistemology

study of knowledge

Empiricism: Senses

Rationalism: Logic

Rationalist

one who claims that most human knowledge comes through reason

-- follow the logic, follow the reasoning, think, that will deliver the certain turth

-- senses will misguide you

Parmenides is this

eternal

is always what is now, what was, and what will be, always present

time is moving

-"You can't step into the same river twice."

- Past->moves further and further away(unchanging, fixed)

- Present->moves away(into the past)

- Future->moves closer (open, unfixed)

- We want to say past exists but contents do not exist

parmendian monism

motionless, changeless being ("the perfect stillness")

-- whatever is, is always existent

-- pure being, no nonbeing mixed in (absolut vodka 80% would have to be absolut vodka 100%)

-- time is not something that involves change

--there is no motion or change from future to present to past

Parmenides

Believes nothing is changing and everything is changeless

-- Believes reality is a single eternal, absolute, and unchanging being

--Believes something cannot be derived from nothing, anything exists cannot come from something that does not exist

qualia

private conscious experiences of sensation and perception

-- our own personal perceptions and sensations

logos

an appeal based on logic or reason

language

a powerful vehicle, a sentence can travel great distance through time

--Upon reflection, we can see that the meanings of our expressions hang and drift like a cloud of smoke

Mythos

tale, narrative

Anthropomorphism

the representation of Gods, or nature, or non-human animals, as having human form, or as having human thoughts and intentions

idealism

The view that some apparent feature of the world is merely present in our consciousness of the world, not present in the world independently of our minds

- Experience of time, its passing, is generated by our "mental apparatus"

- Virtual reality

langer

a philosophical question Is always a demand for the meaning of what we are saying

Russell

as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy and becomes a separate science

Durant

science wishes to dissolves the whole into parts, the organism into organ...

philosophers is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general.

Borges

metaphysical lurks In the very origin of language

-talking something into existence

-verb-age creates a present past and furture

Wittgenstein

their roots are as deep in us as the form of our language

how philosophical arrive in language

(problem come for langurs doesn't truly convey what we mean )

Presocratics

mark a movement of understanding the world that pushes beyond the mythological accounts of god

(separation of logos and mythos)

word origin

originated in Greece

-lover of wisdom

Sarte on desire

Desire involves the recognition of some absence, of something lacking

Love is not a god, it is an intermediate spirit why?

- Exists b/w god and human

- Gods and humans communicate with one another through love

according to Platos symposium humans can't be Gods because humans do not possess pure and permanent ___________ nor pure and permanent __________

beauty, wisdom

oMortal nature does all it can to achieve immortality and live forever. Its sole resource for this Is the ability of ____________________

reproduction

under Immortality/ permanence

Physical reproduction

-Weaker bond: attraction changes with Physical change and offspring die out

- Male and women age of fertility

-Offspring: physical children

under Immortality/ permanence

Mental reproduction

-Stronger bond: can stay true through physical change, offspring last longer

- offspring: idea, knowledge, virtue

- Man &Women, M&M, W&W any age

Practice and permanence

we keep ideas and knowledge alive by revisiting and renewing them

why do humans strive to be fame, seek status or become a legacy

driven by the need to be immortal

What are the five Stage of love

1. beauty of one person's body (physical)

2. beauty of any human body (still physical)

3. beauty of human soul/mind/intellect (mental)

4. beauty of intellectual & moral activities/ institutions of human beings (mental)

5. beauty itself (mental, abstract)

what is pure, unchanging and eternal? (recall Parmenides)

beauty itself

Nehamas characterizes two "embarrassing" views of beauty:

1. Pierre Bourdieu: aesthetic judgement arises from culture norms and political ideologies.

2. Martha Nussbaum: the value of aesthetic experience is in its moral import

Kant: aesthetic pleasure is a normative claim

Essentially we should all be in agreement about objects of beauty

Nehamas's aesthetic judgment

- A "dim awareness" or "a guess" that there something more in the works "valuable to learn"

- A belief that "making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile"

Aesthetic experience

not simply an isolated, private experience nor an essentially universal one; but it is deeply personal and can turn us out toward the social communal areas of life

"beauty requires communication"

It sparks a never ending conversations within this community

by pursing beauty ....

- We broaden our vision

- And we then can broaden how we see our selves, our very individual

- And develop our own style out of the things we love so that life itself becomes our work of art

Why, according to Diotima, is lack of knowledge not the same as ignorance? What might lack of knowledge be when it isn't ignorance?

True belief is in the middle between knowledge and ignorance

Langar's view on art

a work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what is expressed is human feeling

langer on art

what is an expressive form

any perceptible or imaginable whole that exhibits relationships of parts, or points, or even qualities or aspects within the whole, so that it may be taken to represent some other whole whose element have analogous relations

langer on art

Expression is

We use it to represent something "not perceivable or readily imaginable"

langer on art

Form- perception/ logical intuition

Form perception is more powerful than discursive language

langer on art

Form -perception and metaphor

- Metaphor is an example of the minds perception of a relation (or form ) that has no existing word or linguistic counterpart; it formulates a new way of seeing, whereby we can see "more' of the world and of ourselves

- Metaphors bend our Language to push our understanding out beyond the limits of language