so our actions are determined… at least in part.
Key points I’ve come to accept over these last few years in philosophy…
– Determinism is not incompatible with free-will..
– Self-identity is in limbo, and demonstrates a good example in which our language diverges from our philosophical understandings.
– Morality does exist. some properties morality has:
— morality is not subjective.
— morality is not arbitrary.
— morality is best understood as the physical laws governing human social interactions *
– Nietzsche is such a prick.
— But a very intelligent prick who has some very interesting things to say about existence.
— says morality is arbitrary and therefore doesn’t exist.
— destroys prescriptive morality.
-Shakespeare is a very good writer.
— but people attribute a lot to him that makes me wonder how much is our content being pulled out of his mouth, or how much is him actually arguing for this.
— His historical plays are very intriguing**.
– cults are largely misunderstood by the professor teaching the topics class at UL.
– Science and Religion are never going to work in tandem, there can only be Science and a form of personal Spirituality.
– Evil obviously exists, but people trivialize it and don’t recognize that evil is simply a face in which nature wears. Nature being the objects in which humanity interprets. Evil is simply the interpretation we place on the physical world, much like good is. Filters, everything boils down to filters of perception for the world we see.
– Truth exists, people just don’t recognize the stagnant nature of truth as a whole.
— Nietzsche might have argued that truth doesn’t exist, but he used appeals to truth to make such arguments work.
— Logical truths (a priori truths exist as a linguistic understanding and filter of how the world works)
— Nomological truths (truths produced by science like physical laws)
— Moral Truths (Truths governing social interaction), etc.
— There are an astoundingly large variety of truths in the world that people recognize and use on a daily basis.
— These truths are about as absolute as your going to get, if you set your standard for evidence as high as certainty, you will be sorely disappointed with the truths you find because for certainty to exist, we would have to have 100% knowledge about a subject matter, and there are limitations placed on our data, sensory collection equipment, etc.
— Standards of evidence are mandatory for maintaining truth functionality.
– Symbolic logic is fun, when you are not being graded on it.
– Philosophy in general is fun.
– Contemporary moral dilemmas exist, and are relevant in all walks of life.
I’m done for now.. as I think of more I’ll jot them down.
* my own theory of how morals work. cause and effect.. I shoot a person in front of another there are understood reactions to this action.
** I really don’t like Shakespeare, I guess that makes me ignorant in some eyes. I respect him because he garners such renowned popular support, I just don’t care much for his works in a personal opinion.
April 29th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Wow … neat retrospective. I should do something like this on my blog. Reading through your post I think I know a few of the classes we had together in which you formulated some of your ideas.
April 30th, 2005 at 7:53 pm
I’m not crazy about shakespeare, either. I love this post, by the way.
May 1st, 2005 at 7:16 am
i like this post, too. i could never succinctly sum up everything i learned in my major . . . i envy (and admire) your organized mind. mine’s a mess. so. shakespeare. he was a master storyteller. ripped some of his material off of history and legend (and other playwrights), but changed it enough to be respectable. explored an amazing amount of the human condition – for profit! in my opinion, reading enough of him and his contemporaries to get used to the language and studying the historical context of the plays enough to truly understand the work is well worth it. my favorites: king richard III, as you like it, the winter’s tale, king lear, and – finally – romeo and juliet, as read by my 9th graders at central high with sock-puppets. i also truly enjoy the dark lady sonnets. . . that being said, shakespeare is all about betrayal and passion, contemporary-pop language-play and psychology. his plays are fascinating when you think of them in a historical context, as in, “wow, people felt this way back then, too,” or if you look at his plays as evidence of historical social constructs. yet his sonnets are simple- they are not “the waste land” – and his plays are fascinating, but they are not after the fall. as we have continued to document the human condition over the past few centuries, our understanding of language and poetics and the human condition itself has grown; our literature and poetry have become more complex. . . don moore would kill me for saying that. and i should say – this isn’t a terribly scholarly opinion – i haven’t taken shakespeare at the graduate level.