Calling All Philosophy Majors

[princessd3]

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Anyone of you familiar with Descartes, Meditation one (Concerning those things that can be called into doubt) and can put it in a nutshell for me please? This is not a homework assignment or anything. I read it but some of it just flew over my head.
Basically, what exactly are his arguments? There is one about God, dreaming and the evil demon.
Can someone pleaaaaaaase help me out.
Thanks

 

[SillyRabbit]

do a search for it and you'll get a bunch of stuff...it's a great way to get the overall picture of what philosophers have to say. There are summaries all of the place too.

 

[....]

If the experience of a dream is indistinguishable between that dream and reality; and there is no test to differentiate between dreaming and awakens, then one must doubt the world outside their minds.



think The Matrix

 

[tkim]

Descartes questions whether he is dreaming or not dreaming at any given moment. Since dreams are sometimes seems so real as to be indistinguishable from waking reality, he wonders whether an evil demon could be sending him false images to confuse him at times. He concludes that he is not dreaming, there is such a thing as reality, and there is not an evil demon sending him false images ... because God would not allow that to happen.

🙄

That's up there with Pascal's Wager and Occam's Razor.

- Tae

 

[thewebthsp]

Descartes also realizes that nothing can be PROVED to exist except for his own consciousness (cogito ergo...)

 

[mattorama]

I may be a bit rusty on this stuff, but I am pretty sure Descartes thought he proved a lot more than just his existance. He started out with only being able to know that "I doubt" (the only thing he could be certain of given the fact that he might be dreaming or tricked by an evil demon...he rejected anything that could possibly be rendered questionable by assuming the skeptical hypothesis which would say something like..."how do I know I am not in the Matrix"/"dreaming"/"being tricked")

From what he knew had to be certain he would only use DEDUCTION as a valid means of finding out other things. From "I doubt" he went to "I exisit". From there, in the rest of the meditations, he "proved" everything from the exisitance of God, to the exisitance of the external world. Most philosophers now agree that Descartes arguments are bad and that by using the skeptical hypothesis and deduction it is impossible to get past "I exisit". Descartes most certianly did not agree.

 

[mattorama]

ahhaha...so yeah...I misspelled "existence" every time. I think a nap is in order.

 

[Street Philosopher]

Originally posted by thewebthsp
Descartes also realizes that nothing can be PROVED to exist except for his own consciousness (cogito ergo...)

wrong. descartes thought of this as this starting point, but went on to assert a whole lot of bullsh*t that he thought followed from this and a few other suspect assumptions.

 

[Street Philosopher]

descartes sucks ass.

if you don't understand meditation 1, just read it again. it's not that hard... it's just that he bullsh*ts a lot and thinks he's clever but in reality he is a stupid frenchie *****.

 

[....]

"it's not that hard... it's just that he bullsh*ts a lot and thinks he's clever but in reality he is a stupid frenchie *****."

HA, you should have writen a paper for the Philosophy journals.

 

[SistaKaren]

Originally posted by Street Philosopher
descartes sucks ass.

if you don't understand meditation 1, just read it again. it's not that hard... it's just that he bullsh*ts a lot and thinks he's clever but in reality he is a stupid frenchie *****.

OMG, can I marry you? I *hate* Descartes. And he really hated me. That jerk...

And I'm a phil major...so sad.

 

[Cerberus]

Originally posted by Street Philosopher
descartes sucks ass.

if you don't understand meditation 1, just read it again. it's not that hard... it's just that he bullsh*ts a lot and thinks he's clever but in reality he is a stupid frenchie *****.

word

descartes was a little b1tch!@ read Hume, thats the real shiz!

 

[whitesoxfan]

I don't know why this in this particular forum. Even though Descartes' theories are dated and hard to accept he did lay the groundwork for modern philosphy.

From his only infallible truth of his consciousness Descartes deduces the existence of God through a string of semantics that say God exists because the virtues we attribute to him are beyond our capacity to create and therefore must have come from a supreme being. Then he goes on to re-enforce his starting principle from the existence of God in a circular logic kind of fashion that makes his whole theory open to attack.
I haven't posted in forever, but I'm a philosophy major and this caught my eye. Go re-applicants.

 

[shikantaza]

i too am a philosophy major that doesn't like descartes... in fact, i've never known a philosophy major that likes descartes... he was egocentric and illogical and wrong and made fun of animals...

 

[soonerpillow]

This thread made me think of Monty Python: 😀

"Immanuel Kant was a real piss-ant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table. ..
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach 'ya 'bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, after half a pint of shanty was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day!
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
And Hobbes was fond of his Dram.
And Ren? Descartes was a drunken fart:
"I drink, therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed"

 

[thewebthsp]

Ok, I should have qualified that at the _start_ of Descartes argument...nothing can be proved true (without any doubt) except one's consciousness...

I get turned on more about what Descartes brings up than his solution.

 

[thewebthsp]

Hume [not so familiar] and Kant [more familiar] are more my style than Descartes also -- I last read Rene in freshman year...

 

[Iron Horse]

Interesting. I never realized how many phil majors disliked Descartes. I remember writing a paper ripping his attempt to prove God's existence. Personally, in addition to several political philosophers, I like Hobbes.

 

[mattorama]

Let's give Descartes some love. I think his rule of signs far outweighs any mistakes he made. 🙂

BTW: Hume == awful

 

[thewebthsp]

Why is Hume awful? This is interesting...

 

[princessd3]

maybe u guys can help me with the ball of wax argument (Descartes: Dualistic Interactionism). What was that about.

 

[Wardens]

Hey Princess,

Check out the Stanford Encylclopedia of Philosophy; It's an amazing resource. Here's one entry: Descartes' Epistemology Just do a page search for the wax example. If you're writing a paper, it'll probably be a more reliable source than what we can muster up from intro. phil.

On the Hume debate, while the man has written a simply astonishing quanity of philosophy, anyone who is fond of the whole analytical, Kantian tradition (those very few who see descartes as the founder of all 'real' philosophy) is bound to be turned off by him. One of my philosophy profs is a hard-core rationalist who managed to get the whole class to chuckle at Hume and his 'silly' empiricism. Personally, I like Hume, and England worships him. One of my tutors last year said 'he is the greatest philosopher to have written in the english language'. That may be a bit extreme. It all depends on your bag, and although he's written some funny stuff on taste and aesthetics, I love the guy's ethics, even if it did need a bit more developing.

 

[thewebthsp]

Kant AND Hume both rank very highly... so do Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Collingwood (history).

Bertrand Russell is a flake...

 

[Street Philosopher]

Hume is a f*cking genius. In my opinion he is the best philosopher of all time.

 

[Wardens]

Russell isn't too much of a flake. Well, he took Wittgenstein (a personal fav) under his wing and single-handedly destroyed the career of another brilliant mathematician/philosopher Gottlieb Frege. Oh, and as a funny side-note, Jimmy Carter kept a copy of Bertrand Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' by his bed for easy access.

 

[princessd3]

wow, didn't realize there were that many pre-med philosophy student. You guys are really into this stuff.

 

[LetGo of TheEgo]

Whats all this talk about "dissing" Descartes. Without Descartes, the study of the human body would have taken much longer to gain steam with the Church's strangle hold on the sacredness of the mind.

It was his mind-body dichotomy that allowed scientists to flourish and study the human body without worrying the people in Church that these scientists were seeking to disprove God.

The mind-body dichotomy seperated the "mind", which was seen as sacred since it was interpreted as the source of conciousness, from the "body", which is earthly and sentient, and of lesser value because bodies degrade and do not transend the mere existence on earth.

With this separation, scientists could finally dissect human bodies and not worry about being labeled heretics.

 

[kmnfive]

aside from giving all the classical people respect, i personally like heidegger. theres a book called Religious Perspectives, its insightful.


for contempoary writers, i like the Death of Common Sense by Phillip K Howard, and a Liars Tale by Jeremy Campbell.

but anyway i have a question :

for all your philosphy majors out there... if you were unable to attend med school (for whatever reason; not accepted, etc....)
what would you do as a career?

 

[princessd3]

Anyone studied Kant(morality) and Mill(utilitarian). I'm not a philosophy major. I'm taking this philosophy class that I'm trying to get through. I'm doing a paper for extra credit.
The question is : Would you sacrifice one person to save many? Use Kant/Mill to justify your answer.
My thought is that Mill would say yes sacrifice one to save many (greatest good for the the greatest amount of people). Kant probably would disagree because such a deed would not make it through the two catagorical tests...
Need a little help in making sure I have the view of these two philosophers right.
How do you think Kant/Mill would respond to such an issue?
Any help is greeeeaaaaatly appreciated.
Thank You

 

[Street Philosopher]

Originally posted by kmnfive
for all your philosphy majors out there... if you were unable to attend med school (for whatever reason; not accepted, etc....)
what would you do as a career?

most common thing to do is law. the serious people go into academia and write thousands of pages discussing a paragraph of what someone else wrote.

 

[Street Philosopher]

first of all, utilitarianism is "morality" too, just a different version or viewpoint than what we normally think of morality as constituting.

second, you are correct that kant would say "no", but are not exactly right about utilitarian saying "yes". what's difficult about the utilitarian position is that it is clear in theory (achieve greatest utility) but hopelessly vague in practice. in other words, a utilitarian might say that a morally good action is killing that one person IF it achieves greater utility for all, but then another utilitarian might point out that if we allow one person to be killed then anyone can be killed and then everyone would live paranoid lives and that would lead to less utility overall, etc. utilitarianism has almost no prescriptive value, and this is one of the reasons why it is not taken seriously by very many people.

"hindsight is 20/20"