I can't see! The light of nature has blinded me!
Well, it's been awhile, but it seems high time to once again bestow upon the internet a little of my own personal confusion. Wittgenstein has been placed on hold and then thoroughly beaten into the nether regions of my mind by the spiked club that is Cartesian reasoning. When you spend the first hour of the day discussing the Meditations and the last hour debating the merits of the dream argument (Descartes' argument that since you can have dreams in which you do not know you are dreaming you cannot rule out the possibility that you are currently dreaming) in terms of epistemology (the study of what constitutes knowledge, from where it can be obtained, and other such frightening questions) with a little Nichomachean ethical debate thrown in between...it's a good thing I love this stuff, or I would be a bitter, bitter man.
Aristotle appeals to me as strongly now as Plato did before I had a firmer grasp of the now seemingly rather glaring troubles with the concept of the Forms. Perhaps when I get to that Aristotle seminar I'll come to the same realizations about the protege as I have about the teacher, but his concept that applied reason is the potential and therefore duty of mankind strikes me as being powerful indeed. It speaks to purpose! Meaning! Make no mistake, I'm a firm believer in Russel's minimization of ontological commitments (Occam's razor applied; if you don't need to believe in something to logically support your assertions, don't) and far from dazzled by Descartes' varied assumptions attributed to the "light of nature", but the fact remains that I don't have to know whether the chair on which I am sitting is really a chair to come to the logical conclusion that - here it comes - something beyond me exists! There is a purpose (or at the very least simply a power) that did not originate within me, which reveals through this existence elements of my being that are not consonant with my sentience being a genetic mistake or my consciousness being a lone (and very delusional) ball of awareness meandering through some ill-defined void imagining infinitely varying combinations of sense-data. I did not manufacture the concepts of grace, justice, truth or the like to further confuse my own (apparently self-limited, since it does follow logically that to originally conceive of these ideas would imply posession of the power to create and therefore implement them) sorry excuse for existence. As most of the best professors, Jordan makes it difficult to determine many of his personal beliefs, but his vehement and open denial of all things skeptical is thoroughly reassuring to straggle into at the end of the day...Epistemology is the kind of forum in which authority figures need to exercise discretion lest they start shattering participants' feeble grasps of their own awareness, and Jordan does an outstanding job of combating the historically recurring potential for skepticism to rage unchecked like the virus it is.
Reason is the only faculty we have that even remotely appears to be constant, the only aspect of our awareness that remains a viable tool for directing our lives toward that for which we exist. But since my senses are telling me I'm really tired, I'm going to surrender to one of the more questionable aspects of my existence and go to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream...perchance to freak myself out by not knowing whether I'm awake. Cheers!
Kev
***
"...I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive; and it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once." -Rene Descartes
"But the person who was late had an excuse." -Fellow student
"And you, wicked eyes, you have no excuse!
Deceive me even once and I'll pluck you out!" -Jordan Lindbergh
Aristotle appeals to me as strongly now as Plato did before I had a firmer grasp of the now seemingly rather glaring troubles with the concept of the Forms. Perhaps when I get to that Aristotle seminar I'll come to the same realizations about the protege as I have about the teacher, but his concept that applied reason is the potential and therefore duty of mankind strikes me as being powerful indeed. It speaks to purpose! Meaning! Make no mistake, I'm a firm believer in Russel's minimization of ontological commitments (Occam's razor applied; if you don't need to believe in something to logically support your assertions, don't) and far from dazzled by Descartes' varied assumptions attributed to the "light of nature", but the fact remains that I don't have to know whether the chair on which I am sitting is really a chair to come to the logical conclusion that - here it comes - something beyond me exists! There is a purpose (or at the very least simply a power) that did not originate within me, which reveals through this existence elements of my being that are not consonant with my sentience being a genetic mistake or my consciousness being a lone (and very delusional) ball of awareness meandering through some ill-defined void imagining infinitely varying combinations of sense-data. I did not manufacture the concepts of grace, justice, truth or the like to further confuse my own (apparently self-limited, since it does follow logically that to originally conceive of these ideas would imply posession of the power to create and therefore implement them) sorry excuse for existence. As most of the best professors, Jordan makes it difficult to determine many of his personal beliefs, but his vehement and open denial of all things skeptical is thoroughly reassuring to straggle into at the end of the day...Epistemology is the kind of forum in which authority figures need to exercise discretion lest they start shattering participants' feeble grasps of their own awareness, and Jordan does an outstanding job of combating the historically recurring potential for skepticism to rage unchecked like the virus it is.
Reason is the only faculty we have that even remotely appears to be constant, the only aspect of our awareness that remains a viable tool for directing our lives toward that for which we exist. But since my senses are telling me I'm really tired, I'm going to surrender to one of the more questionable aspects of my existence and go to bed. To sleep, perchance to dream...perchance to freak myself out by not knowing whether I'm awake. Cheers!
Kev
***
"...I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive; and it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once." -Rene Descartes
"But the person who was late had an excuse." -Fellow student
"And you, wicked eyes, you have no excuse!
Deceive me even once and I'll pluck you out!" -Jordan Lindbergh