Why was Descartes wrong?

Check this video exploring some of the problems with Descartes' dualism (and therefore the idea of soul).  

We have a Philosophy Club Blog

Click here for Miami Dade Minds! The proposed theme cannot be more timely!

For joining the Philosophy Club, leave a comment @ Miami Dade Minds.

List of possible student-instructors for all Phi 2010 classes

As we know, philosophy is not an easy subject. Some of you have approached me asking if I can recommend a way to study to better prepare for my exams. I think you have the best answers. So, after the results of the quiz, I'd like to present a list of students that can serve as instructors. This doesn't mean they are the only ones, only that they have shown a certain skill, which I think they can share with the class. If you have questions, now you know where to go.

Phi 2010 T,R 9:50am:
Celia Taylor (Philosophy Club President)
Sean McDougall
Sasha Philius
Christine Erice
Randy Armas
Carina Llobet
Alicia Gonzalez
Hector Torranzos
Nancy Narvaez

Phi 2010 MWF, 9am
Susan Guerra
Tania Joseph
Michael Harrington
Andrew Davis
Cristopher Craven
Prince Vargas
Reinel Castaneira
Arlin Fagundo
Luigi Forvil
Hector Torranzos

Phi 2010 MWF, 11am
Michelle Palomo
Khalid Saleh
Angela St. Fleur
Patricia Rodriguez
Leon Pierre
Karina Saenz
Michael Toussaint
Cristina Martinez
Karina Cabrera
Carlos Mena

Phi 2010 T, 5:40pm
Robert Brown
Alan Cardero
Romell McLeod
Alexandra Acevedo
Victor Pedrosa
Yasmani Leyva
Kammie Whitaker
Juliana Bocanegra

T, 5:40pm

TR, 9:50am

MWF, 11am

MWF, 9am

The future anterior: Notes to Thursday's class

let's come back to the idea of the binary karma/dharma (action). in the context of the gita "discipline in action" is called  karma yoga.

karma yoga makes sense if seen from the pov of "we are in the middle of," arms length of our duty, which brings forth the idea of time. we never have enough time! time is our nemesis. when we virtually interact with our own movie "as if" we were in the future of our present whereby we can tap into what is yet-to-come, what is still "on the verge" of happening.

karma is connected with the idea of immanence. why should arjuna fulfill his karma? recall that in the gita, the narrative is twofold: on the one hand, we have this actual battle where kin will die; on the other, we have Arjuna's inner struggle. going to battle is a virtual way of getting outside his own movie.

krishna counsels arjuna to "disturb" the normal order of things (which for the latter appears as chaotic). arjuna's desire is to call off the battle, but this path of inaction is wrong. this is why: Krishna is -as it were- outside, in Arjuna's distant future. by doing his duty, arjuna moves from immanence (his inner battle plus his actual battle) to transcendence, i.e., changing himself and things for the better.

how about the pair action/inaction? we get a complicated picture. you would've thought that asceticism, which we encounter in the upanishads, would be a good example. after all, the ascetic lives a life of dedication and commitment to self-governance. but this is a point we've discussed in class: if the ascetic left his own milieu to pursue a life of transcendence at the cost of his most immediate duty, he is not achieving much. he may end up desiring what he tries to avoid! in the context of the gita, asceticism is like burying one's head on the sand like an ostrich, in order to avoid the relentless chaos of the world.

what is chaos? inner battle the very thing what arjuna is really afraid of. he wants to go his way with inaction, not disturbing, not facing his own demons.
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notes: karma" comes from the root kri, which means "doing" and includes all the actions that a person performs. "yoga" comes from the root yuj, which means, "to join." the idea combines three aspects: 1- a sense of duty towards others, 2- an absence of desire for rewards, 3- a sense of equanimity, which enables one to be as neutral to environmental influences as possible. *what's future anterior^? watch La Jetée. **in the future, one looks back to another moment (it doesn't have to be the past). for instance, last week's class is in the future of classes we didn't have before. imagine a person who makes the mistake of marrying the wrong person. by the time s/he feels happy, there will be many failed attempts at being happy. so, in a sense, happiness is the repetition (& resolution) of non-happiness.

Yoga metaphysics

Pakriti (undifferentiated primal matter)

Buddhi/ mahat 

(suprapersonal potentiality of experience)

Ahankara (egoity: a function appropriating the data of consciousness and wrongly assigning them to purusha)

faculty of action -------------> faculty of thought -------------> faculties of sense (sound, touch, flavor, etc)

-------------------------------------------------subtle atoms realized in subtle bodies

----------------------------------the five gross elements: air, fire, water, earth, ether

We have a Philosophy Club!

We need volunteers immediately! Those who are interested, please, leave your names. I'll get back to you.

Earth, air, sea, life and plastic bags

How bad are plastic bags?

Your turn #2: Jiva in the plastig bag

Make your comments to this week's post here.

MWF 9am

MWF 11am

T 5:40pm

TR 9:50am

Population explosion, rising food prices and sustainability (post for comment)

This summer we got news of global  food-rising prices.

What causes food prices to rise?

The supply of food has been diminished by bad weather in many crucial crop-growing areas of the world. Russia, Ukraine and Argentina have had severe droughts, while Pakistan and Australia have had massive flooding. At the same time, demand for food has been rising as people in fast-developing countries, such as India and China, have been buying more groceries. In addition, production and transportation costs have been driven up by the rising price of oil. Other factors involve currency fluctuations, food trade policies and financial speculation in commodities markets. Energy policy also plays a role, because ethanol makers are using more corn to produce fuel.

This brings us to the issue of world population vs. food production, an increasing concern for politicians, economists, sociologists and philosophers.

How can the world increase the rate of food production and still achieve sustainability? We have not contained the rate of human reproduction. Population increase exceeds the rate of food production and availability in many areas of the world. Nowhere is this more true than in sub-Saharan Africa, where 800 million people must subsist on local yields of one ton per hectare—one third of yields in the rest of the developing world and one ninth those of the U.S. and Europe. That means that a sub-Saharan African each person eats nine times less than what we normally eat in America! 

From Scientific American: Agriculture seems to be the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet. We are literally eating away the other species on the planet.

Agriculture—thanks to deforestation, nitrous oxide from fields, methane from cattle and rice paddies—is responsible for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, making emissions from transporting food, known as "food miles," a "rounding error," said ecologist Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of Minnesota. Pasture has become the dominant ecosystem on the planet, he added, and humans directly employ some 40 percent of the surface of the planet. "Very little of that is urban." In addition, agriculture accounts for at least 85 percent of human water consumption—a growing concern as aquifers diminish and hydrology changes in the face of climate change. Humans now use some 171 million tons of nitrogen as fertilizer every year, much of which ends up polluting lakes, rivers, streams and even the ocean. 

All of the above is tied to UNDERDEVELOPMENT, which is characterized as:

(...) resources not used to their full socioeconomic potential, with the result that local or regional development is slower in most cases than it should be. Furthermore, it results from the complex interplay of internal and external factors that allow less developed countries only a lop-sided development progression. Underdeveloped nations are characterized by a wide disparity between their rich and poor populations, and an unhealthy balance of trade.

Let's bring this discussion home. In many of the countries you guys come from, there is a lethal combination of factors playing all at once: poverty, lack of education, lack of infrastructure, poor or non-existent public health.

What can we do?

(This post closes Tuesday September 13 @ 11pm)

Evolution in a nutshell

Evolution (or more specifically biological or organic evolution) is the change over time in one or more inherited traits found in populations of individuals. Inherited traits are distinguishing characteristics, for example anatomical, biochemical or behavioural, that are passed on from one generation to the next. Evolution occurs when there is variation of inherited traits within a population over time. The major sources of such inherited variants are mutation, genetic recombination and gene flow.

Evolution may also proceed "phenotype-first" with genetic accommodation following afterwards. Evolution has led to the diversification of all living organisms from a common ancestor, which are described by Charles Darwin as "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful".

There are four common mechanisms of evolution: 1- natural selection, a process in which there is differential survival and reproduction of entities that differ in one or more inherited traits. Selection can act at multiple levels of organization, for example differential survival and/or reproduction of organisms, populations, or gene variants. 2-  genetic drift, a process in which there are random changes to the proportions of two or more inherited traits within a population. 3- biased mutation, which can affect phenotypes expressed across multiple levels of organisation. Finally, 4- gene flow, which is the incorporation of genes from one population into another.

Evolution may in the long term lead to speciation, whereby a single ancestral species splits into two or more different species. Speciation is visible in anatomical, genetic and other similarities between groups of organisms, geographical distribution of related species, the fossil record and the recorded genetic changes in living organisms over many generations. Common descent stretches back over 3.5 billion years during which life has existed on earth. Both evolution within populations and speciation between them are thought to occur in multiple ways such as slowly, steadily and gradually over time or rapidly from one long static state to another.
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We'll discuss this topic in class on Monday.

This is no bruised Barbie

Certain images objectify women's suffering. Is this one of them?

Philosophers: let's be friends

If you like what we're discussing in our Phi 2010 class, i.e., the level of ideas, the attitude and the engagement, and want to keep the conversation going, whenever, wherever, just become my friend @ Miami Bourbaki. Thanks.

Your turn! (this post will be closed by next Wednesday @11pm)

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull, (1628).

This is your first post for comment (remember, at least 150 words, you can post and re-post as much as you want).

We started with a stew: The story of the victor and the vanquished. A struggle for redemption. Here are some of the themes (as I interpret them): 

1- Problematization in philosophy (don't take anything as settled or beyond elucidation). Metaphors must be sent to the cleaners and back.
2- Reincarnation (in Hinduism) as repetition.
3- Moksha as "being home" (and our condition of homelessness).
4- Yajna (or sacrifice) as sovereign exchange (or you call the shots). 
5- Dukkha or suffering. How should one approach the finite? I suggested the romantic approach to vanitas, (or, death as an ambivalent friendship)
6- Bhakti (devotion). Think of it as jazz (being in tune with others).

Also, I'd like to stress the importance of poetry, a higher form of philosophy:  Hence, Wadsworth's keen intuition that we're all a whole:

. . . All beings live with God, themselves

Are God, existing in one mighty whole,

As indistinguishable as the cloudless east

At noon is from the cloudless west, when all

The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.

Or this one by Novalis, implying ONENESS:

And shortly, I saw, that now on earth

Men must become Gods. 

In German it sounds better:

Kurz um, ich sah, dass jetzt auf Erden
Die Menschen sollten Götter werden.

What are your thoughts?
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Remember our motto: We are all students!