What's the use of philosophy?

Take a look at this article in The Stone section of the NYT by Gary Gutting.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking.

I find the idea very interesting. Think of a car, or any industrial device and the need for maintenance. What is maintenance in this sense?

1. The act of maintaining or the state of being maintained.

2. The work of keeping something in proper condition; upkeep.

I take this metaphor of maintenance as thinking outside the box. And that¡s generally what the best thinking is about. 

T,R 8:25am

T, 5:40pm

T,R 9:50am

Kill a second?

Read here, time is constantly being adjusted, even killed(?)

Unlike the better-known leap year, which adds a day to February in a familiar four-year cycle, the leap second is tacked on once every few years to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with Earth’s rotational cycle, which, sadly, does not run quite like clockwork. The next one is scheduled for June 30 (do not bother to adjust your watch).

T,R 8:25am

T,R 9:50am

T, 5:40pm

Cheap food? High price

We keep talking about good food in class!

There's a way of problematizing our received idea of what good food is. Let's call it nutri/conomics, the intersection between nutrition habits and the profits of the food industry.*

 Check out this revealing article in TIME MAGAZINE about the kind of food we eat. It boils down to a thought experiment: Is it worth spending so many resources to raise animals for food, when doing so is more detrimental in the long run?

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Through advertising, the BIG COMPANIES brainwash our appetite into consuming cheap food (by cheap I mean BAD). Can we do something about it? Modifying eating habits: improving our diets, making choices as to what and what not to eat, teaching our children the simple fact that a hamburger with fries and soda at McDonalds cannot become our lunch staple.
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*By nutrition I mean the balance between our food habits and the environment. "Good nutrition" cannot transparently imply getting animal protein - as factory farming CEO's would like you to believe- above the environmental degradation of other fauna in the sea, land and rivers.   

I am closing this post next Thursday Jan. 19, @ 11pm.

How "heavy" is your baggage?

This is what I mean by "boulder."

Philosophical provocations

*human existence questions (nature of.., meaning of…, value of ….) how the world be without me?
*the mind (nature of thought, consciousness, ….) is my mind mine alone?
*religion (theism, mysticism, supernaturalism, biblical study and criticism) ---> mortality (what's the meaning of death?) if God exists, am I God?
*nature and function of the natural sciences (human vs. natural sciences) if humans do the thinking, what's natural, what's human?
*nature of mathematics (quantity, structure, space, change) if numbers can sequence to infinity, where is the sequence?
*metaphysics: the study of being and the world:  
*scope of human knowledge (Epistemology, Psychology): is knowledge finite, and if so what's the limit? (the idea being we don't produce more knowledge, merely recycle it).
*truth vs. reality (if all that's real is true, is there something false?)
*logic, linguistic clarity, metaphor and the uses of language: what's the difference between "logical" and "illogical"?
*importance of evolutionary sciences: biology, anthropology, psychology. once we accept the possibility of evolution, into what are we evolving?
*relevance of theories in contemporary physics and cosmology (physics is the discipline that studies matter and its motion through space-time). when does a theory get old?
*moral values and behavior (also called Ethics): if something is right in the present, is it right forever?
*noösphere: culture, politics, history, economics, governmental policies, etc. what does culture do to human beings?