Friday, August 30, 2024
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
La filosofía y sus ramas (bilingüe)
Axiology: the study of value. What is value? Think of something in terms of good or bad, i.e., "I hate broccoli." "I love R&B." "I hate roaches." "What she did to her sister was wrong." "My grandma's chicken soup is still the best."" I'm not crazy about Picasso's art."
Imagine what law, food, art, economy, and human relationships would be without axiology. A wasteland.
An essential question at this point is whether the value we posit is objective or subjective? In other words,
Is Catena Malbec 2014 good because I lived in Argentina, or am I Argentinian, instead of the juice in the bottle?
When we say "Slavery is wrong," are we talking about now, 2017, or any time in the past or the future?
Axiology is divided into two:
Ethics: evaluating human actions, i.e., right and wrong conduct.
Here, we have different branches:
Metaethics studies the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments.
Descriptive ethics: People's beliefs about morality.
Normative ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the questions that arise when considering how one ought to act morally.
Applied ethics: the analysis, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life which are matters of moral judgment.
Ponder this: What makes an action right?
the action's results
the action's intentions
the emotive responses towards the action
the action itself
what (people, society, culture) think of it
Keywords: right, wrong.
Aesthetics is the study of value in the arts or the inquiry into feelings, judgments, or beauty standards and related concepts.
What makes something beautiful, ugly, elegant, awful, attractive, charming, clumsy, mysterious, etc?
Are aesthetic properties objective, subjective, or inter-subjective?
Keywords: beautiful, ugly, amazing (sublime).
Ponder this: Is the sunset beautiful if no one sees it? or better, is there unseen beauty, majesty?
See that though we didn't witness the Big Bang, the idea of such an event has given physicists plenty to talk about. We've seen simulations of it in the movies.
Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
Epistemology investigates the origin, structure, methods, and integrity of knowledge.
How much do we actually know? More importantly, Is our knowledge warranted?
What is the difference between belief and knowledge?
Do I hold false beliefs?
Keywords: belief, truth, justification, explanation.
Metaphysics: the study of what is really real. This is heavy. We're dealing here with principles. The question in metaphysics is the existence status of any kind of stuff.
Consider the truths of mathematics: how is it that a triangle exists? Are points, lines, or planes really real?
What is a soul?
Under what conditions are these entities possible?
Keywords: identity, change, being, necessity, accident, category, etc.
Los presocráticos
what is the fundamental "stuff" (arche) of the universe?
The crucial feature of pre-Socratic philosophy was the use of reason to explain the universe. The philosophers shared the intuition that there was a single explanation that could explain both the plurality and the singularity of the whole. For some reason, they believed this fundamental stuff of the universe was univocal. They called it archë.
Milesian school (born in Miletus)
Anaximander (610-546 BC), a geometer and the first writer on philosophy. He came up with the idea of apeiron , i.e., an undefined, unlimited substance without qualities, out of which the primary opposites.
Thales of Miletus: (of the Milesian school) Thales claims that the world rests on water with the view that water is the archē or fundamental principle, and he adds that “that from which they come to be is a principle of all things.” He suggests that Thales chose water because of its fundamental role in coming-to-be, nutrition, and growth and claims that water is the origin of the nature of moist things. archë is water because, as a substance, it contains motion and change.
Heraclitus: The universe is a state of perpetual flux, connected by logical structure or pattern, which he termed logos.
Xenophanes: comes up with the notion of pephuke (explanation), which states that X is really Y when Y reveals the true character of X.
Pythagoras: the notion that NUMBER (or mathematics) reveals the structure of the universe.
Eleatic School (born in Elea)
Parmenides: is the father of metaphysics and rationalism. His theory is that what IS CANNOT NOT BE. So, BEING (NOUS) is UNCHANGING. For something to change, it has to NOT BE, which is a contradiction because NOTHING cannot exist, and out of nothing, nothing comes.
Atomist School
The Atomists: Leucippus (5th BC) and his pupil Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC) from Thrace. the arche are atoms: small primary bodies, infinite in number, indivisible and imperishable, qualitatively similar, but distinguished by their shapes. They move eternally through the infinite void. They collide and unite, thus generating objects that differ in accordance with the varieties in number, size, shape, etc. We are ALL atoms.
The Pluralist School
Empedocles: comes up with the principle of attraction and rejection, or LOVE and STRIFE. One cannot be without the other. Love unites, strife separates.
Monday, August 26, 2024
Phi 2010 Honors, Syllabus, Fall 2024
