3 posts tagged “philosophy”

What have you changed your mind about? 
Submitted by chitoes.

You mean just today?  Today I think I've only changed my mind about what color I want to paint the bathroom walls.  Oh, and I changed my mind about what to make for dinner.  I was going to make pozole, but we ended up making something else. 

If we're talking more long term, then I have changed my mind about virtually everything, for various reasons.  One of them is that I started reading philosophy in the context of debate and then I majored in philosophy at college.  This all matters because of the way competitive debate works and the type of professors I had.  Allow me to elaborate.

For any of you who have not gone to the extremes of nerdiness that I have and joined a debate team in high school or college, let me explain a few of the fundamentals.  I did Lincoln-Douglas debate, a type of debate that centers on theoretical and philosophical questions rather than matters of policy or practical matters.  The policy debaters are way, way nerdier than the L-D debaters, trust me.  But some of what I'm talking about pertains as well to policy debate.

In a competitive debate, you are given a topic (in L-D, we got a new topic every month, but policy gets one for the whole year, as their research is more complicated).  You must prepare to argue both sides (affirmative and negative) and you are told a very short time (usually) before each round of the tournament which side you are to argue.  That means that whatever you believe you must at all times be prepared to convince someone of the opposite.  This is not always easy.  (Incidentally, I still do this, all the time.  Just because I am arguing some point, that does not mean that's what I personally think or believe.  It goes beyond playing "devil's advocate" for me, as I won't just bring up one or two points to throw you off.  Oh, no, I will have an entire argument with you in which I say nothing that I actually believe, you know, just to argue.)

Then there is the matter of the flow chart.  Any time I am in an argument, I have a little flow chart of it in my head.  I have the summary and organization of my opponent's argument, even if they presented it in an entirely incoherent manner. 

Thanks to debate, I am also adept at predicting arguments.  Most of the time, I know what my opponent is going to say before she says it.  I know the arguments and I have previously considered them.  Occasionally, I jump the gun and start arguing against something they haven't actually said yet, just because I've heard the argument before.  On spectacular occasions, someone says something I entirely failed to predict or consider.  The first time that happened to me in competition, it was Dean who did it, and I had a tremendous crush on him ever after.  Who knew that while debating whether the US has a moral obligation to promote democracy around the world, Dean would opt for arguing that, actually, democracy sucks?  Few people take that position, and he used Plato's Republic to back him up, a book I had not read at that time (you bet I read it after that, though!).  I was flummoxed, not least because of his delicious eyes.  Ah, well.

Anyway, so this is how I used to have fun.  Arguing, considering counter-arguments and ways to successfully eviscerate them, then arguing some more.  Between rounds of debate, my good friend and I would wander the halls in heated debate over the Categorical Imperative.  He was a Kantian, and I was not.  Being forced to adopt positions you do not believe in and --crucially-- convince others of those positions makes you think long and hard about what you really think, and I often changed and refined my beliefs.

The second thing I mentioned above was studying philosophy at university.  This might not have had anything to do with changing my mind except that, well, obviously I read books that presented completely new and startling ways of considering the world, ethics, art, and everything else.  But the key really was Professor Walton, not called Dick for no reason.  No, he was a nice enough guy but inclined to being very stern and old-fashioned in his views of education and ethics.  He taught me all I know, or very nearly, about classical philosophy--Greek, Roman, that sort of thing.  It is not my specialty, to say the least, but he did the best he could.

The most important thing I took away from his class, though, was what he called the "principle of generosity."  The idea is that when you are reading a text, you always assume the author is correct unless and until you can prove them wrong.  Sometimes, like when you're reading Rush Limbaugh, it is very easy to come up with the counter-evidence (or, the factual evidence as opposed to his fabricated evidence) or counter-argument, as his arguments are facile and juvenile.  When you're reading Plato and Aristotle, it is less easy.  Indeed, it is often confounding.  But unless you are really prepared to just accept as truth every work of philosophy (or anything else), you must find those arguments.  Old Walton certainly knew how to separate the serious students from the billy goats and make the serious students work their asses off justifying their beliefs.  More people should try it--it makes your argument-fu very strong.  Instead of encouraging reading for the purpose of passively learning about someone else's ideas, it makes you question and defend your own.

Anyway, so in the course of debating people for fun and profit and suffering under the tutelage of Aristotle and Kant, I have changed my mind about most everything.  I remain always open to new evidence or ideas (I know, you don't believe me, but it's true) and thus my mind changes sometimes--less frequently now, because I have listened to and considered more arguments now than I had 10 years ago, but it still happens sometimes.

Ah, so, what?  You want examples?  Well, I used to be a libertarian capitalist (and I used to believe America practiced capitalism, until I learned about the elaborate provisions of corporate welfare we have).  Now I'm a libertarian socialist.  Discuss.

Of the personality tests, that is.

This one is from Zack--he did it ages ago (you can take it here), but I'm bored at the moment, so I thought, what the hell?  That's as good a reason to post as any, eh?

  What is Your World View? You scored as a Materialist Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood by its smaller elements.

This isn't perhaps entirely accurate, but I thought some of their questions were skewed.  The big one is that while I do think that all that fundamentally exists is matter and energy, obviously the human brain has managed to turn matter and energy into something more.  It isn't important that I think we merely believe we have a coherent self and all that--the fact that we can manufacture beliefs and believe them is more than the sum of matter+energy.  I don't happen to think that the something more is divine or comes from outside us.  It comes from language, an ability we developed with our matter and energy over time and has now grown into something insanely complex and created this humbug we call "consciousness." 

Feh.  Well, that killed some time.  But, just as the sun always rises in the morning, so has my son risen.  I hear him up there shrieking now.  Probably in horror at being condemned to be free, to have no essence, to find his way in the ontological vacuum.  Or maybe he just needs a diaper change.

Which Existentialist Philosopher Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Via RPM.

Dude, that was totally predictable.  Actually, my results are probably skewed because I knew exactly what philosopher most of the questions were referring to, and I know Marty is my man.  I am a very wordy person, as anyone who has read even a post or two by me knows.  (and, by the way, Sartre was just ripping off Heidegger)

As far as the Nazi sympathies, well, no.  Not really.  Although I did once say that we all have a little tiny Hitler inside us, waiting to get out.  You could substitute any dictator's name for "Hitler," and, in fact, you probably should.  Hitler has become known almost exclusively as an anti-Semitic dictator, although he also hated Gypsies, gays, and many others with equal virulence. 

I do know why Heidegger sympathized with the Nazis, though, and I really don't think it had anything to do with the Jews or any of the other groups Hitler persecuted.  Heidegger was a nationalist; you can get nationalism from his theory, but I am not a nationalist.  He was and I am a communitarian, and he took this a step further and went nationalist.  I think that times of great economic hardship, such as those of Germany after WWI, tend to turn people that way.  Heidegger believed, as do I, that by being thrown into a culture, we are bound by that culture in some crucial way; it defines the possibilities and fundaments of our lives.  He wanted Germany to be German in culture.  In that, he shared something with Hitler.  It is reprehensible that he therefore ignored the extermination of the Jews and others (despite his ongoing correspondence with Hannah Arendt, too).

But, while I do believe as he did that culture is important and fundamental, I do not believe that culture equates with nation, and I do not believe that our culture or nation requires either the exile or the extermination of others.  I totally disavow the xenophobia.  Does that make me a Nazi sympathizer?  I don't really think so, because nationalism was, to them, a logical extension of their sense of culture (and cultural superiority, another trait I find repugnant)--they weren't the National Socialists without Nationalism, see? 

And I am in no way a nationalist.

Also, some of my best friends are Jews!   And Gypsies!

Sorry, I totally had to do that.

Last but not least, here's a fun tidbit:  Did you know that if you Google "some of my best friends are black!" you get this from the Economist:  "NINE out of ten Britons have few or no black or Asian friends."   Mmmmmkayyyyyy.

Later Edit:  I just took another one of those quizzes and found out I'm also Stan Marsh!  At least I'm not Kenny!