Philosophy post 2: EPISTEMOLOGY

On to the second major field of philosophy: Epistemology, or “The theory of knowledge, especially its methods, validity, and scope” (OED). Here is the overarching question for the week:

EPISTEMOLOGY: How can we know anything for sure?

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book/story in which the protagonist was trying and trying his/her hardest to find out some fact? Think of Sherlock Holmes, for example, who uses logical deductive reasoning based on empirical facts to come to surprising (and almost always correct) solutions to mysteries. Think of dilemmas that are exacerbated because characters do not even know what kind of reasoning or proof to use—such as Hamlet, who didn’t know whether or not his father’s ghost was an illusion, or, if it was a “real” ghost, whether it was good or evil; or Macbeth, who didn’t know if the witches were supernatural beings or not, or whether he could trust their prophecies. When you talk about characters’ epistemological crises, whether fictional or historical, discuss how much they could have known using a given kind of reasoning—and see how far you get.



Philosophy students: Please post a response to at least two of the following questions/discussions. Add other thoughts as well as they come to you. It’s a good idea to browse some of the recommended websites on your syllabus to get ideas. Others besides students are, of course, more than welcome to join the conversation.

1. What is A Priori reasoning? Look up the definition, then explain it in your own words. Think up an example of a time you have used this kind of reasoning in discovering the answer to an academic or practical problem. Explain the use of this kind of reasoning in an historical, scientific, or fictional (book/movie) situation.

2. What is A Posteriori reasoning? Look up the definition, then explain it in your own words. Think up an example of a time you have used this kind of reasoning in discovering the answer to an academic or practical problem. Explain the use of this kind of reasoning in an historical, scientific, or fictional (book/movie) situation.

3. What is Rationalism? Look up the definition, then explain it in your own words. Think up an example of a time you have used a rationalist attitude in discovering the answer to an academic or practical problem. Explain how someone in history, science, a book, or a movie used this attitude towards trying to know something for sure.

4. What is Empiricism? Look up the definition, then explain it in your own words. Think up an example of a time you have used a rationalist attitude in discovering the answer to an academic or practical problem. Explain how someone in history, science, a book, or a movie used this attitude towards trying to know something for sure.

5. And then here’s the philosophy-and-faith aspect of this question. Three questions in one: How much is it possible for a human being to know without revelation from God? How much is it possible for a human being to know with revelation from God? And finally, how much does God Himself know? You might like to take a look at this new book title. Or you could come at that question from a different perspective: How much do you think Jesus knew when He was a man on earth?

Ethics follow-up

Dear students & other blog readers:

Thank you for your comments on the previous post about ethics. Now I have a few questions to focus our conversation a bit more. Several of you talked about how most people—Christians, members of other religions, athiests—all have some kind of morality, and that the morals of most ordinary people are remarkably similar. Now I would like to ask you: Where does this come from, this general sense that there is good and bad and what they are?

Darlin, Where do you think moral ideas originated?
Amber<3, where do you think logic and reason come from in the first place? How do you know they are valid?
QT Patutee (nice sobriquet): What about people who don’t acknowledge God? How are they supposed to follow Him? How can they even know what He requires, if they don’t know Him or believe He exists?
Andrew (R): Where does the government get its ideas of right and wrong that it then translates into laws?
Andrew (M): Good for you, bringing in Reformed Theology. Please explain the doctrine of Common Grace for those who might not be familiar with it.

Now, for all of you who had these similar comments, here’s
THE BIG QUESTION:
Where does God get His ideas of morality? Are they arbitrary? If God decided that murder and lying were good, would they be? Could He decide that? Why has He set down the laws He has? Does He have appeal to some higher standard (the way the gods in Plato have appeal to The Form of the Good)?

RawkChick: Would you explain how Neo’s choice was a moral one? I see how it was difficult and took courage, so in that case perhaps it required strength of character, but how would it have been evil for him to take the easy way out and forget the whole episode?

Anonymous: I was confused by your comments. They seemed a bit contradictory. Can you clarify?

Rosie & QT & Sem & everyone: how can it be that sometimes it’s OK to sin in order to prevent some worse evil? Think about Rahab, who lied to save lives and usher in a theocracy. How can you decide when to compromise your convictions for a “greater” cause?

Thank you! Epistemology posting coming soon.

By the way, here is a totally cool site on the philiosophy of The Matrix. Enjoy!

Poetry as a prescription for brain fog

David Taylor has a wonderful post over at Diary of an Arts Pastor on taking a dose of poetry before bedtime as an antidote to a foggy brain (brought on, in part, by too much Internet surfing). Here's how it starts, but go over and read the whole thing there; he's got a few excellent recommendations of poems at the end.

The doctor told me I don't have enough poetry in my system.

My mind is weak, he said. I don't think carefully enough about words, which just fumble around in my head in a really embarrassing way. They swim by me like a rush of flotsam noise. They get clogged in my memory.

Words and names and titles to movies escape me and I feel like a dumb old man reaching his greedy hands into a jar of alzheimers when it's not even his turn.

So I've added a new component to my bed-time routine. As a way to supplement my diet and to reinforce my natural energies I've decided to take poetry before I go to bed.

I need just a little bit of poetry, not too much, and certainly not four quartets and definitely not five, just one or two in order to slow me down. I need it to teach me again what a good word is, just one word, just a single fat word that means more than I can savor in one sitting.

I need poetry, to be perfectly honest, to save me. I need saving, especially from the benevolent dictatorship of the internet to whom I have given my fealty morning, noon and night, a willing fealty, for the record, not forced, for the sake of finding what exactly I'm never quite sure. The world wide web, like a spider's web, keeps me clung to my monitor screen so that I can rummange around for things I don't think I need when I should be under my covers, mouth shut, prayed up.

Philosophy post 1: ETHICS

Philosophy class has started! Each week for the next five or six, we will be discussing the interrelations of philosophy, faith, and the arts. We’ll proceed through the five major fields of philosophy: Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Political Philosophy. Others besides students are, of course, more than welcome to join the conversation. Today we begin with:

ETHICS: Is there any absolute right and wrong?

Dear Philosophy students: Please post a response to at least two of the following questions/discussions.

1. Is there any standard besides religious ones (God’s Word/the work of the Holy Spirit/the teaching of mature Christians) on which to base our decisions of what is right and wrong? What might that be? Suggest something that might be used as a measure of what’s right and wrong, and discuss whether all people could agree on it and how it could be enforced.
2. Are good and bad unchanging, or might rules of morality change in certain circumstances? First answer this question without referring to any Christian principles. Just try to answer it from logical reasoning or from experience/evidence. Then if you like, you may bring in Scripture after you’ve tried to establish an “objective” answer.
3. Do you personally believe that there can be any solid set of moral guidelines without religion? Explain why or why not. If you think not, then explain how Christianity offers a stable moral compass.
4. How do moral dilemmas function in art? Give an example of a song, movie, poem, play, or novel in which the entire plot or purpose of the work hinges on a significant moral dilemma. This could be either a personal decision a character has to make, or a larger discussion of the value or possibility of traditional morals, etc.
5. What have various philosophers thought about the Ethical Question throughout history? Describe the position taken by at least one major philosopher, and then tell if you agree with him and why or why not.

If you wish, you may bring up further questions for discussion or debate as well. You may bring into this conversation the ethical situations described on your handout this week. Thank you.

Heavenly Heraldry: Lewis's Sehnsucht

I am right now engaged in the writing of a thesis-style paper for my M.A. I post the current introduction, under a working title, for your enjoyment (or something). Comments/critique welcome!

At the end of his sojourn on Perelandra (the planet Venus), the protagonist Ransom sees or otherwise perceives the “Great Dance” in which all things are interrelated in a Dante-esque hierarchy. He watches shifting points of light which represent those facts and figures taught by history: “peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilsations, arts, sciences” (Perelandra 218). These together merge into a complex fabric of meaning:

It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity—only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated (ibid).

It is possible to examine the work of C. S. Lewis, a writer of great variety in both subject-matter and genre, according to the analogue of the Great Dance. On any given journey through his corpus, a discerning reader might pick up one ribbon or thread and trace it through the work as if it were the primary or even the sole idea. Said reader might choose to follow Lewis’s adaptation of the Platonic doctrine of Forms; or his use of Aquinas’ ontological arguments; or his importation of Classical, Norse, and other mythologies; or the idea of Christianity as True Myth; or the resuscitation of Jove and the Ptolemaic cosmology ; or the necessity of Free Will; or the concept of Aslan/Eros/Maleldil/Christ as The Answer ; or a nostalgia for Romantic poetry; or “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction” (Surprised by Joy 18).
This desire or longing (“I call it Joy,” wrote Lewis, ibid) can be considered the (or “a”) center of Lewis’s polymorphous literary consciousness. It is integral to each of the seven other themes enumerated above, and can be seen as the catalyst for each and that common denominator which unites them all. In this paper, I will investigate the varying conceptions of this so-called “Joy” throughout Lewis’s writing, examining its intentional construction and retrospective application in The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy, describing its use as an essential plot element in the fiction and poetry, exploring its centrality to his other essential ideas, glancing at how “Joy” was informed by some of the cultural conversations in which Lewis was engaged, opening out some of the contradictions in his work, and culminating in a close examination of occurrences of the diction of Joy in his newly collected correspondence.

~ Admonit

March poem of the month

Here's another product of my "Poetry Writing in Baroque Forms" course this semester, very much inspired by Donne. Enjoy.

Counterfeit

Cast this selfness out of me, and mar
Me in Your form, that Your hard image raise
Its shining face, and mine, Almighty, raze;
Impressive and impressing Lord of art.

I ring untrue and hollow, like false coinage
Shaped from drossy silver, less than gold,
Slipped from Your saintly pocket-holes,
Creative and creating Lord of change.

Trodden, trampled, mired under shoes,
I lie effaced and formless, waiting grace:
Your crushing fingers and embossing face,
Renaissance and rebirth Lord of new.

Though my metal cannot bear Your weight,
And though it slay me, stamp me with Your shape.

~ Sørina





"Counterfeit" by Sørina Higgins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This means that you can copy and distribute the work if you will not receive any commercial gain; that you can use the work in a new creative way (song lyrics, dramatic production, visual display), again, if you receive no commercial gain; and any other use that does not make you any money--as long as you do not change any of the words of the original text. Also, the author would like to be notified of any uses of her poem. Thank you.