Love of Lights

One of the arguments for the claim that we are not our bodies but are something else is that the body and the external world is objective and publicly accessible, whereas the way we feel, what it's like to be who you are, is subjective and private -- only you have privileged access to your mental states. Invoke a little bit of Leibniz's law here, and you have to say they're two different things because they have different properties. Invoke a little bit of Descartes' method of doubt there, and you conclude that you are essentially the mind (a thinking thing, a res cogitans), because you cannot doubt that you think (ego sum, ego existo; cogito ergo sum), whereas you can doubt all the other things. I'm not convinced by this though. I don't think the external world or the body is necessarily publicly accessible in the way that people often assume it is. I agree that a lot of it is -- we can see birds, we can see people's skin, we can touch the bark of the tre...

I guess what I want from Philosophy is the ability to stir the passions of people -- an interesting way, a way that appeals to myself too, to look at the world and understand it. I don't mean I have to move people; I'm not so much about moving people. That's politics. I just want to see the world in a more clear, helpful way, without frill and pomp, but still with beauty and majesty, and I guess that's what I want to get out of philosophy and eventually get into my writing. I want to touch people's passions in such a way that they see differently, but this has nothing to do with moving people, or making them do anything. It's an internal thing. I'm trying to figure out the most moving regions of philosophy. Philosophy is very wide, and much of it is interesting, but there comes a point when you have to figure out what it is you're studying it for, and focus more on that area, otherwise you will only be weak in many areas, as opposed to strong or pro...

'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit when you aim, it'll just be luck.' That's from Salinger's story Seymour: An Introduction. I only read those words today, but I've been thinking about the topic of aiming and Aiming for a while now, since I wrote my last post here in fact, about erasing my resolutions. There seems to be two kinds of aiming -- in the story, Buddy distinguishes them with capitalisation: Aiming and aiming. "aiming" is very self-consciously considering how to achieve, focusing on the target with extra cognitive baggage laden, sure to distract and make you miss. You're thinking about the specific mechanics, you're thinking about how it will look when you achieve, you're thinking about what impression you will give to the world having done it. "Aiming", on the other hand, is, as I interpret it anyway, removing the super self-conscious element, and do...

God, I've been falling behind on these, and this is going to be shitty and rushed, just so I can get it out, which is awful, but I guess that is the nature of these things. I read a short 10,000 word essay called The Divided Brain and The Search For Meaning in late January by a lecturer who came to my university and spoke about how our brain physiology affects our understanding of the world, and it was a brilliant lecture, my favourite of the year. The idea is that the left-hemisphere 'is' representationally-minded, substituting the richness of the world for symbols and icons in order to understand more quickly, breaking down the bigger picture into its smaller parts, in a word, logical. The right-hemisphere 'is' more inclusive of the wholes, understands all-encompassing ideas that the left hemisphere has trouble with,  deals with empathy and the more detailed recognition of facts about life, like human faces and the details of nature, i.e. not iconastic lik...

My first review of the 26 reviews challenge will be on the Meno. While many things are addressed in the Meno--including the theory of recollection and the distinction between true belief and knowledge--in my review I will focus only on the central question of the dialogue: of whether virtue can be taught. So, basically, this dude Meno wants to know if virtue can be taught, and Socrates is all: "Hold up, Meno, how am I supposed to talk about virtue when I don't know what virtue is? Let's see what virtue is first." So they have a little Socratic back-and-forth. First Meno is all: "Virtue depends on the subject: virtue is different for man, woman, child, slave..." But Socrates isn't having that. Socrates is all: "Well, they've got to have something in common, if you're gonna call them virtues for each one. There's got to be some underlying form that links them all, as, for example, there is some underlying unity that allows you ...

I  adore people very much and I'm sure that it's my downfall. I want to impress them and I want them to love me, which is the natural response to something you respect and love. We seek reciprocity and turn bitter when we don't receive it. One of the great acknowledged virtues, however, is moderation -- moderation of pleasures that are in danger of becoming vicious. And the adoration of people is one of these. An excessive adoration of people is the perfect breeding ground for detrimental expectations, as mentioned before; you will expect to be adored back, but nowhere in the act of adoring people is this logically entailed, and so you have no true right to expect it. But you will expect it, because that's the natural instinct of man, to expect something in return. A lot of people talk about training yourself to love people without the expectation of love in return, but I suspect this is unrealistic, so as an alternative combat to this vice of excessive anthropic ad...

Before the train of thought slips my mind, I thought I'd make a quick post about it. Recently a few thoughts have been permeating my mind, some inspired by Paul Graham's essays, some by my general anxiety and fear that I'm not interesting because I don't have any particular interests, that I'm not as smart as I'd like to be because I can't find anything particular to be interested in. One of the aforementioned Paul Graham essays is called 'Copy What You Like' which in a way answers my fears and worries about not being interesting, not knowing what I'm interested in. I simply need to mentally trace the things I enjoy down to their core principles, schools of thought, and subject matters and then chase those. I'm currently in my first year of university in the UK, so I've unfortunately already specialised in the fields of Philosophy and Italian (language and culture), but it's no massive problem because I think I've chosen correct...

1. I hate the strict restrictions on freedom (of travel, specifically) on people simply because of where they were born. I wish the world's immigration systems were more human -- effective, but still understanding. Unfortunately, they're not, and I can see very little that I personally could do about it, so I must unwillingly acquiesce to the state of things. 2. Experience of the world is fundamentally first-person. Reading, analysing, interpreting art, literature, and philosophy must also be done from a first-person perspective: you can only see in a piece of art, or understand in some kind of theory, that which you can understand; beyond that, there is nothing to be seen or found. Your understanding can be expanded, but there is only ever so much as your understanding, and your understanding is perfect as regards you. The world that you experience is the true world that exists; the art that you interpret is the true art's meaning. Some might ask by way of response: ...

I was thinking about you the other hour and how by degrees of consideration I have begun to understand the pressure you once and possibly still do feel to achieve greatly, and how you consequently personally desire to do greatly, regardless perhaps of the impracticalities of such desires. I considered my own situation, as one must do in order to understand another, with the express desire to pinpoint the source of this endless undercurrent of guilt that courses through me in the knowledge that I am not doing all that I should be. I thought of Sartre who says that feelings such as guilt, anxiety, and apprehension presuppose the Other, that is: other people, and how if the consideration of the Other was absent, so too would anxiety, guilt, or apprehension. To me, at least compared to you, it always seemed to me that I do my A levels and I study what I study for myself, and that my grades reflect myself and that the sphere encompasses me and me only. But that was naturally, clearly, and d...

I need to note something here, lest I forget: Passion should take precedence over reason. By which I mean, if in a slurry of thought, I figure that something seems right and true, but then my passions, my sentiments, later contradict that strongly, I must never dismiss my passions in favour of reason: I must contemplate my contradictory passion, and in light of it, apply it to my future reasoning. This is so because everything of importance is first based upon passions -- our passions are our intellectual foundations, and if they move or slide, we must learn to build upon their new positioning. Passion, however, is merely a foundation and is only there for us to build upon it a strong edifice of reason. And while, yes, one shouldn't ignore ones passions, it's true at the same time that your edifice of reason might naturally move your passions to align with it, and that is okay. Passions must only take precedence over reason when your passions and rationality are juxtaposed ...