Monday, November 06, 2006
History of Philosophy in Sixty Seconds!
A radio program I like to listen to at work through internet-casting is called Philosophy Talk, moderated by two Stanford philosophy professors who cover a wide variety of interesting topics. Back in August, they did a show on the future of philosophy, but first they took a look back at the history of philosophy. To help them in this endeavor, they enlisted the help of Ian Schoales, the 60 second philosopher. (He is a regularly recurring segment of the show.) Here's what he came up with:
There may, in fact, be a hippopotamus in this room; the arrow will never reach the target; you can't step into the same river twice; the unexamined life is not worth living; if there are no absolutes, the particulars have no meaning; you cannot conceive the many without the one; behold, human beings living in an underground den--like ourselves, they see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another which the fire throws onto the opposite wall of the cave; necessity is the mother of invention; nature does nothing uselessly; a whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end; the universe is change; life is an opinion; love and do what you like; good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good; perfection of moral virtue does not only take away the passions, but regulates them; God is that, that which nothing greater can be thought; one should not increase beyond what is necessary the number of entities required to explain anything; life is brutish, nasty, and short; do not weep, do not wax indignant, understand ther is no hope unmingled with fear and no fear unmingled with hope; cogito ergo sum; the ghost in the machine; this is the best of all possible worlds; to be is to be perceived; the greatest good for the greatest number; if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than if they had the power to be justified in silencing mankind; all wealth is the product of labour; nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; tabula rasa; the supposition that the future resembles the past is not founded on arguments but is derived entirely from habit; every individual neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it--he intends only his own gain and he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; all our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason--there is nothing higher than reason; from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs; the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation; if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you; those who do no remember their past are condemned to repeat it; philosophy is possible as a rigorous science at all only through pure phenomenology; the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it; how do you know there's no hippopotamus in the room; before considering the question of what we should do, we ponder this: how must we think; the banality of evil; hell is other people; we are condemned to be free; life has become the ideology of its own absence; normality is death; the immediate concept of truth is that at first it admits there is no such thing as absolute, pure truth; the new is not fashion, it is a value; if the highest things are unknowable, then the highest virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom; no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines; in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating; to pretend, I actually do the thing--I have therefore only pretended to pretend; is there a hippopotamus in the room, or are you just glad to see me?
Try to say that all at once in a compressed time frame! Whew!
Oh yeah--there's an election tomorrow. If the Democrats lose again, #@$%#&$^# !!!
There may, in fact, be a hippopotamus in this room; the arrow will never reach the target; you can't step into the same river twice; the unexamined life is not worth living; if there are no absolutes, the particulars have no meaning; you cannot conceive the many without the one; behold, human beings living in an underground den--like ourselves, they see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another which the fire throws onto the opposite wall of the cave; necessity is the mother of invention; nature does nothing uselessly; a whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and end; the universe is change; life is an opinion; love and do what you like; good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good; perfection of moral virtue does not only take away the passions, but regulates them; God is that, that which nothing greater can be thought; one should not increase beyond what is necessary the number of entities required to explain anything; life is brutish, nasty, and short; do not weep, do not wax indignant, understand ther is no hope unmingled with fear and no fear unmingled with hope; cogito ergo sum; the ghost in the machine; this is the best of all possible worlds; to be is to be perceived; the greatest good for the greatest number; if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than if they had the power to be justified in silencing mankind; all wealth is the product of labour; nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; tabula rasa; the supposition that the future resembles the past is not founded on arguments but is derived entirely from habit; every individual neither intends to promote the public interest nor knows how much he is promoting it--he intends only his own gain and he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; all our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding and ends with reason--there is nothing higher than reason; from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs; the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation; if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you; those who do no remember their past are condemned to repeat it; philosophy is possible as a rigorous science at all only through pure phenomenology; the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it; how do you know there's no hippopotamus in the room; before considering the question of what we should do, we ponder this: how must we think; the banality of evil; hell is other people; we are condemned to be free; life has become the ideology of its own absence; normality is death; the immediate concept of truth is that at first it admits there is no such thing as absolute, pure truth; the new is not fashion, it is a value; if the highest things are unknowable, then the highest virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom; no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines; in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating; to pretend, I actually do the thing--I have therefore only pretended to pretend; is there a hippopotamus in the room, or are you just glad to see me?
Try to say that all at once in a compressed time frame! Whew!
Oh yeah--there's an election tomorrow. If the Democrats lose again, #@$%#&$^# !!!
