Use the ideas of Robert Nozik, Plato, The Skeptics, Descartes, Karl Pearson, and Socrates to answer the following questions:
Can a life be meaningful if it is fake or counterfeit? Can "you" be real, while the life you are living is not?
In The Truman Show, Christof believes that humans would rather live in a safe cell than seek freedom in an unknown world. Do you agree or disagree? Why? Which option would you prefer?
In what ways is Christof like God? In what ways is he different?
What does American Beauty tell us about our responsibility for our own happiness? Is our happiness completely within our control?
Describe the types of transcendence that the characters, Lester and his wife Carolyn, in American Beauty are trying to attain.
Relate Lester and his wife to the figures in Plato's Allegory Of The Cave. Give an example of a point in American Beauty when a character acted like one of the permanently chained prisoners in the cave. Have you yourself ever acted like those prisoners?
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Nozik and Descartes
Wikipedia post about Robert Nozik's Experience Machine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_Machine
Think about how this experience machine is similar to the life Christof created for Truman in the town of Seahaven.
In his Meditations On First Philosophy, Descartes locked himself in a romm and imagined that the entire world, outside of himself, was an illusion created by a cleaver and malicious demon. He concluded that if such a demon existed, all assumptions would have to be called into question. (Kimberly A. Blessing)
"The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands, or eyes, or flesh, or blood, or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things" (Descartes)
Descartes concluded that the demon could never make him doubt his own existence as a thinking being. "What am I?-A thing that thinks." (Kimberly A. Blessing)
What are the similarities between Christof and Descartes' "cleaver and malicious demon?"
Is Truman's struggle to understand his world similar to the struggle that Descartes undertook during his meditations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_Machine
Think about how this experience machine is similar to the life Christof created for Truman in the town of Seahaven.
In his Meditations On First Philosophy, Descartes locked himself in a romm and imagined that the entire world, outside of himself, was an illusion created by a cleaver and malicious demon. He concluded that if such a demon existed, all assumptions would have to be called into question. (Kimberly A. Blessing)
"The sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands, or eyes, or flesh, or blood, or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things" (Descartes)
Descartes concluded that the demon could never make him doubt his own existence as a thinking being. "What am I?-A thing that thinks." (Kimberly A. Blessing)
What are the similarities between Christof and Descartes' "cleaver and malicious demon?"
Is Truman's struggle to understand his world similar to the struggle that Descartes undertook during his meditations?
Read This: From Fullerton pages 37 and 38
But what shall we say of [the plain man's] claim that the tree is really green, and only looks blue under certain circumstances? Is it not just as true that the tree only looks green under certain circumstances? Is color any part of the touch thing? Is it ever more than a sign of the touch thing? How can one color be more real than another?
Now, we may hold to Berkeley's analysis and maintain that, in general, the real world, as contrasted with the apparent, means to us the world that is revealed in experiences of touch and movement; and yet we may admit that the word "real" is sometimes used in rather different senses.
It does not seem absurd for a woman to Say: This piece of silk really is yellow; it only looks white under this light. We all admit that a white house may look pink under the rays of the setting sun, and we never call it a pink house. We have seen that it is not unnatural to say: That tree is really green; it is only its distance that makes it look blue.
When one reflects upon these uses of the word "real," one recognizes the fact that, among all the experiences in which things are revealed to us, certain experiences impress us as being more prominent or important or serviceable than certain others, and they come to be called real. Things are not commonly seen by artificial light; the sun is not always setting; the tree looks green when it is seen most satisfactorily. In each case, real color of the thing is the color that it has under circumstances that strike us as normal or as important. We cannot say that we always regard as most real that aspect under which we most commonly perceive things, for if a more unusual experience is more serviceable and really gives us more information about the thing, we give the preference to that. Thus we look with the naked eye at a moving speck on the table before us, and we are unable to distinguish its parts. We place a microscope over the speck and perceive an insect with all its members. The second experience is the more unusual one, but would not every one say: Now we perceive the thing _as it is_?
Now, we may hold to Berkeley's analysis and maintain that, in general, the real world, as contrasted with the apparent, means to us the world that is revealed in experiences of touch and movement; and yet we may admit that the word "real" is sometimes used in rather different senses.
It does not seem absurd for a woman to Say: This piece of silk really is yellow; it only looks white under this light. We all admit that a white house may look pink under the rays of the setting sun, and we never call it a pink house. We have seen that it is not unnatural to say: That tree is really green; it is only its distance that makes it look blue.
When one reflects upon these uses of the word "real," one recognizes the fact that, among all the experiences in which things are revealed to us, certain experiences impress us as being more prominent or important or serviceable than certain others, and they come to be called real. Things are not commonly seen by artificial light; the sun is not always setting; the tree looks green when it is seen most satisfactorily. In each case, real color of the thing is the color that it has under circumstances that strike us as normal or as important. We cannot say that we always regard as most real that aspect under which we most commonly perceive things, for if a more unusual experience is more serviceable and really gives us more information about the thing, we give the preference to that. Thus we look with the naked eye at a moving speck on the table before us, and we are unable to distinguish its parts. We place a microscope over the speck and perceive an insect with all its members. The second experience is the more unusual one, but would not every one say: Now we perceive the thing _as it is_?
There Will Be No Test Friday
There will be no test on Friday, April 23rd. Instead we will start watching the next movie.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Reading Assignment, Monday April 19
Please read Section 19, Things and Their Appearances, in Fullerton. Those are pages 36 and 37.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Plato: The Allegory Of The Cave
Here is a link to a page with a section of Plato's Republic called The Allegory Of The Cave.
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html
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