j a n e t

Trying to come to terms with Philosophy. With little success.

I Kant understand it, although I can see why people think philosophy is easy and a pretty bullshit kind of topic. I have to admit it is pretty interesting in bite-size quotes like this:

"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."

"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end."

"By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man."

"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."

"I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief."

"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."

(irrelevant) I like the one on animals, because I remember me in secondary 3/4 giving a speech during English class about how I would fall for a man who loves animals . LOL. I remembered saying how it is so nice to see Peng Guan caring and feeding cats and how a man is kind if they bothered to care for something less than human.

I never once cared for Philosophy, and believe that I would never choose to take such a subject even though I've been exposed to many bible study classes and preachings. My dislike for Philosophy sort of deepened when my ex-enemy exclaimed his love for it, saying he wishes to do Philosophy after NS and carrying a thick novel of Ayn Rand instead of a bible, everywhere.

To me, philosophers are people who are just so quarrelsome, with too much of time in their hands, thinking of theories much like building castles in the air, and are almost hypocritical. They are self-absorbed with beliefs that everyone should agree with their theories and treat them with utmost importance. People who do not agree with them or find as much passion for their subject-matter would be condemned as ignorant, stubborn and silly.

And sometimes these philosophers can be such emo freaks, generalizing the whole world to be lowly-minded people and being constantly judgmental, waiting to be disappointed in mankind and getting themselves proven right. Look at this quote by the same person who quote all the above quotes: "Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination" It makes no sense to profess to know so much, only to be so critically unhappy all the time.

That being said, my detest for it is stumbling me in some way and killing me, yet pushing me to "prove myself wrong" that I should destroy the very thing that I hate by being good at it. Sometimes I really just want to succumb and walk out on Philosophy... as much as I like to walk out on people whom I dislike. sigh.

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Am googling on some key terms used in philosophy and shall put them up here to give myself a somewhat vague reminder what philosophy is about:

• A priori is Latin for "from the former" or "from before"
• The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" (skhēma), which means shape, or more generally, plan.

"Philosophers often create their own vocabularies by giving special meanings to ordinary terms and phrases."

"But, as civilization advanced, two parts of philosophy became so powerful in their own right that they separated off, claiming for themselves the status of independent disciplines. Mathematics was the first, and split off very early in the game; science (or natural philosophy, as it was called even into the nineteenth century) was the second, splitting off much later. To modern philosophy is left whatever questions these two disciplines cannot solve (at least at a given time), including not only questions that are traditionally thought to be beyond the two (e.g. "What is the meaning of life?"), but also theoretical questions at their fringes (e.g. "Can natural selection operate at the species level?") and conceptual questions at their foundations (e.g. "What is science?"). Philosophy, of course, is best known for the first class of questions, which includes some of the most difficult and important questions there are, such as whether or not there is a god, how one can know anything at all, and how a person ought to live."

"The four main branches of philosophy are logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics:
Logic is the attempt to codify the rules of rational thought. Logicians explore the structure of arguments that preserve truth or allow the optimal extraction of knowledge from evidence. Logic is one of the primary tools philosophers use in their inquiries; the precision of logic helps them to cope with the subtlety of philosophical problems and the often misleading nature of conversational language.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. Epistemologists ask, for instance, what criteria must be satisfied for something we believe to count as something we know, and even what it means for a proposition to be true.
Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things. Metaphysicians ask what kinds of things exist, and what they are like. They reason about such things as whether or not people have free will, in what sense abstract objects can be said to exist, and how it is that brains are able to generate minds.
Ethics is the study of the nature of right and wrong and good and evil, in terms both of considerations about the foundations of morality, and of practical considerations about the fine details of moral conduct. Moral philosophers may investigate questions as sweeping as whether there are such things moral facts at all, or as focused as whether or not the law ought to accord to rape victims the right to an abortion."

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zoning off.....