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Still learning from my students about the history of philosophy

Here are many … errr … insights from my students, collected from exams and essays over the years. Updated this semester. I offer you:

A Student History of Philosophy

(Being a compilation of student research, gently edited by Stephen Hicks, Rockford College)

Is philosophy a waist of time?

Ethical debates have been around for a long time, but nobody seems to have any answers. Ethnics are very important. Basically, what you do with your life comes down to your personal ethnics. For the world to be good means having strong Altruistic people to help the society survive in this doggy dog world.

Socrates started democracy in Greece so he is a democrat. When Socrates was in court he was blamed for piety and disturbing the youth. Melekus is the accuser in the case of Socrates. Another of the charges brought up against him was pity. Socrates argues that the son is not a god but simply a burning rock in the sky. So Socrates was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

To Socrates, having a good life meant dying. Socrates was completely opposed to the Sophists. Not only did the Sophists not have reasons, they also did not have reasons. Sophists felt that there were no real reasons.

For Aristotle, the virtuous person can be known as temperature, someone who is under complete control. Aristotle thinks the Principle of Noncontradiction is an axiom is because it is one.

In the Bible, God created the heavens and the universe in seven days, so there are seven planets. (Seven is a big thing in the Bible.)

The existence of God is questionable since evil does have some good points to make. The greatest gift is to be in God’s presents, but when we are in God’s presents we should not think about ourselves. John Hick rebukes the concept that God would not allow suffering if he existed in the third paragraph of his essay. Because of evil there is said to be another force in the universe—a dark force. His name is Satin.

Mysticism is the direct and immediate experience of the scared.

In feudal times, jobs were passed on from fathers to sons. For example, if your father was a priest, you would probably become a priest too.

Priests vow poverty and while money isn’t everything a priest should be able to have a little of life’s enjoyments just like every other human bean. Priests also take the vow of celibacy. On the conventional view, sex without the possibility of recreation is immoral. Priests want to sustain themselves from sex so they can have eternal childhood in the Lord’s eyes. One thing religions teach is that you should prey regularly.

Some people base their life solely on religion, which may be perceived as silly, but imagine how lost they would be if they didn’t have something so vital. That would be like me going without coffee.

In modern times Decarrt explains why reason is wrong. He shows that I am a real thing but what kinda of thing? Descartes proved that God exists in Medication III. The argument is sound, me being from the South and a firm believer in the Lord.

Galileo was on trial for his blasphemic saying the Earth is the center of the universe. Galileo had people follow his exact word, and those people were called the people of Galilee.

Justice is really a double bladed sword: at times it is a warm blanket keeping you safe and at other times an uncontrollable juggernaut ready to mow you over.

Basically, we need to decide what’s best for society as a hole. That is the purpose of laws. Some states have laws that if broken cause one to be a criminal. Power definitely corrupts; both power and corruption are all too often abused.

In our country, the Deceleration of Independence sets the basic rights and laws. Some people have the right to liberty, but are unable to exorcize it. Shall I go against the laws put forth by my four fathers, who wrote, “All men are entitled to certain unalienable rights”?

Capital punishment is the death penalty for a crime that dates back to the beginning of civilization. Some people believe in capital punishment because of the “eye for an eye” theory: for instance, if you kill me, I should be able to kill you. Capital punishment is mostly about whether persons who have been executed will commit further offenses if and when released. Cruel and unusual punishment is included in the Constitution. Though capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment because it makes people feel like they are less of a person. But really, the death penalty is not necessary because it is not needed.

In modern times, Utilitarianism is the doctrine that we should all strive to pleasure our neighbors. John Stuart Mill said that even if what is being said is true, it is still wrong to censor it. Of course, we cannot take it for granite that all of Mill’s assumptions are true.

According to Freud, the USA became a frightened country after the terrible events of 9/11. Freud opposes the tabula razor theory of human nature. According to Freud, the child has lust during the breast-feeding stage. Eventually his mother stops, and his lust is suppressed until his adultery stage.

Marx says the broughers who employ the workers can and do enslave the proliterate workers. So Marx promoted socialism which operates the production of products produced by the society. Marx believed socialism was the best form of government for the world after World War II. Communist Russia failed because of Mises and Hayek’s lack of knowledge. Socialism is an ideal, but come on now! Let’s be realistic!

Against Marx, Rand advocates free enterprise and selfishness. The rich are able to create new jobs and hand them out to the poor, which takes many poor people out of poverty and also gives the rich something to do. She said that minimum wages increases raise the cost of labor, so workers may lose their fridge benefits. But her philosophy is sort of controversial, in a sense. She commits the fallacy of hoc poc der doc.

[Version 4. Updated December 2010.]

Posted in History of Philosophy and Humor and Philosophy 13 hours, 35 minutes ago at 10:21 am.

2 comments

I’ve been experimenting more with Gmail after my disappointing Zimbra experience (I haven’t totally written Zimbra off though, I’m just letting it mature in the cask for a while – the ultimate winner will be the first to allow offline use of Contacts and provide reliable contact synchronization). Anyway, aside from Gmail not having a decent way to delete a message without get kicked back to the message list (instead of just going to the next message like every other email client on the planet, there is also the annoying fact that in Gmail there’s no button to just view messages with no label. In their wisdom, the Google people no doubt think that I’ll be using their wonderful search engine to just search and find the messages I want and locate the relevant message. But as the great Donald Rumsfeld said, there are known unknowns (I can search for those) and unknown unknowns like the credit card bill that I totally forgot about and which I could search for if I knew I had forgotten about it, but then I wouldn’t have forgotten about it and wouldn’t need to search for it now would I?

So the way you find emails that have fallen through the cracks in Gmail is simple, but os so cumbersome. You have to do a negative search for every label you use. That is, you look for messages not labelled Labe1 and not labelled Label2 and so on. There’s no way around this.

If you do this more than once, typing in all your labels in the arcane syntax Gmail uses gets old. So what I’ve done is simply create a shortcut, which you can do quite easily and it works up until you add a new label, but then it’s just a simple matter of editing the bookmark.

So first, you have a full syntax and a compact syntax and, as far as I can tell, the compact syntax does not work with multi-word labels. So if you have Gmail labels with spaces in them, you have to use the full syntax and substitute hyphens for spaces.

So let’s say you have the following labels:

1. Label1
2. Label2
3. Label Three
4. Label Four

First, we want to exclude all messages that have those labels. To exclude a labeled message from your search, you use the -label: operator.

For the single-word labels, we’ll use the short syntax. This allows you to group terms within curly braces without repeating the “-label:” qualifier. So it looks like this in your Gmail search box

-label:{Label1 Label2}

Simple as that. Now for the multi-word labels, in theory as I read the instructions, I merely need to add quotes around the terms, and they should work within the curly braces. Not so for me. If you create a filter and look at the test search, that’s not how it does it either. So based on that, what I found worked for Label Three and Label Four was:

-label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

So the entire search, with both single-word labels and multi-word labels, looks like this

-label:{Label1 Label2} -label:Label-Three -label:Label-Four

Now, that will create a URL that looks like this

http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/-label%3A%7BLabel1+Label2%7D+-label%3ALabel-Three+-label%3ALabel-Four

Now you can save this as a bookmark or shortcut and instantly access your unlabeled Gmail messages. Sometimes Gmail will add a zx parameter to your URL that looks like zx=afeoasdxou3swf that is just a random string so that if your ISP is caching data, it will see this as a unique URL and won’t give you cached data for Gmail. Since this effectively creates a single-use URL, if that appears in your URL when you do your search, you should edit it out before saving the bookmark.

Note that if a message has two labels and you are only excluding one of those, the message will still show up in your search. So if you have something labeled Label1 and Label5, and you use the search above, it will still show up in your results.

Also, sometimes a conversation that is labeled shows up unless you relabel the entire conversation, because one message is unlabeled or is still in the Inbox or whatever. If you select the whole conversation in the list view and label it, that takes care of that issue.

Tagged with: gmail • search

Filed under: Software and Computing • Web Fun

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