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[General TSAR]

I mean, don't get me wrong I'm having fun. But this philosophy class just makes me want to scream

Part of life is suffering through nonsense, consider the class to be a preview of the rest of your life. 

 

Just sit through it, who knows you might find something fascinating about it. 

[Fidite Nemini]

How is it not interesting?

 

Philosophy is one of the more hardcore subjects you can possibly have, doubly so because it is a very argumentative subject rather than one you just imprint in your memory and I remember the debates we had back in school were already intense (and unimaginably invigorating!), so I can only imagine how the arguments could be at a higher educational level!

[General TSAR]

What Fidite Nemini said, philosphy requires you to get outside your safezone and examine your interpretations of reality with an objective sight.

 

It's terrifying to some, but I guarantee you it's worth it especially if your deep rooted beliefs can survive a test of skepticism.

This is depressing.

Well this life is pretty much that, the next one will be more chill IMO.

[DEUGH Man]

This is depressing.

Just wait until that boring and irritating thing lasts 8+ hours, and its the only way you'll stay few. Don't worry, you'll be to tired to notice. X_X

[Fidite Nemini]

There's no arguments happening though. The professor just lectures for the entire two and a half hours, then tells us to read from the book as homework.

 

What sort of philosophy prof is that?

[Fidite Nemini]

Idk, but I'm in my second semester(first year) and so far he's the worst prof I have had.

There's no discussion, just him talking. The only time anyone else speaks is to ask a question

 

Well, might be a high bar to set, but why not try coercing him into a debate by disagreeing with a particular philosophical argument he's currently lecturing about? Pulling that off obviously requires knowledge about the particular argument and having a sound counter argument, but really all you need to start a fire is cause the first spark. Might be he's just the kind of prof that's already heard all the half-assed arguments and thus decided not to argue with college plebs anymore, so getting an intelligent argument running could very well get his blood pumping once in a while.

 

 

Because I've never met anyone who dabbles in philosophy that didn't practically orgasm at the chance to have a good argument, this guy would literally be the first.

[mousestalker]

At the professors house? That sounds really controversial.

For my American Pragmatism class it was awesome. Just three students and the professor was visiting from Tulane. He'd cook lunch and we'd have red beans and rice or gumbo or jambalaya and talk for hours. No lectures, just William James.

[leighzard]

I took one philosophy class in college.  Philosophy of Language.  It involved a lot of "thought experiments" that seemed silly to me, because science has already proved they can't happen, making them not speculative, but completely impossible.  The hypothetical is interesting to consider, of course.  "What if Germany had won WWII and conquered all of Europe?" is a great setting for your new post-apocalyptic teen lit novel, but it's not a great basis for an education.

 

I feel you, E-Ro.  I love school (well I was made to love it - my parents wouldn't let me stay home from school unless I provided an organ that had fallen out of my body, or I vomited in the car on the way to school).  I took classes that I thought would find interesting, and by and large, I did.  I rarely missed a class in college even if I knew we were into a less than stellar book for my lit classes.  That philosophy class is the only one I can recall willfully skipping without at least a really bad hangover to use as an excuse.

 

I hope you enjoyed the time off and recharged for when you're forced to go next week.  I drew a lot of stick figure comics in my class.  Try it out.  Might pass the time and it makes it look like you're taking lecture notes.

[Jorji Costava]

I actually teach philosophy as my job, though not on Thursday nights, so no worries.

 

One of the challenges I encounter when I'm teaching is that sometimes, it's tricky to get students to participate after the first few classes. Often times, students are used to getting validation whenever they participate, but that's not always possible to provide in a philosophy class. If a student raises his hand and then just says something very confused, you can't just say, "Well that's intersesting. Thanks Jimmy!" You have to point out why it's confused, or else you're not really teaching them anything. But that tends to discourage further participation, with the student thinking, "I'm stupid; I'd better shut up now." Better teachers have more diplomatic ways of doing this, but seeing as I'm a jerk, I don't.

 

I took one philosophy class in college.  Philosophy of Language.  It involved a lot of "thought experiments" that seemed silly to me, because science has already proved they can't happen, making them not speculative, but completely impossible.  The hypothetical is interesting to consider, of course.  "What if Germany had won WWII and conquered all of Europe?" is a great setting for your new post-apocalyptic teen lit novel, but it's not a great basis for an education.

 

The fact that most philosophical thought experiments can't actually happen might be relevant if philosophers were in the business of making factual, empirical claims about the physical world, but more often than not, philosophers who make use of thought experiments are offering theories about how things ought to be, or trying to clarify concepts like truth, knowledge, etc. For instance, the chances of you ever having your kidney hooked up to a violinist or having a people seed implant itself on the carpet of your home (as in Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion") are basically nil, but how you react to these thought experiments may profoundly inform your views about the morality of abortion.

 

The twin earth thought experiments you probably discussed in your class had a major impact on how most English-speaking philosophers thought about our ability to successfully describe the world through our scientific theories. Today, a plurality (if not majority) of such thinkers describe themselves as naturalists (basically, people who think that what exists is what our best sciences tell us about), and the strange thought experiments you heard helped pave the way for this kind of thinking.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

Cos exams are all about memory.

 

I could recite you the entire thesis behind Marxism, Neo-Marxism, Functiolism, Left Theory, Right Theory, Durkehim's past and a ton of other stuff last year.

 

Now I can hardly tell you what the Neo-Nuclear family is.

 

Face it.

 

School is great for social skills, how to interact with superiors and a tool to utilise for your future.

 

You learn very little in the academics area.

 

Maybe once I get to university this'll change since your focus is on one thing alone.

 

But during my GCSEs and A levels you're so pressured into remembering the next key points for the next exams that you really forget most things once you've passed them so you can focus on the next.

 

That entire paper is your future.

 

There's no way out of it unless you want a sh*tty job at minimum wage.

 

There's A LOT of pressure, so much that I think a lot of adults don't realise this since they forgot about it all.

 

Exactly. Dat memory...

 

And again I had much difficulty reading/researching my studies (crappy situation) and teachers didn't like my style of writing in final exams. I use to get Bs...

 

Yeah, I have new "connections" that can hardly be called "friends". Yet, I doubt they prove useful in the future. My Social Skills... are high but my speaking sucks balls. I may have several "typos" in my speaking every minute and I really need to concentrate when I'm talking to avoid them.
 

[Jorji Costava]

Oh by the way, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions in your philosophy class you think I can help answer (that goes for anyone who happens to read this and is taking a philosophy class).

[leighzard]

The fact that most philosophical thought experiments can't actually happen might be relevant if philosophers were in the business of making factual, empirical claims about the physical world, but more often than not, philosophers who make use of thought experiments are offering theories about how things ought to be, or trying to clarify concepts like truth, knowledge, etc. For instance, the chances of you ever having your kidney hooked up to a violinist or having a people seed implant itself on the carpet of your home (as in Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion") are basically nil, but how you react to these thought experiments may profoundly inform your views about the morality of abortion.

I think that what thought experiments taught me is that I'm a very rigid thinker.

Although now I'm curious about how that kidney thing would work... and what it's supposed to teach me.  Does it change if I already know how to play the violin?

 

I don't remember doing twin earth stuff, but it sounds familiar.  It's been a long time since college, and even longer since high school.  I just have trouble wrapping my head around why we would speculate about things that aren't and cannot be.  I'm fine with out things "ought" to be, and I think ethics lends itself well to this sort of endeavor.  I also think that a lot of what's happening at the newest frontiers of science is, essentially, philosophy.  Biology, physics and computer science in particular come to mind.  Like when does AI become an autonomous, sentient individual and how would know if it had?  The history of philosophy is fascinating too.  I think your point about how thought experiments helped paved the way to new schools of thought is a good one.  It's interesting to see how human perception of our world has evolved over time.  But I don't know why I would spend a class on dogs potentially having fully formed language they can't express, when all the research evidence points to contrary and we already have a human model for the same condition in cases of selective mutism and many motor disorders like CP and ALS.  Basically my beef with philosophy was the specific class I took, and not the discipline as a whole.

 

I'll stop nerding up this thread now.