Psychologist deal with the brain, nerves, chemicals, hormones etc, in a way they are more medical… Philosophers like a few critics have always mystified me. Having done the first reading, I went to the library to look up on Martin Heidegger, and found a book called “Beginners Guide To Heidegger” It began by giving brief histories of the other great philosohpers…
These were the “key” points i picked out…
Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”
Probably the basis to everything, including intellectual debates and how critics came about…
Parmenides: “Can we come to know that which does not exist?”
For some strange reason it brings to mind about the MATRIX? i was back home in singapore and attended this strange free philosphy lecture where my friend was attending classes, where the person presenting was asking the audience, “so how do you know that we are all not just living in the MATRIX” (it was the hype of the movie i think…) Always gets me thinking about parallel worlds for some strange reason, and how when you go to different countries some pepole look the same…
Are we actually one person born into many different bodies world wide?
Heraclitus: “How we do we comprehend a world that constantly changes?”
My answer is we may not fully comprehend but we try and learn to cope with it… try in our humanisitic ways to change, overcome, accept what is going on…change the bad if that is possible
Plato:
Theory of Ideas – Everything that exists-books, horses, trees, etc. derives its shape and meaning from its Form. Forms are the perfect, eternal ideas of things that everyday objects copy.
Every object and every idea can be judged by comparison to its original Form. The big problem is how do we know about these Forms if they exist outside time and space?
Plato answered this by stating that every human goes through a process called “anamnesis” multiple cycles of life and death of “bodied and disembodied states.”
During each disembodied state we know the Forms but to our chagrin we forget about them at birth.
Now….see WHO invented words? WHO invented names, categories, how do we know was my friend once asked “How did we know RED is red? And associate it with say danger….”
Rene Descartes (1596-1650):
“Father of modern philosophy”
He did not like uncertainty, we wanted a system.
He began questioning everything through a process called radical doubt.
Examining knowledge derived from senses.
He ruled out mathematics as an absolute form of knowledge
“I think, therefore I am”
Ah…yes, if we did not think we would be dead… or stoned…
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Gave the “thing” a more romantic flair
Nature – he concluded that humans were not cold analytic things but rather creatures isolated from their true natures by the constrains of modern society
Core of the human nature – SELF Backlash- that he rousseau was a deluded idealist I def have to agree with the constrains of modern society bit 
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
John Locke (1632-1776)
David Hume (1711-1776)
Kant (1724-1804)
Proclaimed that Self had innate structures that if used to take in all sensory information.
He came up with Unity, Reality, Substance and Possibility Yes this dude…and Lacan seems to have been creeping up a lot this semester…Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Tided up Kant’s philosophy
TRUTH
Like his denial of absolute truth, Nietzsche rejected conventional moral values
He had what was called will to power
To him every organism lives to increase its life force- or power – and all “truth” claims depend on this will to power
Truth became simply a matter of “interpretation” It is true, but then if everything is a matter of interpretation what is right and wrong??
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
To him truth was subjective
We cannot know anything universal anything that transcends time.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
Believed that scientific knowledge was very useful but despite this utility it did not produce the most important kind of knowledge…
Martin Heidegger – student of Husserl
BEING Is that primordial condition which allows everything else to come into existence.
Contrast it to “The Nothing”, it is the possibility of non-existence of all things literally nothing.
Now Heidegger THE NOTHING is really quite confusing…
if it is because of nothing and there is something then….if we choose to be nothing does that mean we just cease?
this may or may not help…
