B. K. Silverthorne's List: Philosophy

• Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience  ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and  volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including  linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically  involves what Husserl called "intentionality", that is, the directedness of  experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is  a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian  phenomenology, our experience is directed toward — represents or "intends" —  things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.  These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct  from the things they present or mean.

• Holmes's correspondence offers no shortage of examples of this disdain. About  a pacifist in World War I, he wrote, "What damned fools people are who believe  things. . . . All 'isms seem to me silly-but this hyperaethereal respect for  human life seems perhaps the silliest of all." In another letter, he wrote, "I  see no reason for attributing to a man a significance different in kind from  that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."

   

  He took a similarly jaundiced view of the concepts of rights, truth, and  justice. "All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man." Rights were  merely "what a given crowd will fight for." Truth was "what I can't help  believing. . . . I can't help preferring port to ditch- water, but I see no  ground for supposing that the cosmos shares my weakness." And de gustibus non  est disputandum. "[W]hen men differ in taste as to the kind of world they want  the only thing to do is go to work killing."

   

  Yet Holmes eventually came to appreciate aspects of the wartime experience  that had snuffed out his ideals. The highest expression of that appreciation  came in "The Soldier's Faith," an address Holmes gave at Harvard on Memorial Day  in 1895: "I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe.  But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do  not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt,  and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw  away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he  little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under  tactics of which he does not see the use." Teddy Roosevelt, of course, loved the  speech.

• had noticed for a long time that it was necessary sometimes to agree with  opinions about ethics which I knew to be quite uncertain, even though they were  indubitable, as I said earlier; but since I wanted to devote myself solely to  the search for truth, I thought that I should act in the opposite manner, and  reject as absolutely false anything about which I could imagine the slightest  doubt, so that I could see if there would not remain after all that something in  my belief which could be called absolutely certain. So, because our senses  sometimes trick us, I tried to imagine that there was nothing which is the way  that we imagine it; and since there are people who are mistaken about the  simplest matters of geometry, making mistakes in logic, and supposing that I was  as likely to make mistakes as anyone else, I rejected as false all the  reasonings that I had considered as valid demonstrations. Finally, considering  that all our thoughts which we have when we are awake can also come to us when  we are sleeping without a single one of them being true, I resolved to pretend  that everything I had ever thought was no more true that the illusions in my  dreams. But I immediately realized that, though I wanted to think that  everything was false, it was necessary that the "me" who was doing the thinking  was something; and noticing that this truth--I think, therefore I am--was so  certain and sure that all the wildest suppositions of skeptics could not shake  it, I judged that I could unhesitatingly accept it as the first principle of the  philosophy for which I was seeking.

• Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the  interconnection of all things with one another
• And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to  know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing  things as they really are. .. What is at issue is the conversion of the mind  from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which  we shall call true philosophy. .. When the mind's eye rests on objects  illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and  functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and  decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs  shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.
• In the late seventeenth century the term 'idealist' was used by Leibniz to refer  to a philosopher who gave priority to the human mind, who attached lesser  importance to the senses and who opposed materialism. He referred to Plato as  'the greatest of the idealists', associating the Greek philosopher with doubts  about the existence of a material world. Kant sought to mediate and, in his way,  overcome the dispute between the idealists and the realists. (One Hundred  Twentieth Century Philosophers, 1998)

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• The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) postulates that thought and thinking  take place in a mental language. This language consists of a system of  representations that is physically realized in the brain of thinkers and has a  combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are  causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations.  According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that  has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking  thus consists in syntactic operations defined over such representations. Most of  the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain  certain empirical phenomena like prod

• Naturalism and LOTH

   

  One of the most attractive features of LOTH is that it is a central component  of an ongoing research program in philosophy of psychology to naturalize the  mind, to give a theoretical framework in which the mind could naturally be seen  as part of the physical world without postulating irreducibly psychic entities,  events, processes or properties

• The Language of Thought Hypothesis is so-called because of (B): token mental  representations are like sentences in a language in that they have a  syntactically and semantically regimented constituent structure. Put  differently, the mental representations that are the direct "objects" of  attitudes are structurally complex symbols whose complexity lends itself to a  syntactic and semantic analysis. This is also why the LOT is sometimes called  Mentalese.
• According to LOTH, when someone believes that P, there is a trivial  sense in which the immediate "object" of one's belief can be said to be a  complex symbol, a sentence in one's LOT physically realized in the  neurophysiology of one's brain, that has both syntactic structure and a semantic  content, namely the proposition that P
• So, contrary to the orthodox view that takes the belief relation as a dyadic  relation between an agent and a proposition, LOTH takes it to be a triadic  relation among an agent, a Mentalese sentence, and a proposition. The Mentalese  sentence can then be said to have the proposition as its semantic/intentional  content. It is only in this (perhaps indirect) sense can it be said that what is  believed is a proposition, and thus the object of the attitude.
• Functionalist Materialism. Mental representations so characterized are, at some  suitable level, functionally characterizable entities that are realized by the  physical properties of the subject having propositional attitudes
• Officially, it is silent about the nature of some mental phenomena such as  experience, qualia,^[4] sensory processes, mental images, visual and auditory  imagination, sensory memory, perceptual pattern-recognition capacities,  dreaming, hallucinating, etc.

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• Jerry Fodor offered a bold hypothesis: the medium of thought is an innate  language that is distinct from all spoken languages and is semantically  expressively complete.

• Representational Realism   

   

  To be a representational realist is to think  that some, many or most mental state attributions that involve apparent content,  e.g., the belief that there is no justice in poverty, correspond to mental  states that are related to explicit tokens with the expressed content. That is,  what makes the above attribution true is that the mind/brain actually possesses  a representation that means that there is no justice in poverty.   

• • Dualism. Justin used platonic terms but not alwas with platonic meaning. Clement of Alexandria started it: "philosophy brought the Greek mind to Christ, just as the Law brought the Hebrew to Him." Hebuilt on the Neoplatonic mettaphysics. Christians now worhsip the same God as Plato. This was passed or Origen, that sin was negative, aprivation (man a victim of sin rather than responsilibel cause). To the caue of Evil, it became a choice between sin as substance or essence and the choice of the individual, where man is a victim or responbile party.

• Empiricism, on the other hand, had sought a solution to the same question by  beginning with sense impresssions, which it declared to be copies of the object  perceived and hence valid for a knowledge of the world of nature. However, it  had not succeeded in demonstrating the universality and necessity of such  knowledge.