#Philosophyblr

[dvstgatherer]

cemetery walk / antique edition of a plato in the original greek i was mesmerised by in my favorite place in the city a few months ago

[crazyonce]

books i want to finish reading / rereading before december

[friend-of-wisdom]

93/100 days of productivity

Wednesday, September 4th 2024

Although I did not sleep much during the night, I managed to wake up at 6:30am to go to class. I explained to my professor that I've been dealing with health issues etc and he was very understanding, thankfully! Since his classes are so early, it is even harder to have strengh to go than other classes. But I'm enjoying the class a bit, it's okay. We're diving a bit into phenomenology, so it's worth it, even though the religion part does not interest me. Anyways, here's my day:

went to Philosophy of Religion class

studied phenomenology from the beginning cus I want to understand it very well

re-read a few pages of the book on Philosophy of Religion and annotated it

went grocery shopping

Now I'm watching The Umbrella Academy newest episodes and I might continue studying later, or maybe I'll continue reading Rousseau's On The Social Contract.

[captainsvscaptains]

Battle of the Ships

Round 2 Part 4 Poll 2

Ship of Theseus :

The ship Theseus used to travel back from Crete after slaying the minotaur. Is commemorated and repaired for centuries after.

It's the original ship of Theseus! ...or is it, anymore? If it is, what makes it so? And if it isn't, when did it stop being that?

Temeraire :

"He's a uuhhhhhhh dragon. Almost guaranteed to not be qualified, but I figured I'd take a shot for him; forgive me for the time-wasting.

While he's more of a 'plane' technically I guess, his captain is a navy captain, he's named after the original ship 'Temeraire', and something like 75% at least of the books takes place on/around navy ships... Plus he likes swimming so I guess in a way he's a sea-faring vessel??

As far as looks go; big-ass black dragon."

This ship has Opinions and hates racists and Napoleon Bonaparte.

[thehumanfront]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a novel written by Milan Kundera. The bowler hat is one of its motifs. (rolffimages via Adobe Stock)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If someone offered you a life that repeated itself infinitely, would you take it? Life as we know it is deprived of weight; for every event occurs only once. Thin and fleeting, the present is inscrutable. The future is shrouded by uncertainty. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, favoured repetition: the beauty of necessity. A life of eternal recurrence? Divine!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kunderais a story about the heavy and the light. The heavy signifies fate: the force of being ‘nailed to eternity’, of carrying the ultimate responsibility of our actions by seeing them repeat, their necessity, their reality, and their truth.

The light signifies the present: its weightlessness, ethereality, and the absence of burden.

Which is the correct approach to life: heavy or light? Nietzsche and Parmenides disagree on which is the positive pole.

According to Nietzsche’s eternal return, fate is to be loved. In it we face what is necessary and thereby see beauty. Amor fati!

Parmenides, by contrast, saw splendidness in constancy. He forbade change, let alone a perpetuity of things coming in and out of existence. Reality is unchanging; being cannot be dispelled, regathered, or repeated. Lightness is cherished.

The answer remains ambiguous to us all. Indeed, Kundera’s characters slew between both sides of the dilemma. Though one senses Kundera himself is drawn to the heavy.

Our experience of love (amongst many other things) exemplifies the opposition of heavy and light.

In love you attach yourself to The One: the person with whom you could spend eternity, over and over. Love is therefore heavy: undying and unable to be thinned by repetition. ‘En muss sein!’ Kundera cites Beethoven: ‘It must be so!’ Love is a necessary connection.

Yet, in imagining just one small change to the past, we meet an unbearable lightness. ‘Es könnte auch anders sein,’ writes Kundera: ‘It could just as well be otherwise’.

Life is full of such mysterious oppositions and ambiguities.

[oneandocey]

We are more than sisyphus

To compare us to the figure of old is robbery,

His task is one of monotony yes,

But there is reassurance in that,

No external factors or randomness,

That's not what life is,

Singular as it might sometimes be,

It is chaos incarnate,

We are not damned to a lonesome demise like he is,

Neither do we posess the grace of eternity,

How comforting it would be to just have to push.

[studentbyday]

going through my ReadEra and came across deep work which i hardly ever read. decided to skip to parts that seemed relevant to me instead of reading front to back. and. i love this quote: "I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on the Internet."

it would be nice to achieve that.

ironic that i say that as i type up a tumblr post.

what makes a person feel like they exist?

often, when i'm drowning in schoolwork, i eventually stop feeling like a human. do you know what i'm talking about?

[dkl9]

Pure logical argument weakens claims

In formal logic, the law of addition says that, from true proposition P, you can correctly conclude P∨Q, for any propositions P and Q.

...

P∨Q is weaker (less strict) than just P. This is true, but it's not unique to the law of addition. Every fundamental logical law produces conclusions at most as strong as its inputs, and often weaker.

...

Logical work just helps to interpret the set of worlds your observations accept as options. If pure logic could rule out possible worlds, you might rule out the one true world and not know it, thereby missing the point of valid argument.

Logic is still useful sith a weak claim focused on what we care about (like the mortality of Socrates) is often more useful than a more precise claim with confusingly irrelevant details (like the humanity of Socrates and the mortality of humans).

Applying modus ponens, conjunctive simplification, or syllogism doesn't get rid of the strong input claims P, P∧Q, or P→Q, respectively — they don't diminish your total knowledge — but addition just as well keeps around the original P, and to ignore that is to judge logical laws by different standards.

[ohthehumanities]

29 March 2023

After some drama (and a lot of doctor's visits, oops), I am back and better than ever! Since my last post, I've finished two courses and started a new one (Philosophy for Theology). I'm spending my days on Thomistic metaphysics, cleaning, and a bit of language learning. Although I still value productivity, I'm working on giving myself a lot more leisure time.

Objectives

Stream Mass.

Play piano today.

Outline capstone essay.

Work on final essay.

List books for sale.

[dvstgatherer]

[crazyonce]

new acquisitions after library + bubble tea date

[friend-of-wisdom]

89/100 days of productivity

Monday, August 19th 2024

I have become a THESIS MONSTER AAAAAAAAAA

I actually drank too much coffee while sleep deprived and ended up writing 2 pages of my thesis in like 2 hours (which is a lot for me, really) and have lots of ideas of what to add next, so I'll probably write another 2 pages yet today. That's such progress!! I'm really excited seeing the text come to life. A big thank you to my boyfriend who supports me and cheers me up when i send him a text every 30min saying how many words I wrote of my thesis :D

So, let's start from the beginning: I woke up at 6:30 am to go to class, and it hasn't been as hard as I thought it would be. I'm managing to go to bed around midnight, which is still late but is good enough to survive 2 hours of class. Hopefully it will continue like this or better! I kinda enjoyed waking up early? Yes, I start feeling sleepy when I get home at 10 am but there's so many hours of sun available when one wakes up early. So even if I take a nap, I still have a lot of daytime to enjoy.

After class, at 9am, I went to a store to pick up a usb hub I bought on the internet for my computer, and only then did I go home. Read a chapter of a philosophy / politics book I got from a professor in the subway. It was quite interesting for my research! Spent the next hours at home doing research and writing my thesis.

Then, I did some medical documentation stuff cus i have some appointments to go to. I then read a couple of chapters of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun. Then I went to gym and exercised a little! I am so weak lol I gotta change that... After taking a shower and eating, I played some minecraft, wrote one last paragraph of my thesis, then finished the day watching Seven Samurai with my bf ♡

[glitterishmagnus]

hey there!

i'm not gonna pretend like i'm new here, i've actually spent majority of my adolescence on here so i'm probably older than many of you and that's okay!! i just rediscovered this space as a place in which i could express myself and my various interests, together with my work, my hopes and dreams.

i would love to transform this place into a studyblr/filmblr/philosophyblr/physicsblr/mathblr and much more!!

i hope to become part of this community and maybe interact with many of you!! so, without further ado, here are some facts about myself:

i'm italian pizza pasta mafia

i'm in my first year of university even though i'm much older than what i should be

i'm getting my degree in physics

i suffer from DID, even though i probably won't talk about it much on here for privacy reasons

i'm a classically trained cellist

i study korean

i love humanity and its creations

i'm a leftist

i'm a lesbian

that's about it!! i hope i'm able to make a significant impact on this community, i also hope to be welcomed and find a space to freely express myself on here. thank you for reading, see you super soon!!

[thehumanfront]

Treating madness with reason

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous novel Crime and Punishment Lebeziatnikov witnesses Katerina Ivanovna at her wit’s end. Katerina has consumption (tuberculosis) and recently lost her husband. Now she’s losing her sanity. Lebeziatnikov has heard of a solution: reason. But Katerina just won’t be convinced by any.

‘"She has certainly gone mad!" he said to Raskolnikov, as they went out into the street. "[T]here isn’t a doubt of it. They say that in consumption the tubercles sometimes occur in the brain; it’s a pity I know nothing of medicine. I did try to persuade her, but she wouldn’t listen."’

Lebeziatnikov claims that, although she is ‘out of mind’, Katerina can be restored from her madness if she listens to reason.

‘[W]hat I say is, that if you convince a person logically that he has nothing to cry about, he’ll stop crying. That’s clear. Is it your conviction that he won’t?

‘[D]o you know that in Paris they have been conducting serious experiments as to the possibility of curing the insane, simply by logical argument? One professor there, a scientific man of standing, lately dead, believed in the possibility of such treatment. His idea was that there’s nothing really wrong with the physical organism of the insane, and that insanity is, so to say, a logical mistake, an error of judgment, an incorrect view of things. He gradually showed the madman his error and, would you believe it, they say he was successful?’

Sigmund Freud later wrote something similar. He described, for example, mourning a pathology to be cured. So understood, in the extreme our response to loss, as an experience, is a wishful psychosis and the individual must eventually return to ‘reality’.

'Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. The demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis. Normally, the respect for reality gains the day.'

Perhaps the state of mourning—in being treated as an illness—can be reasoned away, too. I doubt it.  

As for the unwell Katerina, successfully deploying reason on her also seems unlikely. Even Lebeziatnikov had his doubts.

Moreover, Katerina had reasons for her unreasonableness. Reason is a contradiction! The death of her husband, illness, poverty... How does one withstand such arbitrary wickedness? If Reason ever graced our lives, it deserted us long ago.

[gloriaris]

is philosophyblr a thing

[cece-alex]

i’m on philosophyblr so i didn’t realize this was an mdzs post; because of this, when it said “suppose you are jiang cheng” i was like “yeah that is a moral tragedy, i would hate to have been jiang cheng” and then i cracked up because it made me sad and i can’t cry over jc in front of my family 😭

one topic i've been interested in lately is the idea of moral luck.

let's start somewhere else. i was surprised to learn that the question of "do moral dilemmas exist" is actually debated upon in moral philosophy. broadly speaking, a "moral dilemma" is a situation in which the agent can only choose one of several mutually exclusive options, and yet the agent has moral reasons compelling them towards each option. some philosophers have argued that, given a sufficiently robust moral philosophy, a "genuine" moral dilemma cannot exist: the moral philosophy will organize the differing moral reasons for each course of action into a hierarchy, in which more important moral reasons override the others; thus, the moral philosophy will always be able to identify one or more correct courses of action.

based on my own analysis - if one takes a more moral-pluralistic point of view, though, this is no longer true. moral pluralism indicates the view that multiple different values can all be equally valuable and morally significant, even when they are contradictory. in this case, a moral reason may not be able to override another moral reason. in my opinion (which i am not sure if lines up with official ideas of moral pluralism), this entails the return of the moral dilemma. after all, if the agent can only choose one of several mutually-exclusive courses of action, and the agent has genuine moral reasons for each course of action, and these moral reasons also cannot override each other - then it seems the agent is doomed. no matter what the agent chooses to do, they will be violating some moral reason. they will be committing some moral wrongdoing.

the idea that someone is doomed to commit some moral wrongdoing is referred to as moral tragedy.

this is all kind of abstract, so let us consider a more concrete example. first, let's consider the trolley problem. from a deontological perspective, the perfect duty of not violating the categorical imperative by killing the 1 person comes before the imperfect duty of taking action to save 5 people from death; hence, the correct choice is to not pull the lever. from a utilitarian perspective, the outcome in which 5 people live and 1 person dies involves less harm than the outcome in which 1 person lives and 5 people die, so pulling the lever is the correct choice. however, from a more morally pluralistic point of view, both the choice of pulling the lever and not pulling the lever involve violating some moral duty. people have a moral duty to not kill people, and people also have a moral duty to not allow people to die through inaction. you can only either kill the 1 person to save the 5 people or allow the 5 people to die through inaction. no other choice exists. thus, no matter what choice you make, you will be violating one of those two moral duties; you are trapped in a moral tragedy.

now let's consider another example. suppose you are jiang cheng, and wei wuxian has just busted wen ning's wen remnants out of the jin labor camp at qiongqi pass. from a more morally pluralistic point of view, you are also caught in a moral tragedy: no matter what choice you make, you will be violating some moral duty.

if you choose not to stand by wei wuxian, then you are violating some of your moral duties. wei wuxian is your martial brother; you have a duty towards him. wen ning and wen qing helped you greatly in the past; by the virtue of reciprocity, you owe it to them to help them too. furthermore, as a human being, you have a moral duty to stand against the mistreatment of innocent people. choosing not to stand by wei wuxian entails violating all three of these moral duties.

however, if you choose to stand by wei wuxian, then you are also violating some of your moral duties. you are the leader of the yunmeng jiang sect, which is currently recovering from near-absolute annihilation and thus lacks the resources the other great sects have. as the leader of yunmeng jiang, you are its representative: thus, you standing by wei wuxian when he has alienated lanling jin means that you are making yunmeng jiang stand against lanling jin. and since the jin sect is tied to the other two great sects via the venerated triad, if yunmeng jiang stands against lanling jin, then the situation will become all three of the other great sects against your one weak recovering sect.

you are the leader of the people in yunmeng jiang. those people just fought a war for you. as their leader - or even simply as someone for whom these people bled and suffered - you owe it to them to put them first. as a leader you exist for your people. if you act in violation of what is best for your people's safety and happiness, if you actively choose to put them in danger, then you have broken the social contract by which they gave you authority. then you have failed your duty. and since choosing to stand by wei wuxian puts everyone under your protection in danger, choosing to stand by wei wuxian entails violating your moral duty as a leader.

so. no matter what choice you as jiang cheng make, you will be violating some moral duty. you will be committing some moral transgression. you are caught in a moral tragedy.

from a morally pluralistic point of view, any choice in a moral tragedy entails some moral wrongdoing. so what determines whether you end up in a moral tragedy or not?

luck.

it's commonly said that a person's moral character can be determined from the choices they've made in their life - judge a man by his actions and all that. in other words, we look at what moral violations he has committed, as well as what morally upstanding acts. and yet! if he's ended up in a moral tragedy before - then he had no choice but to commit a moral violation, because all of the available choices were moral violations! does that mean that a person's moral character is subject not just to his own choices, but to luck as well? whether or not you can be called a good person or a bad person is affected also by merely how lucky or unlucky you were?

i do not personally use the framework of "good person" vs "bad person" very often; the utilitarianism i favor cannot be used to judge entire moral characters. however, it certainly is the case that other people will judge an individual's entire moral character by the choices they've made. and yet, it seems that - again and again - the concept of moral luck is not considered.

who did not have moral luck? who ended up in a moral tragedy?

wei wuxian. jiang cheng. lan xichen. jin guangyao. nie mingjue. and many others.

who did have moral luck? who avoided all the moral tragedies?

lan wangji.