Philosophy Thoughts as and when

Following on from my previous post, the compulsory History of Philosophy modules were half Ancient Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle only) and half Early Modern (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes) and they covered various fields e.g. Epistemology, Science, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics. Out of those, I only like Spinoza, and Hume as a second favourite. Although, apart from Spinoza, I wouldn't want to research these philosophers in themselves, I've made good use of these history modules by researching Mary Shepherd who argues at length against Hume, Berkeley and Locke. Luckily, there was no medieval (in history or elsewhere) except for 5 minutes on Aquinas over coffee in a coffee shop with the tutor, Simon Hewitt. There was a metaphysics tutorial mix-up which resulted in Simon saying that everyone had to email him to see him over coffee individually. So I did but I was bored with talking about Aquinas and it wasn't my essay topic either so the conversation tur...

What you'd ideally like to study and learn in philosophy is different from what your university will allow you to do or offer and run as a module. So what you seem to choose on your degree may not reflect your passions or priorities. 😥 I had to choose 3 module options and so chose Ethics; Aesthetics; Political Philosophy. This was a no-brainer out of the options on offer. The one option I definitely wanted to do from the beginning was Political Philosophy 🙂 because I had already done it at A Level and I've been interested in Politics from an early age. The 20 week module was half history (Rousseau; Marx) and half contemporary topics. I was pleased they added on Aesthetics to the list of options because it was a way for me to build on my art (the module was heavily weighted towards art) and my music (although there was only one lecture on music, so that was disappointing). There was no Philosophy of Dance so, unfortunately, I couldn't build on the A Level Dance I'd sta...

I woke up thinking - maybe I should flesh out the Logic course a bit more since it's an area which is slightly dying out in Philosophy. Most universities only offer it as an option rather than making it compulsory, which is a shame. It is very different from the rest of the course because Logic is more of a skill you have to keep practising, rather like maths. So I got through a huge stack of paper just working through Logic exercises, very much like everybody does when they study maths at school. It is not maths as such because, unlike maths, it is more thinking-based. In maths you just follow the rules of maths to get the right answer, whether it makes sense or not. One of my favourite areas of maths was geometry which, like my Latin (which I studied at degree level just prior to my BA Philosophy), has come in handy when reading Spinoza's Ethics. However, I much prefer Logic to maths because it makes sense and it requires thinking through a process rather than doing robotic c...

  Here's the list of speakers for the 2010 'Varieties of Higher-Order Logic, in conjunction with the ERC Plurals, Predicated and Paradox Research Project' Conference I attended and referred to in my previous post. It also gives a brief summary of what the aim of the workshop was and a little bit about the topic of different forms of higher-order Logic. I put it here because it's no longer easily available on the internet and it gives an idea of what I was learning about. Also, the first speaker is the same person I was discussing in my previous post, namely Salvatore Florio.  You'll also see an arrow on my page - it means he was my favourite speaker because I loved the structure of his paper which made it easier to follow what he was trying to convey.  Just because I love my Logic, does not mean that I have suddenly switched from being a Spinozist to a Logician!  I've always seen Logic as merely an useful tool which can capture and analyse an argument succinctly...

While I'm on the topic of my Facebook posts on Logic, I thought I'd share a post I wrote on a Second Order Logic paper I heard when attending a logic talk in December 2016 which continued fascinating me afterwards.  This shows the value of attending talks that are not necessarily relevant to your research field or interests - it gives you a better perspective on your subject and broader field of vision, improving your overall knowledge and skills in the subject, in my case, philosophy. I have attended lots of conferences and talks both during my undergraduate course and subsequently, which greatly enhanced my knowledge of and skills in philosophy beyond my BA degree. They weren't all relevant talks to my study or research but I attended them anyway and I'm pleased I did! In fact my first philosophy conference/talk I attended was a higher order logic Birkbeck project in 2010 (Varieties of Higher-Order Logic [in conjunction with ERC Plurals, Predicates and Paradoxes resea...

I'm starting this blog because I have discovered that I have thoughts on philosophy which aren't necessarily about one of the philosophers or topics that I'm researching or have blogs on. So even though I have an unmanageable amount of blogs, I'm going to add another one. And what better way to start this blog than a foundational building block for Philosophy, namely, Logic!  I found 'The 10 Commandments of Logic' on Facebook and they make for a good constant reference as and when. It was posted by Philosophy Matters, 31st December 2016 and I reposted it pubicly as a 4 year memory end of last year because I had only posted it to Facebook 'friends' previously. So here they are! "1 Thou shall not attack the person's character, but the argument. (Ad hominem) 2 Thou shall not misrepresent or exaggerate a person's argument in order to make them easier to attack. (Straw man fallacy) 3 Thou shall not use small numbers to represent the whole (Hasty ...