Who here has studied philosophy?
 

Ok, the death penalty debate raised a questionin my mind.

Has anyone here actually studied philosophy?

Kant, Hobbes, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Hume, Bentham, Satre, McTaggart, etc.?

The list is by no means exhaustive.

Who have you studied?

spent alot of time on Kant, Barth, and Moreland

Most of my work is in philosophy of religion and ethics.

-sm

Have you checked out Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil yet?

Haven’t read it, but saw a series of debates between shermer and doug geivett. Shermer has a tendency to ignore your actual argument, and rail against what he thinks you said. Geivett built a very convincing kalam cosmological argument, and shermer tried to argue as if he was trotting out Aquinas for another round. Either not very bright, or not very intellectually honest, regardless of what you think about the final conclusion.

Straw man defense.

-sm

edit: sorry, i should say, he wasn't arguing in a very bright way. I'm sure he's an intelligent man. i'll have to check out the series.

Re: Who here has studied philosophy?
 

Yes.

In the context of all four Ideas In Conflict in the honors curriculum, plus Ethics. That's enough philosophy for me. We went through Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, Nietzsche, Freud, Martin Luther King, Kant, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Satre, Rousseau, and Heisenberg. The courses covered Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic, and the Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century philosophers.....

Poor Jean-Jaques....

Dammit, now I have the Philosopher's Song stuck in my head!!

Sidhe

Studied quite a few in various different contexts( some formal some not)...Loved some of the ancient greek but mainly because of the historical context....Favourites though, I think would have to be Nietzsche and Karl Marx

Color me so not surprised. :D

Neett-che4e'sses (sp?) essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral sense" is an interesting read. I find some of his thinking a little muddled on the concepts of eternity and being. I know he's standing at the edge of existentialism, but there are some threads that hang pretty loose at the edges.

-sm

i did my best to squeeze in as mucy as i could in school, but admittedly my grasp on anything beyond kant is lacking, philosophy beyond that time period didn't interest me, except for philosophy of science. i was initially drawn to the greek philosophers as a matter of personal taste, but as time went on i took to studying the chronological progression of philosophy and the historical/sociological context of each thinker. man that reminds me i have a lot of reading to do.

Well great..thanks for sharing, now we ALL have the philosopher's song running through our heads!

Ya....kinda fun though :band:

"Well great..thanks for sharing, now we ALL have the philosopher's song running through our heads!"


:haha: ....sorry....It's one of my favorite Monty Python songs...just not ALL DAY LONG....


For those of you who have absolutely NO idea what we're talking about:

IIIIIIImmanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will
With half a pint of shandy got particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away
Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
"I drink therefore I am"

Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed

Sidhe

you had a grasp on Kant!!!! Dude, you're a f*&ing genius. Nobody really reads Kant, they just read people's critique of Kant. The ones who actually do read it end up addle-headed and shiftless, working as surrogate breast-feeders for the rest of their known lives.

which is hard to do with only one nipple. And no experience.

And, you know, a penis.

Am I drunk?

-sm

Informally, mostly to keep up with my peers at the time, read a fair bit of Satre, Plato, some nietzsche, bits and bobs here and there.

Now I've got ~5000 pages of data and reports littering my desk instead =(

Informally. I read some of Nietzche's books because I had liked his quotes for so long that I thought that I may as well read the rest.

I tried and failed to read an Lucretus' poetry version of Epicurean writings - I may have been reading the wrong segment.

I decided to stop reading philosophy for a while since I wasn't putting enough of it into practice.

Solzhenitsyn may not have primarily been a philosopher, but his advice on how to live is my favorite of all that I've run across.

...and I've read Sartre and Camus and bits of others.

All philosophy written since Kant was written out of the author's hatred of Kant -- Nietzche

Me:

PHI 101 Intro (B)
PHI 201 Logic (A)
PHI 203 Ethics (C) (asshole prof wouldn't take bribes)

As well as
MAT 207 Fundamentals of Math (C)
which was PHI 201 in math
And
FRE 213 French Existentialist Writers (B)
which was a way to take something really cool instead of another class in stinking French

As Woody Allen once said, I cheated on my metaphysics final... I looked into the soul of the person sitting next to me.

Had 3 years of philosophy :
Starting in last year secondary studies : Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche (later I read more Kant), Plato, Aristoteles. The common stuff.
During my one year of Social Worker (normally 3 years of university studies) mostly religious philosophy and the whole bunch of greek philosophers and the usual, common classics (was quite interesting, gave me a vision of philosophy as a whole and I could pick my favorites out)
At Royal Military Academy it was mostly Ius at bellum, Ius in bello and the use of power by the government and social philosophy : Grotius, Thomas d'Aquino, Plato and Aristoteles, Marx & Engels, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Malthus, Pareto, Ricardo, Weber...

Can't remember everything, loved it for shure. Read some of the books, it isn't that difficult if you read the originals (but Kant was really heavy...). I don't know if there's an english translation but look up Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner (or so). Very pleasant reading.
If I could go back to university (when I'm 64) I'd like to do some philo but it's such an egoistic study...

Took as many philosophy courses as I could squeeze in during my science studies in both under-grad and grad school. Read Sartre and Camus in high school. In college studied Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, (hated Nietzsche but had to read a chapter or so to pass the class), Machiavelli, Marcus Aurelius, the Dhammapada by the Buddha, many Eastern philosophers that I'm sure no one has heard of, Ayn Rand (if you want to call her a philosopher), St. Augustine, Malthus, Edward O. Wilson (philosophy of science), Thomas Aquinas - the list goes on. I liked the Stoic's best, as well as many of the Hindu and Zen Buddhist thinkers.

Sophie's World is available in an English translation. Its a charming book.

Most of my reading on philosophy has been informal really. Very unstructured. The formal stuff was more in the context of learning about the history of the people concerned and being given a quick crash intro to the relevant philosopher...so as to be able to understand the historical context

Lookin down this thread I realise how woefully uneducated in matters philosophical I am *chuckles*

Excellent book! It was a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy 101. I would recommend it to anyone that wants to skim thousands of years of philosophy and get the gist of it in an entertaining way.

Honors Philosophy and Medieval Philosophy. Had I stayed an English Major I might have done a lot more, but changed to Geography and Planning and had to finish everything in the two years of financial aid I had remaining, so didn't have time to enjoy more.

Medieval was cool. We had a coloring book of illuminated letters, and had to turn one in for our grade. The prof (still) has them covering the walls of his office. I approached the angels dancing on the head of a pin from a different angle than most ... rather than focusing primarily on the number of angels, I determined the length of time that it would occupy as well as determining what dances medieval angels would do, and where you would put the band. I was in the Musica Antiqua at the time. It was a natural illogical progression, you see.

The prof had never heard the Philosophers Song. So one day the entire Honors class serenaded him back to his office. He was a bit odd, so it was hard to tell if he was amused or horrified. I don't THINK that was the same day we bought a couple bags of Tootsie Pops and attempted to determine how many licks it took to get to the center ...

I studied Hegel in college - a little thick but I thought he had some good ideas. Kant was too abstract. I tended towards those philosophers who could actually help understand the world.

I'm not sure if Jean Baudrillard counts but his extremely short book, Simulations, is easily the most useful philosophy work I've ever read.

I took some sort of "History of Intellectual Thought" philosophy class. It was actually a history class, but we had to read a lot of works by the famous philosophers. I don't remember it that well, because I didn't like it that much. All I remember was Kant.

That guy, Kant, was absolutely full of BS. He would construct these very complex arguments that would really end up just being a house of cards. Again, it was ages ago that I read his crap, but I remember that he would define these terms, and then try to weave some sort of argument out of these terms he defined. The problem I always saw was that these foundations that he based his arguments on were very arbitrary. The entire argument would end up being something that had no relevance to real life.

The students in that class fell into two camps. Those, like me, who thought it was all just a bunch of BS, but tried to get a handle on its alleged importance so they could pass the class. And those who were buying into the whole idea that Kant actually had something to say. These others were so eager to be taking an "intellectual" class, they left their critical minds at home.

If it reads like crap, sounds like crap, and is deliberately convoluted, chances are it's just crap.

Academic fields rarely spend 200 years arguing over, critiquing, and generally wetting themselves over an author whose work is crap. To understand the significance of Kant, you have to understand the 200 years that came before him, and the “Prime Edifice” of philosophy. His work is a polemic; read what he was critiquing.

-sm

But:

Why are we studying these ideas? Because these are the ideas that lasted. Why did they last? Because these were the ideas that were studied.

Maybe I wish that my intro course had been taught as a history of philosophy course, not a philosophy course. Instead of, let's study these ideas without bias, it might have been, let's study these ideas with the bias of what we know today and how these ideas came into wide reknown.

That strikes me as eminently sensible

the word you're looking for UT is renown, reknown is not a word.
Ok enough english nazi from me.

I did a history of science course once, one of the most interesting things I've ever studied.

Thanks guy, that's one of those that somehow got into the long-term synapses. I think I've done that one several times. I hate when that happens.

I've also studied a little bit of Marx--it was required--and I didn't see his ideas as workable because of human nature being as it is. Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, right? I liked that. Lots of common sense. However, I LOVED Machiavelli. Realism at its finest.


UT: speaking of looking at philosophy insofar as what we know today, we did that in one of my Ideas in Conflict classes...that's where we got the phrase, "poor Jean-Jacques"--as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his idea of "the Noble Savage" (back in his day, philosophy and archaeology were much the same thing. They didn't have our knowledge of history, or our scientific methods, and they hypothesized that early man was by nature good, noble, helpful to others, and sociable/friendly to others.)

....poor Jean-Jacques....:rolleyes:



Sidhe

my last semester at good old apoo i took 4 units of indy study, let's call it 1800 pages of reading (it was supposed to be 500 pages per unit but padge was merciful...) most of which was kant or books about kant. the key for me having enough "grasp" on that nebulous density of a philosopher to pass the class was to focus on a few specific ideas (my course was roughly centered around epistemology) and attempt to discuss in a somewhat coherent matter. i literally wrote 5 page papers on one sentence, if not a fragment.

and for the record, i read his critique of pure reason in it's entirety. let's just say my retention level on that book was decidedly sub-par compared to other books i've read.

Karl Popper, a fierce opponent of Marxism, has claimed ‘all modern writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it’.

He wrote about so many things. He wasnt just the father of Socialism, his writings have influenced all kinds if fields of study ( education, sociology, economics) His ideas werent just the "workers revolution" ....thats really the only aspect of Marx I see as being potentially incompatible with "human nature"