11/1/2013 Plato and the Sophists

by Kiriell Popienko

     The Sophists were a group of teachers who claimed to teach virtue and proper governance, and would charge significant fees for these services. The Ancient Greeks practiced Democracy and believed that the people had the right and thus the proper knowledge to rule. Therefore, the Sophists claiming to teach the proper way to rule and that the common man did not know this posed a threat to Greek Democracy. Socrates was famously indicted on the charge of "corrupting the youth", but in fact he was brought up on three charges, one of them being Sophistry. 

     My goal in this discussion is to look at the distinctions Plato makes between a Philosopher and a Sophist in his dialogues.  By using this comparison, I hope increase everyone's overall understanding of what it means to be a Philosopher.  Many of Plato's definitions of a Philosopher come as response to or about Sophists; Plato did not want people to put Philosophy in the same category as Sophistry, because Sophistry had a bad reputation and Plato has problems with the idea of Sophistry in general.

10/25/2013 Zombies

by Nicholas Palladino

If you eat our brains, do we not die?

     Friday we're going to talk about zombies. Not the concept of "philosophical zombies," but good ol' fashioned brain eating zombies. First I'll set up background information on zombie mythology, and provide modern media examples.We will then confront how these entities are treated, and whether it is truly ethical.

     I'll be addressing questions about the nature of zombies. Are zombies people? If so, are they the same people as they were before undeath? And what is the moral status of zombies? After we've discussed these questions I'll provide specific examples in media that we can dissect for moral problems.

10/18/2013 Patterns

by Manish Garg

There are patterns; patterns in thoughts, patterns in emotions, patterns in actions.  That is what makes some behaviors and pieces of information stick out in our heads.  This is what the discipline of psychology (and other social sciences) is based on: finding patterns in the way humans think and feel and act and using the idea of repeatability and experience to create a model of human behavior so that we know what is going on when good things happen or when bad things happen (or something like that).

This week is kind of experimental, and I hope it will be fun.  I'm terrible at scholarly research but pretty ok at thinking and talking, and I care about people.  So I thought maybe we could all take some time to meditate together on patterns in the behaviors we see in ourselves and the people around us.  What I wish to do is a bit hard to explain; it is something that will either come naturally or fail completely, and I hope we can all at least have some fun with it.

Like I said, I'm no good at research, so I won't have any books to quote from or any fancy names or dates to quote.  This will be purely you, me, us, thinking and feeling together in a room.  I also wish to transcend the philosophy club tradition of a big group discussion followed by a small group discussion format and not necessarily follow any format; I want to see how the group feels and what seems best to do at the time.  I hope this makes your lives at least a bit better, and I hope we can have fun with it.

10/11/2013 So-Called Objective Reality

by Kyle VanderWerf

     In last week's meeting, Nathan Turowsky presented a controversial idea, which was mostly rejected by the other members of the club. Namely, he proposed that non-scientific epistemologies have some validity. He described the belief system of the Shingō village in Japan, which states of the story in which Jesus travels to Japan after the events of the New Testament and lives there until his death at 106 years old: “The more [the story] was repeated, the truer it became, until the people of the village, frankly, believed it.” Nathan argued that this wasn't any less true or valid than a system of knowledge derived from science.

     This week, I'm going to follow up on that discussion by presenting a more formal defense of this idea. First, I will briefly review last week's discussion and the philosophy of Wittgenstein, the latter of which I led a discussion on just over a year ago, to set the groundwork. Then I'll use this groundwork to show that religion and science can happily coexist, while simultaneously proposing a theory of a role that stories and authorities play in societies. I'll show that a lot of the perceived tension between science and religion arises when people misconstrue the former as being tied to an often ridiculous and over-applied concept called “objective reality.” I also aim to show that the Shingō epistemology does not actually necessarily conflict with our own, and in fact all of us make use of that epistemology on a daily basis.

10/4/2013 Welcome to the Satoyama of the Real

by Nathan Turowsky

     Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of how knowledge is acquired, identified, and justified, and hence the branch most closely appertaining to how one identifies what is or is not 'true' or 'real'. For most of us, this question comes up in daily life less frequently than one might expect, and when it does come up it is resolved through the notion that that which is observed or related on reliable authority is true insofar as it fits the manner in which we conduct our lives and solve our problems. Currently popular and dominant epistemologies in the West are for the most part either pragmatic in character or in some way reliant on a scientific episteme--the idea that science and the much-vaunted scientific method is, through some mechanism or other, the area of human inquiry to turn to for definition and delineation of truth and reality. It is of course taken for granted that something is either true or it is not, and it does not get truer or less true without some change in external circumstances equally ponderous and portentous as the change in truth-value.

     There are, however, certain areas of experience in which these kinds of models break down, one of which--the realm of religion and especially of folk religion and popular piety of the kind that has no real internally compelling reason to engage with or gauge itself against abstract philosophical concepts--becomes unusually salient in the Japanese village of Shingō. Shingō, a remote farming community in the mountains of Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Japan's largest island, claims to be the true burial site of Jesus Christ and has a detailed set of local stories and attractions expounding upon this. The Legend of Christ Museum, near the Grave of Christ in Christ Park, makes the arresting claim that 'the more times [the story as presented in the so-called Takenouchi Document] was repeated, the truer the contents became'. Obviously we cannot account for this sort of claim very easily in most epistemological models, mainly because it does not pass even the most cursory smell test--a professor of religion at Kyoto University has referred to the Legend of Christ as a prime example of 'fakelore', defined essentially as folklore that is transparently bullshit, and well may we say that it is transparently bullshit and does not present any real threat to conventional notions of truth. That does not, however, answer the question of why the people in charge of the museum--whose promotional literature seems to go back and forth between denial, scepticism, and belief sometimes within the same sentence--would choose to pursue this line in the first place.

     In this meeting, I hope to demonstrate that because of the somewhat circular nature of defining justification it is not nearly as easy to dismiss notions of truth based on consensus, repetition, belief, expectation, or desire as it may seem at first glance. We will also, to the extent possible, have a general overview of and debate on epistemological concepts, particularly that of the episteme and the idea of different types of institutionalised(as opposed to independent) structures of defining and storing truth and knowledge in different times and places. I hope to open a debate on whether or not independent apprehension of truth or reality is even possible, at least in a way that satisfies a demand for putative rigour and limitation to the natural universe.