Thursday, May 27, 2010

“If you are inquisitive and have a logical mind, Philosophy is right for you” plus 2 more

“If you are inquisitive and have a logical mind, Philosophy is right for you” plus 2 more

If you are inquisitive and have a logical mind, Philosophy is right for you

Posted: 26 May 2010 11:48 AM PDT

Philosophy, which literally means love of wisdom, is one of the oldest academic disciplines besides Mathematics. In the Indian context, it also implies a way of living life righteously.

Hence, philosophical analysis refers to intellectual and reflective method for attempting to comprehend the underlying principles and to discover normative criteria. At the same time, philosophical activity refers to rational and critical examination or a critique of the most basic elements of our everyday life situations and experiences.

Philosophy differs from other academic disciplines in mainly being normative. For example, when philosopher states that human beings are rational beings, it is not a descriptive statement of how humans behave but how they need to act. The normative function of philosophy also implies an attempt to unravel or conceptually analyse the fundamentals of underlying principles. Accordingly, it can be argued that philosophical enquiry and methodology differ sharply from natural sciences and other social sciences as well.

The BA (H) Philosophy course is being taught at 15 colleges of Delhi University and is being taught as inter-disciplinary credit course for various BA Honours courses and as Discipline course for BA Programme in most colleges.

Students pursuing the BA (H) Philosophy course in DU have to study papers such as Logic, Elements of Indian Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy and Text of Indian Philosophy and Ethics as compulsory papers and rest three are optional papers. For instance, there are options to choose from Social and Political Philosophy, Early and Later Greek Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language, Contemporary Philosophy, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Logic.

A student needs to be inquisitive, be able to have a critical insight, needs to have good command over language and be able to put things in perspective besides having a flair for logical analysis. However, any intelligent minded and a keen learner can pursue this course.

(The course profile on BSc (H) Biomedical Sciences published on Wednesday erroneously mentioned that admission to the course is through entrance examination. Admission is based on merit.)

Rekha  Navneet is an Associate Professor at Gargi College.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

PHT: These Flyers share philosophy with ‘Bullies’

Posted: 26 May 2010 12:10 PM PDT

Biggest differences

According to the HHOF.com, the Broadstreet Bullies era Flyers had a combined regular season winning percentage of .715. They won 2 straight Cups, garnered 8 individual awards and the team included three players who would make the Hall of Fame.

While these current Flyers have a shoo-in Hall of Famer in Chris Pronger and a few others who have a shot at having HoF-worthy careers, let's not forget that they needed to win a shootout in the last game of the season to get into the playoffs.

Despite posting an amazing three shutouts in four games against the Canadiens, Michael Leighton is far from Bernier Parent right now.

Finally, the other big difference is that this team has a player named "Simon." That just doesn't seem like it would fly in the 70s.

Some similarities

For some time, it seemed hasty to compare Mike Richards and Bobby Clarke. It might be a stretch at this point, too, but his recent heroics - along with his brutal checks - make the parallels reasonable. Both teams have an interesting mixture of finesse and barbarism.

Overall, the Flyers seem to share a philosophy with its Bully brethren. After all, Chris Pronger is the ultimate embodiment of that spirit. But my feeling is that the team doesn't exactly elicit the same kind of fear from their opponents anymore.

It'll be a long time before we see another team quite like the Broadstreet Bullies.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

17:58 2010/05/26

Posted: 26 May 2010 06:34 AM PDT

Nick Bostrom made the remarks in an interview with the Mehr News Agency conducted by Hossein Kaji and Javad Heirannia.

Following is the text of the interview:

Q: What are the most important questions about the relationship between ethics and politics?

A: One important question is how we can make political struggles more responsive to ethical concerns, without losing touch with practical realities and without descending into interminable ideological feuds between different bigoted factions.

Q: Some thinkers have focused on the point that Kantian ethics is for personal spheres and utilitarian ethics for public spheres such as political environment. Do you agree with this viewpoint?

A: I don't quite see why that should be the case. Oversimplifying, we may associate Kantian ethics with simple rules ("Don't lie!", "Don't steal!" etc.) and utilitarianism with the idea that one should try to figure out what will have the best consequences.

Now, setting aside the question of which of these moral systems is closest to being ultimately correct, we can make the observation that it is usually easier to check whether somebody has broken a simple rule than whether somebody has tried hard enough to do what will have the overall best consequences. From a practical point of view, it is important that we can hold people to account. Since humans often pretend that they are acting morally even when they aren't, we need criteria that are unambiguous and hard to fake. This is an argument for using a morality that includes some simple rules.

But it is not only in the personal sphere that people are prone to self-serving and immoral behavior. Government officials frequently abuse their power and pretend that they are good even when they are corrupt or evil. Brutal dictators always claim that their actions are for the common good. It therefore seems helpful to have some simple rules - such as internationally recognized human rights - such that we can more easily see when they are violated and hold our political leaders to account.

Q: Is 20th century the best century in the history of philosophy? Why?

A: I think the 20th century has been a very good one for philosophy. It has, in particular, brought some refinement of the techniques of analytic philosophy, and achieved a precision and attention to detail that the works of previous centuries lacked. There are of course also vastly more professional philosophers active in the world now than at any earlier time. But whether it is the 20th century was overall the best one in the history of philosophy is difficult to say. To some extent, the century reaped the fruits of basic ideas that had been sown earlier.

Nick Bostrom is professor in the faculty of philosophy and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He has some 170 publications to his name, including three books: Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), and Enhancing Humans (ed., OUP, 2009).

JH/HK

END

MNA

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