What I would like you to do is to find a topic from section chapter 2 that you were interested in and search the internet for material on that topic. You might, for example, find people who are doing research on the topic, you might find web pages that discuss the topic, you might find a youtube clip that illustrates something related to the topic, etc. What you find and use is pretty much up to you at this point. Please use 3 or more quality resources.
Once you have completed your search and explorations, a) I would like you to say what your topic is, b) how exactly it fits into the chapter, and c) why you are interested in it. Next, I would like you to take the information you read or viewed related to your topic, integrate/synthesize it, and then write about it. At the end of your post, please include working URLs for the three websites. Keep in mind that it will be easier if you keep it to one topic.
By integrating/synthesizing I mean to take what your read/experienced from the internet search (and from chapter 1 if you like) organize the information into the main themes, issues, info, examples, etc. about your topic and then write about the topic in your own words using that information. This is hard for some people to do - many students write what we refer to as "serial abstracts." They are tempted to talk about the websites rather than the topic proper and this what you DON'T want to do! They will talk all about website #1, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #2, start a new paragraph and talk all about web site #3, and then write some kind of conclusion. Serial means one after the other...again, this is what you DON'T want to do! If all three sites are on the same one topic it will be easier.
Additional instructions: For each URL (internet resource) you have listed. Indicate why you chose it and the extent to which it contributed to your post.
One of the more interesting topics that I found in chapter 2 was related to John Locke’s theory of the Social Contract. In it he says that the government and the people enter into an agreement that requires both of them to bring something to the table and to work together. The government is required to govern wisely and protect the rights of the people, and while the citizens agree to support the government and participate directly in it. I found this interesting because I felt like it was slightly out of place with the overall concept of the chapter, but was important in explaining Locke’s history and what he contributed. I also was interested in whether or not this “social contract” had any meat to anymore. Does it still work in today’s world? I really have my doubts about that, but that may just be my opinion. I think overall it is an interesting concept, but doesn’t mesh completely with all the other topics about philosophy and the experiments discussed, but it is important when discussing who Locke is and what he was talking about. The articles I chose to look at were nice and diverse to help me learn as much as I can. The two things I was most looking for were how well we still use this contract, and whatever criticisms that may be prevalent.
URL’s
http://www.constitution.org/soclcont.htm: I chose this website because it gives a brief definition, but then it goes on in more detail about Social Contracts. I enjoyed reading the 2 articles called Duties under the Social Contract and Origins of the Social Contract. The Origins part was interesting because of the beginning when it said that most children are born into a society and have little to no choice about entering into this contract.
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/08/the-social-contract-in-a-social-business.html: This website was not exactly what I was looking for but I am glad that I found it. I had only ever thought about this social contract in a governmental sense, but this article showed the relationship between workers and IBM. I found it refreshing to find an author that first of all knew about what social contract was and secondly wants big business to use it more often in their business dealings. By using this concept about government and using it in the business world I think he is helping to promote sharing and positive relationship in the corporate world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Criticism I used this article even though it is from Wikipedia because I feel that it has a lot of useful information. Having already researched the main concepts I decided to look at the criticisms section because I believe it is important to learn both sides of the story. David Hume was discussed in our book so I was slightly familiar with him to begin with, and the rest of the articles were helpful, but the idea of natural rights being criticized helped me the most. After having talked about Religion for most of the class last time I found it interesting to see that there was a whole section talking about how these 2 ideas can be conflicting with each other. I would probably raise questions about it too if I was in charge of a faith that was being questioned by a philosophy that cast a shadow on my teachings.
I chose to research and write about John Stuart Mill. It fits into the chapter because there is a section of the book specifically dedicated to him and he is really the first person to talk and write about the science of psychology. I chose to write about him because I felt he was the most interesting person written about in the chapter and he was the most relevant to the history of psychology.
John Stuart Mill was born in Pentonville, near London, in 1806 to his father James Mill and mother Harriet Burrow. He was very well educated by his father with help from Jeremy Bentham. He grew up without interaction with other children his age besides his siblings. Mill did not attend a formal University and instead decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and work for the East India Company. In 1851, Mill married his long-time friend Harriet Taylor. She is believed to be a very large influence on his works and beliefs, especially in regards to his beliefs on women’s rights. She unfortunately died only seven years into their marriage of severe lung congestion. Mill served as Lord Rector at the University of St. Andrews from 1865-1868 and at the same time served as a member of parliament for the City of Westminster. He died in 1873 in Avignon, France and is buried next to his wife.
John Stuart Mill has written many texts on his theories in philosophy, ethics, and many others, but his most well-known and significant are A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays on Religion, and his Autobiography. Although he had many opinions and I could write pages and pages on what he has done, I am going to stick to something I am most passionate about, women’s rights. Unfortunately he could not fully escape the prejudices of his time and believed that women should not seek employment outside of the home. He believed that like men who choose a specific profession or job, women do the same when they marry. He did believe, though, that women had free will and did not necessarily need to be submissive to their husbands, but should break themselves of this conformity. On top of that, he was a huge advocate for women suffrage (women’s right to vote). While he was a Member of Parliament, he supported the Reform Bill of 1867. This bill, if passed, would have given women at that time the right to vote. It unfortunately failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill
I used this site mostly for his biography and finding more information on his opinions and viewpoints on different issues.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/#StaWom
I used this site for information on John Stuart Mill’s opinions on women’s rights and to find some info on his early life.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/milljs/#SH2f
I used this site for information on his different works and texts and for more information on his biography.
The topic that I am most interested in is John Locke and his ideas on education. I've heard about Locke in other psychology courses with tabula rasa etc, but never in depth concerning his other theories. I think Locke and his theories fit into this class because so many philosphers and psychologists after him have used some of his ideas to elaborate and evolve their own thoughts, making psychology evolve as a science. Some of Locke's ideas are pretty intense involving education, universal truths and innate thinking, and how soon one should start educating their child and sleeping on hard beds etc.
John Locke didn't start printing anything until 1690's after a long career of tutoring and studying. Locke's ideas about education did not get printed until after Locke was 54 years old. It started out as a letter to his friend, Edward Clark, about how he should raise his son because there was so much "corruption of youth" in his eyes. Locke believed that man had no innate beliefs about God or no innate moral beliefs, he says man becomes moral through education. Locke also says that manners and unconscious habits are learned by example. So if a son has a bad habit, he probably learned it from someone he is around most.
Locke has had many other things he's studied, he was a doctor a tutor, but most know him as a philospher and mostly for his writings "An Essay of Human Understanding" In our book Locke describes how a sound mind requires a sound body. "A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world." He based a lot of man's personality, morale and their personal beleifs on the type of education they grew up wiht. He believed in good outcomes requires some degree of suffering. This was partly because Locke grew up in a strict puritan home and in my opinion he let some of the way he was raised into his theories and ideas.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1692locke-education.asp#Some Thoughts Concerning Education
This website was very fascinating to me because it went through his life and education than continued with the letter he wrote to his friend about how to raise his son.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d0cdR_Fz1Y&feature=related- This video is more of a lecture about Locke's life and his views in his "Essay of Human Understanding" and about innate beliefs and universal truths. I used bits and pieces to confirm some of the stuff in the book and how he thought that everything is learned, and everyone is born with a blank slate
http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Locke.html
This website was a list of theories and what Locke had to say about them and how they worked.
I choose to research John Locke and empiricism. John Lock made great progress in epistemology, the study of knowledge, especially in empiricism, which states that all knowledge comes from the senses. In studying knowledge and how people develop knowledge Locke can be seen as laying the ground work for early psychology in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
Locke’s model can be complex, where there are simple and complex ideas produced by sensation or reflection. Basically, Locke believed humans are born with a blank slate and all thinking comes from sensation or reflection. When Locke talks about all knowledge coming from the senses he means from the five senses we all learn when we are young: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. There are primary and secondary qualities differing in whether they are present in things, primary qualities.
The mind converts these senses into either simple or complex ideas in the reflection process. Simple ideas are the basic concepts that can’t be broken down any further. They are like the materials that make up building blocks. Complex ideas take the block and build them into a wall which we can understand only because we know what hold the wall together, simple ideas.
It is the sensation and reflection that make up Locke’s basis for the two substances in the world: body and soul. The senses make up the body; they are material. The soul is made of reflections, or thought, and is immaterial, or mental. To Locke the mind and body are two separate entities, they can interact, but are not connected.
It is important to note there is only one exception to Locke’s blank slate theory. Locke believed the desire for happiness is essentially, human nature. According to Locke, All people want to be happy, but have no experience to justify this. He says people are hardwired to feel pain or pleasure: An aspect he calls the Will. To Locke this is initially controlled by the Creator, but is taken over by humans who choose pleasure.
http://elvers.us/hop/index.asp?m=3&a=76&key=38
I used this URL to understand Locke’s model of human thinking. I choose this website because it had good information and went further in depth than other sites, especially in regards to the Will.
http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/western/lect_5.html
In this URL I found Locke’s beliefs on the origin of ideas and his blank slate theory. I choose this URL because it was written in a way that I could understand.
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/com/com_lock.html
I used this URL because it had good information on sensation and reflection and Locke’s thoughts about the two.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooT1op-UmJI
I used this youtube video because it helped me understand the relationship between simple and complex ideas. Starting at about the 0:35 mark and lasting until the 1:55 mark is what I found most useful.
I decided to do my topic Rene Descartes and his ideas on dualist, known as the parting of the mind and body. In the book we learned about an idea of Descartes and the animal spirits and where you get your reflex from. I’d like to get more of an understanding of dualist and his thoughts on the mind and body.
Descartes wanted to know if his mind and body was a whole or separate. Throughout his research he founded dualism, which is still the biggest topic in the philosophy area. The mind, according to Descartes, is an “immaterial, nonextended substance that engages in various activities such as rational thought, imagining, feeling, and willing.” He also thought that the body was machine like and that it simply followed nature’s laws. He believes that body is controlled by the mind and the mind only. However, the body can, at times, influence the mind. This is just some of his thoughts; the next part of this is what he found.
The first thing that Descartes had to do in order to find the answer to his question was to find “existence”. He looked at three things for this, God, material things, and himself. First he went after the existence of himself.
Descartes came up with the famous “Cogito”, or as we might know it, “I think, therefore I am”. With this saying he came up with the conclusion that the mind doesn’t necessarily need the body. Because he was able to think, Descartes came to the conclusion that he, himself, did indeed exist.
Now that Descartes knows that he exists, it’s time to seek out God. His statement for God’s existence is that the idea of God did not come from him (his mind), but came into mind because God does indeed exists and planted the idea into his head. And that was that.
The last thing that Descartes wanted to find out was if material things existed or if they were just a figment of his imagination. With his new find information that God was real, he came up with the idea that because God was real and all powerful, that God could bring things into existence. From his findings he made the argument that the mind and body are separate, for the reason that he can think that the mind and body are separate, therefore they are.
Dualism has been studied for years, and over time different types of dualism have come into play. Property, non-reductive physicalism, and substance are the main three. Property dualism focuses on the difference between the properties of both the mind and the matter. Non-reductive physicalism, is a form of property dualism. This type is where the mental state works into the physical state. The last is substance dualism. This is what Descartes believed in. This is where there are two different kinds of substance, which we know is mental (mind) and material (body). The body is unable to think, and the mind is never ending. This concluded my report.
http://www.unc.edu/~wkidd/phil.htm --This site is where I got most of the background of dualism. It’s mostly about Descartes theory about what is real and what is not.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/383566/mind-body-dualism -- This one is a small article, I used it to understand “Cogito” and what it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind) – Here is where I found out about the three different types of dualism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes -- This one I used for a little background information about Descartes.
I wanted to write about Goodwin’s assertion that Kant “argued that psychology could never become a science like the physical sciences.” Goodwin seems to suggest that Kant led European thinkers astray and waylaid the development of psychology, but I think that this is a misleading assessment of Kant. Like the other philosophers preceding him in the chapter, Kant was asking questions about what we know and how we know that we know; that is, how do we come to understand and what criteria do we use to judge/verify our ‘knowledge’ of the world?
[I feel obliged to defend Kant’s position for two reasons: first, I still remember the spanking one of my History of Philosophy professors (quite rightfully) gave me when I naively asserted that Kant was a ‘one-trick pony’; and second, because I remember my Phenomenology professor shutting me down cold with the question, “What do you think the difference is?” when I tried to argue “but that is just psychology!”]
Descartes believed that there is some knowledge that we can deduce by reason alone (innate ideas), and other knowledge that develops from our sensory experience (derived ideas). However, he believed that innate ideas were more reliable because while the senses can be fooled, pure reason is logically consistent/sound.
But Locke thought that the concept of ‘innate ideas’ was the bunk. He argued that knowledge was founded solely in our experience of the world: objects have ‘Primary’ qualities that are inherent --that is, independent of our perceptions-- (e.g., extension, shape and movement) and ‘Secondary’ qualities that are contingent upon our sensory perceptions (e.g., color, smell, sound, warmth and taste).
Kant’s response was that experience of the world was not sufficient to account for our knowledge of the world because that experience was itself contingent upon our ability to perceive it. Kant was kind of a very early Phenomenologist in this regard: like Heidegger, he thought that we experience the world in particular ways because that is how we are built. Being able to experience the world necessitates that we have certain a priori conceptions of that world, such as time and space.
Kant was also kind of an early Idealist, because he thought that the way we are built puts certain limits on how much we could actually know of the world outside of our heads.
Kant laid out some detailed criteria that we can use to verify whether or not something pertains to the world as we know it (i.e., is true). Kant addresses these divergent issues in terms of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Kant understood that if we want to call something ‘science’, we should have a clear definition of what science is. For Kant, some of the criteria that had to be met for a discipline to be considered a science were that the phenomena studied had to be observable, measurable, and independently verifiable. (As I recall, Kant thought that if we all generally agreed on something, it was probably true - but if no one agreed with you, you were probably crazy.)
In Kant’s day, a lot of what we now call ‘psychology’ was simply a philosopher sitting someplace thinking about what the heck was going through his own head (introspection/reflection). As this process could not be said to meet any of his criteria for what constitutes ‘science’, he deemed it a branch of metaphysics (beyond the physical) rather than a pure science.
If Kant had known about behavioral psychology or the like, he may have agreed that it should be considered science - as it would then accord with his definition of the term (observable, measurable and independently verifiable).
(I would say that my use of most of these URLs is based on little more than effective marketing/branding.)
http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/modern/descartesMajorPoints.html
Curtis Brown is a Philosophy professor at Trinity University, and these are his lecture notes on Descartes.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-science/#Psy
Stanford University: generally considered a reliably accurate and authoritative source. Provides detailed information on Kant’s philosophy of science.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/
Stanford University: generally considered a reliably accurate and authoritative source. Describes Kant’s philosophy of the mind (a priori concepts and functions)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy#Idealism
Wikipedia: not 100% reliable (in terms of accuracy), but widely accepted. Good information on Kant’s epistemology.
http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2007/07/concise-statement-of-daseins-essence.html
I used this because it seemed to have a fairly clear (I use the term loosely) synopsis of Heidegger’s concept of da-sein (as I understand it).
I chose John Locke's stand on human understanding. I chose him to look more into because this was my first time really reading about him and his ideas on human understanding. I wanted to know and understand more. It fits into the chapter well because, well, the topic is in the chapter! The title of the chapter is "The Philosophical Text", and John Locke was a great philosopher of his time.
John Locke really embraced the idea, and I really enjoyed reading about, that innate ideas are false, or not real. He believes that humans get ideas from our minds and thoughts. He tells us that we have to things, sensation and perception. Sensation tells us about things around us, and as we take them in our perception of whatever we are sensing (from sensation) we form ideas or thoughts. This, he said was also a good indicator of how we get to know our own mind. This really intrigued me because it frees yourself to think independently, and to think critically and ask questions.
Locke also talked about "simple ideas" vs. "complex ideas". His simple ideas were ideas that came from simple memory techniques. Like colors, smells, touch; one experiences them through sensation, then perceives them and has a memory of them. Like our book illustrates, if a kid is learning the color "green" one might read Dr. Suess's "Green eggs and ham" and they might remember the color green from this book. Complex ideas are more interesting in that we enjoy a cold drink of water on a hot day. It isn't just one idea, its the idea that it is cold outside, and then we have learned through perception that it might be a good idea to get a cold drink of water. This is so fascinating to me that Locke, in his time, was able to think these, what seemed like "crazy" ideas I'm sure, to most people of his time.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/#LimHumUnd
I used "the limits of human understanding" section to help describe his thoughts on perception and sensation.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
This is just a good overview of Locke and what he accomplished.
http://www.philosophyprofessor.com/philosophies/innate-ideas.php
This one is describing what exactly "innate ideas" are, to further understand my post
http://www.economyprofessor.com/theorists/johnlocke.php
This gives a clear bullet point explanation of the points Locke made in his lifetime
The topic that interested me the most from this chapter was the idea of determinism. Although I may have mentioned that I do not like the idea because it bothers my feelings about my existence, I still have a strong interest about its roots and the questions behind it. Determinism is the belief that all events have prior causes. It means we are not really in control. This is obviously difficult to prove true from both sides of the argument. However I will make a weak attempt and try. I am purposely stating that this fits into this chapter because much of this chapter discusses old philosophers and their ideas. I say purposely and I mean purposely because I am trying to illustrate that I am in control. But can I be so sure? After searching a few sites on determinism I have found some reasons to believe in this idea and reasons not to.
After breaking a lot of my research down I’ve recognized good evidence for both sides of the argument. As much as I want to believe I am in control, part of me feels like I am not. Trying to explain this feeling is like trying to catch a ghost. On the one hand some say, "Human actions result from wants, wishes, motivations, desires etc. These wants, desires, motivations, etc. are caused in turn by specific antecedent conditions that ensure their occurrence." On the other hand some say, " The bottom line is: you can’t outwit the course of events but can only play your role in them. That statement is one I feel more comfortable believing in. I feel that way because I believe that some things happen in this world people can't explain. All I can do is watch it happen, feel it happen, see it happen, smell it happen, or taste it happen and try and make the best controllable sense of it.
I believe that is what all these famous philosophers did and what so many still do. For example, "Nicolas Copernicus challenged the traditional geocentric view of the universe, which held that the earth was the center of the universe, and replaced it with a heliocentric theory, which argued that the sun was at the center and the earth moved around it just like the other planets" (Goodwin 30). This philosopher demonstrated how he could play a role in events that would change the course of science. He was watching something happen that did not fit with what was known to be "the truth" and purposely acted out by coming up with his own data to prove earth revolved around the sun.
This will continue to be a frustrating topic to think about because I feel we will never figure out a conclusion to it. Atleast not in this life.
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue75/Taking_Determinism_Seriously I chose this resource because I wanted to read more about the basic definition of my topic so I could get a deeper understanding from other articles.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/FREE.HTM I chose this resource because I wanted to read about the side of the argument that I did not agree with. After reading through this article I have mixed feelings about the topic.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/determinism.html I chose this source because I wanted to read what one philosopher had to say about the topic.
The topic I chose to research was the philosopher John Locke, along with his ideas on education and the nature/nurture debate. This fits into the chapter in that John Locke was a large part of the section entitled "British Empiricist Argument", and his views and theories proved to be very important in both philosophy AND psychology. I find this to be interesting mainly because I've studied Locke quite a bit in past psychology courses, and I find his theory of "tabula rasa" to be pretty fascinating.
John Locke is considered to be one of the very first British empiricists, as well as the father of liberalism. He also had a lot to do with epistemology and the concept of social contracts. His conception of the self (along with his essay "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding") changed the entire direction of the study of knowledge.
Perhaps one of Locke's greatest influences on the field of psychology was his epistemological theory of tabula rasa, meaning "blank slate." This concept basically just says that we are born without any real thoughts or instincts - our minds are blank slates that are later shaped and molded by our environment. Locke didn't believe in such things as human nature or innate ideas; instead, he believed that experience was really the only thing that mattered in shaping a person's mind.
John Locke is also extremely well known today in modern philosophy and psychology for his ideas on education. He wrote some letters in the past to a friend which later evolved into a manual of sorts entitled: "Some Thoughts Concerning Education." Primarily directed toward young boys, this manual emphasized practicality and morality in education. Locke also did not believe in the reward/punishment system; instead, he focused on early training and play to keep children healthy. Children should be children while they can, he believed, and not given too much work to handle. Locke believed that if they were given too much stress, children would not be able to handle it, and would later develop a strong aversion to anything even slightly related to education. His ideas on such matters have had a huge impact on modern philosophical ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
This website was basically just Locke's biography, and it gave me a lot of information on everything from his childhood, his awards and recognitions, to what he is best known for today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY
This video, silly as it may be, actually had a lot of great information on John Locke and his ideas on knowledge and "tabula rasa." This is where I got much of my information on the "blank slate" theory.
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume2/june04/primsource.cfm
This was a great source for information regarding Locke's views on education and play. It was also very interesting to read.
I saw those 3-Minute Philosophy videos on YouTube, too! Hilarious. That guy has a bit of time on his hands...
I decided to do a blog about the controversy over rationalism and empiricism, since that's another conversation I've been having with some of my friends. I'll summarize both positions, then give Kant's ideas which appear to synthesize them.
Rationalism is the approach to epistemology from reason alone. This approach was founded on Descartes's skepticism. Remember that Descartes was one of the original skeptics, and that his first criterion for truth is that an idea must "[present] itself so clearly and distinctly in my mind that there was no reason to doubt it". Sensory input can be doubted quite easily. Anyone who has ever been fooled by an optical illusion can attest to this (Neil DeGrasse Tyson even calls them "brain failures" instead of optical illusions, which is both funny and interesting). Rationalists believed that the only way to get to Truth was to solely rely on reason, thereby avoiding being tricked by the senses.
The empiricist response to this (and the foundational idea of anything recognizable as science) is that a system is not true if it does not scale with our experience of reality. Charles Peirce writes: "To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency -- by something upon which our thinking has no effect." This idea is paramount to psychology or any other science. Instead of, "Wouldn't it be cool if...", the thought becomes, "I wonder if...let's test it."
Rather than pick a side in the rationalism versus empiricism debate, Kant appears to form a compromise between the two systems. Kant accepts the rationalist view that we can't experience the world directly because we can't trust our senses, and so he divides the world into the perceived world and the real world. The perceived world is the world we experience, regardless of how close that world aligns with the real world.
Kant grants that we get all of the information we have about our perceived world (he called it the phenomenal world) through our senses, and in that way he agrees with empiricists.
However, Kant argues that in the real world (he called it the noumenal world), which we don't know about through sensory experience (or rather, which we don't know if we know about through sensory experience), the only thing we can really trust is reason, and in that way he agrees with the rationalists.
Basically, Kant is saying that we get all of our data from the outside world, so the rationalists are wrong. However, the ability to reason and process that data does not come from the outside world, so the empiricists are wrong. I think Kant would agree with Leibnitz that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses "except for the intellect itself" (text, pg 51).
Sources:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1999868/immanuel_kantrationalism_and_empiricism.html?cat=37
This source better explains Kant's views on the relationship between rationalism and empiricism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism
I included this wikipedia source on rationalism because it was the best source I could find to give an overview of what that philosophical viewpoint entails.
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
I included this piece that I read for a Philosophy of Science class. Peirce breaks down belief formation into four methods: tenacity, authority, a priori (rationalism) and what we would now call science (empiricism). It's worth noting that Peirce was writing much later than Kant or any of the other people we read about in this chapter, but I'm familiar with him and he summarizes the empiricist spirit well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRSYSTkwFW0
I included this really boring video that I couldn't get all the way through, for the sole reason that at first I thought it was narrated by John Malkovich. Really though, don't bother here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvtJR1zNO8k
Finally, here's a funny video about Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. I think they have it all wrong though: the lab coat goes on the empiricist, and the joint (yes, this video features fake marijuana) should go with the rationalist, if it goes anywhere at all. Or maybe Kant should be holding it; maybe it was his inspiration for combining these two opposing approaches.
In reading Chapter 2 of our textbook, I was struck by the caption included on page 51, written by John Stuart Mill. I could barely continue reading on as I continued to connect this thought process to a class I am taking called Macro Economics. To me, JS Mill assumes that all he has ever wanted to have and to accomplish is suddenly realized, and yet he is not happy. This relates to economics in that there exists “scarce resources to realize unlimited wants.” In making models for satisfaction, economists make “assumptions” for certain factors in order to induce the specific “cause” for changes. Further along in Chapter 2, these models are explained further. I found in thinking of psychology as a “self-economy,” I have been able to better understand the function of cause and effect as I was previously confused on the issue.
I was still curious as to, how does one deal with lethargic times and apathy? Or how does one get happy?? C. James Goodwin, the author of our textbook mentions that JS Mill discovered “Wordsworth.” I gathered from the next sentence that Wordsworth was a person-poet. So…I typed him in the search box on the internet. I then read that William Wordsworth was a romantic-age poet form the Lake District in England. I continued search and found his vast amount of works catalogued on different websites. I tried to think in the context of the times while reading through the sonnets and poems. I probably read more poetry in this sitting than all my life combined. I never knew how romantic psychology could be. I am very interested in how romance can inspire logic. Here William Wordsworth seems to be writing down his thoughts, but includes style and flow, kind of like a romance journal. I think I enjoyed “The Tables Turned” most of all. This searching process assisted me in answering the above inquiry. JS Mill found beauty to deal with lethargic times. Happiness is beautiful. Beauty is happy…..and happening.
So if I can’t be “made happy” by getting everything I think I want…..then what is the purpose of my effort in life? The purpose is the purpose. Instead of starting on a process to get happy, I will BE happy and GET processed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics
(desc. of economics…attempting to apply to Economy of “one’s self”)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordsworth
(desc. Of life and times of William Wordsworth for contextual connection)
http://www.bartleby.com/145/wordchrono.html
(William Wordsworth Poetic Contents…browse at will)
Empiricism is the idea that all of our knowledge is based on what we have experienced and perceived with our own senses. The person who came up with this idea and who is thought of as the father of empiricism is John Locke. The roots of empiricism date all the way back to the great Greek Philosophers. Aristotle spoke of having a clean mind or blank slate in which experiences leave impressions on. The concept that Aristotle developed was also studied in the middle ages by philosophers. The concept was further developed in the renaissance period by great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci. This concept was taken by thinkers later known as empiricists such as Francis Bacon before the true founder of the concept, John Locke, actually gave this concept a name.
However, some saw problems with Locke’s philosophy. Church goers were left with the impression that if god can’t be perceived than can he exist. One researcher, George Berkley, who also happened to be a bishop sought to solve this problem. He suggested an entity can only exist if it is perceived or if it can perceive, thus giving god life once again. Berkley’s approach to empiricism is called subjective idealism.
Empiricism gives tests a template for physiologists and researchers to use for their studies. If the theory psychologists test cannot be played out in our natural world than that theory they test would be empirically false. Also along the same lines all tests that are empirical should be falsifiable. With empiricism we should be guided by the information that we perceive. In the theory of empiricism if we can perceive it we can test it. Testing empirically allows for a very accurate means of gathering data in the experiment.
The theory has progressed throughout history and branched out to other disciplines of science. With the logical empiricism movement in the 20th century researchers saw the benefit of real life testing in empiricism. They combined empiricism with mathematic logic to bring about a new philosophical sense. Also in the 20th century a form of empiricism, pragmatic philosophy, rose. This form of philosophy is a combination of empiricism and rationalism. This concept took the best of both ideals giving light to an experienced and concept based form of thinking. Thinking this way allowed researchers to take their experienced based work and think critically beyond in order to further develop their research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Empiricism.htm- The first two links I used to increase my general knowlage of the subject and find a timeline for empiricism.
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/220/Notes14.html
The final link I used was to help me understand how empiricism was used in a practical application.
I chose to do my topical blog on John Locke and his empiricist beliefs on education. Locke fits into the chapter because he was an empiricist thinker whom attempted to apply his empiricist beliefs to different theories. His empiricist beliefs, particularly related to education, show some strong similarities to behaviorism that won't come into play in psychology until the 1900's, but are still very important to psychology's history. Locke and the other empiricists in some ways can be seen as forefathers to be behaviorism. I'm interested in Locke and his views on education for two reasons: for one I plan to be a future teacher and his views on education may help as a future teacher or at least give me another view point on how to teach children. Secondly, I've always been a huge fan of lost so I want to get to know the real John Locke better and see if his views and theories in real life relate to the show at all.
Locke believed that all humans are born without any innate ideas and without any knowledge at all in a babies brain. He referred to this as "Tabula Rasa," or blank slate. Even though I found this interesting because of pop culture and Lost (a name of an episode in season 1 is titled Tabula Rasa) I found this quite interesting as a different theory from the idea of Hobbes that all people are born with some basic human characteristics. Locke separated himself from dualists by stating that the mind and body are one unlike the dualists who claimed the mind and body were separate of each other. He also believed unlike the idealists that not only is a sound mind necessary, but also a sound body (or healthy body) which can support the mind. One of Locke's quotes states "I think I may say that of all men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education" which can be interpreted as humans are the result of the choices and education that they receive and will determine how individual people will shape themselves throughout their life. Locke also stresses the importance of physical health for children in the first year of life in order to develop a good foundation for the child. Locke says that under certain circumstances punishment is appropriate as well as strictness, but he points out in his work "Thoughts Concerning Education" that "great severity of punishment does very little good." He also says that "those children who have been most chastised, seldom make the best men." He feels it won't punishment won't result in the desired effect and can possibly have unintended consequences. Another person featured in the text of chapter 2, Kant, differed heavily from Locke who believed that regular punishment in education should be utilized. Locke believed that punishment could turn children into bad beings with behavioral or discipline problems and trying to solve them with more punishment will only make it worse. He questioned if children are punished constantly than how are they supposed to learn to be good people? He thought that manners should be learned by example because he believed authoritarian rules with punishments if not followed correctly was a bad idea. He was in the camp that children already want to idealize their parents at a young age so why not have the parents set a good example on how to use manners properly by having the children see it and emulate it. Locke states "never trouble yourself about those faults in them, which you know age will cure" in order to demonstrate how children will be children and look at it as something age will fix instead of viewing it as original sin that needs to be nipped in the butt right away.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY&feature=related: I used this video because I found it quite informative despite the added humor and stick figure sketches. The video explained several of Locke's theories, particularly on knowledge, and also how his work related to the creation of the United States.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSIyg-Y7uCw: I used this video because it's a professor, Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College, giving a lecture on Locke's ideas on education and was very informational because he uses quotes from Locke's work "Thoughts Concerning Education."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8YZgWz6Pfo&feature=related: This video was the second clip from Dr. Hicks video on Locke and education as he goes through Locke's work on education. He has three more clips on Locke and education and I would have used all the videos for this topical blog, but work has given me a time constraint.
John Locke's views on education were a lot different than what normal teachers today would view their ideas on education. In the textbook, Locke's views on education are very eye opening of what he wrote in his book in 1693 called Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Some of his views were how children should start learning education early. Early training would mean that they need to learn good habits so they do not develop bad ones. Locke's interpretation of how children should be punished was by being beaten if they did something wrong. After I read this section of the textbook I was curious to see what other thoughts Locke had on education, and did not know that Locke had a view on education. I decided to do more research on Locke's education views.
Locke's viewed children in education as to not be put to work because their mind couldn't handle it. He believed that the parents made mistakes on the minds of children by not making the minds be obedient to discipline. "None of the things they are to learn, should ever be made a burthen to them, or impos’d on them as a task." Locke wanted children to learn in the education, not work while they were at home. John Locke's purpose of education was to have a child have a sound of mind, body and to serve the country, children develop into a character, and chose a curriculum for the academics. Locke was very interested in the education of what the child's mind would be like instead of viewing education to better everyone in society. The schools that followed Locke's ideas were mainly for gentlemen. The gentlemen in the schools would learn about history, geography,math, science, and foreign languages.
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume2/june04/primsource.cfm- this site was included the quote, and it gives a lot more other quotes from his book of Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agexed/aee501/locke.html- this site gave more detail about the three methods that Locke wanted to use in his gentlemen schools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Thoughts_Concerning_Education- this site gives information about John Locke's book he wrote with three methods of education.
I chose to write about Rene Descartes, because in a history class prior to psychology I found his discoveries to be very interesting. This fits into the chapter because the chapter focused on famous philosophers who helped to create the birth of psychology. I am interested in Descartes work because the quote I think therefore I am has always stuck with me when I hear or read about Descartes.
In reading about Descartes and his ideas on dualism, I have always found intriguing the comparisons that are made by the body being this vessel that is like a machine and does all these functions but that the substance or soul of the human being is there as well but cannot be found within the body.
In another article I read about Descartes it mentioned that he was very unsatisfied with his education he received. I can relate to this because he questioned this. Another thing I find intriguing about Descartes as well as the other philosophers is there broad range or scope of study. These philosophers were involved in study in multiple fields where as now days, individuals study one specific field. The sources I used gave various different viewpoints about Descartes regarding the different professions he was involved in.
I feel that these philosophers involvement in many different fields allows individuals to make connections across disciplines that provides for a better understanding and approach to education and what they were working towards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes- Even though it is a Wikipedia website, I feel that this provides a dense amount of information on Descartes while also providing links to other aspects of his study. This creates a web of information that helps one to make broader connections with information.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/De-Du/Descartes-Rene.html- I chose this source because it broke up Descartes life into different aspects and showed how he learned and benefited from study from different points in his life and how those experiences helped him.
http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Biographies/Descartes.html I chose these resources because it discusses how Descartes felt about his education and even though he went to college how little he actually knew.
One thing/person I found interesting in this chapter was John Stuart Mills and his feminist ideas that women deserved as many rights as men. This particularly interested me because it was so ahead of its time to be arguing for women’s rights and the right for women to vote. The other reason this caught my attention isn’t just because I am a woman, but also because him feeling this way was because of such a strong love for his wife.
I was also interested in Millis views on Psychology because of how early in time he was relating Psych with science.
http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women.htm Reading this chapter on The Subjection of Women made me more interested in John Stuart Mills.
http://www.utilitarianism.com/jsmill.htm Basic bio on Mills
http://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/one.html His essay on LIberty
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When reading through chapter 2, I had some difficulty finding interest in the chapter. I did, however, think that the legend about Berkeley arranged himself to be hanged was interesting. Due to this, I decided to do more research on Berkeley’s life and ideas, particularly regarding idealism and sensitivity.
Berkeley was born in 1685 in Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin in 1704. While he was attending school, he learned about Descartes’ and Newton’s studies. John Locke was becoming very popular and was openly discussed. He became very interested in philosophy and took part in creating a society which discussed new theories. He became a fellow in 1707.
Berkeley became an Angelican priest in 1710. Berkeley attempted to build a seminary in Bermuda, but his plan failed. This plan increased his influence as a religious leader, and he was names Bishop of Cloyne in 1734.
Berkeley’s epistemology says that there is only a mental world, there is not a physical world. He believes that if something exists, it has to be perceived by the mind,which he considered to be idealism. Descartes and Locke supported dualism. By Berkeley supporting idealism, he attacks materialism as well as dualism. He believes that no material things exist. Berkeley is associated with the phrase "esse est percipi," which means to be is to be perceived. He is particularly concerned with materialism because it promotes that things could exist without thinking minds (to perceive them).
In relation to the legend in the text book, Berkeley wanted to discover more about sensitivity. An example discussed is pain. If two people feel that something hurts, there is no saying that what they are feeling is the same; they are just using the same word. Language helps people to communicate even though they may not be experiencing the same sensory levels. This people may not be seeing or feeling the same things, but they use the same words to describe the experience. I believe that this is why he arranged to be hanged. He could get his own experience of the sensations.
While I did have a difficult time reading the chapter, I did find many interesting things about Berkeley. I found his ideas to be interesting, even though I did not agree with all of them.
Sources:
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/61987/George-Berkeley I felt that this was a good educational site to provide a biography of Berkeley.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/berkeley/ I used this site to find more information about the later part of his life, particularly his plan in Bermuda and becoming bishop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgRdqoDm9oE I found this video to be very informative, and I also feel that, while slightly weird, it provides nice visual means of information
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#1 This site was used in regards to his ideas on idealism and attacks of materialism.
http://www.nndb.com/people/584/000087323/ This source gave a nice background on his life, and allowed me to get confirmation of information from other sources.
I really found reading about John Locke and his views the most interesting aspect of this chapter. I found a video on YouTube which relates the views of Locke to today’s i.e. the present culture. His views are very significant to the field of psychology as he was one of the first philosophers who attempted to understand the human mind and actions were based on experience. Information about John Locke is very relevant to this chapter as he has made a noticeable and historic contribution to the study of psychology. Another reason why I feel that information about the works of John Locke fit it not this chapter is that this chapter is titled about philosophers and John Locke was basically known as a philosopher but the fact that he was one of the first people to initiate towards studying the human mind makes it interesting for the reader as well, what arose my interest in the work of John Locke were his liberal views and his views about the distribution of power in the society. John Locke’s views were very just and extremely modern for a person living in the time when he developed his views and wrote his works.
There is a lot of information about John Locke on the internet. Most of the information I found on him relates to his work as a philosopher. It was very interesting to watch a video about him and to know about his contribution to the history of United States and to be specific the constitution of the United States. John Locke was the person who introduced the idea of Life Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness. John Locke was against the possession of absolute power by any one person. John Locke’s most known publication “An Essay concerning Human Understanding “is known to have influenced early study of psychology especially the school of behaviorism. The most important concept that John Locke is known for is called “TABULA RASA” which basically states that a human beings mind is initially blank and it’s only the experience that develops their knowledge over the span of their lifetime.
Websites used:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-buzVjYQvY&feature=related
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/johnlocke.html
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/locke.htm
Please state why you chose these links and how they contributed to your post. Thanks.
The topic I wanted to research further from chapter two was Descartes’ beliefs of being an interactionist because I think I am one as well, but I wanted to know more about it before agreeing completely with him. An interactionist is a person who believes the mind and body directly influence each other. To be an interactionist, you also must be a dualist, believing the mind and body are two separate and distinguishable essences.
Interactionism says that the body is responsible for the physical movement and sensations that one occurs, but the mind is responsible for the awareness of these actions. Even though the mind and the body are indeed two different entities, they can not fully function without each other in the human. Also, the mind is infinite, without mass, so it is throughout the body. The mind and body interact within the pineal gland, according to Descartes, because it was thought it was the only structure in the brain that was unique to humans.
When I searched for interactionism, I found a lot on that subject, but a lot of references talked about the idea of occasionalism. Occasionalism branched off of interactionism as an attempt to strengthen the argument of Cartesian dualism. This idea intrigued me as well, so I researched that further. Occasionalism says that no act is done without the will of God. According to this theory, there are no miracles because this is God merely behaving in a way that may seem strange to us. God makes every move for us and creates every sensation for us. Not that it is one of my sources, but one of the articles that came up in my search was from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which I thought was sort of funny.
Many critics have discounted interactionism. Since the mind is immaterial and the body is material, interaction would be impossible. This is also an idea that cannot be supported by empirical evidence, so many believe it can not be considered a theory based in science.
Goodwin, C. James. A History of Modern Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Print. - This reference was merely because I used the glossary to define the terms interactionist and dualist.
http://www.custance.org/old/mind/ch2m.html - This reference gives a deeper explanation of dualism, and critics’ views of his idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29#Interactionism - This article talked about interactionism and the different arguments for and against the dualism/interactionism debate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism - This reference explained occasionalism and connected it to interactionism.
http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/K057 - This website talks about occasionalism and the different forms it comes in.
The topic that I chose to research from chapter two is the person David Hume (1711-1776). This topic fits into the chapter because it talks about impressions, and ideas. Both of these terms that I will explain a little later on, directly relate to psychology and this chapter helps us understand where these ideas originate from. Hume also proposed three laws of association which can be related to "Cause and effect". This as well, will be explained in a little while.
All of this is super interesting to me because Hume specifically talks about cause and effect of events, and how one can never be absolutely certain about the causes of events. Before reading the work of Hume, I have already recognized some of his work without even knowing who he was or how and when this work was proposed. Overall I thought this chapter was incredibly boring, but I felt a sense of connection with David Hume, thus choosing to write about him.
To start off with, it is important to know the place of origin for any specific person of great importance, or of a person that fascinates us in general. David Hume was born in Scotland near Edinburgh. He then entered the Edinburgh University at around the age of twelve. While attending school Hume became fascinated with philosophy and literature but eventually dropped out without completing a specific degree. Hume then moved away and proceeded to write his first book "A Treatise of Human Nature". For anyone who does not know what a treatise is, it is the "Systematic, usually extensive written discourse on a subject". This book ended up failing and not being popular, but Hume continued to write philosophy and history.
Hume came up with "Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects". Hume decided to observe human behavior and thinking, including his own. Hume basically wanted to uncover the basic laws of the mind. Hume believed that all human understanding is solely rooted from experience. Human believed that the mind had to basic elements: Impressions and Ideas. According to the book, impressions are basic sensations that are derived from experience (see things, taste and smell things). Ideas are "faint copies" of these impressions. According to Hume, ideas are similar to impressions and are derived from them, but these ideas are not as vivid.
Along with impression and ideas, Hume proposed three laws of association. These are resemblance, contiguity and cause/effect. With resemblance, we can look at an object and have it remind us of another object. With contiguity if you only go for runs by the river, thinking of runs may make the person think of a river. If one even is associated with another, and in most cases with regularity, we know this as cause and effect. For example, climbing a cliff with no equipment has caused a person to break their arm a few times. While thinking back on the situation and looking at an arm cast, that person will be reminded of the pain that was inflicted upon them.
To go along with this idea, Hume was a firm believer that events occur together with some sort of a predictable regularity. To know that A causes B, it is important to know that when A occurs, B occurs regularly. A occurs before B does, and B will not occur unless A does.
Hume challenged the ideas on religion a lot. He did not deny that God did, or did not exist, but he certainly said that the existence of God could be questioned. Like we had discussed in class, this made the church angry and labeled Hume as somewhat of a tyrant.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/treatise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/hume.html
http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/hume.htm
Left a few things out..For the first source listed, I used this just as a reference to find out what the work treatise meant. I thought that it would be pointless to talk about it even when I wasn't sure exactly what it meant.
For the second source, I used wikipedia for most of my information. As long as the other sources on this website are reputable, I feel that it is okay to go with this one. As far as what the book said, this information was correct.
For the third source, I liked this one specifically because it gave a timeline with the events in Hume's life. One thing I found out that I didn't know, was that he died of cancer. In all, this timeline was in sequence with the second source telling me that my sources so far are accurate.
For my fourth and last source, I didn't use this one so much. It was rather on the short side, but accurate. Most of my information came from the second and third source, but the fourth source supported first other ones very nicely. This source was used for a check of accuracy.
In high school, one of my persuasive speeches I wrote was about why you shouldn’t home school your kids. After reading chapter two and the segment on “Raising a Philosopher”, it altered my opinion. John Stuart Mill, an amazing politician, philosopher, and psychologist, was homeschooled by his father, James Mill. However, this was no ordinary homeschooling. The father and son duo had a vigorous work schedule and studied long, tedious hours throughout the day. Mill credits this for why he was so intelligent, though some say that with how advanced he was in his early years, he was likely to be a child prodigy. This leads to the nature vs nurture argument, and lead me to look up statistics and facts about homeschooling now of days.
In doing my research, I found out a lot about how the homeschooling system works today. Its more popular than I would have imagined and it’s almost as if its this own little world. Homeschooling is increasing at a rate of five to twelve percent a year. More importantly, however, statistics show that homeschooled kids are more intelligent. According to one of the websites I visited, homeschooled children score 15-30 percent higher on standardized test scores than individuals who went to public school. The National Home Education Research Institute has also done studies and have found similar results.
Obviously, homeschooling has changed drastically since then, yet Mill wasn’t the only famous, intelligent person to be homeschooled. Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln are two of many successful individuals who were homeschooled. They both went on to do amazing and brilliant things, just like John Stuart Mill. Obviously, there is also the whole nature vs. nurture argument, but I believe its safe to say that Mill’s rigorous homeschooling definitely made an impact, and a positive one at that.
http://www.homeschool.com/?Hover_NoThankYou=true
This site was great - extremely detailed. It goes in depth about today's homeschooling. Its not just fun facts, but it shows curriculum, subjects, etc. I found it very interesting
http://www.successful-homeschooling.com/homeschooling-information.html
This site was great for fast fun facts about homeschooling. It talked about homeschooling as a whole, and not so much the individual details.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/701348/posts
Finally, this site was great about sharing the success of homeschooled children. It had nice comparisons with kids who were homeschooled and kids who attended public school.
While reading chapter two I felt that there were many philosophers that had a lot of good ideas, but Descartes really stuck out to me. I would have to say what had drawn me to him the most was his idea that “the only way to get to the certainty of the truth is to arrive at it oneself, relying on the clear use of one’s own reasoning powers.” I also liked the fact that he decided to find things out for himself, rather than relying on authority. I feel that just these two things alone make a huge statement and could really help us, as college students, to think about things a little more rather than just taking other peoples word for it.
Descartes really contributed to science in many ways. For example, he brought about the coordinate system, the powers you multiply a number by, laws of a fraction, and much more. However, he was more interested in the fundamental truths of the universe. Not only was he focused on looking to find the truth but he also gave insight about judgments. How what we perceive may not be true at all. Even having evidence and suggesting that what we are witnessing is in fact true, we may doubt later on or feel as though we are right no matter what others think. This could be anything, color, shape, size, we all may see it differently, so what is true? This goes along with his idea of truth to oneself and one’s own reasoning. He discovered that we “experience the world through our senses and our senses are fallible and it is impossible for us to know anything and what we know is based on varying levels of belief.” This was frustrating for Descartes but he then found a fact that he could tell people without; that he existed. This is when he came up with the famous, “I think therefore I am.”
Along with this information, I found it very interesting that the Roman Catholic Church put his work on its index of prohibited books. Descartes had not released a lot of his work because he did want to remain in good graces of the Catholic Church. I found this fascinating because he did try and prove the existence of God. However, since he questioned many ideas and tried to find answers, the Church in turn did not want Descartes to encourage others to question as well. The good thing to do would be to follow authority and because he wanted to search for things himself, the Church looked down on him. I just think that it is crazy that the Church felt so strongly against different ideas and banned things almost immediately without disregard. The reason I might find this so interesting is because times have changed so much and society doesn’t put as much of an emphasis on religion as they once did. How people feel about that is up to them. Descartes had a lot of good ideas and I felt as though they brought up a lot of questions for me, such as, will we ever find truth even if we believe it to be true? The answer is, probably not, but I definitely like to understand other people’s thoughts and what they believe compared to my own thoughts. “I think, therefore I am.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHihkRwisbE : when given the idea to use YouTube, I thought I should give it a try. I actually really enjoyed this video about Descartes because it was humorous and very informational. I liked that it broke down his work and helped me realize that I know more about him than I thought. Seemed like a win/win for me.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/ : after viewing the YouTube video I decided to look up more ideas that Descartes had about the truth. What I found was that he too judged what he saw and sometimes after turning away, he would doubt what he thought he knew. I found this very interesting.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/descartes.htm : I liked this sight just because it talked more about the Church and why Descartes ideas had offended the Church society. Since Descartes had questioned and come up with different answers than the Church would have appreciated, they banned his books from the Church community so others would not question.
Philosophy is not something that I have learned much about, nor is it something that I am particularly interested in learning about, so this is a blog that I have struggled with the most so far. Although it was sort of like pulling teeth to find something I cared to talk about I finally decided to focus on John Locke. One thing that stood out to me about Locke was his view on primary and secondary qualities of matter. His view on these two categories came from his belief that all knowledge came from the senses.
Locke stated that the primary qualities of matter were the inherent properties of the object. He then stated that the secondary qualities of an object depend solely on the perceptions of the observer. The book states that a distinction between the two qualities was first made by Galileo, Locke however; adopted this language from writings he read by Robert Boyle. The conclusion I was able to draw about the two categories of qualities is that first off primary qualities are qualities that an object will possess with no need of perception from a person. Secondly the qualities that are secondary are qualities that need an individual to perceive them.
The information that I learned about Locke and his thoughts stirred up my curiosity about perception so I decided to look for studies that have been done on visual perception specifically or perceiving color. While searching for studies that had to do with perception I found out learning about how the eye and the brain perceives color was actually called color science (proof that studying the brain is science). As I continued my search for a study on color I was able to discover a very interesting fact about the way we perceive color. In one study it was shown that although there are some differences in the amount of color sensitive cones in the eyes of people, those who are able to perceive color (not colorblind) in the same way. I am not quite sure how to feel about the results from this study. It makes me think that if this is true for most people then when it comes to the color of things there is no reason to specify between primary and secondary qualities.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/#HisBacLocLif –learned about Locke’s interaction with Boyle, also helped me to better understand the difference between primary and secondary qualities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color - found out about color science. This led me to look for studies on perception of color.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051026082313.htm - covered color perception. Informed me that a lot of people perceive c
*color the same way
I have learned about John Locke in other psychology courses, but I only learned the basic information about him. His ideas are still relevant today when it comes to tabula rasa, because the nature verse nurture debate is still occurring today. Locke not only had the idea of tabula rasa, but he also had research and theories on other topics that the field of psychology later built on. I think that John Locke is very interesting because of the impact that his ideas still have today, and his desire to find truth. I think that today we can all relate to searching out truth and the meaning of things. Today, we have a lot more freedom to explore, but Locke lived in a time when truth was what the church told you, and was not supposed to be explored any further, this is why I find Locke’s search for truth and answers even more respectable and interesting.
Locke had very original ideas for his time, and did not believe what was told to him, but wanted to discover answers for himself. Locke’s idea about tabula rasa was unheard of during this time. He had some good evidence to support this, like saying a child does not innately know there is a God, but it has to be taught to them. Although, I think that it is not nature verses nurture, but a combination of both, Locke’s ideas were very important and are still debated today.
One thing that I found interesting was John Locke’s idea about the church. He did not believe that Kings and Queens had divine right because there was no scripture to back it up. This shows that he was obviously knowledgeable about the Bible and had read it in entirety. This was likely a bold statement for him time, because the King was in power and was believed to be “chosen by God”, but Locke did not believe this because he had done research on his own, and didn’t just believe what he was told. I think it is great that he read the bible to look for answers, but he is also said to have beliefs that are Deist, which is not a truth that is shown in the bible. It is interesting that there is a disconnect in his religious views.
Locke also published information on simple and complex ideas. This is interesting, because Locke was so inquisitive that he even questioned thoughts. Locke broke down thought into classifications of simple and complex ideas. This seems pretty obvious and basic, but it had never been thought of before, or at least in writing. I think that Locke had great ideas, and has definitely impacted how the field of psychology is even today. I find Locke and his ideas to be very interesting and I admire and respect his desire to learn and discover answers and truth for himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StBlNYX7HBU&feature=related
http://www.iep.utm.edu/locke/#SH2e
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
Please add why you chose your urls and how they contribute to your post. Thanks.
I went back and forth on my topic a lot this week. First, I started out being most interested in how so many great philosophers were incredibly interdisciplanary. But as you've said, that's a very broad topic, so I picked something a bit simpler...
Descartes.
And for whatever reason, I wound up with THIS incredibly funny video (one of the other commentors has also found the team at Three-Minute Philosophy): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHihkRwisbE&feature=relmfu. One of the first quotes says: "Descartes contributed SO much that the French decided to call it a day and never contribute anything else to society, ever again..." Funny, right? It goes on to talk about all of the amazing things that Descartes came up with that spanned many fields.
Which brought me back to how interdisciplanary he was. And I said, AH Screw it, I'm already late handing this in (according to the posting times on this blog which are several hours fast and must be set on Philippine time).
So anyway, I decided to examine the question: Why such a range of contributions from these important philosophers?
It turns out that, according to a study: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mathematical-aptitude-in-academics/ Philosophy graduate students ranked relatively HIGH (in general) in their comparative scores between verbal skills and math, then writing and the aforementioned. They evaluated each grad student major with the others, and Philosophy held its own. I wasn't expecting that at all, especially how much it stood alone at the high ends of the scale. It says to me that the people "drawn" to Philosophy are generally bright thinkers who can express their ideas clearly and grasp difficult concepts. Or perhaps that just means they can BS through a test, but I digress...
So what does that say about people like John Stuart Mill who dabbled in Arithmetic and - like John Locke - politics? http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ Or Descartes who took major strides in Mathematics (http://www.answers.com/topic/ren-descartes) or Hume the Economist? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume
I think it comes down to allowing ourselves to be creative. As I read the biographies of these men, I realized that some of them were born poor and most of them still had to work incredibly hard to get into school even though people like JS Mill had a bit of a "leg up" due to an MP Father.
Today, we hear about Bill Gates inventing a computer (or was that Al Gore? I forget) or Stephen Hawking theorizing over the non-existence of God, and we think that people can only be smart in one field. That they're somehow limited in having an impact in one place.
But the truth is: thinking critically is a SKILL. These people (and other philosophers) must have an innate talent to think through problems when some others lack the ability. Even now, we're asked to pick a major that will decide our future job path.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm a "jack of all trades, master of none."
Maybe I'm a philosopher after all ;)
I wanted to find more information about Berkeley’s theory of vision. He went further than just stating the obvious that we just see things, but “we make judgments about them based on visual information and our experiences” (45). This can be supported throughout history simply by our human nature. Everyone makes first judgments when they see something, whether it is right or wrong. Things completely change from person to person based on experiences that we have. An example of this can be seen in an experiment done by John Watson through classical conditioning. In this experiment Little Albert is conditioned to be afraid of a white rat through introduction of a loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) every time he touches the rat. (Wikipedia) Not every person is scared of a white rat or for that matter anything white and fluffy. There are many other examples that you can see personally, certain songs or places will bring about memories that don’t have the same sentimental value to someone else.
He also wanted to be able to explain “distance is not immediately perceived via sight, although it is immediately perceived using touch” (Hillbert). This makes a lot of sense because we rely heavily on the working of our sense together to be able to fully understand the world. Although there are exceptions for people without the ability to experience certain sense, such as vision, it’s tested that their senses they can use heighten to over compensate for the loss. Through the readings it seems as though he didn’t want to give too much credit to the brain specifically, but more to our personal understanding and experiences of the world. The example in the book is about being able to understand up and down. We come to the realization of this by looking at an object, perceiving it and touching it relating it to where we are.
What happens when we aren’t there to perceive something happen? Or how will we be able to distinguish between what’s real and what’s in our minds? Berkely came up with the idea of the “Permanent Perceiver”. He said that “we can be sure of the permanence of reality, but only through our faith in god” (45). This makes sense to something with strong faith, but what about everyone else? This idea raises a lot of questions as we can already see I’ve asked three. It seems as if he didn’t want to put forth effort into explaining the flaw in his theory and just thought it was easiest to explain it with the unknown.I guess that's what philosophy is, always asking more questions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley: This page also gave an overview of his life. It was hard for me to fully understand his theory so by looking at multiple view of this theory helped me to start to better understand what he had been thinking.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~hilbert/Images%20of%20Berkeley/Berk_life.htm: This page gave a summary of his life and had an interesting paragraph about his theory of vison.
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Berkeley/vision.htm: I thought it would be a good idea to be able to read some from the exact writings of Berkeley to get more in-depth about his research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment : I choose this website to learn more about classical conditioning and how it could be tied into experiences personally perceived that could link psychology from the past to more recently.
For this assignment I wanted to learn more about Sir Francis Bacon. I know that when reading the chapter they did not talk much about Bacon, nor did they go into detail about what he did that pertained to Psychology. Bacon to me sounds much more interesting than any other people that were talked about in the chapter.
When going to find resources to write about Bacon, well most all of them were all informational.
Francis Bacon was the son of Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Seal of Elisabeth I. He entered Trinity College Cambridge at age 12, where he studied all the sciences that they taught at the time. This shows that Bacon was very smart in many ways! Bacon’s father died when Francis was only 18. Francis was the youngest son, which meant when his father died this left him pretty much penniless. It was hard to get farther in life when you are penniless. However, being penniless lead him to a career in Law. But Bacon was also able to be 23 and already in the House of Commons Later down the road in 1613 Bacon becomes an attorney general. Bacon then died on April 9, 1626 (65).
Bacon was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. I found that for one person to do all this and still die at a young age was just amazing. So far I have not found anything truly geared towards psychology, but that he did do a lot for others to learn from him. Bacon has been called the father of empiricism, which I found to be very interesting. It was cool to see that the scientific method is often called the Baconian method.
One thing that I found really interesting was about his death. Bacon was doing an experiment which brought him to his death. His dedication probably led to his death, bringing him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments. While driving near Highgate, decides to experiment with the effect of cold on the decay of meat, purchases a fowl and stuffs it with snow. Catches cold and develops bronchitis, dying on April 9. So from working on his own experiment he gets sick and dies.
The information that I found was not what I was looking for but I was however to find more information about him in general. Bacon was a philosopher and it ties in to chapter two because that is what chapter two dealt with was philosophers and history of psychology.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/bacon/
This site gave me a better understand of Bacon’s work. This site was very informal, and gave me what the book did not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dva7KQWxJxE
This video talks about some of Bacon’s work and what he did for Philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon
This site was the first one that I went to, and I was able to get some general information about Bacon and what had happened to him. I liked the knowledge that I gained from this site.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/bacon.html
This site was informational but yet I learned about the scientific method and what it was often called. This site was not the best but I did however gain some knowledge from it.
While reading chapter 2, there was a concept that stuck out to me right away. John Locke and his "white paper" idea is something that I often think about, and to see how this textbook describes it was very interesting to me. The book says that Locke "considered and rejected" innate ideas. Wow. As I read this, I found it hard to not explore what this actually meant. Of course I have heard the term "innate" multiple times, but since this huge concept was described so simplicitly, I forced myself to sit back and think about what this meant to Locke's research. For my own understanding, I chose to pull Webster's Collegiate Dictionary off the shelf and investigate the full definition on the word "innate." I found the following definition: Inborn; native; natural; not acquired. Originating in or derived from, the constitution of the intellect; not acquired from experience.
Again, wow. As an adult, I feel the one of the most powerful lessons I have learned in life is just that. Life IS learning. I feel that all of the choices I have made, from brushing my teeth to choosing a partner, are lessons that I will and continue to learn from. So to break down Locke's theory, I asked myself, "Do I agree with this concept completely?"
To answer this question, I forced myself to think of other questions that pertain trial and error, experiences, and unconsious decision making. How do I know that purple is purple? How do I know when a dream is a dream and not realty? How do I know when a loved when is sad, even when they say nothing at all?
Locke describes two ways in which ideas originate and these are SENSATION and REFLECTION. Sensation refers to how we perceive the qualities of an object. Reflection refers to the experience that lies within an idea, in respect to our individual minds. As I process this, I am reminded of my favorite classic story. William Shakespeare must have been thinking about these ideas when writing the questions that went through Juliet's mind when she discovered that Romeo was a Montague. To quote the classic tale, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." To me, this means that in her association with the name Montague was that of a negative perception, but only because of information that had been presented to her by her parents and the rest of the Capulet family. It was not until she had HER OWN EXPERIENCE with a Montague that she was able to form her own idea of the name. In this example, I most definitely agree with Locke's "white paper" theory.
In retrospect, there are still things questions that are not answered by this concept. Going back to my earlier brainstorms, "How is it that before very young children can even talk, are they able to tell when their mothers are sad?" I believe that Locke would answer this by using ideas of facial expressions, etc. To me, I think this is an innate idea that refers to the connection between mother and baby.
In closing, I agree that very much of what I do and the decisions I make are products of sensation and reflection, but I also feel that innate ideas do exist. I also believe that I learn from about life THROUGH life and its up to me to know the difference of what I can control and what I cannot control, and just to stir up the fire a bit, I think this would be a good time to use an example of how religion and philosophy CAN work hand in hand. After all, innate ideas are the basis of the first verse of the serenity prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/locke.html
(I used this website because I think to understand Locke's ideas, it is important to go directly to the source. This was an excerpt from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/locke.htm
(This site also explored the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but it broke down some the ideas more than the other site, which was important to me because, as I stated earlier, this is a huge concept that can be difficult to process)
http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/what-s-name-that-which-we-call-rose
(I used this website because Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is my favorite story, and while reading about sensation and reflection, this classic quote by Juliet seemed to fit in perfectly with Locke's breakdown of "white paper.")
http://www.cptryon.org/prayer/special/serenity.html
(I wanted to integrate the first verse of the serenity prayer with the conecpt of innate ideas, that which we can control and what we are unable to control)