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Economists love to invent stupid theories of how 2 completely separate things are correlated. They believe (and make believe) that when you compare 2 variables and, after some basic math, check that they are "correlated", you can guess the value of one by having the values of the other.
Models like these for example find that the expenses in beer and evolution of the GDP of a country a correlated; the number of rock songs in the Rolling Stone 500 best songs of all time and the production of oil are correlated; etc.
Well, I'm a fashion victim as well: I've just noticed, after 5 years of deep study on the matter, that 80% of the serial killers of the world eat bread for their breakfasts. So next time you'll be interviewing someone to do some babysitting for your kid, remember to ask what they eat in the morning...
cheers.
September 23rd 2009 08:54
One of the hardest points to understand in phylosophy allways seemed to me a problem of quality of explanation (once i understood the solution for it, of course). It is the solution for the antinomy between Realism and Idealism created following Kant's philosophy.
Let me explain from the beginning: when Kan't proposed that the interpretation we have from the hold is not exactly what it is - the representation problem, the difference between Noumena (what things are) and Phenomena (what things are for us) - he created a problem: how can we prove that the world in front of you is real?
Actually this problem is quite older, it dates from the Greeks, you can see it on the Allegory of the cave. This problem was solved by Cartesians by saying that it was God that guaranteed that Noumena = Phenomena. Kant wanted to surpass this, so he considered this hypothesis invalid.
After this point he developed his hole "Shematics" phylosophy which made the link between Empirists and Cartesianists. This theory is what generates the concepts, intuitions and ideas, which we used to propose a more mathematical approach using the infinite transforms and link it to Nietzsche's philosophy. But this is not the point for today's post.
The root problem of prooving that the world was real (or not) could not be solved by Kant. Thus after him we had a hole generation of people that developed the Idealism, and could not solve it either.
It was only in the beginning of the XXth century that Husserl started to find the solution for this issue (which is not a real solution, but it seems to me more the acceptance of our incapability): the transcendental ego proposed was that the being should not be studied separated from the reality it lives, because no analysis is possible in this way.
This means: it is pointless to study the being apart from the reality, and thus it is pointless to ask the question if the outside world is real or not.
Following this path, Heidegger came with Dasein: his "being there". There is no meaning to study the being without the reality where he is imerged. And more than just the simple reality around you, the most important step of Heidegger is that it's the hole history which has to be taken into account for the study of beings (mostly for men).
Then we have Sartre, who came with a pretty sentence to add to Heidegger's philosophy: existence precedes essence. This means that we exist, then we define a reason for being, in function of the history (the reality) around us.
From Heidegger and Sartre we have found that men are born opened: we can be, in function of our inborn capacities, anything that history allows us to be.
All of this to conclude that: when you read those "be yourself" logos from any clothing shop or fast food chain, send them to hell: 20 centuries of philosophy are there to proove us that we can be anything, and even change it tomorrow.
September 20th 2009 08:53
Good moto for a philosophy book: "You must be able to question everything, but don't question everything."
Basis for any person who ever wanted to do any science and arrived somewhere. If you don't question nothing, it is meaningless to start trying. Start by questioning why do you keep your job or live in a certain city.
But to avoid spending your life in doubt, you must also be able to stop in a certain moment and define your "theorems" so that you can start questioning other things; otherwise you'll go crazy and probably hang yourself...
cheers, have a nice weekend.
In the last century we had to get used to something new to humanity, the "kafkaiene" structures: organisations that get to big and completely discoordinated that we are completely out of any reality and reasoning when dealing with it (please read the Proces, the best book written in the XXth century).
Now that we're used to them, I'd like to give an approach to it for us to avoid crucifing all people that work for a given structure (company, state, any kind of organisation). Structures that get too big are not human any more, and no one inside them can be considered the fault of their errors. I mean, if someone worked for the US government during the Bush era, its not thier fault if the US had such a terrible diplomacy
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Following item 3 of the first chapter of the book:
"The capacity of creating abstract notions (...) is what we have allways called reason
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From the first page of the book we see (free translation, from French):
"everything that exists, exists for the mind, it means, the hole universe is an object for a subject, (..) it is pure representation
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Following some holidays and "The World as will and representation" from Schopenhauer (read in French, I don't know German..), here we go for a little series of posts.
This one is on time, space and matter (as all philosophers like to start their books
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a nice way to simplify the explanation of the humans goal on earth.
"Take 3 things out of your pocket and i'll explain your objectives in life
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A great historical fact we're seeing these days, where Hegel's dialectic is being applyed to the American system. As The Economist tries to explain why they agree with state's intervention as an "expetion" to save free economy (it means, save men from themselves) we see the state as some not human, as some kind of external entity that we don't understand.
I don't know where they got their notion of state, but it seems to be the same interpretation that americans have. The state is somthing that imposes you taxes and block development
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Comment by Uula Limanski
on Transcending...
Thinking The World
Uula