More snippets from Philosophy 314

So we read a little Galileo, and it was all about something called corpuscularianism.  The world is full of these little corpuscles which are responsible for such things as our ability to smell.  When the corpuscles get up our nose, we smell things.

I thought, What is this nonsense?  I even skipped the class on Galileo.  But then in the next class, referring back to that one, the prof referred to Galileo’s “atomism.”

Oh, atoms, I thought.  Molecules.  They do get up your nose and trigger sensations of smell.  Hmm.

Though how do I know that?  Why am I prepared to believe in molecules, but not corpuscles?

I think I just went through a defamiliarization experiment, like in Gulliver’s Travels when the Lilliputians say that Gulliver keeps his god in his pocket because he won’t do anything without consulting it, and you think, What nonsense, but it turns out they’re referring to his watch.  Ah, you think.

Or it has something to do with paradigm shifts and belief systems.  I’ve abandoned many of the beliefs of my youth, but I still believe in atoms and molecules.  God knows why; I’ve never seen either.  I suppose that means that if I had never heard of atomic theory and someone presented it to me now, I’d call it nonsense.  I wonder why.  Because it goes against experience?

An argument for not trusting experience and the senses, I suppose, which leads to Descartes, but I’ve talked about him already.

I suppose I believe in atoms and molecules because some things you concede to authority, as even the great skeptic, Michel de Montaigne, said you have to do, because after all you can’t know everything and you have to trust authorities on some issues.

So I accept atomic theory, but didn’t even recognize it when presented under a different name (corpuscularianism).  Under its strange new name I rejected it utterly; once I realized it was just another name for atoms and molecules, well, at first I felt embarrassed and defensive, but eventually I thought, Okay, so Galileo wasn’t crazy.

Though I only think that because he fits into my current belief system.  Hmm.  There’s a moral in there somewhere.

Cogito Part Deux

So maybe he did say it, Descartes I mean, "cogito ergo sum."  Or in French, "je pense, donc je suis."

Further research has turned up new possibilities.  I let the prof know.  I'm helpful that way. Last year, in the Religious Studies class I was taking, the prof decided to explain BC/BCE and AD/CE.

He began by saying, "Who knows what happened in the year 0?"

I said, "There was no year 0."

Always helpful.

Snippets from Philosophy 314

So this term I continue my plan to be the oldest student in a variety of classes across campus, pursuing philosophy in the hopes of understanding the meaning of life. 

   

This is what I’ve found out so far as I sit on one of the few old-fashioned chairs without wheels (the wheeled chairs that dominate the classroom hurt my back):

Cogito ergo what?

So we’re reading Descartes, who seems a bit of a bore, committed to finding implausible proofs for the existence of God.  The one thing I knew about Descartes before taking the course was that he was the one who said “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). 

Only he didn’t say it; he says things like that; that famous phrase accurately sums up his main approach (which is a skeptical view in which he begins doubting everything he can, and decides he can be sure only that he exists, and he’s sure of that only because he knows he’s thinking; and if he’s thinking, he must exist in some way to do the thinking).

A reasonable point of view, but he never actually sums it up in the famous Cogito phrase.  “Yes,” says the prof, “I was surprised to discover that too.”  Who did say it first, I ask?  The prof shrugs. “Philosophy is full of slogans,” he says.

Hmph, next I’ll find out that Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

And philosophy is full of slogans?

Synagogue and Student Council

I don’t go to synagogue very often.  The last time was almost a year ago, and I’d been away so long I didn’t realize they’d moved the time back half an hour, so when my girl-friend (who had never been to synagogue before) and I showed up, they were just getting underway.

This is not ideal because a synagogue service lasts three hours, and the thing to do is show up about 45 minutes late, after the opening prayers but in time for the Torah readings and the rabbi’s sermon.  Only the 100-year-old men show up right at the start, and of course the officiating officers: the rabbi, the cantor, and in this case another official, a sexton, a beadle – I don’t know what to call him – gabbai and shamash are possible Hebrew names.

He greeted us at the door and sounded happier to see me than I’d expected, it turned out because I was the tenth man needed for “minyan,” or quorum, the minimum number required to conduct a full service.  This was only the second time in my life that I’d been pressed into service this way because usually I show up late enough that a minyan has already been formed.

So at first there were very few of us at the service, and I felt uncomfortable, worried I might be called on to do something I didn’t know how to do, but making up the minyan doesn’t require anything but your presence, so that was all right, and eventually others who knew about the later start showed up and I could feel more comfortably inconspicuous.

And it was a pleasant experience overall.  I always enjoy the mysterious prayers and chants, and the sermon is sometimes interesting; there’s ritual and community and even food at the end and some pleasant conversation with members of the congregation.

My girl-friend and I said we should go back, but we haven’t, perhaps for a number of reasons.  In my search for ritual, community, and spiritual sustenance I have other outlets.  I keep signing up for Continuing Studies courses, for one thing, and even courses for credit.  But perhaps more important, I attend Student Council meetings.  Every two or three weeks I am there with my real community, my real congregation, and I am there in an official capacity as Clerk of Council.  I walk around holding the Code of Procedure, looking a bit perhaps like the sexton-gabbai holding his prayer book and ushering people in.  Not that I usher people in, but I walk around whispering advice, or I sit in my designated place taking notes for the minutes.  Oh, and I help establish the numbers for quorum, the Council’s minyan.  And when called on, or even when not, I offer information about the rules.

I am not uncomfortable there; quite the contrary.  It’s like a second home.  I’ve been doing it for years and I know the rituals, the order of service.  In this case the food comes at the beginning, and there are lots of people who show up on time and then leave early, the opposite of how it is in the synagogue.

Then the Speaker calls the meeting to order, there are introductions, I get to introduce myself as the Clerk.  There are presentations and questions, and then the Approval of the Minutes (my Minutes among others), then the debate on motions.  No sermons (well, not usually).  Sometimes elections to committees, and then the motion to adjourn.

No one says Good Shabbes afterwards, but groups may gather for post-mortems or libations.  I may stay for some post-mortems but not for the libations.  It’s late at night by the time we finish; often the meetings are even longer than synagogue services, and I am tired at the end, and yet it feels comforting.  There is no God, unless you count Brigadier General Robert (inventor of Robert’s Rules), but it is my synagogue.

On the death of Neil Armstrong

In July 1969 I was on holiday with my family in Cape Cod.  I think I felt uneasy about that.  I was a teenager already; why was I still hanging out with my parents?  Not to mention my three younger sisters.  I felt developmentally challenged, or something.  But there I was.  Always a slow developer.

Mostly on Cape Cod we went to the beach.  There was a television in our cottage, and the four of us kids would’ve been happy to watch it – for one thing it brought in American channels we didn’t get in our cable-less Canadian home.  But kids just like to watch TV, even if their parents are saying, We didn’t come all this way for you to sit in front of the television; you can do that at home (not that it was encouraged at home either).

But on July 20, 1969 it was different.  My father actually wanted us to watch TV that day – to see the Moon landing.  This surprised me for a number of reasons.  There was the idea of watching television, and also the idea that it was important to watch a couple of Americans set foot on the Moon.  We weren’t a particularly science-y  family, though my father was a doctor.  The humanities were more our thing.  I didn’t grow up wanting to be an astronaut or anything like that.

More importantly, in our household the United States was more or less the Great Satan (though we didn’t use that term, of course).  They were the villains in Vietnam, and a bunch of racists to boot, oppressing the poor black people, not to mention all the capitalist exploitation of working people.  And their president was Richard Nixon.

And yet here was my father saying the Moon landing, the American Moon landing, was a great achievement.  I’d been prepared to dismiss it as more U.S. imperialism, but if this was the Party line, then I was entirely able to go that way instead.  I was a great follower of Party lines in those days (not so much anymore).

So we sat and watched the fuzzy, snowy pictures on the old television set in the cottage on Swan Pond River Road.  I suspect that the snowiness of the reception had less to do with the pictures being beamed a quarter of a million miles from outer space than that the cottage we were in had poor reception.  And so I saw Neil Armstrong take his famous step and utter his famous words.

I can’t remember what I thought about it now.  Was it a great achievement?  Perhaps.  I’ve become skeptical of achievement over the years.  What is achievement?  Does it matter?  It was certainly the culmination of a great aspiration.  Aspirations, I like them – maybe the aspiration is the achievement.  Or not.

On not believing yourself

So the other day I was walking near my apartment building with my girl-friend.  There’s a block beside it which has no sidewalk; there’s grass instead.  My girl-friend walked on the grass.  I walked on the street.

When she asked me why I didn’t walk on the grass, I said, “Well, it gets wet here a lot, and who wants to walk on wet grass?”

But lately it’s been hot and dry, the grass is dry, and one day when I was walking home and came to the grassy boulevard, I thought, “Well, it won’t be wet today, so I guess it will be okay to walk on it.”

But it wasn’t okay to walk on it.  It was all bumpy and uneven.  I had to look down to make sure I didn’t twist an ankle or something.

So now I know why I really don’t walk on that grassy boulevard, or maybe any plot of grass.  It has nothing to do with wet or dry, and yet for a while I believed that was why I avoided the grass.

Not for a long while, only from the time I first produced the pseudo-explanation until the day, a week or so later, when I decided to act on it.  How very odd, really.  First of all to come up with a phony explanation.  I suppose there’s lots of things we do without understanding why, and when someone presses us, do we just blurt out the first thing that comes into our heads?  Where did I even get the idea that it was wetness I was avoiding?

In a way it was a very skilled response.  It drew on my knowledge of Vancouver weather and the fact that it can be unpleasant to walk in the wet.  A logical response, you might call it, and the trouble with logic is that it often has nothing to do with reality.  I took a philosophy course once; maybe this is one of those valid but unsound arguments: I don’t like getting my feet wet, walking on the grass may make my feet wet, therefore the reason I don’t walk on the grass is to avoid getting my feet wet.

Actually, that’s not even logical.  The premises don’t hold together.  Let’s just call it a rational-sounding response.

Anyway, the really astounding thing is that, having come up with the rational-sounding explanation, I even thought it was true and tried to act on it.  It’s one thing to come up with a consciously phony reason to fool someone else, but here I was fooling myself.  Or my rational side was fooling my sensible side.

Ah, well, I suppose this is what they call believing your own propaganda.

More on Aristotle

The discussion of killing the children of one’s enemies (see my previous blog post) led me to wonder if ancient Greek society was very much a society of blood feuds, so that the children of your enemies would indeed be a threat to you.

This prompted our seminar leader to say, Oh, yes, there you are, having vanquished, or so you think, but off in the wings people are plotting, saying, We’ll get you, you f----ing b----.  And this led me to wonder about cursing in ancient Greece.  Did the ancient Greeks have words like that?  Maybe in spoken language, but they never wrote them down?  Just like a reading of mainstream Victorian would expose you to nothing stronger than d---d (with the hyphens in place), so the reading of ancient Greek texts may expose you to no curse words at all (we weren’t actually sure about this, and we had no experts on ancient Greek society and literature among us).

But the larger issue was, Are there words some societies use in speech that they never write down?  Are there words that are known but that are never repeated in polite society?  And if polite society is the only source of writings from an era, how can we ever know their impolite utterances?

This led us to muse about modern day society and the Internet.  Everything goes now, we thought at first.  No one a thousand years from now will have to wonder if we had some private words not seen in public forums.  Everything gets said in public forums, in novels, movies, and as I said, the Internet.  Every conceivable swear word must be there somewhere.

But then I thought, But don’t we still have some forbidden words?  Racial epithets and the like?  People still know them, but how often do they appear in print?  Well, again with the Internet, there are no doubt sites spewing out hatred, so they may be around.  Still, it was interesting to speculate about words that might be widely used and yet not make it into the historical record.

And I came up with a great title for an academic study: Curse Words of the Ancient Greeks.