“Education is a Human Right, Not an Economic Good” (Vernor Muñoz Villalobos)
technorati tags:Education, Human Rights, UN Special Rapporteur, Muñoz
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I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks on a kind of “roadtrip” through Europe. We’ll try to document it in pictures as much as possible over here.
- They’re suspected of not being progressive: They seem to be dealing with exactly the same problems since at least 2400 years. Why should society support something that produces only questions, no answers? (An inspiring position against this view is detailed here, eventhough it seems to be somewhat weak on the example-side, and I can’t help the feeling that this problem has something to do with a possible difference between science and the humanities.)
- They foster heterogeneous opinions: The humanities are all about discourse. You ask (e.g.) four classicists about Homer and get five contradictory opinions. This kind of situation is common in very many areas of research in the humanities. The best thing they have to offer is either an overly cautious mainstream, which barely resembles the spearhead of research, or buzzword-compliant zealots who essentially aren’t really contributing any substancial research findings. Not so with the natural sciences, situations where different opinions and theories contradict each other are rare here (at least as far as I can tell).
- Humanities don’t have an applied branch or any industries depending on them: Physics have applied phsyics, mathematics has economical mathematics, Biology, Chemstry and Computer Science each have a massive industry supporting them. The only thing I can reasonably think of as similar in the field of humanities is Publishing.
- The elite and the folk: The humanities are constantly facing a huge dilemma. On the one side, people recongnize that they deal with topics that are of interest to them (e.g. leading a good life). Still they usally don’t agree that a scholar of the humanities is a specialist in that field and that his word should have more weight than that of the layman. (Something that’s usally assumed in the natural sciences. Who would be willing to dispute that living beings are made up of cells, if the biologist says they are.) And if a scholar insists that he is a specialist and ought to be treated as such, he succumbs to the other side of the dilemma, for he is then regarded as an elitist “priest” hiding up in his ivory tower. (A suspicion which I admit having wielded against some movement in natural sciences on another occasion). But if he gives in and decides to play nice with the layman, he is always at risk of watering down the complex statements he usually tends to make. Anyways, the layman will infer that there is no added value in educating people for years in stuff he (as a layman) know about without further training. Wathever side the scholar chooses to err on: He looses.
technorati tags:science, humanities, society, Philosophy
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Last night, I had the following discussion at a party, all of the protagonists being students or graduates of the humanities:
Alice: I’m thinking of picking Indology as a second major.
Bob: That’s probably not a good decision employment-wise. You’d better stick to Philosophy and get a teacher’s position.
Alice: I’m more interested in the way different languages treat different phenomena differently.
Me: Additionally, not everybody likes being the ass who has to correct all the mistakes made in 5 decades of educational mismanagement in two republics.
Bob: That depends on your ambitions. You could very well conceive yourself as an psych-iatrist (ἰατρὸς τῆς ψυχῆς, a doctor aimed at bettering one’s soul) and try to provide a corrective against this development.
(Names changed to protect the innocent). This startled me, for this is the concept of philosophy I always claim is appropriate. Education is the only thing that can cast some hope upon the problems of society at large. In the short term it will not result in any alleviation of these problems, because changing people’s mindsets is a slow and painful process.
So how did I come to refute something I am usually inclined to support wholeheartedly? As for us scholars-to-be, the notion of employment opportunities sets us off on a totally wrong tangent. We are used to a certain ethos of not caring for those things. Thinking about how to sustain our day-to-day life is just too mediocre and dirty for those higher things we ponder in our working hours. We are good at complaining that society is impairing the spirits of our scientific work with calls for utility.
Actually the German newspaper DIE ZEIT has an article this week on why the humanities shouldn’t do this. The author, a sociologist, claims that the humanities actually are useful and that we should stop insisting on that we aren’t because it’s detrimental to our goals. I think he got it all wrong:
If it’s spelled out correctly, the humanities never claimed that utility were no criterion for their work. Unfortunately this has never been correctly understood, because what the humanities were doing for the past decades was refuting external claims of utility. Which is the crucial point: The humanities, be it historical (History, Classical Philology etc.) or systematic (Philosophy, Psychology etc.), are concerned with our understanding of the world and the ways we interact with it. And in order to (inter-)act you always have something in mind that you want to see fulfilled by your acts (eg: You are thirsty, you get something to drink). It is thus the business of the humanities to define which utility is worth following and to educate people about possible shortcomings of certain decisions and ways of life (I know that this is dark, but I plan to elaborate on this).
We need to find the self-confidence to convey this to the public, we need to reclaim the status that has been taken away from the humanities for too long, leaving them almost dying of starvation in the mainstream academe.
Unfortunately this also means stressing the difference between the humanities and the natural and social sciences, which is something I’m not really content with. I really like the idea of a methodological commune to which both “parties” belong, and I would not sacrifice it lightheartedly. But from the view I briefly sketched here, there seems to be no other choice but to declare them different in an important aspect: The natural sciences investigate the casual relationships between that what is in this world, while the humanities try to express all possible teleological relationships between mankind and what is in this world.
What appears as progress sui generis from the vantage of natural sciences is actually only one example of advancement that relies heavily on extrapolation. Scientists travel down the road of discovery wanting to arrive at the point where they know what the world is like, while scholars of the humanities aim at how the world can be, drawing their inspirations from the past and using it as an exemplum.
Still I’m not suggesting that the humanities are superior to natural science. What I’m doing is insisting on the fact that they are not inferior: They just don’t share enough of their motives, motivations and goals to allow a ranking between the two.
To this end we need to take up the argument: Just because our common-sense use of utility is more apt for natural science does not mean (a) that natural science is superior and the humanities can be neglected without doing any harm (b) that this really the best definition of utility available.
The humanities can do better than you expect, and most of us are willing to defend what we believe is right, you just have to give us a fighting chance.
technorati tags:Humanities, Education, Science, Utility
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Die [...] Bereitschaft, die Privatsphäre preiszugeben, macht erschrecken. Ihr liegt Unwissenheit und manchmal auch naive Unbekümmertheit zugrunde. Der Ruf nach mehr Datenschutz alleine reicht nicht. Der grassierende Narzissmus und seine Ausbeutung müssen Gegenstand der Kritik werden. Eine schöne Aufgabe für aufklärerische Geister, sich online einzumischen.(Gero von Randow: Das Leben im Netz. In: DIE ZEIT 4 (2007), p. 1)
The [...] willingness to sacrifice one’s privacy is shocking. It is based on ignorance and sometimes on naïve mindlessness. Calling for more privacy protection alone is not enough. The raging narcism and its exploitation have to become the subject of criticism. A nice task for those with educational impetus to get involved online.
(translation mine)
technorati tags:Narcism, Privacy, Web2.0
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Philosophers are all in for symbolic acts, I’m no exception. So I decided to give my blog a new look. The theme is called “Tarski” and I thought it might be appropriate for a blog by a student of philosophy, especially of the more formal kind.
This is because of Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century. He left us with a great little idea to ponder, which is as simple as it is miraculous. It is tentatively called “Convention T” (“T” for “truth”) and reads as follows:
“Snow is white” is true iff snow is white.
This is of course a simplified statement of the convention, but it suffices to show with what little effort things about truth can be said. (BTW: “iff” is short for “if and only if”) The magic of course lies within the quotation marks. They allow us to distinguish between using a given string of signs and mentioning it. The use/mention distinction is of course to be credited to Willard Van Orman Quine, but it fits nicely with Tarskis idea: Whatever we say is related to a state of events. So to find out whether a sentence like „Snow is white” is true, you have to go outside and look whether the stuff actually is white or not. The usefullness of the convention is even more obvious, if the sentence within quotation marks belongs to a different language (say, German):
“Schnee ist weiß” is true iff snow is white.
This implies that truth is not a notion we define in our language but in a language which is apt to make statements about our language. This type of language is called a metalanguage and it provides a nice way of dealing with paradoxes like “This sentence is false” (which is true only if it is false and vice versa). With Tarski we can dismiss this paradox by saying that it fails to distinguish between object language (like the sentence “Snow is white” enclosed in quotation marks) and metalanguage, which would be capable of expressing truth or falsity.
technorati tags:Meta, Logic, Paradox, Alfred Tarski,Convention T
In our de anima reading group here, we just got stuck in III,2 on a certain problem on the notion of κοινή αἴσθησις (koine aisthesis), which is, again, an example on how formal semantics can help to alleviate philosophical problems.
Now in III,1 of de anima Aristotle is concerned about how there are five senses at most (an argument clearly dependant on more basic assumptions in the Physics) and how we can have any notion of qualities which are conveyed to us by more than one sense (like motion, form, number, size). Which creates the problem of how every sense can perceive the αἰσθητά of the others as κοινά, common objects of perception and how we can realize that a perception is actually a perception of one and the same object and thing (ἅμα γένηται ἡ αἴσθσις ἐπὶ τοῦ αὐτοῦ, 435b1).
Afterwards, in the second chapter of book three, he starts pursuing what might seem to be a totally different topic: He puts forth that we have some kind of reflexive perception of our sensual acts. But to me, this seems to introduce the kind of solution he has in mind for the problem of common perceptional qualities. Precisely put, he states that we have perceptions of that we hear and see (435b12). It seems to be relevant in as far as the distinction that hearing and seeing are different sensory channels is only possible if one realizes that he does hear or see.
Problems abound concerning the possibility of this kind of reflexive perception, and it is often pushed into the direction of a modern concept of self-consciousness, but after this discussion, Aristotle returns to the question on how we can distinguish between different sensations. Apparently, he is under the impression, that two conditions need to be met in order do make this possible:
- The capacity needed to judge whether two perceptions are distinct or not cannot be in itself distinct for both perceptions (426b17–18)
- The judgement has to occur ἐν κεχωρισμένῳ χρόνῳ, in the very same instant (426b24ff.)
Nonetheless, Aristotle judges these to be somewhat aporetical, because—looking at perceptions as inflicting certain movements on the soul—this would violate the no-contradictions or consistency principle. The sensation “red” would move the soul in one direction, the impression “hot” in another, and all in the same time and without spatial displacement. So a way must be found to both make the capacity in question separable (διαίρετον) and preserve its unity (ἀδιαίρετον).
That this is possible is illustrated by a crude mathematical analogy, which calls the αἴσθσις a στιγμή, a point. Ioannis Philoponos, in his commentary of de anima, tries to explain:
Ἐντεῦθέν ἐστιν ἡ δευτέρα λύσις, ὅτι ὥσπερ ἡ στιγμή καὶ μία ἐστὶν ὡς στιγμὴ καὶ δύο καὶ πολλαί, καθὸ συμπερατοῦται ταῖς εὐθείαις καὶ ὡς πολλαὶ κεχώρισται, οὕτω καὶ ἡ αἴσθησις‧ καθὸ ὡς στιγμή ἐστιν, ἕν ἐστι τὸ αἰσθανόμενον καὶ ἅμα, καθὸ 〈δὲ〉 συνεξέρχεται τοῖς αἰσθητοῖς, ὡς ἡ στιγμή ταῖς εὐθείαις, καὶ δύο καὶ πολλὰ κρίνει‧ καθὸ δὲ ἕν ἐστιν, ἅμα καὶ ἀχρόνως ἀντιλαμβάνεται. (Philop. 484, 25–30)
Herein lies the second solution, that perception is one like a point and two or many like a point, in so far as it ends together with the straight lines and can be thought of as differentiated into many, and thus is the perception; in as far as it is like a point, the perceiving subject is one and at one time, and in as far as it is the identical end of the perceptions, it differentiates two or many, just as the point does of lines; and in as far as it is one it perceives instantly and timeless. (Translation mine)
Okay, strong meat, but what can we make of this? First, I remembered that Aristotle pictures perceiving as an relation be between the sensible qualities and the capacities that are directed towards them. So, looking at, say, a red, hot fire, we have four personae in this little play, which I will treat as points, or vertexes in this context.
- o1
- The object’s quality of being red (in actuality)
- o2
- The objects quality of being hot (in actuality)
- c1
- The subject’s capacity of seeing
- c2
- The subjec’ts capacity of feeling heat
This is a little bit like comparing apples and oranges, even more so since Aristotle thinks of the perception of being not solely in the subjects but essentially bound to its being a relation. But this is not intended as a strict formal representation, but merely to illustrate the example. These vertexes now form the set V = {o1, o2, c1, c2}. Now the capacities and the qualities which they perceive are related to each other, which means that we can draw lines between them, resulting in the set E = { {o1, c1}, {o2, c2} }, which represents these lines. (It has unordered pairs as its elements because Aristotle thinks of perceiving not only as being a relation, but also as being a relation of similarity, but that’s a different story). And now let us think of how the resulting graph G = {V, E} will look like:
Unfortunately, this is not what the example was meant to imply. While the duality is adequately accounted for in this model, there is no sign of ἕν, no unity whatsoever. Now it is quite clear how this could be solved:
In this graph, we just amended a capacity-vertex cr and the accompanying edges {c1, cr} and {c2, cr}, thus describing some kind of reflexive perception, which has been the topic of the whole chapter. But is this adequate to the Aristotelian account? I think not so, because both Aristotle and Philoponos are trying to illustrate the concept of combined duality and unity with only one point, and not by introducing additional entities. I think the solution lies in taking seriously the concept of identity. The whole passage quoted from Philoponos seems to indicate that we have to conclude that there is not merely a relation of sameness between different perceptive capacities and their reflexive counterpart, but of equivalence, which is even stronger. We would thus have to illustrate the example accordingly:
This seems weird at first, because we somehow have lost the duality/plurality of capacities. This stems from the fact that if c1 and c2 are different names of the same vertex (i.e. c1=c2), then the sets V = {o1, o2, c1, c2} and V = {o1, o2, c1} are equivalent. But plurality is preserved as well, because c1 still takes two different roles: It is a member of {o1, c1} as well as of {o2, c1} and thus doubles as the capacity to see and the capacity to feel heat (which are expressed by the relation of perceiving).
I regard this approach as highly beneficial. Not only does it explain the “switching” of topics within these two chapters, but it does as well refrain from taking the perceptive capacities as all too material. They are not identical to the bodily organs which are necessary for their operation, which is precisely the misunderstanding that brings about the problem of how different perceptions can be related. Furthermore this approach captures a general feature of Aristotelian psychology: The perceiving capacities are all part of a unified, self-same soul, whose parts can distinguished by their respective functions, but never separated from each other.
technorati tags:Aristotle, Philosophy, Psychology, Ancient Philosophy, de anima, set theory
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Now it happened! First projections show that the neo-Nazis of the NPD will make it to the state parliament. Not that we are suprised. Everybody foresaw it, including the current (and supposedly future) prime minister, Harald Ringstorff. And having preached all the week who important a high turnout would be, he now goes on to saying that he is shocked to see that more people than expected support the fascists (German). If you ask me, this is not a particularly clever move. It leaves the impression that the folk are actually supporting racist policies, antisemitism etc. Well, this seems not to be the case. It’s more like people are disappointed with the current situation (unemployment, globalization etc.) and the NPD is only feeding on this.
This is not a failure of the common people, it’s a failure of the elites. Of politicians, teachers, the cultural elite. I am somehow inclined to include myself along on that list. We somehow failed to empower people to see through the Nazis’ shallow and inhuman slogans. Granting people the autonomy to partake in political decisions (commonly called democracy) is deficient if they are at the same time not autonomous (in the specific, Kantian, sense of rational autonomy) enough to understand the problems and make informed decisions.
This doesn’t make the situation any better. But it is not yet catastrophic, because we’ve seen this before and actually had some fun time seeing how the Nazis made fools of themselves. Still, I regard this as a sad day for democracy in Germany and I really hope that there’ll be some way out of this mess.
technorati tags:politics, mecklenburg-western pomerania, neo-Nazis, NPD, democracy, elections
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