User:SJCstudent
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
[edit] So what?
I am a philosophy/history of mathematics and science major. I graduated in 2006 with a BA from St. John's College (hence the namesake). I will begin school at the University at Buffalo in the field of economics.
This is a work in progress so not everything is filled in yet. Give it time and it will be fleshed out.
[edit] Views, Thoughts, Philosophy, etc.
This section is kinda (entirely) piggy-backing on the wikipedia concept. The difference is that if you choose to edit the "Commuism" section, I do not want to see facts about communism, but views, beliefs, etc. backed up by sound argument. Think of this place as a discussion page that isn't about the best way to report the facts, but a dialectic for the sake of better understand our beliefs and thoughts.
[edit] Educational Approach
Extremism is bad. It clouds one's judgment. A level-headed perspective is crucial to complex decision making. If one accepts a radical world view, he or she will usually try to fix certain facts to make them conform to this view. Keep an open mind. Be like Bacon, not Descartes. Work from the facts to the world perspective, not the other way around. (Please don't be mad at my oversimplification of both Bacon's and Descartes' philosophy.) Perhaps Machiavelli said it best in the prince,
- But my hope is to write a book that will be useful, at least to those who read it intelligently, and so I thought it sensible to go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with a discussion of an imaginary world. For many authors have constructed imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.
Don't knock it 'till you try it. The best thing to do is to try to believe everything. What this means is everyone ought to make a wholehearted attempt at agreeing with nearly every position.
No, don't go become a Nazi. What you should do, however, is, for example, if you are a libertarian, consider the advantages of authoritarian rule (there must be some, it is irrational to assume all statists are irrational). Try to really believe the counter-argument. This will be refreshing for three reasons:
- You will see that your opponents are NOT crazy whackos with a distorted view of reality, but instead you will find that they usually want something similar to what you want and are trying to achieve it through different means.
- You will better understand your own position and why you believe it. For example, if I say that I prefer chicken over steak but have never tried steak, in what sense can my claim be valid. Likewise, if you are a liberal, and you have never genuinely tried to understand the conservative perspective, how can you be sure of your political beliefs?
- You might even change your mind! Holy Crap! In today's highly pugnacious environment, especially surrounding political discourse, changing one's mind is often seen as a sign of weakness. It is a sort of "If you abandon your position and agree with me, in what way did you know anything at all." This is flawed of course. I have been in countless discussions where my position contradicted that of another person's. At the end of the discussion, I had changed my mind on the subject. After this point, I was able to make more compelling arguments for my new position than those previously presented to me.
As John Stuart Mill stated,
- But the particular evil of silencing the expression of an opinion that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation - those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost a greater benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
While this quote is about state censorship, it can be applied to an individual's judgement as well. Be open minded.
