AnnaPrescott ASPhilosphy

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Freedom

1. What is the difference between positive and negative freedom?  Negative freedom means freedom from interference - how many options are open to you, how much are you allowed to do, without restrictions imposed by anyone else? Positive freedom means, while lots of options may be open to you, how many of them can you actually do? Although you might technically be allowed to do them, there may be (mental) obstacles in your way that make them very difficult. 2. Why (do you think) they are given these names? Negative can be used to imply an absence of something, and here there is an absence of restrictions on your actions. Positive is used in this case to indicate that there is something there - there are obstacles in your way. 3. Examples: Jan is positively free if he wants to watch a film but decides to finish his work instead. He is not constrained from doing his work by desire or compulsion. Jan is negatively free if he has Freedom to Religious Worship, or Freedom of Speech etc - there is an absence of constraints on his behaviour. 4. Increasing Jan's positive freedom may require an interference with his negative freedom. For example: the State might ban smoking so that nobody is a slave to an addiction to tobacco.

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I've loved pretty much everything we've done in this class. It's probably my favourite lesson because it's the only class that I have never dreaded coming to at some point during this year. All the topics we studied were really interesting, my teacher was great and supportive and the class was friendly and quite vocal. I particularly enjoyed the 'idea of god' and 'art' topics, the former because I find studying religions fascinating and have always been interested in why people believe what they do, and the latter because I'm passionate about art and it was great to find out about all the different theories on why we value it. I think that thanks to philosophy I've become more able to express my opinions well both verbally and in writing and I've learned not to think immediately that one viewpoint is infallible. I spend a lot of time discussing the ideas we've studied with my philosophy and non-philosophy friends alike. Depending on what combination courses different universities offer, I might take philosophy at university. Even if I don't I would love to study it further in my free time. I got a layman's-guide-to-philosophy book in the summer before I started college to try and prepare myself a bit, and I've just got another so that I don't get too rusty in between now and the second year. I think philosophy will always be fascinating to me because it challenges things that you would otherwise never even dream of questioning, and this year has helped me think more open-mindedly about everything.

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Formalism in Art

a) Explain and illustrate the view that we should value 'form' alone in works of art. The 'form' of a piece of art is intrinsic to it: it is not the intentions of the artist when creating it or the emotions the audience feels on experiencing it, it is the art itself. For example, in a painting it might be the use of shape, line and symmetry to draw the eye into the picture, as in Leonardo Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper', or in music the harmonic and melodic structure, such as the transition from a perfect fourth or fifth to a major first at the end of a piece to make the phrase sound complete. Kant says that our judgment of art should be 'disinterested' - that we should not take into account any emotions that the artist might have put into it or emotions that the audience receive from it, or even if we like it: we should only judge the form. The formalist Clive Bell thinks that all good art makes us feel 'aesthetic emotion', ie pure emotion that has nothing to do with the history or meaning of the art, and that this is caused by the 'significant form' of the art. For example, he thinks that although the painting 'The Oath of the Horatii', is representative, it should be valued for the use of symmetry in the background and the central cross that attracts the eye to the middle of the painting. In contrast, he thinks that 'Paddington Station' does not count as good art, and is merely an 'interesting and amusing document', a record for posterity, because it is highly representative rather than a good use of form.

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Outline the view that we value art that communicates to the audience emotions the author has felt at some point.

   This view means that the only art which is valuable is art that tells the audience something about how the creator felt; for example, if someone painted a picture of a stormy sea to convey their emotions upon hearing about the death of a family member. An example of this would be Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which was inspired when a blood-red sunset left him ‘melancholic’, ‘deathly tired’ and ‘trembling with fear’.

     Leo Tolstoy claimed that while men expressed their thoughts through words, they expressed their emotions through art. It is a ‘means to pleasure’, but also a valuable method of communication, a way of leaving your own mark on the world. He believed that in order for art to be valued, a) it had to make its audience experience emotions, b) it had to have been intended to have this effect by the creator and c) the creator themself had to have experienced the emotions it conveys in reality or in imagination at some point. He talks of deliberately ‘infecting’ other people with one’s feelings, meaning that the act of inadvertently making someone feel what you feel is not art – you must have intended to (referring to b)). An example of art which fulfils all of these conditions could be blues music, which was originally developed by former slaves as a means of expressing their feelings about their oppression.

   Like Plato, Tolstoy believed that some art depicted ‘bad’ emotions. Tolstoy decided that the emotions that the audience are made to feel should be ‘good’: altruistic, beneficial, loving. He criticised Shakespeare’s plays for being immoral, satirical and flippant, with sexual themes and evil characters.

   According to Tolstoy, art which conveyed a good message in an expressive way was better than art which only conveyed the message. This is demonstrated in his attitude to Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which he thought inferior to Nikolai Ge’s portrayal of the same subject. Ge’s version, through his dynamic use of light, shade, and composition, inspires stronger feelings in the viewer than Da Vinci’s more ordered, symmetrical one.

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'The music is sad.' Discuss.

   The view that 'the music is sad,' means that sadness is an intrinsic part of the music; sadness is in that music, regardless of whether anyone is listening to it or how it actually makes us feel. In the same way, if one has a green tablecloth, greenness is an intrinsic part of the tablecloth, and it doesn't stop being green if no-one is looking at it.    An example of 'sad music' could be Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata'; sadness is inhere in it, and if it was played without anyone hearing it, it would still be sad.    However, the problem with this view is that to say a piece of music is sad is to give an inanimate object a human quality, which is nonsensical. A piece of music cannot cry or be upset, like a person.   Someone who believes that music can in fact be sad would argue that we do not mean it literally that a piece of music is sad, we mean it metaphorically. For example, if we say 'Louis is a kitten' or 'Armand is a shark', we do not mean that they are actually animals, we mean that they share some characteristics with kittens and sharks.    On the other hand, when we use metaphors to describe people, we are able to reduce them down to other qualities to understand them: 'Louis is shy and gentle', 'Armand is nasty, ruthless and cruel'. It is impossible to do this in relation to a piece of music, because a song in a minor key is in no way comparable to a sad human being.    Therefore, one can conclude that since sadness cannot be metaphorical,  we must mean it literally. However, it is not philosophically satisfactory to conclude that sadness can be intrinsic in music, for the reasons already discussed; music is not a living, feeling thing, so it is unreasonable to ascribe it emotions.    Consequently, the only other option left to us is that the music is not sad at all, but that we interpret it as sad due to psychological or cultural influences. Sadness is a 'relational property', meaning it depends the perception of the listener, rather than an intrinsic property. Therefore, we know that the view 'the music is sad' is incorrect, and anyone who claims that any art has inherent emotional qualities is mistaken.

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Some of my favorite drawings from 2012. (I never do these! But hey why not this was a pretty good year.)

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d r a w i n g s

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not…. pictures

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no way! NO WAY these are drawings! 

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DRA-

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Italian Sculpture

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Realistic art

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Innate Knowledge

Empiricist Response 1 to Knowledge Innatism - there is no Universal Agreement

Locke

John Locke's response to knowledge innatism is that 'children and idiots' (people with mental disabilities) do not have knowledge of mathematical truths, identity and cause & effect. So, if this innate knowledge is not universal, what is the point in it being innate?

Leibniz's response to Locke

Leibniz's reply was that they do have this knowledge, it simply needs uncovering. He used the analogy of a block of marble containing veins in the shape of Hercules: in order to see them, marble has to be chipped away. This is an adaptation of Plato's belief that we never learn anything new, we are simply helped to remember all the knowledge that we forgot as our souls combined with our bodies at birth.

Locke's response to Leibniz

Locke's response has two parts: 1. If 'knowledge' is defined as 'something that you know', it surely cannot be possible to have 'innate knowledge' that you do not know. 2. Since Leibniz and Plato claim that mathematical truths can be in the mind but not be known, it is therefore potentially possible that anything and everything man can know is innate and simply needs uncovering.

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Things I've learnt from the mock on the Idea of God

After using a counter-argument and then countering the counter-argument, need to discuss it and reach a conclusion;

Go into detail on fewer arguments rather than trying to explain all the arguments and running out of time;

Make Part A perfect to get maximum points; however...

Don't spend ages on Part A, planning or introduction;

Make sure I have all the key critical arguments.

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Explain and illustrate the empiricist account of a priori knowledge

The empiricist view of a priori knowledge is based on the idea that although it exists, it only reveals tautologies - statements that are necessarily true, because they agree with the definitions of their subjects, therefore making them empty - so can only reveal analytical truths, or 'relations of ideas' (Hume's term).

Relations of ideas or analytic truths are those that can be discovered, examined and proved without any reference to experience in the real world, eg you don't have to draw a square to know that a square has four sides, because the definition of a square includes 'having four sides', and you don't have actually to draw a circle to prove that the area of a circle is pi times radius squared, although working out the maths in your head might be difficult. These are the opposite of synthetic truths, which are contingent on other factors and are capable of not being true, eg 'Paris is the capital of France' - if the people of France wanted to, they could change their capital to Lyons.

Because a priori knowledge only deals in facts that require no experience to be known, empiricists say that therefore no knowledge that involves experiences, or physical things, can be discovered through a priori knowledge. So, there can be no a priori synthetic knowledge.

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Carruthers' Objection to John Locke's Concept Empiricism

Carruthers uses the counter-example of red to object to Locke's concept empiricism and theory of abstraction.     According to Locke, red is a simple concept - one that cannot be broken down any further - but Carruthers disagrees. He says that our general idea of red is a complex concept that is gathered from our experiences of different shades of red and abstracted. However, he then argues that there is nothing definably similar between any two shades of red, apart from 'red-ness'; there are no common features. Nevertheless, as we clearly do see something similar in different shades of red, Carruthers says that our ability to recognise similarities must in some sense be innate. However, for Carruthers, evolution can be the source of this innate idea rather than God.    Furthermore, Carruthers argues that Locke's process of identifying common features in concepts is circular: to be able to recognise a common features we need to have already the concept of that feature. This would prove Locke's approach to be false.

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The Missing Shade of Blue

   Hume, despite being a concept empiricist, came up with a counter-example which, if correct, could prove concept empiricism to be wrong.

Hume asks that if there was one particular shade of blue that you had never seen throughout the duration of your life, but you had seen the shades on either side of it, would you be able to imagine it? If you could, this would qualify as an idea that was based on nothing you had ever had experience of, which concept empiricists say is impossible.    Hume's response to his own counter-argument was to trivialise it by saying that as it was only a singular example, it shouldn't worry empiricists.    However, his argument can be applied to more than just the colour blue: it could be applied to any missing colour, a missing note in a scale, a missing taste. Hume is wrong to dismiss it for this reason.    In response, one could argue that by estimating the colour/taste/sound etc you are using ideas from your experience, or simply by saying that we could not actually imagine these things.

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Concept Empiricism

Explain what is meant by the claim that all ideas are derived from sense experience.

The claim that all ideas are derived from sense experience is made by John Locke, a concept empiricist. He says that at birth our minds are like a 'tabula rasa', or 'blank slate', which is written on by our experiences as we grow, as opposed to the rationalist idea that we have at least some 'innate' ideas - ideas we were born with.

A 'simple concept' is an idea that cannot be broken down into any further ideas, like, for example, 'blue' or 'soft'. Simple ideas can be put together to form 'complex ideas', such as 'apple' - if broken down, apple would become 'red', 'crunchy', 'round' etc.

The process of abstraction describes how one can take a concept and abstract it from all examples of the concept; there are many different types of apple, but if we subtract all their differences from the idea of 'apple', we get the abstract idea of what makes an apple - 'apple-ness'.

In conclusion, what we can draw from John Locke's theories about ideas is that he would argue that all ideas are gained from sense experience.

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Half-term Audit

How is it going in general – are you a happy philosopher?!

Yep, as far as any philosopher is happy. XD

Is the course what you expected?

Yes, in fact it's better.

What have you enjoyed most in terms of topics?

I really enjoyed looking at all the concepts of God and thinking about whether they are coherent, and also considering ideas about where the idea of God came from.

What have you enjoyed most in terms of lessons?

Having whole-class discussions about topics.

Is there anything you have been disappointed about?

No.

Did you feel that you knew how to write the essay? Were the Technique sheets helpful?

They were extremely helpful and with them I felt that writing essays was much easier, although I have doubts about my ability to remember the structures from memory during the exam.

Do you need any extra help with any aspects? This could be understanding aspects of the course or help with writing.

I think it would be useful to have a long list of questions to practise essay-writing on. If we already have such a list, I will probably find it immediately after I post this.

What is your personal target grade for AS Philosophy?

A.

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Outline one problem with the view that God is the source of moral laws and moral goodness

The view that God is the source of moral laws and moral goodness is considered by some to be flawed becasue it leads to the Euthyphro dilemma.

The idea that God is the source of moral laws and moral goodness refers to him as being 'supremely good'. What this means is that either God is incapable of doing evil things or that whatever he says is good becomes good, just because he says so. This also means that God is the one who gives us divine commands as to what is right or wrong.

For example, if you are a Christian theist, then you would believe that God told us what is good and through the Ten Commandments which he gave to Moses.

The problem with this view is referred to as the Euthyphro dilemma (so called because it is a question asked by Socrates in Plato's dialogue 'Euthyphro').

It is suggested that there are two options available to us if God is the source of moral laws and moral goodness.

Either whatever God says is good becomes good, or God tells us that things are good because they are innately good.

These two options, though, present us with a dilemma. If the former is the case, then what God commands is good could be arbitrary and meaningless; he could command that, say, murdering infant children is good, and it would become so, even though it seems evil to us. For example, in the Old Testament, God wiped out the entire poulation of earth with a flood, save one family. This seems abhorrent to us, and contrary to the Commandment 'Thou shalt not kill', but because God did it, it must be good.

Secondly, if it is the case that some things are and have always been 'good', and God informs us what these things are, then he is not the original source of morality - goodness exists externally from God, therefore he is not omnipotent. Furthermore, this suggests that there is a higher being than God which create morality.

In short, the view that God is the source of moral laws and goodness is problematic because it raises a dilemma; if God is the source of goodness, then his commands may not be trustworthy, but if he is not the source, then he is not omnipotent.