• Educational Endeavors
• Travel
• Broaden Horizons
• Interesting & New Experiences
• Re-Invigorated
• Resolve Money Issues The Best You Can

It’s a great time for you to try to broaden your horizons a bit. All sorts of travel and educational endeavors will be strongly favored at the moment. And any interesting new experiences you’re able to enjoy should leave you feeling really reinvigorated right now. Just try to give a little thought to how you can start making some real career progress in the days ahead.

If some money matters are weighing on your mind today, just try to resolve any financial issues the best you can. Don’t be surprised if someone ends up presenting you with some interesting new financial ideas right now. And some intriguing romantic opportunities could be available to you as well. Mantra: I will earn the respect I desire.

Pick up hair dye

Pick up Tropic of Cancer

Philosophy Homework

Catch up on music homework

Find out about financial hold

Register for classes

Make meeting with advisor

Make taxes appointment

Get organized for class this week

Think about jobs

7:30 AM - Wake Up! =)

9:00 AM - Moorestown

9:30 AM - Vinyasa Yoga @ The Studio for Yoga

11:00 AM - End your practice

   Starbucks on Main St. for breakfast / coffee

11:45 AM - Tanning Sun Devil Tan’s Marlton

12:30 AM - Get home to Maple Shade and pack for Mom’s

1:30 PM - Begin Homework at Mom’s

• DesCartes is a committed Dualistic Interactionalist and the princess poses the question “Where does the interaction take place?”  Asking a materialist question, that poses a huge problem.  If mind and body are separate and your mind interacts with your body, then someone who believes that everything is reducable to matter (who already doesn’t believe that you have a mind separate from your body), and who is also a causalist, thinking that everything happens from material cause and effect, would want to know where this interaction takes place.  Where does the mind enter the body? Where does the mind meet the body?  Where does the mind interact with the body?  Which Hobbes doesn’t directly ask but the princesses comments shed light as to how his views once again conflict with DesCartes.
• So so far the enormous difference between the two is rationalism vs. empricism as well as the ideas of dualism, interactionalism, materialism, causalism, and mechanism.  We do not get into DesCartes ethics but we do know that Hobbes is a psychological egoist and choses not to play in the ethics game, but this to me poses some problems.
• Hobbes is a psychological egoist and thinks that humans are egoists, but psychology is a science.  By saying that humans are egoists then he is saying that him himself is a egoist, and I am guessing he is saying that it is out of his control.  Because he is saying that his is the way that people are then there is no choice, and that makes it easier to come to his conclusion that humans need harsh punishment, because the only thing to control and contain human behavior is the repulsion that we experience from fear.  I think that this is an instrument that he can use to prescribe his political methods.

Great, now I have gone through all these thoughts but haven’t even touched on Hobbes, or done any readings, I think i should skim Hobbes then power-read DesCartes and Hobbes.

Here is a little bit of a free write, before History of Western Philosophy II, because our open ended essays require us to take a side and prove our case.  I just need to gather my thoughts about empiricism and rationalism and DesCartes, Hobbes and Bacon.  All doing so over a salted caramel mocha ♥ mmmmmm…. Some Ideas to touch upon: How does knowledge originate? Does the understanding have innate knowledge or know nothing (tabla rosa), and need to look to senses/nature to know anything……Science: Science is used to explain how the world works but commiting to empiricsm undermines the possibility of science at all because of the contradiction of cause……

• Bacon’s attack on rationalism can be summed up to say that just because something follows a valid structure doesn’t make it true.  While he is correct, I think the deductive method of using valid argument forms to attempt to come to a truth is far more true and reliable then Bacon’s empiracle method of induction.  If we see 100 black crows on an island where they all have a disease then we might think that all black crows have one eye and one foot, and may never travel anywhere else in our lives, and could come to a completely false conclusion.  Using deduction and valid argument forms starts with one premise, and all following premises are conditionally valid based on if the first premise is true or not, so yes, it is easy to blow your whole argument but have it set up beautifully, but with the amount of information that is avaliable, if there is enough reasonable cause to assume that the first premise is true, I think that that is more reliable than relying on observation and senses.  If the argument is valid but untrue you just scratch it all and start over, and if you are trying to prove something that hasn’t been proven true, then yes, you have a challenge, but the more valid argument forms you can use to support your claim, the more true it is, where for induction, it may be nowhere near the truth that crows are usually born with one eye and one leg and someone could be extremely mislead.
• What makes something right or wrong?  Bacon has his idols which are fallacies in reasoning that he blames on being part of human nature like the idol of the tribe/mankind and the idol of the cave where individuals believe that what they believe as an individual makes something right or wrong.  Humans are born with a tabla rosa, so everything they learn from there senses kind of builds their world,views, life, ect.  So in order for something to be right or wrong it has to be OBJECTIVELY true and not attributed to a function of the human mind because that was learned.  Bacon rejects the idea of all of his idols which are a plea for subjectivity, and he does not accept the use of idol’s within morality or science.
• Do I exist?  DesCartes devices of doubt are similar to Bacon’s idols in that they are things that we can not rely on, and things that we should consider a danger to put into our reasoning (fallacy).  Des Cartes has the insane, the dream state, the evil genious, and the piece of wax.  DesCartes main hang-up is to always DOUBT EVERYTHING, which leads us to realize that we exist.  The evil genious can confuse you about everything, what planet your on, where you are, dreaming can make you think that you are doing something that you are not, we could be dreaming right now, if your insane you could think your wearing a purple robe and staff and the king of a magical country, but the one thing that can’t be doubted is that you exist. How?  Because when you think, you exist, and when you doubt that you exist, you think more, which establishes that you exist even more.  You can not be fooled about whether you are thinking or not, nothing can confuse you or mislead you.  
• What defines a human?  DesCartes gives us the idea that we exist.  I think therefore I am.  But he says that I am, not what I am, so what makes a human a human?  At the end of his meditation you get nothing other than the fact that you exist.  And if we somehow do confirm that we are human what defines keeping it a human.  The ship of thesis paradox then comes into play and if someone moved us atom by atom or by a laser beam then are we still us?  are we still human? are we something else?  are we someone else?  Is your mind separate from your body?  DesCartes says that we can’t just be our body and I agree.
• How do I know that god exists?  DesCartes finds it within himself, but mechanics can also give an explanation.  Every machine presupposes a maker, the universe is like a machine therefore the universe must have a maker, science just explains how the machine works. 
• How do I know that the world exists?  DesCartes can only prove that the world exists by starting with the self, he knows that he exists, then he gives his cosmological argument to prove god exists, then he says that the worl is good and god wouldn’t confuse him like the evil genius and that god made the world with regularity (we see in science), so the world exists because god made it and god is good and made the world good and with regularity. (this one got a little confusing)
• Innate Idea:  The opposite of tabla rosa, DesCartes entire metaphysical views depends on this.  DesCartes buids this huge way of proving to us how the self, God and the world exist and the main first premise being “I think therefore I am” then goes to another main premise which has to be true in order to gain truth from his whole argument is that the idea of God is an innate idea that humans are born with and he knows this because “He finds the idea of God within himself”  so the whole world and god are resting on the idea that DesCartes finds the idea of God within himself, dangerous, as the princess criticizes him for in her correspondence with him via letters but he builds a completely valid and beautiful argument saying that then he knows that the world exists because God made the world, and God would not want to trick him.  It seems that few argue with the idea that “I think therefore I am” but there is an uproar of criticism that can be thrown at the idea that DesCartes finds the idea of God within himself, especially because if you attack this you attack his whole argument, but there is no other way to prove it, and I think it is a good start, and a good argument even though it may not be perfect.  If you believe that there is an objective right and wrong and that humans are born knowing nothing until they look at nature then you can not accept this idea because the whole idea of this can not come from any observation of the world or of senses (you have to doubt everything), and this comes from an innate idea inside ourselves, which is still not subjective, but can not possibly be known by looking at the world.
• A criticism of the cosmological argument proposed by DesCartes is that it makes God an object of knowledge rather than faith, and if God was knowledge then it would be easy for everyone believe and everyone would “be the perfect Christian”, but the problem I find with this is that they are forgetting still that people are stupid.  If there is a valid, logical argument, people sometimes still do not believe in it.  I guess this goes back into the idea of what makes a person rational, which we get into greater detail with later but religion does depend on the idea of faith and that you have to have this leap of faith to believe in God and have this sort of belief that is so strong even though it is blinded from knowledge, but it also has to make sense, and thats what DesCartes is doing here, I don’t think he is necessarily reducing God into a faithless God or altering the definition of faith or making it any lesser of an idea, but merely just making it make sense.  Kierkegaard has this whole huge long extravagant extraordinary description of faith within Fear and Trembling that he would absolutely have conflictions with DesCartes ideals, but I think they are not conflicting, not hand-in-hand but they can sort of co-exist with each other, in a sort of balance, because it is still something that no one will ever truly know anything about, being metaphysical.

OKAY, I NEED TO STOP AND START ANOTHER ONE FOR THE START OF HOBBES.

This was just rationalism vs. empricism.

(Source: decemberjuliet)

1. Get Industrial Piercing (That I have wanted Forever)
2. Organize Bedroom and Bathroom
3. Finish Painted Mural on Closet Door
4. Completely Rage on Valentine’s Day
5. Tattoo when weather is nice
6. Get Good Grades

Okay, so maybe I am writing this in too high of hopes, but I’m writing this in very high aspirations that I can find new balance in my life.  Tomorrow I am starting yoga again, after stopping almost a year ago.  Without work now, there is no excuse why I can not make room for 90 minutes once or twice in my week, and have the goodness overflow into every aspect of my life.  Yoga is a time to be inside yourself, and stay there, and it is the only thing that can do so.  Since that aspect of my life has been missing, I have been missing the feeling that it brings me.  As well as beginning my practice of yoga once again, I also would like to make some organizational changes in my life.  Through organizing my room and my bathroom, and my life, I hope that I can bring about better focus and make it so that there is never a time where all these things are on my mind, and I am not doing them.  So tomorrow starts at 7 am, as well as a me that I hope I can keep for a while.