So we’ve been covering some cool stuffs in my psychology class recently. You’ll find my notes on motivation (why I became a hermit to do well in school), personality development (raise your kids not to be dumb), and stress (spoiler: it’ll kill you). Next couple of weeks will be mental illnesses - your depressions, schizophrenias, etc. Everyone’s favourite topic, really. On that note, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with every anxiety disorder except Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (though I’m only lightly OCD) and just about every personality disorder. Hopefully they can medicate those away for me.
My other class this semester is phonetics, which will be boring to everyone who isn’t a linguist, aka just about everyone. And if you are a linguist you already know phonetics so you probably don’t care. So that sucks I guess.
But my other other class this semester is philosophy! And that is pretty cool and you’ll probably find interesting stuff in the notes for that. The topic is “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and so far we’ve done Knowledge and we’re about to move into Mind. I can’t really organize those in any meaningful way for you, unfortunately, but check ‘em out anyway. Some of it is boring, some of it isn’t.
The best thing from PHIL 1301B, however, is definitely Pyrrhonian scepticism. There are three basic parts to Pyrrhonian scepticism: making no assertions, the method of opposition, and the four modes of acquiescence.
- Making no assertions means that the Pyrrhonist doesn’t claim to know anything - they simply describe things the way they appear
- The method of opposition is comparing opposing ideas - different religions, or superstitions perhaps, or even political ideas - and because they tend to be equally convincing, judgement is impossible and peace of mind is achieved - this is my new way of looking at my religious beliefs, because it sounds better than “apathetic”
- The four modes of acquiescence just mean the Pyrrhonian sceptic accepts the laws and customs of their culture, their feelings and biological needs, their instincts, and the expertise of others in order to live their lives
Check out the last three (or four if you read this on monday) days of notes for more on this. The only really valid criticism we’ve covered would have to be that knowledge of skills - something the Pyrrhonist accepts as “know-how” because it doesn’t involving making assertions - at some point has to involve a bit of “know-that”, or regular knowledge which eventually becomes equivalent to assertions. So being a doctor doesn’t just mean knowing how to treat your patients (know-how) but there’s also knowing facts and things to help you treat your patients (know-that).
I’m writing a paper about scepticism and how, as far as I can tell, Pyrrhonian scepticism is a perfectly tenable (fancy word for “it works”) position. So COME TEAR IT APART so that I can include that criticism in my paper! However please do check out the notes in case I’ve screwed up somewhere.
edit: also I’ve replaced Q10 with WriteMonkey for writing in peace
edit 2: if you google certain things, my notes show up as results - awesome, except when I’m looking for answers and find my own notes