Dear Ken, Terry, Jean, Keith and all others engaged in this thread.
I have jumped in and out of the discussion, which has had it's high and low points.
I might have missed something but I have so far seen no reference to neuroscience. When discussing issues linked to mind and body, self and consciousness, reality and illusion, and more, advances within neuroscience are very relevant. In a recent key note a famous Swedish neurologist said something like: "neuroscience can today prove what philosophers suggested hundreds of years ago." Or as put by Antonio Damasio: (free quote) "as a neuroscientist you must have a good understanding of philosophy."
Best
Kristina
Envoyé de mon iPhone
Le 20 nov. 2012 à 08:35, Jean Schneider <[log in to unmask]> a écrit :
> Dear Ken,
>
> Sorry and apologies to Jerry if my post was unclear. But I had cut and pasted the excerpt he sent of Yalom's text, acknowledging the source (and not Jerry), I thought that it was clear enough that I was joking about Yalom's synthesis.
>
> I don't know Yalom's work, so I can't say anything about it. Not that Yalom is wrong (in the sense of misinterpretation), but it gives the impression that you can start reasoning from that. But this summary of Kant's philosophy is —at least to me— not simplifying things, but making them simplistic. In particular, applying some kind of scientific jargon (neural apparatus, sense data etc…) on an interpretation of what is consciousness that neither built on these notions (as they were not defined, or could we say discovered/modelled in the same way ?), nor stem from the same ground, the same vision of what is consciousness in relation to being.
> And in particular, I don't see where Kant would be even close to describing reality as some kind of chimera or fiction. This is stretching things so far. It would be like saying : "design is some kind of sketching, but not like making drawings".
> About Schopenhauer, I can't say anything, I never could read it, and didn't have to…
>
> I do think that there is a value in conveying deep philosophical stances through novels, and I would say that we are seeing the closing of a time in which most of the our understanding of what life is (what it is to be human, what is the self, what is the other, what is a human relationship, what is nature in respect to us, what is a society and its values…) was coming from novels. Beyond the two that you are mentioning, there is the whole tradition of the "Bildungsroman".
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jean
>
> Le 19 nov. 12 à 23:15, Ken Friedman a écrit :
>
> Dear Jean,
>
> Your “Woody Allen” comment to Jerry Dietheim’s post wasn’t quite fair. Jerry didn’t summarize Kant. He offered Irvin Yalom’s interpretation of Kant’s views on a specific aspect of knowledge.
>
> We do this whenever we quote and apply a passage from an author to a problem. We don’t summarize all of the author’s work. We interpret and apply an idea from a specific point within a specific work. The art of this application is to choose a relevantpassage and to use it well. This involves what Victor Margolin describes in an earlier thread as intertextuality.
>
> In my view, Jerry did that in an appropriate way. Jerry’s source is not Kant, but Irvin Yalom, a physician, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist who summarized one issue from Kant in a passage in the book Jerry quoted.
>
> Yalom is professor emeritus of psychiatry at Stanford University. He has a deep interest in the relationship of philosophy to psychotherapy and the relationship of philosophy to the way we construct and interpret our world. Along with his scholarly articles and books, Yalom has written three novels in a genre he calls “teaching novels.”
>
> Yalom’s teaching novels use fiction to address genuine problems. He reflects on and writes about the philosophical underpinnings and psychotherapeutic meaning of the action he portrays. In philosophy, similar novels by other authors include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig, or Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder.
>
> Yalom is serious about the teaching mission of his novels. Linked to the fictional plot, he offers the kind of information that one would expect to find in a scholarlywork, hopefully made tangible and more comprehensible by its active presentation in the fictional life of the characters. The Schopenhauer Cure is one of those novels. While most critics praise the intellectual depth and integrity of the novels with respect to psychotherapy and philosophy, some argue that Yalom takes his teaching mission too seriously, exploring and reflecting on ideas while breaking the momentum of the plot.
>
> Jerry posted Yalom’s interpretation of an issue in the thread. Without agreeing – or disagreeing – with the cited passage, I’d argue that it is a reasonable argument that is relevant to the thread. It’s not a summary of Kant, but an apposite contribution based Yalom’s reading of Kant’s ideas on the topic, and Schopenhauer’s response to Kant. What makes this unreasonable or unsuitable to reasoning?
>
> Yours,
>
> Ken
>
> Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design
>
>
> Jean Schneider wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> Wow! Summarising Kant in these 11 lines reminds me of Woody Allen’s: “ I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” Can’t do any reasoning on that !
>
> —snip—
>
> Jerry Dietheim wrote:
>
> —snip—
>
> Here’s a quote that provides the Kantian and Schopenhauerian perspective on the discussion:
>
> Page 232, The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom
>
> “Schopenhauer’s major work began with a critique and an extension of Kant, who revolutionized philosophy through his insight that we constitute rather than perceive reality. Kant realized that all our sense data are filtered through our neural apparatus and reassembled therein to provide us with a picture that we call reality but which in fact is only a chimera, a fiction
> that emerges from our conceptualizing and categorizing mind. Indeed, even cause and effect, sequence, quantity, space, time are conceptualizations, constructs, not entities ‘out there’ in nature.
>
> “Furthermore, we cannot ‘see’ past our processed version of what’s out there; we have no way of knowing what is ‘really’ there - that is, the entity that exists prior to our perceptual and intellectual processing. The primary entity, which Kant called ding an sich (the thing in itself), will and must remain forever unknowable to us.
>
> “Though Schopenhauer agreed that we can never know the ‘thing in itself,’ he believed we can get closer to it than Kant had thought. In his opinion, Kant had overlooked a major source of valuable information about the perceived (the phenomenal) world: our own bodies! Bodies are material objects. They exist in time and space. And each of us has an extraordinary rich knowledge of our bodies - knowledge stemming not from our perceptual and conceptual apparatus but from direct knowledge from inside, knowledge stemming from our feelings.
>
> “From our bodies we gain knowledge that we cannot conceptualize and communicate because the greater part of our inner lives is unknown to us. It is repressed and not permitted to break into consciousness, because knowing our deeper natures (our cruelty, fear, envy, sexual lust, aggression, self-seeking) would cause us more disturbance than we could bear.”
>
>
>
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