Freud

• Similar to Descartes, Freud was concerned with the misery of human condition. Our unhappiness means that we are undivided and therefore alienated from ourselves this is the same starting point as Marx. We don't know what we want, unhappy inside. Freud therefore came to the conclusion that we're all troubled and so Freud's career was an attempt to answer why the human condition is the way that it is. Freud says we are controlled ( psychoanalysis) even if we don't realise we aren't as rational as we believe to be. Therefore it can be said that Freud discovered the unconscious mind- says he discovered in psychoanalysis the archaeology of the human mind.
• Dreams, Freud said, are the road to your unconscious.
• Seen as sexual renegade- sex is at the centre of our motivation this causes humans to be damaged ideas of ourselves as noble creatures. This is a challenge to the Enlightenment because we aren't the type of people the Enlightenment would want us to be- we're not ran by our rational mind (Newton part of the brain).
• Overall Freud was very pessimistic about human beings. He described his philosophy as being: 'full of darkness but with a little light'.

Attack on Plato

• Freud followed Plato's idea of the tripartite self E.g humans are made up of reason spirit and desire ( the allegory of the chariot). Plato stated that our rationality, our ability to control our mind is of the most importance. However, Freud believed rationality to be our weakest point because we are driven by our desires and we don't realise (alienated-Marx term).

Attack on Marx

• Marx thought of the self as the tripartite self: natural, alienated, species self. He believed that we progress towards a better, happier self. We have the ability to evolve therefore it is possible to overcome the state of unhappiness. Freud rejects this idea by calling it idealistic. Unhappiness is part of us,  the most dominant part of us is aggression which is caused by unhappiness. Unhappiness is a state which will always find ourselves in, can't escape it- consistent with Hobbes.

The Freudian Personality

• Pain is what it means to be human. We are divided, we cannot find peace because we are at a constant war with ourselves. Divided into 3 distinct parts- always in dispute with each other:

1. The Id
2. The Ego/Self
3. The superego

 The Id is the most dominant part of us- at our core from birth. A reservoir of the unconscious, 'a cauldron of seething exoitations'. The Id demands fulfilment, full of aggression an sex- there is an instinct to gain pleasure and avoid pain. The Id dominates our personality even though we don't know that we are dominated by feelings of aggression and sex.

The Ego or Self - reality principle, the least powerful part of the personality- the voice of reason. Moderation, commonsense. It is turned towards reality- the real world. It is hopelessly embattled and besieged. We are all born with the ego.

The Supergo - internalised rules of parents or society, therefore we are not born with the Superego. It is gained and developed from wider society eg external influences. It is irrational just like the Id and is constantly fighting against the Ego.

• Society is full of suffering because it is full of pain:

1. We are decaying, nature.
2. Nature- the external world- the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
3. The greatest pain is our everyday interaction with other people. Other people are out to get us, to hurt us but we are irrational beings and so we are inclined to hurt others.

• Freud thinks the answer is psychoanalysis- but not open to everyone ( needed to strengthen  the Ego) the masses will continue on their destructive path.
• He outlines some ways to contain these urges- the Id is so powerful that it needs distracting but you cannot control it, too dominant, can only contain it.
• Coping mechanisms are:

1. Intoxication- only a temporary chemical solution.
2. Isolation- also temporary as only for a few people.
3. Religion - a type of sublimation- a way to control constant demands of the Id.

Sublimation is finding socially acceptable ways to release our aggression eg through sport or by working hard. This is the only thing he believes is to give you real satisfaction is to be aggressive.

• Imposing moral limits on the Id ''Love our neighbour as ourselves''. Men are not gentle creatures, they're aggressive forces. Religion puts impossible demands on us, all animals can't reach level of divinity.
• The key to psychoanalysis is that you are hiding something from yourself. Freud claimed he had found a way to deal directly with the unconscious- this is the Id.

Attacks on Freud

• Popper - Freud was vague so Karl Popper believed that his theories couldn't be proven.
  Schopenhauer spoke of similar things such as controlling sexual urges and being controlled by internal, irrational forces therefore it is possible that Freud was actually not the first person to raise these theories.
• Reich believed the complete opposite- the unconscious forces inside the mind are good and it is their suppression by society that distorts them and made people dangerous ( similar to Rousseau). He believed that the underlying energy was sexuality and if this was released then humans would flourish.

27/11/2012 Channel 5 News

I thought the layout of the news was different, I like the fact that Channel 5 thought of a a different way for the presenter to be on screen. Although it was strange to see her stood up at first, I soon got used to it and thought it made the bulletin stand out from any other news bulletin usually shown on TV.

There was a good mix of stories but I got the impression that celebrities usually feature in this bulletin as there was two celebrity stories in tonight's bulletin. This also indicated to me that this news bulletin is aimed at women. I could be wrong but it was just the general overall feel I get from the language and wording used in the links and also, as I previously explained, from the choice of VTs.

The footage from the RNLI of an elderly woman being rescued from her flooded home was really interesting feature in this VT because we have been bombarded with flooding stories over the past few days so it was a refreshing idea which I liked alot. I also thought there was a good variety of interviews. However, I thought the VT went on for just abit too long and also I didn't feel that it was necessary to have two correspondents, one in Yorkshire and  one in Wales. I felt that they took up too much time of the bulletin when both correspondents were talking about the floods.

The David Cameron interview was a good angle to take in the 2nd VT though, as it showed the viewers what the government are planning to do.

The interview in the Norovirus VT included an interview with someone from the Health protection agency. I thought the positioning of the interview was odd, I don't know why Channel 5 prefer to have their reporters in shot but slightly blurred in this case. To me it seems unnatural as you can't see the reporter's face and also the reporter detracts from the interviewee. I did think that there was a good use of graphics in this VT though.

Before the adverts and also before the credits the presenter winked to the camera which I thought was really cheesy and made the bulletin informal. To me it just seemed like an odd thing for a news presenter to do.

I also didn't like the fact you could see the gun mic in the Vox Pops in the last story about Sports Personality of the year.

Modernism

• Kant's influence on aesthetics was to study the emotional sense to beauty. Artists are the closest to the beauty form of real objects. All of us 'normal' people can only see the shadows of the beautiful, perfect forms.
• The most powerful aesthetic response is to music according to Nietzsche etc. Materialists believe that our reaction to music is our neurons responding, however, Nietzsche believed music to be a tool that can be used to overcome 'the will'.
• Nietzsche concerned himself more with art than with beauty and Wagner was one of his greatest influences.
• Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's ideas of 'the will' are very similar. They both agreed that every human is a function of power which must be embraced.
• Similarly both men stated that the two ways to successfully escape misery is:

1. Intoxication
2. Dreaming

• Schopenhauer was strictly Kantian but the main difference between the two philosophers is that Schopenhauer believed that is only one noumena in the world which is the universe. We have the 'will to survive'.
• Human happiness is created by controlling 'the will'. This can be done through intoxication and music can be used as a tool to overcome desire as well as 'the will'.

Aesthetics

• According to Plato and Aristotle believed that happiness is supreme good. Kant challenged this because he believed that duty was the supreme ethical motive.
• Bentham believed that the greatest happiness principle was pleasure. Aristotle made distinctions between pleasure and pain as he refused to link happiness with the pleasure of the senses.
• Bentham promoted the Utilitarian motto: 'Greatest amount of good (happiness) for the greatest number of people'. This motto was open to criticism since people argued how you measure happiness or the greatest number of people? Also is it just people that should be considered to be happy? Recent Utilitarians have included animals.

• Kierkegaard observed aesthetics as ethical rather than an aesthetic category. An aesthetic person searches for immediate pleasure whether this is from a natural source or an artistic source.
• He believed that there are three modes of life:

1. Religious
2. Ethical
3. The aesthetic

• Life is the progress through these modes of life onto the most important mode, the religious mode.

Economics

In the 18th-19th Century economics was a popular subject amongst philosophers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Ricardo, Malthus and Smith. Economics claims to be a science and came about in the period of anti-enlightenment.

All of the following are Economists:

• Adam Smith wrote the book 'The Wealth of the Nations' which explored the reasons why one country is richer than another country. He believed that one of these reasons is Racism, wealthy countries are characterised by free individuals. Countries find themselves poor when there is too much government intervention.

Another one of his books which he wrote had a similar moral philosophy to Hume. For example, people always looking out for themselves- giving to charity to give yourself a good feeling, an ego boost. Therefore he believed in a philosophy which says that we are constantly weighing up what will give us the most pleasure by avoiding pain.

The law of unattended consequence - trying to help people but then you end up damaging them more in the process. You must allow people to be completely free economically.

• David Ricardo believed that all money comes from trade- reveals in a scientific way its true value. This is a metaphysical view. A spirit of value of things which is in things. According to Ricardo a world of contingent objects is worthless and is only valuable once humans apply conscious effort. This therefore can be described as the labour theory of value, a theory that states that the more labour that is put in to an object, the more value something has.

• Tom Malthus was associated with the Victorian period and had an outlook on life which believed that humans will always starve to death, since we always eat everything. To be man is to be on the brink of extinction. This is true since agriculturally we cannot make our own food.

Another theory of his was that marriage and no sex means that there will be no starvation. This is because in the 19th Century the human race almost bred itself into extinction, there just wasn't enough  resources to satisfy the vast population. Modernists disagree with this statement since they believed that with every mouth brings another pair of hands.

• Karl Marx believed that labour is the only real source of value. However, the more workers there are the more of a decrease in worker's wages.  Profit and capitalism consequently causes a large fatal flaw in the system. People won't be able to buy aggregated food. It is the workers that make objects valuable.

• Keynes Philosophy Keynes solved the Marxist problem of wages. Keynes offered the 'trade cycle' which means that if wages were so low people could be employed again.  The great depression of the 1930's was solved by World War 2 because men went into the army and this allowed women to work in factories. Everyone then stopped worrying about the superstition of gold as now people were able to use money in everyday life. 

Logical Positivism- Seminar Paper

Logical Positivism

Logical Positivism essentially combines empiricism (the belief that knowledge is only truly derived from experience) and rationalism. It is a type of analytic philosophy.

In 1929 Wittgenstein travelled to Cambridge and the ‘Vienna Circle’ was formed. The ‘Vienna Circle’ was a discussion group of philosophers who raised various propositions such as the idea that metaphysics is an out-dated system.  The ‘Vienna Circle’ also led to the creation of Logical Positivism. The members of the ‘Vienna Circle’ believed that a scientific perspective of the world was more suitable. The philosophers, on the whole believed in the same philosophy and one of their common beliefs was the ‘Verification Principle’ which was used as a device to attack the issue of metaphysics. The ‘Verification Principle’ means that if something cannot be verified, it is therefore meaningless. For example, metaphysical statements have no meaning because they cannot be verified. We cannot prove notions that help us understand the world such as existence, cause and effect.

The creation of the ‘Verification Principle’ led to disputes because people argued about the formulation of the ‘Verification Principle’. Not even Science could provide a satisfactory answer to these disputes.  Wittgenstein was amongst those who opposed the ‘Verification Principle,’ however, he was still against metaphysics.

Karl Popper did not support the Logical Positivists either and was therefore given the name ‘The Official Opposition’. His book ‘Logic of Scientific Discovery’ attacks the ideas of Empiricism and as I previously mentioned, Logical Positivists. He believed that the ‘Verification Principle’ could not be verified and nor could scientific theories be proven to be true because of the Theory of Induction. The thing that marked out all science is its potential to be falsified. Induction cannot be a reliable source because according to Hume’s ‘Rising Sun’ just because things have happened in the past doesn’t mean that the same will definitely happen again in the future. Popper realised that everything in the world is potentially untrue and this is why he disagreed with the Logical Positivists.

The philosophers of the ‘Vienna Circle’ believed the method of clarification showed how empirical statements were truths derived from protocol statements. Protocol Statements are statements that report the results of observations and provide the basis for scientific confirmation.  Experiences recorded by protocol appear to be private to each individual, but this caused people to question how can we can ever begin to understand everyone else’s own meaning? This is because meaning depends on verification. Verification is a private process and therefore no one else has access to this. Schlick responded to this argument by insisting that a distinction must be made between form and content. Content of experience is what you enjoy or live through life. For example, to see something a certain way such as the grass is green. This is private. However, the form of experience may be common to many of us. For example, many people can experience the same sunset although we can’t be certain it’s the same thing we’re experiencing  but as long as everyone agrees that what they are witnessing is the same then everyone is able to communicate with each other and construct the language of science.  Wittgenstein didn’t agree with this solution and so he distanced himself from the ‘Vienna Circle’.

 Wittgenstein’s later Philosophy                                                              

In the 1930s Wittgenstein became a very influential teacher. Descartes and Schlick had striven to show how knowledge of the external public world could be built up from immediate private data of experience. Wittgenstein however, showed that private experience is something that itself presupposed a shared public world. He also believed that we do justice to the private within a social context rather than the public to be constructed from the private.  

After his return to philosophy, Wittgenstein ceased to believe in logical atoms and he also chose to not believe in a connection between language and the world. This contradicts with what Wittgenstein stated in his work ‘Tractus’. Wittgenstein reassessed his beliefs and established that he now believes that language is interwoven with the world in many different ways which he expressed as ‘language games’.

The Language games are a point of speaking whether it is expressing sensations or reporting an event etc. He doesn’t mean it’s trivial, they are simply linguistic activities. The meaning of the word is its use in a language game, if you want to give an explanation for the meaning of a word we must look for the part it plays in our life. For example, the meaning of a table.

Wittgenstein never abandoned his view that philosophy is an activity, not a theory. We need philosophy if we are to avoid being entrapped by our language.

After Wittgenstein’s death in 1951 at the age of 62, many considered Quine, to be the most respected English speaking philosopher. Quine spent time with the ‘Vienna Circle’, his aim was to provide a framework for a naturalistic explanation of the world in terms of science and physical science. All the theories that we use to explain the world are based on our sense receptors. Sense receptors account for our ability to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, sense pain and temperature.

Wittgenstein and Quine despite being considered two leading analytic philosophers had very contrasting views. On the whole they disagreed about the nature of philosophy. Wittgenstein firmly believed until his death that philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.

The Open Society and Its Enemies

During the Second World War Popper developed the idea of political philosophy in his book ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’. Popper explained that in order for a political organisation to flourish, its institutions must leave maximum room for self-correction. The two things that Popper believed are important for an Open Society to exist are:

1.       That the ruled should have ample freedom to discuss and criticise policies proposed by rulers.

2.       That it should be possible without violence to change the rulers if they fail to promote citizen welfare.

 

Popper didn’t rule out a government as he believed that we need a government that worries about trying to protect their state from the economically strong.  A Utilitarian view, the greatest good for the greatest amount of people.

Popper attacked Marx and Plato because he considered these two philosophers to be enemies of the Open Society.  In an Open Society there would be no secrets just an authoritive figure with supreme knowledge of all and all citizens would also have equal rights and be trusted with knowledge too.  

Year Two First HCJ Lecture-Science and Certainty

Science is the search for the truth, you can never know the absolute truth about anything. Kant supported this idea by expressing that you can never possibly know truth but you can always have an honest opinion about what you believe to be the truth. The Universe is ultimately unknowable. This statement can be applied in journalism since you can possibly never know the real truth of a story but you can be honest in what you write.

Kant also believes that the truth can be split up into two categories:

1.  A Priori truth. 'Truths before experience'
2. A Posteriori truth. 'Truths found out through experience so that facts are known.

Before Kant people supported the idea of of 'Mirror theory of the mind'. Plato also shared a similar theory of Forms. Plato believed that though forms of the world existed independently of human consciousness.

The Empiricists Bacon and Newton thought that the Cosmos was the sum total of many things. Some of these things are very remote or very large or small and therefore are difficult to see but they are 'there' as objects whether we can obviously see them or not. Therefore the same theory can be applied to Science just because we can not see microscopic molecules in a material this does not mean that they don't exist. Barclay opposed this view by stating that perception equals existence. No existence if an object has not been seen or witnessed.

Kant's view is that the Cosmos is more like a computer game where the object (space and time) is created in consciousness and then fades away again first into the apparent distance and then disappears entirely again. However, Kant wasn't a pure idealist and therefore didn't believe that objects were really there, but only existed in a Noumenal Form.

Humanity will always have the ability to strive for more, to learn more (this is similar to Nietzsche's 'Will of Power') .

Logic- Deduction vs Induction

1. Inductive logic is moving from a particular proposition.
2. Deductive logic is moving from a  general proposition, usually mathematics and geometry.

Deduction :  

 All things are created.

The Universe is a thing.

Therefore the universe was created.

From Newton to Einstein

The Copernican Revolution in 1543 was the eruption of Science. It was the idea,that is now known as fact, that the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun.
This created a clash of Science and the traditions.

The Verification principle

The truth of any proposition is the way in which you verify it. Therefore, if a proposition cannot be verified, then it is neither true nor false. Arguably, the verification principle cannot be verified itself.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'

Schopenhauer was a member of the generals school of German Idealism in the 19th Century and his ideals were similar to Hegel, whom he disliked. His position is that of immaterialism. The apparent world does not exist independently of perception. In many ways Schopenhauer is similar to Kant as well as Hegel, for example, they both believe that you can deduce by reason that there is a necessary pre-existent formless 'something' which is a necessary condition of the existence of anything at all.

Schopenhauer believed there is only one undifferentiated 'thing in itself' this 'thing' he describes as 'will'. This has the same meaning as Nietzsche which is the will power or the will to be/ to exist/ to live. This concept of will is the same according to Nietzsche as 'eternal fire' in Heraclitus (a pre-Socratic). Nietzsche hated Socrates and believed that the Socrates were only trying to think their way out of things and this method would never work.

Nietzsche believed in the saying: 'god is dead' and that violence would end humanity which must be overcome. The future is full of violence and he was anti-Christian believing that humanity is simply a passing phase.

Life is pain- the cause of pain is desire- achieve denial of the will is intoxication- the best type of this is music. If you are a moral person then you can overcome your desires and also get these desires out which ensures that you won't worry about these things. Nietzsche doesn't believe in Schopenhauer since he believed him to be a bad Christian. He said you should follow your desire as then you will be without regret when you die.

Nietzsche's first book was called 'The Birth of Tragedy' that talks about Greek political organisation.Nietzsche believed that art and music can carry out the same functions a religion because it can express the 'Nature of Humanity'. He believed that true tragedy had not been achieved since the time of the Greeks due to an imbalance between 2 key themes. This true form of tragedy transcended pessimism and nihilism by allowing the audience to look at human suffering and allow them to affirm their own existence.

These two key themes centre on the Greek Gods Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus was the God of wine, ecstasy and intoxication. Apollo was the God of sun, reason and dreams. Nietzsche believed that a fusion of these artistic impulses create the perfect drama.

Nietzsche hated Euripides for 'destroying' art since he disposed of any Dionysian aspect of tragedy. For example, Euripides introduced plays which were much more realistic and a good representative of reality. This coincided with the Socratic movement of rationalism. He believed that by rationalising everything it would reduce people's ability to engage with art. Nietzsche found all types of form or structure to be Apollonian sculpture since it relies entirely on form. Rational thought enables distinctions to be made between the good and the bad.

He also believed will to be vital. Socrates, however, did not agree. Nietzsche believed the only way to rescue modern culture from self destruction is to restore the spirit of tragedy.