mental checklist
just spewing, because my cold is killing me.
epistemology
- justified true belief, gettier cases, gettier problems
- rationalism/empiricism
- justification theories & problems of perception
- kant
- evolutionary epistemology (dawkins and memetics), virtue epistemology, vedanta epistemology (sankara)
ethics
- subjectivists: emotivism: not!hume; boo-hurrah theory
- objective sine qua non trinity: duty and liberty (kant), utility and the mob (bentham/mill), virtue and the mean (aristotle); additionals: intuitionism: prima facie duties (ross)
- non-sine qua non existentialists: sarte (bad faith), nietzsche (will to power), kiekergaard (theistic leap of faith)
- non-ethic-ists: logical positivists
- eastern ethics: confucius' return to rites and virtue (compare vis a vis aristotle); hanfeizi's return to state control (compare vis a vis machiavelli, a state-level nietzsche, maybe); mozi's utilitarianism; buddha's (gautama) internal path to transcendence (aristotle again); sankara's epistemological removal
- ethical relativism: epic fail, reasons why it is epic fail
- fact-value gaps, reductionism, etc.
language
- truth-value theorists: socrates/plato, aristotle, semantics, logical positivism
- context theories: pragmatics vis-a-vis throwback to john buridan, quine's holism vis a vis throwback to those random old farts,
- genetic theories: noam chomsky
- eastern theories: accuracy of names and categorisation, hanfeizi + confucius + mohists all in one
- important concepts: picture theory (tractatus), private language argument (post-tractatus) == wittgenstein; ideal forms == plato; mind-language-nature gap == aristotle; meaning as myth, analyticity as fail = quine
social sciences
- natural sciences applied hardcore: positivism (comte), durkheim (suicide studies), all the problems of empiricism (weber: state capitalism; merton: institutionalist ethics; lakatos: research programmes; bloor: strong programme; feyeraband: anarchy)
- interpretivism, rational: instrumental rationality (weber)
- contextual rationality: narratives - mcintyre; language games - winch; phenomenology - schutz; hans-georg gadamar - hermeneutics
- critical theory: critical rationality - habermas; critical realism
- standpoint theories: marx on science/history; feminists on epistemology
- post-modern theories: derrida on deconstruction; focault on epic fail of structures; lyotard on language games; baudrillard on hyperreality
science
- social nature (see above)
- problems of observation (universals, unobservables, human fallibility)
- problems of usefulness (falsification; bohm's quote)
- problems of accuracy (induction)
- problems of progression and true knowledge (kuhn's paradigmatic view; also french historical epistemologists)
- problems of creativity (occam's razor + abduction; use of creative hypothesis; feyeraband's anarchy)
- problems of functionality (einstein: cannot give us the taste of soup; emergentism; displacement from normative values)
- problems of system (scientific method; hypothetico-deductive model; definitions within the scientific method)
aesthetics
- definition of art: pleasure, formalism (clive bell), emotional expressionism (collingwood; the contagion model), mimesis (general theory of), contextualism (tomaskova), didactic nature (leo tolstoy), give up, it's all subjective, biology
- oppositions to the above: pleasure (non-pleasurable art), formalism (limited, cyclical); emotional exp (unintentional, replacable, retarded), contextualism (issue of why; gatekeeping; zeitgeist), didacticism (ars gratia artis), subjectivity (horizon of intelligibility as per charles taylor
mathematics
- realist versus non-realist argument: plato versus the joint forces of intuitionism, fictionalism
- a priori nature: plato/aristotle (forms + syllogisms); logicism (frege until cantor and russell)
- a posteriori nature: empiricism (quine, ayer)
- synthetic a priori: axiomatic systems (euclid, riemann, ZF axiom of choice, formalism)
- problems of each of the above: idealism (pluraity of mathematical ideas, eg the triangle that is scalene and obtuse), logicism (set theory failure), fictionalism (recurrence of things like pi (Buffon needle problem), dramatic application of random things like riemann/einstien, apollonius/kelper); empiricism (uncanny nature of mathematics, see again blah; usefulness of induction; the meno (tm) argument); formal axiomatic systems (plurality, coherentism fail, also kuhn)
epistemology
- justified true belief, gettier cases, gettier problems
- rationalism/empiricism
- justification theories & problems of perception
- kant
- evolutionary epistemology (dawkins and memetics), virtue epistemology, vedanta epistemology (sankara)
ethics
- subjectivists: emotivism: not!hume; boo-hurrah theory
- objective sine qua non trinity: duty and liberty (kant), utility and the mob (bentham/mill), virtue and the mean (aristotle); additionals: intuitionism: prima facie duties (ross)
- non-sine qua non existentialists: sarte (bad faith), nietzsche (will to power), kiekergaard (theistic leap of faith)
- non-ethic-ists: logical positivists
- eastern ethics: confucius' return to rites and virtue (compare vis a vis aristotle); hanfeizi's return to state control (compare vis a vis machiavelli, a state-level nietzsche, maybe); mozi's utilitarianism; buddha's (gautama) internal path to transcendence (aristotle again); sankara's epistemological removal
- ethical relativism: epic fail, reasons why it is epic fail
- fact-value gaps, reductionism, etc.
language
- truth-value theorists: socrates/plato, aristotle, semantics, logical positivism
- context theories: pragmatics vis-a-vis throwback to john buridan, quine's holism vis a vis throwback to those random old farts,
- genetic theories: noam chomsky
- eastern theories: accuracy of names and categorisation, hanfeizi + confucius + mohists all in one
- important concepts: picture theory (tractatus), private language argument (post-tractatus) == wittgenstein; ideal forms == plato; mind-language-nature gap == aristotle; meaning as myth, analyticity as fail = quine
social sciences
- natural sciences applied hardcore: positivism (comte), durkheim (suicide studies), all the problems of empiricism (weber: state capitalism; merton: institutionalist ethics; lakatos: research programmes; bloor: strong programme; feyeraband: anarchy)
- interpretivism, rational: instrumental rationality (weber)
- contextual rationality: narratives - mcintyre; language games - winch; phenomenology - schutz; hans-georg gadamar - hermeneutics
- critical theory: critical rationality - habermas; critical realism
- standpoint theories: marx on science/history; feminists on epistemology
- post-modern theories: derrida on deconstruction; focault on epic fail of structures; lyotard on language games; baudrillard on hyperreality
science
- social nature (see above)
- problems of observation (universals, unobservables, human fallibility)
- problems of usefulness (falsification; bohm's quote)
- problems of accuracy (induction)
- problems of progression and true knowledge (kuhn's paradigmatic view; also french historical epistemologists)
- problems of creativity (occam's razor + abduction; use of creative hypothesis; feyeraband's anarchy)
- problems of functionality (einstein: cannot give us the taste of soup; emergentism; displacement from normative values)
- problems of system (scientific method; hypothetico-deductive model; definitions within the scientific method)
aesthetics
- definition of art: pleasure, formalism (clive bell), emotional expressionism (collingwood; the contagion model), mimesis (general theory of), contextualism (tomaskova), didactic nature (leo tolstoy), give up, it's all subjective, biology
- oppositions to the above: pleasure (non-pleasurable art), formalism (limited, cyclical); emotional exp (unintentional, replacable, retarded), contextualism (issue of why; gatekeeping; zeitgeist), didacticism (ars gratia artis), subjectivity (horizon of intelligibility as per charles taylor
mathematics
- realist versus non-realist argument: plato versus the joint forces of intuitionism, fictionalism
- a priori nature: plato/aristotle (forms + syllogisms); logicism (frege until cantor and russell)
- a posteriori nature: empiricism (quine, ayer)
- synthetic a priori: axiomatic systems (euclid, riemann, ZF axiom of choice, formalism)
- problems of each of the above: idealism (pluraity of mathematical ideas, eg the triangle that is scalene and obtuse), logicism (set theory failure), fictionalism (recurrence of things like pi (Buffon needle problem), dramatic application of random things like riemann/einstien, apollonius/kelper); empiricism (uncanny nature of mathematics, see again blah; usefulness of induction; the meno (tm) argument); formal axiomatic systems (plurality, coherentism fail, also kuhn)