[lit-ideas] FW: Re: Here's a useful word for the list....

Just real quick.  Nature doesn't seem to address truth at all.  Death is 
central to Nature, but truth isn't even an afterthought.  I don't know what 
that means.  Nothing at all probably.  On the other hand, maybe nature is 
telling us something.  Perhaps truth, like death, exists but is unknowable.  
Except in religion, and that's still only if someone agreed that Truth was in 
fact conferred, or the revelation is meaningless.  


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Andy Amago 
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 1/8/2006 5:24:36 PM 
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Here's a useful word for the list....


I'm on thin ice here, will skate real fast.  I think Pirandello addresses the 
issue of "truth".  His take on it in Six Characters is that by definition truth 
slides instantly and continuously into the past.  Truth therefore changes 
constantly (depending in addition to time also on perspective, etc.).  We can 
reflect truth but we can never know it (as embodied by the actors playing the 
characters but never quite getting there, among other things).  This position 
is born out by reality I think.  Truth by consensus is alternatively known as 
propaganda, politics, religion.  It's not much, but it's all there is.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: John Wager 
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 1/8/2006 4:29:49 PM 
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Here's a useful word for the list....


I was taught that philosophy classes were supposed to examine and evaluate 
philosophical arguments.  All my classes as an undergrad and in graduate school 
did that.

But when I got to my first year of teaching, many many years ago, I found that 
students could not grasp the "argument" because they didn't understand or 
appreciate the statements that made up the argument, and further that they 
didn't have any appreciation or interest in the concepts that made up the 
statements.

I decided the first thing I should do is try to teach the value of 
philosophical CONCEPTS, before puting them into an argument.  "Arete" 
("virtue") is something that one should understand even before evaluating how 
successful Aristotle is in making an argument about this concept.  

Ever since, I'd say that over half of my efforts in teaching have been to 
address the concepts philosophers use, exploring and meditating on them, rather 
than evalu ating arguments containing them.  Of course that means my students 
do not get to "truth" because they don't get to evaluate arguments.  I'm a bit 
uncomfortable because philosophy should be about the "truth" in some sense, and 
I agree that concepts by themselves cannot be true or false.

Am I doing the right thing or not?

(This isn't a rhetorical question; I would like to know what you think.)

wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote: 
A concept can't be true. Only statements, judgments have a truth value. Concepts
can be useful, coherent, possessing wider extension than another concept,
lesser intension than another, inspiring, noble, sublime, motivationally
ert/inert. They can't be physically extended or coloured, are odourless, are
not possessed in coherent form by any member of the American Reublican or
Canadian Conservative party, and they don't taste good with leg of lamb with
rosemary and sage (isn't there a song like that?) So I go "We should, like
y'know, care for language and thought as we do for the planet and our own
souls, or sumptin like that." And then she goes: "Yeah, whatever." Like, you
know what I mean? Like, get a life.

Realizing that most of the students who will appear in my undergrad classes
tomorrow were born when or after I turned thirty (and still trustable). 
Your friendly neighbourhood baby boomer, Walter

No, I sat out Woodstock. Not the camping type.

Quoting JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx:

  
<><< A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is 
"truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or 
believes 
to be true, rather than the facts. >>




-- 
-------------------------------------------------
"Never attribute to malice that which can be     
explained by incompetence and ignorance."        
-------------------------------------------------
John Wager                  johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx
                             Forest Park, IL, USA

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