Wednesday 31 May 2006

Student philosophical 'research'

Stephen Hicks has a compilation of some recent philosophical 'research' that's passed across his desk from his students. Clearly, some haven't been listening too well in class ...
Is philosophy a waist of time? Ethical debates have been around for a long time, but nobody seems to have any answers. Ethnics are very important... For the world to be good means having strong Altruistic people to help the society survive in this doggy dog world.

The existence of God is questionable since evil does have some good points to make. John Hick rebukes the concept that God would not allow suffering if he existed in the third paragraph of his essay. Because of evil there is said to be another force in the universe, a dark force. His name is Satin.

According to Freud, the child has lust during the breast-feeding stage. Eventually his mother stops, and his lust is suppressed until his adultery stage.

In feudal times, jobs were passed on from fathers to sons. For example, if your father was a priest, you would probably become a priest too.
Read on here for more 'insights.'

TAGS: Philosophy, Humour

13 comments:

Berend de Boer said...

No one will lament the collapse of this 'civilisation'...

Berend de Boer said...

Read this one: Against Marx, Rand advocates free enterprise and selfishness, but her philosophy is sort of controversial, in a sense. She commits the fallacy of hoc poc der doc.

Berend de Boer said...

PC, what are your thoughts on another article I found in his site, namely "Why art became ugly?"

Josh said...

If by "research", you mean "typos and other clangers obviously culled from Stage I Philosophy exams"...

Berend de Boer said...

Josh, they would be typos if the students would recognise them as such. Somehow I doubt that...

Peter Cresswell said...

Josh, you obviously missed the word 'humour' at the bottom, and that funny bone you should have been born with. As recompense, you at least have my sympathy.

Berend, I agree with every word. There ain't a fallacy in it. :-)

Josh said...

I refuse to use smileys -- "..." is the closest I'll allow myself to indicate that I'm not taking things that seriously, either. At any rate, I get the humour -- I've chuckled at plenty of similar mistakes in my time teaching Philosophy -- but in the context* of a blog that regularly mocks and denigrates philosophy departments and academics, I felt the significance of some poor students' errors might be overstated -- Berend's comments on collapsing civilizations kind of confirmed that to me.

* You Objectivists like appeals to context, right? How that's different from advocating Subjectivism I'm still not sure, but that's something for another time... (See the "..."?)

Peter Cresswell said...

Okay, fair enough Josh. :-) (Oops ... )

CD said...

I've heard a lot of things said about Rand, but never have I heard her accused of using the fallacy of hoc poc der doc.

It has a ring to it, doesn't it?

Josh said...

Watch it, man -- it starts with ":-)" and before you know it you're ending every sentence with "ROFL u r teh orsum funniez !!1!!1!"

I don't think any of us wants that.

CD said...

I think you're taking everything a bit too seriously. Dawg.

;-)

Anonymous said...

Josh said:

"You Objectivists like appeals to context, right? How that's different from advocating Subjectivism I'm still not sure, but that's something for another time..."

Josh, just curious do you teach philosophy? If so, where? You would be interested in a series of tapes by a Physicist called David Harriman about the philosophical corruption of modern physics. The tapes argued that modern physics interpretation is based on subjectivism and must be thrown out. He tried to argue in favour of objectivism. Are you familiar with 'particle-wave duality collapse' ? This is the sort of physics subjectivism of interpretation that Dr. Harriman said it is wrong. You can borrow those tapes from PC and evaluate for yourself whether reality exists independent of an observer (objectivism) or existence is materialises whenever an observer is present (subjectivism).

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry, but I have to point out something about this post that may not seem so obvious. I may not even be right, but it's an observation that's worth considering from the view of someone who has worked teaching students how to read and write. It may be that some of these students have a form of dyslexia, which is not a bad estimate considering 10-15% of the US population has some form of dyslexia, and most go undiagnosed. Our own President may even be a perfect example.

So while looking at this may be kind of humorous - to an extent - I think there may be something else lying hidden in these errors. Most are not errors in understanding the concepts. (Of course, if there were such errors, I wouldn't doubt that the students probably have a loose concept of the material anyway, something which is not altogether uncommon in the current academic climate.) But look closely at the errors themselves. Satan = Satin. granted = granite. Dog eat dog = doggy dog. These homonymic errors, though sometimes loose, are fairly symptomatic of dyslexia.

I would caution in the future against ridiculing these students, and especially ridiculing the general "faults" of dyslexia. It fosters a culture of misunderstanding that I'm sure we would all rather avoid.


(For some background, I'm an undergraduate student of philosophy, and I've worked for America Reads.)