Bertrand Russell’s 10 commandments for teachers everyone with a brain Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue”… The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: (via MetaFilter) Surprising Reality Behind What Motivates Us @Blueluck: Very true - I've seen other countries where people leave their family in another country to go find work, and then to manual labor for extremely cheap just to be able to send it all home to their family. I guess that could be interpreted as their purpose, but the work is not purposeful in and of itself. I guess "pay enough to take money off the table" covers that, so we're only talking about how to motivate people after they're at the comfortable level most Americans that read this blog are at. Interesting results in India, though. I believe there is a threshold that once you're paid a certain amount, you feel on top of things like you deserve it, so you don't work hard to move up further. If you take money completely off the table, or put the carrot completely away, there's not much to work for anymore. I think that's one reason government employees aren't known for super service. @Blueluck: Its completely subjective, is the answer.
Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave" "In fact, you get pretty good at understanding how the patterns in the show work, and everyone else chained up is like, 'Holy shit bro, how did you know that that tree was going to fall on that guy?' and you're like, 'It's because I fucking pay attention and I'm smart as shit.' You're the smartest of the chained, and they all revere you." Glaucon: "But Socrates, a tree didn't really hit a guy. It's all shadows." Socrates: "No shit, Glaucon, but you don't know that. "So eventually, someone comes and unchains you and drags you out of the cave. "Slowly, as your eyes got better, you'd see more and more shit. "Finally you'd want to go down and tell everyone about everything you've discovered. "Philosophy, same thing.
The Better Angels of Our Nature — By Steven Pinker — Book Review It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of “The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more.
The Examined Life & the Task of Public Philosophy This phrase is over 2400 years old, dating back to 399 BC when Socrates first uttered the words at his infamous defense trial, and retold by his pupil Plato around 387 BC in the Platonic dialogue the Apology of Socrates. Beyond modeling the examined life himself, Socrates pressed ordinary Athenian citizens to question their notions of justice, virtue, piety, and love, and never held set definitions himself. Since Socrates, the aphorism of the “examined life” has given rise to analogous sayings such as “life of the mind,” vita contemplativa, and “learning for learning’s sake,” and is the subject of countless books and courses. But the examined life, as fundamental to human life as it was for Socrates, has never been available for all human beings. While many consider philosophy a purely theoretical project, Socrates considered his work a great and necessary service for Athenian democracy. The Socratic Tradition Examined Life Criticism of Examined Life Peter Singer Slavoj Žižek
www.math.rutgers.edu/~lenci/jokes/chicken WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Plato: For the greater good. Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability. Nietzsche Quotes: Christianity Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.405, R.J. Hollingdale transl. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life. from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, p.23, Walter Kaufmann transl. Change of Cast. -- As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples. Speaking in a parable.
Waking Essay Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life by Doug Mann 1. Introduction: What if Life Were Just a Dream? Richard Linklater's 2002 film Waking Life is all about dreaming, and how we can sometimes lucidly control our dreams. This issue is not new. This whole idea of "waking up" is a key idea in a number of philosophies explored in the film. The film was made first by filming live action with a digital video camera, then transferring the video to computers, and rotoscoping (colouring over) the images to turn them into animation. To understand the structure of the film and to keep track of what's happening in each of its scenes, I've named and outlined each scene in the following chart. As I've said, the central issue in the film is dreaming. In Scene 24, The Human Ant Colony, Wiley is stopped by performance artist Tiana Hux, who engages him in a fairly long conversation on a variety of subjects (I'll return to this important scene a couple of more times). 2. 3.
Some Moral Dilemmas The Trolley Problem, not in Grassian. Suggested by Philippa Foot (1920-2010), daughter of Esther, the daughter of President Grover Cleveland, but of British birth because of her father, William Sidney Bence Bosanquet. A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. This is a classic "right vs. good" dilemma. The Costly Underwater Tunnel Compare: 112 men were killed during the construction of Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border (the "official" number was 98, but others had died from causes more difficult to identify -- or easier to ignore -- like by carbon monoxide poisoning): The first to die was a surveyor, J.G. with a return to a completely unfamiliar Earth, against what seems to be genuine love for Preston, with a life in what actually are rather comfortable circumstances in the spaceship.