918th Street, Walled City

ontologically DIY
I made this little philosophy primer for my friend Veronica because she's getting ready to take a Being and Time class. I thought I would share it.

Branches of philosophy

Metaphysics investigates the nature of being and the world. Traditional branches are cosmology and ontology.
Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, and whether knowledge is possible. Among its central concerns has been the challenge posed by skepticism and the relationships between truth, belief, and justification.
Ethics, or 'moral philosophy', is concerned with questions of how persons ought to act or if such questions are answerable. The main branches of ethics are meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Meta-ethics concerns the nature of ethical thought, comparison of various ethical systems, whether there are absolute ethical truths, and how such truths could be known. Ethics is also associated with the idea of morality. Plato's early dialogues include a search for definitions of virtue.
Political philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals and communities to the state. It includes questions about justice, the good, law, property, and the rights and obligations of the citizen.
Aesthetics deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory-emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment.
Logic deals with patterns of thinking that lead from true premises to true conclusions, originally developed in Ancient Greece. Beginning in the late 19th century, mathematicians such as Frege focused on a mathematical treatment of logic, and today the subject of logic has two broad divisions: mathematical logic (formal symbolic logic) and what is now called philosophical logic.
Philosophy of mind deals with the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body, and is typified by disputes between dualism and materialism. In recent years there have been increasing similarities, between this branch of philosophy and cognitive science.
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language.
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy that asks questions about religion.

In academia, philosophy is generally seperated into Analytical and Continental philosophy. Analytical is generally taught in American and Britich philosophy departments where as Continental refers more to 20^th century continental European philosophy that is more of a critique of French and German philosphy of the past. Analytical philosophy is getting largely into what the future of science of modern economics will bring us where as Continental philosphy as more to do with teaching us how to question our assumptions and how to think about history. Continental philosophy is taught more in anthropology, english, and art departments because it has to do with criticizing our way of thinking that developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The branches of philosophy traditionally investigated in Continental philosophy are Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Heidegger has important things to say mostly about Ontology and Aesthetics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology (Look into: some fundamental questions)

Heidegger wrote that in order to understand him one should study Plato for five years and Aristotle for ten. His main task was to question what Being meant in the discourse of Western philosophy. Since Plato and Aristotle are the bedrock of Western Philosophy, he uses them as a reference point to reads older and newer philosopher in relation. One of the reasons he is so important was that he tried to look into what was before Plato. Pre-plato philosophers such as these had grand philosophical visions that were often tied into their line of work and place in society. It was their interpretation of the world based on their perspective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras

One of Heidegger’s key concerns was over thinking about things as ‘things’ or ‘not things / nothing’. Is Being a thing or is it nothing? When people pejoratively criticize ideas as being “platonism” they are usually talking about people who think certains ideas are fixed ‘things’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato (focus on metaphysics, theory of forms, and epistomology)

Ontology and Epistomology are deeply related. Ontology is your view on what is real/not real a thing or not a thing. Epistomology is your view on what is knowledge, what is belief, what is knowable, what is not knowable. So of course, whether or something is considered real has a lot to do with how accurately you think you are perceiving the world around you.

When studying Epistomology, you always end up dealing with Descartes who wants to establish a rock solid foundation for reality by supposing that he could doubt everything he knew until he couldn’t doubt anymore, and the last undoubtable thing would then tell us what is really real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descarte

From Heidegger’s perspective, the development of a school of philosophy called phenomenology really undermined Descartes’ method by suggesting that perception inherently has knowledge and reality built into it. You can’t just use your brain to separate things like a math problem. The problem of reality isn’t so much what we can prove we know so much as understanding how our ideas actually relate and correspond to the outside world. How do we interpret the world?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_%28philosophy%29

Phenomenology is not so interested in what we can prove we know and more interested in the assumptions that go into every proclaimation and usage of knowledge. That is why Being is of such interest. Another way of thinking about Being is simple: what do we mean when we use the word ‘is’?

Phenomenology is a 20^th century philosophy. Another major philosophical current of the 20^th century is Existentialism, which really developed out of literature and religious thinking of Kierkegaard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

Every philosopher, prehaps every person, has a say and a perspective on metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Everyone has an idea of what is beautiful, what is right and wrong, and what is real and unreal. Usually those perspectives are somewhat coherent. So you can think of existentialism and phenomenology as parts of the same ethos (general outlook) that Heidegger grew up with. The inventor of phenomenology, Edmund Hussurl never really got into problems beauty or right and wrong. Nietzsche (the existentialist) had definite ideas about right and wrong and to an extent about beauty as well. Heidegger tries to talk about all of that (although less so about right and wrong). Heidegger’s main contribution, I would say, was to turn the discussion toward language. For him, reality is not something proven or unproven but something to be read and interpreted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics

The interpretation of reality was traditionally a purely religious discipline used by Rabbis and Brahmins. However, if we take reality to be an amorphous book that we have to read using the language that we have, then hermeneutics begins to look like epistemology and ontology as well. This is why after Heidegger, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida became interested in language, literature, and religion as much as what is traditionally considered philosophy. Heidegger was personally a Nazi, but after his death, Marxists also took a deep interest in this way of interpreting things. It was especially nice for Marxists because view everyone on a scale of material history. By tying in interpretatin of reality to material history, they can then attribute ways of thinking to different material conditions, systems of economic oppressions, and so on. In this way, reality (ontology) itself becomes deeply political. Art too becomes political.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger

Deep down Heidegger was still most interested in the basics, Plato and Aristotle (Aristotle basically decided that the world was objectively categorizable into real things and not real things. Among real things are people, animals, rocks. Among unreal things are unicorns, certains ideas and so on). The most important philosopher before Heidegger was probably Kant. Kant pretty much used Plato and Aristotle’s foundation and built the largest philosophical system there was fleshing out all that is considered objectively right and true and logical and beautiful in the world. Of course, there was a lot of problems with Kant’s big creation (he had never been more than 70 miles away from his birthplace). That is why it was nice for Heidegger to come along and point to the world of thought before Plato and to further develop the philosophy that came after Kant in order to show that Kant’s way of thinking wasn’t everything. There is a before and after of what is considered traditional European philosophy (that ruled the world for so long). Our present world still functions largely on a Kantian way of thinking, which is why academics like literary critics, artists, and athropologists are so interested in Heidegger and Derrida and postmodernism, so that eventually society at large will have more of a perspective on why they think the way they do and understand that our ideas about right and wrong and real and unreal and beauty are largely contingent on certain historical forces. Using a hermeneutical approach to looking at reality allows us to be more flexible and critical about our fundamental supposition since reality is always just another interpretation.

Some people now go back to the Greeks and go, oh yeah people have made similar criticisms of Plato and Aristotle long ago, except nobody paid attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrida

There are certain similarities but Diogenes was obviously too silly to be taken seriously.