On the pathway for a Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree, the last two modules are a free choice.
You can only study two of the three subjects in the last two modules.
At the moment i can quite happily say that philosophy will be my dtopped subject.
I wonder if i will still feel that way after i have slogged my way through this module?
Are there any past or present A222 students who read this blog?
How are you coping with?
A. The huge amount of reading required?
B. The lack of resolution of topics.
C. Thought experiments, i get a bit overehelmed with all the potential positions, do you?
I am keen to hesr your input.
Bloody A222. I thought the first tma was to ease you into the module.
Not the case with A222, it is confusing and difficult.
I will be paying close attention to the tutorial tomorrow.
I need to get me some clarity about this 'ease in' tma1.
I cannot even imagine how hard the rest of the module is.
Okay personal identity.
Locke refuted physical identity as part of personal identity,
Locke decided that the continuity of memory is important to identity.
Locke decided we have a soul and it is a material thing.
But Hume...
Hume thinks we don't have continuity of memory as personal identity
The identity is made up of impressions (senses) and idea's (informed by senses)
Our identity is a mental stage that ideas and impressions float across like actors.
Hume looked inside himself and could only detect ideas and impressions, hence he had no soul, he could only detect ideas and impressions. Hence the idea of a 'self' is only a fiction.
If I wrote my TMA1 today I would suggest that I agree with Hume, because when I look inside myself t the moment I just find confusion.
The self as confusion?
Now to wade through Taylor, lets hope Taylor proves insightful, because after that is Parfitt's bloody tele-transporter and that's not going to resolve anything!
'The self as confusion' so I must rely on the process of the study to see if it all becomes clear.
Perhaps Hume was right, my 'self' is the theatre that the ideas and senses play up, and only by having a organised process to make clear stage directions to those bloody ideas and impressions can I make a clear 'play' out of all of it.
The self as 'mental play- director, stage manager, orchestrator, lighting rigger, critic, actor, audience, in fact just the whole bloody theatre'.
So is, 'my self' just the auditorium that all the external impressions and internal ideas perform in. The performance is a fiction, the theatre is not.
Can you quote Nick Hornby in TMA'S?
Rather than ponder so much about personal identity,
I could reference Hornby's 'about a boy'
'they say every man is an island!, fucking right, and if I am to be an island,
I will be I-fucking-biza, thank you very much'
I have to say, The first month of A222 is really challanging.
I cannot even begin to imagine how hard months four and five are.
I might not be the worlds most natural philosopher
8 year old A222 strikes again.
None of the forums work in a mobile format.
So i have to dig the lap top out to use A222's completely non interactive study planner just to read the forums.
Here i am currently on my mobile, blogging that my module planner will not work on a mobile.
And i am still getting charged full whack for it.
Come in A222, your time is well up.
Is it just ME feeling a little overwhelmed by this module so far, or is anyone else in the SAME BOAT.
For clear use of language, informed by the chapter one glossary.
By ME, I am not referring my physical self, I am referring to my personal me, my conscious self. SAME BOAT is not used in the sense of an numerically identical boat, regardless of its state of continuum, as in the ship of Theseus. SAME BOAT implies a shared position of consciousness potentially shared by YOU*
. *YOU refers to my fellow students senses of self identify in consciousness, not their physical existence. (Which cannot be empirically proven until we have physically interacted with each other at tutorials).
So I have completed week 1's work, the study planner for week 1 is done.
Happy days, I think!
So I have looked at the ship of Theseus and john Locke's ideas about personal identity.
So Locke separate's the self, from the physical existence of a 'me', thats not relevant, to the idea that I am my self.
It is the continuity of memory and the persistence of self-consciousness that make me a self.
Okay I can get with that, no problem, week one done. Feel smug, happy its done, I can do this, no worries.
Then....................
I clicked the link to an article from the additional reading list:
Mind blown------ they were words, but I could not follow them,
temporal identity, empirical duality of purpose, four dimension definition of spatial existence.
There are even formula's !!!!
if a is to b as x is to y, across a continuum of t1 to t2, then t1a is the same as t2b if X(t1a) is spatially separate to Y(t2b).
MIND BLOWN !
This years blog posts might turn into a whinging set of 'I do not understand' entries.
Or I might get an handle on it all, after all my self now (OMFG1) might be temporally identical to my self in 9 months time (OMFG2). So (OMFG1)=(OMFG2) if I add the empirical factor of time (t). OMFG1 x (t) = (omfg2) / T.
This might be a very long nine months......
Are you reading me?
Cause i am reading text books.
A222- philosophy contains so much reading.
This might be a long module.
Following on from my last post on the paradox of the ship of Theseus, and following on from the post of some pictures from berlin that are social science relative,
here are pictures of the two sides of the Theseus paradox.
This is the Mary Rose, completely unrestored, the only work that has gone on with her, is to preserve her timbers.
And here is the HMS Victory, the Mary Rose is preserved in the black domed building in the background:
As you can see from the picture, the top part of the Victory's three masts have been removed for some more 'restoration', ergo, 'replacement' work.
So both side of the ship of Theseus paradox, just a stones throw apart.
My first book had some interesting reading in it last night.
The ship of Theseus.
Is it still the same ship if every plank of wood in the ship has been replaced because of decay?
The book talked about numerically indentical and quailitive indentical.
Looking very breifly at the philosophical arguements around if the Theseus would be the same ship or the restoration means she is not the same ship.
That made me think of the 3 ships just a couple of miles away from me, in Portsmouth dockyard.
The Mary Rose, 500 years old snd preserved. No replacement of any of the wood. Just preservation work rakes place.
The HMS Victory. A classic ship of Theseus. Virtually all the wood has been replaced over the last 275 years.
The HMS Warrior also has had much of her wood replaced. However as an iron clad hull, much of her metal work is orginal.
All very intetrsting stuff.
I have some more pictures from our berlin trip to share, so I thought I would bundle them up here, with how they relevant to the key themes and idea's discussed in my Politics, Economics and Philosophy course...
Marx, the political and economic philosopher, and his backer, Engels.
The Reichstag, power, sovereignty, Legitimate use of violence.
The Berlin Wall, boundaries, international relations, globalisation
Wearing an old soviet republic t-shirt outside the rebranded Russian federation embassy.
International relations,
A222 philosophy.
It is all about the reading baby.
6 course books and 1 set book.
Thats alot of reading.
Does anyone reading this, have any advice about reading all that?
To quote whitesnake...
Here i go again out on my own...
The study planner is open, the books are with me,
Time to start the 9 month A222 philosophy adventure.
Happy days...
Hope you all had a good summer.
Mine was okay. I changed jobs in August, so i did not get a summer holiday.
I get get to go to Berlin with my son, to celebrate his 18th birthday. That was a great trip.
Berlin is a beautiful city. Here is a picture of us at the Reichstag dome.
as well as that trip, I also abseiled down the spinnaker tower to raise funds for the Solent MS Therapy Centre.
This is me 315 feet, 103 metre's up the tower.
I got 79% for my DD211 exam, so a overall OES score of 79%.
So a 2:1 score so far.
Now here I am, it is September again and time for fire up for my third module.
This time round it is A222- Philosophy.
Let the fun begin, and more blogging, now that we are back to study.
So I have finished with revision, I will read through all the introductions and conclusions from the module books this afternoon, and then that's it.
The exam is tomorrow at 10 am in Southampton.
glasses, pens, watch and ID all prepared, and so it is time to mentally prepare for the 3 hour exam.
Here is the link to my latest specialistgeneralist.net blog:
https://thespecialistgeneralist.net/2017/05/21/centrists/
The blog deals with the current general election and a fledgling political party in the U.K which hopes to offer a Centrist alternative to the political agenda in the U.K
I hope you follow the links to the Centrist UK page and have a look through their materials.
So I bundled all my flashcards up by block and published them on my blog:
www.thespecialistgeneralist.net
I included some other musing about the relationship between states and globalisation and Weber theory on the 'legitimate use of violence'
Now I really must motivate to revise from the module books...
I am calling it quits now with the flash cards.
Time to move on to revising the module books this weekend and the website modules after that.
I hope that my fellow students who i shared the flssh cards with found them in some way useful.
is it transnational or suprainternational?
You decide... with the help of this flash card for block 5, globalisation.
I think I only have 2 more flash cards to do, then I will just get on with revising from the module books. It might be well time to move on, I gave this latest flash card a thunderbirds theme because it looks at International Relations. My focus might be starting to slip, only two more to go though.....
now for the second flash card about globalisation.
Here is my final flash card for DD211 block 4, this one deals with leadership within lijphart defined liberal democracies.
Here is the flash card that ties Lukes (block 2) with Lijphart ( block 4)
I am really enjoying making the infographics for revision. For me it is a good revision tool, I am able to produce them without referring from the module materials, I only check what I have produce against the module materials to correct what I have produce, so I must be retaining the info quite well.
I am about half way through producing the flash cards, I have 2 more to do for block 4, Lijphart's model of liberal democracies. Then I will move onto 4 cards about globalisation.
That should mean I can take sound knowledge of 4 of the 5 blocks into the exam, and then once there, I can decide on the structure and themes of my short and long answers, depending on my confidence in producing short and long answers to each block themes.
Well that is the plan anyway.......
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