Reflections after second seminar

After this week’s lecture and seminar I have gained further and broader perspectives of the philosophical questions. In the lecture we discussed the foundations of enlightenment. At the beginning, church was the solid source of knowledge. And in the beginning of the 18th century, philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and science men like Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, started to question the beliefs of religion. Because there was no real evidence to the religious statements.

When cities started to expand and construction works began to excel, the enlightenment developed further (in the engineering sphere) due to overcoming the gravitation law. Constructions works such as The Eiffel Tower also became cultural monuments defining the city and country.

I think the texts was quite hard to understand but yet easier than the texts we read the first week. It was easier to apply these statements and questions because they were more concrete than the earlier texts. I had a hard time understanding the meaning of dialectic and nominalism but after the seminar with Håkan this became clearer. Håkan explained that dialectic illuminates a problem from two different sides and brought up an example between Hegel and Marx. The lecturer gave a lot of worthy anecdotes that made this topic clearer. During the seminar we talked a lot about nominalism and Plato’s cave. Nominalism is divided in universal qualities and the particular qualities. Plato’s cave explains the difference between these two qualities. Håkan explained that in the cave there is a fire, a horse and a shadow on the wall representing the horse. The shadow is only a sensory input which occurs from the fire. The fire in this case is what the real world represents in itself, and the shadow of the horse is only a sensory input that is a representation from our senses. Therefore, these senses you can not see or touch, because it is just a representation of something. The particular qualities are those that share a property with something else. For example the color blue, we perceive through our senses, and we know that the color shares it qualities with something else (another object for example). We also know that two chairs beside each other shares the same qualities and that is how we know they are of the same kind. But the name chair is not directly associated with the object and qualities of the chair. I still think that this discussion and way of thinking is particularly abstract, but it is very interesting.

This is why nominalism was criticized because then we would be ‘stuck’ in the representation of the world, and all universal qualities would not exist because we do not see them as a representation of things. That is why the empirical world needed a complement like a concept based on values, to not get stuck in the world as a representation of itself.

This brings us back to the second world war when nazi-germany revealed propaganda movies that weakened the jews. Due to the “truthful” world they lived in, people did not believe in values or the things they did not see. And that is not a world we want to be stuck in. So thanks to the enlightenment and the critique of enlightenment as Adorno & Horkheimer wrote about, we have compromised on a way of life that includes both the universal and particular qualities and via values and things we perceive, we can determine how we want to interpret the world.