The History Channel has a content-rich page called “The Declaration of Independence.” Of particular value is a copy of the Declaration’s text with historical and interpretative commentary from  Elizabeth Hovey, adjunct professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. (Make sure you have your pop-up blocker turned off to use this function.)

Hovey’s interpretations respect natural law traditions and display a solid understanding of Jefferson’s political theory. You’ll find far less explanation, though, of the bill of grievances in the Declaration, which is the longest section in the document, as well as no explanation of Congress’ reference to prior efforts to reconcile with Great Britain.

Other material at the site such as biographical information and a brief history of the Declaration answers basic questions most students might have about this founding document. Teachers will also find some decent open-source lesson plans for their use.  All in all, this is a useful and accessible site that would benefit the history buff, social studies teacher, or high-school student.

Aproveitei meu “momento sabático” para rever as 5 temporadas de Lost.

É incrível como cada vez percebo outros detalhes e descubro novas ligações (se é que elas realmente existem!) entre os fatos.

Sempre gostei de séries, mas nunca me senti tão envolvida como em Lost. Tanto que venho enfrentando uma crise de abstinencia desde o fim da quinta temporada, crise esta que só acabará em 02 de fevereiro de 2010, quando está prevista a estréia da sexta e última temporada nos EUA.

Jacob, anti-Jacob, John Locke dead-or-alive, realidades alternativas, egípcios…são várias as teorias e spoilers, mas continuo não tendo a menor ideia do que os roteiristas estão nos preparando para este grand finale.

Até fevereiro!

E Namaste!

Lets begin at the end Whats in a name? well quite a lot actually.

Well we have a trinity of characters with two of them appearing to resemble the same body. Jeremy Bentham(1748-1832)

the man who was so philosophical about the ideals of pleasure and pain (AKA john Locke when we see him on what is refered to as the island) and lived his life as a reformist and a believer in utilitarianism.

One of the quotes he was best known for was “The greatest happiness of the greatest number”

I think we see some elements of pleasure and pain in John Locke’s life as the named Jeremy Bentham though maybe with

a lot more pain than pleasure.

Then we come to John Locke(1632-1704) and his theorem of mind which I guess is why he was adorned as a great man

I cannot say I can agree and all his views but when I look at the times he lived in certain things that

were accepted then are not so acceptable in today’s society. On this level he did not have the same

ideals as Jeremy Bentham.

John Locke is said to have influenced Voltaire,Hume and Rousseau with his views on the self and consciousness with the writing of one of his more famous essays An Essay Concerning Human Understanding which portrayed the mind at birth as a Tabula Rasa .

From the Tabula Rasa things are then shaped by events and experiences Though I am not sure that is quite

what I see happening within Lost. when he is reborn after the incident I cannot tell whether the information

he gains are remnants of past memories or a trail of information purposely placed: put there to keep him on the right path.

Less we forget Christian Shephard has already succeeded in what we also see John Locke to do.

Some have ascribed him as the philosopher of freedom, what we see at the end of the 5th series of Lost is John Locke

free the others from leadership of Jacob but in doing so is he offering freedom or just a different kind of leadership.

Then we come to Christian Shephard Though this is not the name I know him by in philosophy. If this man is not Christian then

in my eyes he should be. He is known as the father of philosophy Rene Descartes(1596-1650) and as I saw him rise from the waters of the ocean

in season 1 he appeared to be a great father though his life off the island of letting alcohol get the better of him

depicts him as a man who knows too much of future and past events and wants to just forget it all through the liquor

of the bottle.

He was also a mathematician and scientist and played his part in the scientific revolution

Best known for his quote “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am)

I have only tickled the surface of these great men and this is a good demonstration of the richness of Lost

you may think these names are just chosen by coincidence but do not mistake coincidence for the purposeful

movement of the hidden hand of the puppet master,

and so i shall end this blog as I began whats in a name? well quite a lot actually.

I wanted to do something for Thanksgiving and because LOST has been pushed back to February. But chin up… LOST will be here soon. In the meantime, some things to be thankful for… ( My apologies, and total respect, to both Julie Andrews and Anna in Indiana.)

MY FAVORITE LOST THINGS

Raindrops on wreckage and whiskers on surgeons
Young rock stars kicking their heroin addictions
Locke telling Eko they’re puppets on strings
These are a few of my favorite LOST things

Cream colored jumpsuits and crisp Sawyer nicknames
Buttons and timers and Benjamin’s mind games
Wild Hurley Bird with the sun on its wings
These are a few of my favorite LOST things

Girls who knock boys out with just elbow smashes
Snowflake-like logos and subsequent hatches
Silver haired Ellie and Course Correcting
These are a few of my favorite LOST Things

Talk of end dates
And hiatus
Make me feel so sad
But I simply remember my favorite LOST things
And then I don’t feel so bad

Raindrops on wreckage and whiskers on surgeons
Young rock stars kicking their heroin addictions
Locke telling Eko they’re puppets on strings
These are a few of my favorite LOST things

Cream colored jumpsuits and crisp Sawyer nicknames
Buttons and timers and Benjamin’s mind games
Wild Hurley Bird with the sun on its wings
These are a few of my favorite LOST things

Girls who knock boys out with just elbow smashes
Snowflake-like logos and subsequent hatches
Silver haired Ellie with Course Correcting
These are a few of my favorite LOST Things

Talk of end dates
And hiatus
Make me feel so sad
But I simply remember my favorite LOST things
And then I don’t feel so bad

(Parody of the song “My Favorite Things” Written by Rodgers and Hammerstein II, 1959, for the Broadway Musical”The Sound of Music” . New lyrics by Wendy Lincoln, 2009)
MyFavoriteLOSTThings.mp3

It sure took some time, but New York’s latest financial crisis seems to have brought out the Machiavelli in Governor Paterson. Yesterday, after weeks of negotiating with the legislature over budget cuts, Paterson proposed a bill that would let the legislature “punt” the question to him. With the legislature’s carte blanche, Paterson’s staff and cabinet would unilaterally make cuts, effective upon his execution.

Of course, it’s never going to happen: if the legislature won’t make a decision with Paterson, why would they let him make the decision without them? But the bill sends a message — “if the legislature lacks the courage to make the necessary cuts, I’ll do it” — clearly designed portray Paterson as the exasperated but genuine public servant, just trying to get something done, and to hell with the cost.

Unfortunately, the cost may be the state constitution (kudos to Assemblymember Lancman for picking up on the constitutional issue — but might we tone down the Beckian rhetoric?).

One of the (few) ways in which modern constitutionalism preserves untarnished the Montesquieu/Locke “classical” model of separation of powers is to prevent the complete fusion of the legislative and executive powers: the legislature may not completely abdicate its authority to the executive. The legislature may partially delegate its authority to agencies under executive control, but only if the surrender of power comes with the guidance of an “intelligible principle,” thus preventing the executive from ever overstepping the scope of the delegation. See A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S., 295 U.S. 495 (1935).

The “nondelegation doctrine” — per Schechter — finds its textual hook in the Congress’ “vesting” clause. See U.S. Const., Art. I, § 1 (“All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States…”). New York substantially duplicates that language, at Art. III, § 1. Our state constitution even adds another, more explicit ban on outright delegation, providing that “no law shall be enacted except by bill.” N.Y. Const., Art. III, § 13. Nondelegation concerns apply with more, not less force in New York.

We haven’t seen many nondelegation doctrine cases lately. In fact, the doctrine’s often thought of as dead. Modern agencies take more and more discretion from the legislature, and that’s probably a bad thing (a subject for another day). But we also don’t often see attempts to delegate as much power as Paterson is proposing.

Modern democracy necessitates muddying classical separation theory — but only to a certain extent. Still, the prohibition against the fusion of the executive and legislative powers is ancient indeed, and with good cause.* Paterson’s bill sends a compelling public relations message, but espouses a theory of legislation that ought not come to pass, and will not.

The Isocracy Network interviews Mr. Carson on the theory and practice of mutualism, worker self-management, anarchist thinkers and his critics.

3 Nov 09 | The Isocracy Network

Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism. Describing his politics as being “the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism”, he certainly will find a welcoming audience among our group—which is why he’s been asked several difficult questions.

“The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand” is available in HTML format and Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective are both available as PDF files.

Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The Isocracy Network.

Thanks for inviting me.

Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial definition offered by the anarchist, Proudhon, to contemporary examples and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?

Well, first of all, it’s important to distinguish between mutualism as a general form of praxis, and mutualism as a theory. Mutualist practices (friendly societies and lodges, guilds, arrangements for mutual aid, etc.) are probably old as the human race. Proudhon, Owen, Warren, et al simply created a theoretical framework that emphasized such forms of organization as a building block of society. It’s a bit like the centipede trying to figure out how it’s been walking all this time, or the man who was astonished to learn he’d been speaking in prose all along and didn’t even know it.

For that matter, there have been important anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin who emphasized mutual aid and other mutual organizations, without in any strict sense being mutualists. Cooperatives and mutuals have been central to the counterinstitution-building of much of the decentralist Left in the U.S. since the 1960s, but their thought is not explicitly mutualist either.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the important examples of mutualist practice (the cooperative movement, the local currency and alternative credit movements, etc.) are not explicitly or self-consciously mutualist in ideology.

Having read Proudhon for some years, his thought is so complex and at times even seemingly self-contradictory, that I still hesitate to summarize it. But I’d venture to say, as an approximation, that his programme centered on: 1) abolishing artificial property rights in land and artificial scarcity of credit, so that the working class could secure cheap access to the prerequisites of production; and 2) organizing the economy around associations of producers. Of course Proudhon was an important founding thinker for anarchism as a whole as well as for mutualism; so these ideas, in modified form, have heavily influenced later collectivist, communist and syndicalist variants of anarchism.

Mutualist praxis was central to the Owenite movement in the U.K. (e.g. Owenite craft unions organized cooperative production and distribution by strikers in their own shops), as well as such things as the Rochedale cooperatives, the Chartists, and land colonization movements. Owenism, by way of Christian socialism and guild socialism, probably had a significant (if indirect) influence on distributism.

In the U.S. mutualism’s primary founder was the Owenite Josiah Warren. Warrenism, cross-pollinated with J.K. Ingalls’ occupancy-and-use view of land ownership and William Greene’s mutual banking theories, together led to the plumbline individualism of Benjamin Tucker. Tucker focused almost entirely on the abolition of artificial property rights and privilege in land and credit, assuming that when the legal props to rent and interest were removed and cheap land and credit were universally available, the forms of organization would take care of themselves. He displayed almost no interest whatever in cooperatives, associations for mutual aid, etc., as such.

Dyer Lum, John Beverley Robinson, and Clarence Swartz, all heavily influenced by Tucker, supplemented his focus on eliminating monopolies with some positive speculation on cooperative forms of organization; in so doing, they represented a partial fusion of Tucker’s version of individualism with the older cooperativist tradition of Proudhon and Owen. Lum, in particular, was also friendly to the radical labor movement and had fairly close ties to the I.W.W.

Would a highly successful large worker’s cooperatives, like the John Lewis Partnership in the U.K., and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain [centered in Basque Country] serve as evidence that mutualist economics can and does work in the large scale? Are credit unions evidence that mutualist economics can replace capitalist banking?

Although I’m quite friendly to both Mondragon and credit unions, and consider their influence to be decidedly positive, I believe their form is still distorted considerably by the capitalist milieu within which they exist. I like Mondragon’s federated system of cooperative producers, distributors and banks within a single umbrella organization. But it’s much too centralized a system in my opinion, with worker representation only effected at the level of the board of directors for the system as a whole; below the level of the Mondragon system as a whole, it’s a fairly top-down system of conventional management, with no significant self-management at the level of individual departments or factories.

I would greatly prefer local markets with lots of stand-alone cooperative manufacturing shops on the Emilia-Romagna model, integrated with cooperative banks in some sort of barter or local currency network of the sort promoted by Tom Greco.

Most credit unions, unfortunately, have adopted the culture of the conventional banking industry, and have almost no ideological affinity for the larger cooperative or counter-economy movement. Of course they are still greatly preferable to capitalist banks; being controlled by many small, local depositors, they are far less prone to the excesses of the capitalist banking system that we’ve seen in recent years.

Proudhon, although arguing that he opposed the idea of individuals deriving an income through rent and investments, said that he never wished “to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree” such activities. A contemporary mainstream economist may argue that Proudhon’s position here would be particularly utopian in those markets that have high barriers to entry or other monopolistic features, that a worker’s cooperative versus an entrenched capitalist enterprise in such a market would require a miracle on the scale of David vs, Goliath for success.

That sounds a bit like Tucker’s pessimistic view of things in his later years, when he seemed resigned to the idea that the large industrial trusts had grown to the point that their market power would persist even after the Four Monopolies were removed.

I think such a view neglects the extent to which capital-intensiveness is a source of high overhead cost and inefficiency, and is only made artificially profitable by the state’s subsidies and protections. In fact production as such has become far less capital-intensive over the past three decades, with the old mass-production core outsourcing increasing shares of total production to flexible manufacturing networks and job-shops, and some of them retaining little more than control over marketing and “intellectual property.” The development of cheap, small-scale CNC tools in the 1970s meant that the capital outlays required for manufacturing imploded by one or two orders of magnitude. That was the beginning of a long shift from older mass-production industry to Emilia-Romagna, the Toyota supplier network, the job-shops of Shenzhen and Shanghai, etc.

The process continues even further in the same direction with the desktop manufacturing revolution of recent years: cheap, homebrew CNC machines scalable to the small shop and garage.

When physical capital costs are so low, most of the financial role of the old industrial core is becoming redundant. And with small-scale production driven by local orders on a lean, demand-pull, JIT basis, marketing is similarly redundant.

“Intellectual property” is the main surviving buttress to the old corporate walls, and it’s becoming increasingly unenforceable.

A follower of Henry George would argue in the realm of natural resources it would be impossible for success and that land-rents should be socialised. How would you respond to these claims?

I’m quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed. But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalities created by taxpayers—not to mention by removing state enforcement of title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own miniature “downtown” cores, differential rent would be far less significant. I think a majority of George’s aims could be achieved by Tucker’s means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard’s means.

With examples of worker’s self-management in the former Yugoslavia, and modelling by economists such as Jaroslav Vanek and Benjamin Ward, it has been shown in some cases (especially in critical infrastructure) it is advantageous for labor-managed firms, in their objective of increasing income per worker, to either lay-off workers or—like a monopolistic capitalist firm – to reduce productivity and thus derive monopoly profits. How would a contemporary version of mutualism prevent these problems?

It’s been a long time since I read Vanek’s work on worker-managed economies, but my immediate reaction is that there’s probably no fool-proof set of governance rules. When the firm is controlled by capital-owners, they’ll behave in such a way as to maximize returns on capital; when it’s controlled by managers, as in most large Western corporations, they’ll maximize benefits to management at the expense of both labor and capital. At least in a worker-managed firm, the decisions will reflect the interests of a bare majority, which can’t be said of the other two mechanisms. Beyond that, I think the answer to the kind of behavior you describe lies in exit as much as in voice: the lower the capitalization requirements and the lower the barrier to entry for most forms of production, and the lower the cost threshold for comfortable subsistence, the less catastrophic changes in employment will be. I’d like to see an economy where a much larger share of total consumption needs are met through production for subsistence or barter in the household/informal sector, and the average time spent in wage employment is much less than at present.

That would mean a significantly larger share of the population would be self-employed than at present, a very large share would work hours that we would regard as “part-time,” household arrangements for pooling wages and hoarding labor-time would be much more resilient, and even wage-earners would tend to accept as normal prolonged periods of unemployment during which they lived off subsistence resources while waiting for a job to their liking.

Pro-capitalist neoliberals, such as George Reismann, Roderick T. Long have criticised your advocacy of mutualism. Reisman and Long both argue that you do not support John Locke’s ownership of landed property that has been mixed with labour or, to use the peculiarly U.S. vernacular, “homesteading”. It seems that both this critics have fundamentally misunderstood Locke’s concept of land ownership, which recognises a public cost for exclusion and use in addition to the right of added value. How do you respond to these criticisms?

To be frank, I can’t say with any degree of confidence what Reisman understands about anything. But I think Long acknowledged Locke’s Proviso and explicitly characterized his own position as “non-Proviso Lockeanism.” I’m not a Georgist myself, although I’d be well-disposed to a local property rules system based on some form of common ownership and community collection of rent. In any case, justifiably or not, when answering Lockean critics I tend to tacitly work from the premise that “Lockean” means “non-Proviso Lockean.” And for the most part, I think a radical and consistent application of non-Proviso Lockean rules would go most of the way toward achieving the aims of the Tucker-Ingalls land theory.

… all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous band of nature: … Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property… For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

–John Locke, Of Civil Government – Second Treatise

For that matter, over time I’ve come to see the bounderies between the Tucker-Ingalls and non-Proviso Lockean systems as less distinct, and to perceive some practical problems with the Tucker system (at least the more radical variant–he seems to promote different versions of the system at different times). At times Tucker himself seemed to concede the existence of house-rent, but to argue that the nullification of titles to vacant land would (through market competition) cause the land-rent component of rent to disappear and overall rent to fall to the value of rent on buildings. Now, to me, that seems to imply that Tucker wasn’t necessarily (at least at times) dead-set against absentee ownership in principle. That variant of his land theory, at least, seems to imply that the important thing was to eliminate large-scale absentee title to vacant and unimproved land.

In any case, I tend to think that doing so would go a long way to eliminating landlord rent through market competition.

Another critic, Walter Block argues that you are actually some sort of Marxist because you use the labour theory of value for deriving a theory of exploitation. It would seem that (a) Block is unaware that Adam Smith and David Ricardo also used the labour theory of value and (b) using it to calculate a rate of exploitation is hardly the same as using it as an anchor to exchange values.

I think the Austrians also, for the most part, exaggerate the extent to which marginalism/subjectivism is a radical departure from classical labor and cost theories. It’s closer to the truth to say that marginalism provides a mechanism for explaining the tendency that Ricardo et al described. The marginalist/subjectivist claim that “utility determines value” is true in a technical sense, if you add the qualification “at any point in time given the snapshot of supply and demand in the spot market.” But it’s not true in the ordinary way we use those words. If you allow changes in supply over time to enter the picture, then supply alters until the utility of the marginal unit reflects the cost of producing it—i.e., exactly what Ricardo said.

It makes far more sense to treat marginalism as a complement or fulfillment to classical political economy, rather than as supplanting it.

Politically, where do you think mutualists should align themselves. Should they spend their efforts in building cooperative organisations, like Proudhon’s advocacy of dual power? Or is there some mileage to be made in being involved in existing political organisations, such as the Labour Party—Cooperative Party groups in the U.K.? What about in the United States; is the Libertarian Party salvageable?

I think by far the most important, and the most interest, of our tasks is actually building the kind of society we want, and doing so so far as possible without regard to the state. But there’s something to be said for putting external pressure on the state, and participating in political coalitions to remove as much state interference with our activities as possible. Of course the primary emphasis of such coalition-building should be forming pressure groups, rather than attempting to become part of a governing coalition.

A lot of this parallels Daniel DeLeon’s disputes with the anarchists in the I.W.W. DeLeon argued that “building the structure of the new society in the shell of the old” (i.e. building industrial unions to serve as organs of self-management) would not be enough by itself. So long as the capitalists controlled the state and its armed force, and the significant minority of people whose class interest was tied up with it, there was the danger of the “Iron Heel” being brought to bear against counter-organizations. On the other hand, political victory alone wasn’t sufficient; he gave the example of threats by Jay Gould to organize a national capital strike and lockout if the socialists ever captured the national government. Workers, DeLeon argued, should be focused on building counter-institutions, but also be prepared to seize the commanding heights of the state long enough to dismantle them and prevent them from being used against themselves.

What we need is a primary focus on institution building, without entirely neglecting the need for a political movement to run interference for the counter-institutions.

What’s more, there’s the very real danger an authoritarian state might make a concerted effort to stamp out the counter-economy through (for example) the kinds of totalitarian surveillance Richard Stallman described in “The Right to Read,” intensified licensing and zoning to suppress low-capital producers, etc. It’s a waste of effort and probably corrupting to seriously run our people for Congress or the White House. But it’s perfectly sensible to carry out propaganda against legislation like the DMCA, to support lobbying campaigns organized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NORML, etc.

Proudhon argued that through a society of contracts between individuals, a federal structure could arise. This of course must presume that individuals have the capacity to engage in uncoerced contractual arrangements. What other political requirements do you think have a particular priority in breaking down authoritarian elements in statist rule?

Well, it could be that the authoritarian elements of statist rule will persist on paper right up to the point at which they become irrelevant. But in my opinion it’s at least worth a shot to pressure the state from outside, and form ad hoc alliances to pressure the state, in order to minimize its interference and fend off attempts at intensified interference. That includes local efforts against licensing and zoning that impede household microenterprise and micromanufacturing, local pressure to defend peaceful squatters and vagrants, pressure against the regulatory suppression of self-organized mutual-aid efforts, pressure at the national level against further expanding “intellectual property” law, and so forth.

Kevin, thank you for your time and views.

Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society, contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective. Mr. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Ecco qui uno schemino che ho fatto per i capitoli 2-3 di storia. Non sono incluse le pagine 80-89 e quelle di oggi; quando avrò aggiunto anche quello metterò online tutto.

Cap. 2-3 .doc

Nicola

“Psychology as we know it didn’t suddenly appear on the intellectual scene.  It is impossible to say just when it began, or who was responsible for it.  Instead, we can only point to a number of currents that take us from philosophy and the natural sciences into something recognizably psychological.  This chapter looks at two of these “primordial” currents — associationism as the beginnings of a cognitive theory, and the introduction of quantification in the forms of psychophysics and intelligence testing.

Associationism

Associationism is the theory that the mind is composed of elements — usually referred to as sensations and ideas — which are organized by means of various associations.  Although the original idea can be found in Plato, it is Aristotle who gets the credit for elaborating on it.  Aristotle counted four laws of association when he examined the processes of remembrance and recall:

1.  The law of contiguity.  Things or events that occur close to each other in space or time tend to get linked together in the mind.  If you think of a cup, you may think of a saucer;  if you think of making coffee, you may then think of drinking that coffee.

2.  The law of frequency.  The more often two things or events are linked, the more powerful will be that association.  If you have an eclair with your coffee every day, and have done so for the last twenty years, the association will be strong indeed — and you will be fat.

3.  The law of similarity.  If two things are similar, the thought of one will tend to trigger the thought of the other.  If you think of one twin, it is hard not to think of the other.  If you recollect one birthday, you may find yourself thinking about others as well.

4.  The law of contrast.  On the other hand, seeing or recalling something may also trigger the recollection of something completely opposite.  If you think of the tallest person you know, you may suddenly recall the shortest one as well.  If you are thinking about birthdays, the one that was totally different from all the rest is quite likely to come up.

Association, according to Aristotle, took place in the “common sense.”  It was in the common sense that the look, the feel, the smell, the taste of an apple, for example, came together to become the idea of an apple.

For 2000 years, these four laws were assumed to hold true.  St. Thomas pretty much accepted it lock, stock, and barrel.  No one, however, cared that much about association.  It was seen as just a simple description of a commonplace occurrence.  It was seen as the activity of passive reason, whereas the abstraction of principles or essences — far more significant to philosophers — was the domain of active reason.

During the enlightenment, philosophers began to become interested in the idea again, as a part of their studies of vision as well as their interest in epistemology.  Hobbes understood complex experiences as being associations of simple experiences, which in turn were associations of sensations.  The basic means of association, according to Hobbes, was coherence (continguity), and the basic strength factor was repetition (frequency).

John Locke, rejecting the possibility of innate ideas, made his entire system dependent on association of sensations into simple ideas.  He did, however, distinguish between ideas of sensations and ideas of reflection, meaning active reason.  Only by adding simple ideas of reflection to simple ideas of sensation could we derive complex ideas.  He also suggested that complex emotions derived from pain and pleasure (simple ideas) associated with other ideas.

It was David Hume who really got into the issue.  Recall that he saw all experiences as having no substantial reality behind them.  So whatever coherence the world (or the self) seems to have is a matter of the simple application of these natural laws of association.  He lists three:

1.  The law of resemblance — i.e. similarity.

2.  The law of contiguity.

3.  The law of cause and effect — basically contiguity in time.

David Hartley (1705-1757) was an English physician who was responsible for making the idea of associationism popular, especially in a book called Observations of Man.  His emphasis was on the law of contiguity (in time and space) and the law of frequency.  But he added an idea he got from the famous Isaac Newton:  This association was a matter of tuned “vibrations” within the nerves!  His basic ideas are very similar to those of D. O. Hebb in the twentieth century.

James Mill (1773-1836) also elaborated on Hume’s associationism.  The elder Mill saw the mind as passively functioning by the law of contiguity, with the law of frequency and a law of vividness ”stamping in” the association.  His emphasis on the law of frequency as the key to learning makes his approach very similar to the behaviorists in the twentieth century. But he is most famous for being the father of John Stuart Mill.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 3: The 1800’s

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

“John Locke is sometimes called “the father of the enlightenment.”  He was born August 29, 1632, the same year as Spinoza.  His father was an attorney and a Puritan, who taught young John the value of representation and religious freedom.  John’s father died of tuberculosis when John was 29, leaving him with a small inheritance.

John went to Oxford, received his Masters degree, and taught there. He later studied medicine and became the personal physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury (grandfather to the philosopher of the same title).

Beginning in 1675, Locke studied in France.  When he returned, he found the political climate under James II less than congenial, and so moved to Holland.  It was there that he wrote his great psychological work, Essay concerning Human Understanding.

In 1689, he returned to England after William and Mary took the throne from James II.  There he published his works — the Essay, his two Treatises on Government, and two letters concerning the need for religious tolerance.  In 1691, he retired to a friend’s mansion, and died in 1704 at the age of 72.

His Treatises alone would assure him a place in history near the top.  In them, he outlined the basics of representative government, including natural rights, consent of the governed, the protection of property, religious tolerance, separation of church and state, and the checks and balances between executive and legislative branches.  His ideas would become the foundation of the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.  Not bad.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke sees people as having a positive nature, one that contains instincts for social good and the ability to reason.  Since our nature is positive, we are should allow ourselves and others the freedom to develop that nature.   For this reason, we must each surrender some degree of freedom in order that others may likewise be free to develop their potentials.

Laws are created, not to keep us from destroying each other, but to allow us to express our positive, rational natures. And so a government is legitimate only if its laws promote that which is our nature — to be free and rational.  And it can do this only if is based on the consent of the governed!  If Hobbes reminds you of Skinner, Locke should remind you of Carl Rogers.

His Essay concerning Human Understanding attacked another popular idea of his time:  Many scholars believed that the idea of God and the ideas of good and evil are planted in our minds at birth, perhaps by God himself.  It was said that these ideas were innate.  But when Locke looked at the variety of beliefs, non-beliefs, and moralities, he concluded that these things could not possibly be innate.

He admits, of course, that there are reflexes and instincts and the like, but these are just physiological sequences of movement, not ideas!  There are some ideas, learned from experience, that are learned so early and reinforced so consistently, that they have the appearance of being innate.  But that’s only an appearance!

In the course of arguing that there are no innate ideas, he also sets the stage for two future arguments, taken up by Berkeley and Hume.  First, he notices that if we try to find matter, we see nothing but qualities that we attribute to matter — but never matter itself.  The idea of matter is not empirical!  This would be elaborated by Berkeley.

Second, he notices that if we try to find mind, all we see are the qualities we attribute to mind.  Never do we see, empirically, a mind at all!  This would be elaborated by Hume.

Locke doesn’t make the leaps that Berkeley and Hume will, however.  He is too practical for that.  He says we are no doubt correct in believing in matter and mind.  Life makes little sense without them.  And yet, they are not empirically verifiable.  He is sometimes called a metaphysical agnostic:  He believes that there is mind and matter (and that they do interact, somehow), but no one can prove their existence.

Locke’s ideas were adopted enthusiastically by French philosophers as well as English (and American) thinkers.  They would translate him into a revolutionary, and his philosophy of human nature into Sensationism and Mechanism.”

The History Of Psychology, Part 2: The Rebirth

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright 2000 C. George Boeree

Ali.♥

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Locke on Language
By Walter Ott, Virginia Tech

Keywords

Section: History of Philosophy
Subjects: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Modern (C17th – C19th), Logic and Language, Philosophy of Language
People: Locke, John
Key Topics: meaning, empiricism

(See all Philosophy Compass ‘Teaching & Learning Guides‘)

Visto il lungo periodo di assenza dovuto a imprecisati motivi da parte del servizio pubblico wordpress.com abbiamo deciso di trasferirci in uno spazio dedicato che sia la nostra nuova casa nella speranza di non dover più vedere il sito “oscurato”.

 

Il diario di Locke

Good job state!

I have previously written about the necessity of protecting property rights- that being a result of man’s will and mind and labour- and how the guarantee and the recognition of such rights is not only a constitutional mandate but in the vein of Locke, an integral natural right as well. As such, I would like to give mad props to the United Supreme Court (with the exception of Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor and other dissenters – I specifically mention the great lady for this rather brave, valiant and well-measured defence of property rights and private ownership- http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Kelo_v._New_London/Dissent_O’Connor) and the State of Connecticut, more notably the city of  New  London, for utterly, completely, and thoroughly maiming and butchering such a right for the appeasement of populist sentiments and the vagueness of the “common good” and “public use”- really. Good job!

For the uninformed, Kelo v. New London was a distinctly novel concept in the already absurd realm of eminent domain, so far as it involved the transfer of ownership from one private owner to another, as long as such an action would fall under “public use” that would result in the “common good”. In this instance, the state may award a private entity the ownership and possession of real property of another if it could be proven that economic growth and development would benefit the community as a whole, regardless of the established legal validity on the original owner’s claim or more importantly, the choice of the original owners themselves (whether or not to participate). As such, homeowners in New London were duly and legally (according to the Supreme Court) deprived of their residence so that Pfizer may establish offices and facilities that would create jobs and promote income in the area.

Good job state! That’s a great thing right?

Except four years later, this is what happened:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Pfizer-abandons-site-of-infamous-Kelo-eminent-domain-taking-69580497.html

And this:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/11/09/taking-land-for-public-uselessness/

Thus, all in all, I would like to congratulate the state for realising the tax revenues it sought, creating jobs for people around the area, and still, having those individuals and their families keep their homes.

Except none of those happened.

So good job state!

(Articles copyrighted and owned by their respective authors and publishers).

Confieso que “Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano” es uno de los libros que más tiempo me he tardado en leer. No solo por su extensión, no solo por la profundidad de sus temas, no solo por el complejo y simple, a la vez, que el estilo de Locke para escribir, no solo porque lo he querido disfrutar y no devorarlo como a otros libros. Creo que si he tardado tanto es porque es un libro que exige reflexionar sobre cada uno de sus capítulos, hay repasarlo una y otra vez y maravillarse con las ideas del escritor.

Sigo leyendo esta obra, pero he llegado a un capitulo que  deseo compartir a todos ustedes. El capitulo X “De nuestro conocimiento de la existencia de un Dios”. Sin duda las reflexiones de Locke son de las más originales, todas sustentadas en el conocimiento, que he encontrado sobre la existencia de un Dios.

Lo primero que tenemos que entender es que no estamos hablando de religión, Locke habla de cómo sabemos que existe un Dios, pero nunca le da un nombre.

La primera prueba para el autor somos nosotros mismos, nuestra propia existencia “Creo que esta fuera de duda que el hombre tiene idea clara de su propio ser.  Sabe ciertamente que el existe y que es algo… Si alguien pretende ser escéptico como para negar su propia existencia ( ya que en realidad dudar de ella resulta manifiestamente imposible) que disfrute de su bienamada felicidad de ser nada hasta que el hambre o algún otro dolor lo convenza de lo contrario” (Locke 393).

 A lo largo del libro Locke nos habla de que el humano no nace con ideas innatas, todos los conocimientos del ser humano se obtienen únicamente de dos medios LA SENSACIÒN Y LA REFLEXIÒN. Ningún ser humano nace con la idea de la existencia de un Dios, es nuestro deber reflexionar sobre el tema y aprender, estas son conclusiones a las que hemos llegado miles individuos, otros miles, no.

Locke pensaba que todos los hombres nacimos ignorantes y es nuestro deber hacer la tarea de conocer más, es exactamente lo mismo con nuestro conocimiento sobre Dios, nacimos ignorantes pero: “Tampoco es justo que nos quejemos de nuestra ignorancia en este gran asunto, ya que el nos ha poseído de medios tan abundantes para descubrirlo y conocerlo, en la medida en que nos es necesaria para los fines de nuestro ser y nuestra gran inquietud por la felicidad” (Locke 393).

El siguiente paso es darnos cuenta que si existimos algo nos debió haber creado, algo que debió haber existido eternamente.  Porque la nada no puede producir algo; “es una demostración evidente la que desde la eternidad, ha habido algo, ya que lo que no es eterno tuvo un principio, y lo que tuvo un principio debió ser producido por algo más” (Locke 394).

¿Cómo debe ser ese ser eterno? Poderoso y sabio, según Locke. “Si se digiera que hubo un tiempo en que ningún ser tenia saber alguno, en el que aquel ser eterno se hallaba vac a ío de todo entendimiento, yo objetaría que entonces habría sido imposible que se produjera jamás un conocimiento. Porque es tan imposible que cosas completamente vacías de conocimiento, que operan a ciegas y sin ninguna percepción, de origen a un ser sapiente, como que un triangulo se construya a sí mismo tres ángulos mayores que dos rectos”. (Locke 295)

Es un hecho que el ser humano le tiene miedo a lo que no conoce, a lo que no se puede explicar, por esa razón muchos han asegurado que Dios es una invención del ser humano para explicar algo que ha estado fuera de nuestro entendimiento desde siempre, pero también es ingenuo pensar que nuestro capacidad cognitiva es capaz de explicar y entender algo tan poderoso, sabio y eterno como Dios.

“Si, no obstante, hubiera alguien tan insensatamente arrogante como para suponer que sólo el hombre conoce y es sabio, siendo empero el producto de la mera ignorancia y la casualidad, y que todo el resto del universo ha actuado tan sólo en virtud de ese ciego azar, le dejaré que pondere a placer esa objeción  tan racional y enfática de Tulio: “¿Puede haber algo más estúpidamente arrogante e indigno que un hombre que piensa que tiene en sí mente y entendimiento, pero que, sin embargo, en todo el universo que lo rodea no existe inteligencia alguna?, ¿O que aquellas cosas, que ni con el mayor alcance de su raciocino puede comprender, se mueven y controlan sin razón alguna?” (Locke 396)

El capítulo y el tema son de lo más extensos por lo que necesitaría mucho más de un post para terminar de desarrollarlo. “Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano” es una obra altamente recomendable y que se puede encontrar fácil y gratuitamente en Internet, a continuación pongo la liga por si alguien quiere leer este capítulo X  o todo el libro:

http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=JclUnOhCGTsC&dq=ensayo+sobre+el+entendimiento+humano+libro&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=es&ei=ak_4SpvYCtOk8QaryfTzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=ensayo%20sobre%20el%20entendimiento%20humano%20libro&f=false

Más adelante en este mismo capítulo Locke reconoce que hacen falta más reflexiones para los que son ateos y desarrolla brillantemente el tema de dos tipos de seres: cogitativos y no cogitativos.

El autor termina el capitulo diciéndonos que intentar comprender la existencia eterna de un ser poderoso y sabio, es imposible para nuestro entendimiento (Sin embargo las pruebas de su existencia estan presentes), tendríamos que limitar lo que El (Dios) es capaz de realizar o de plano hacer infinita nuestra comprensión.  “Si tu no entiendes las operaciones de tu propia mente finita…, no te extrañe el no poder entender las operaciones de aquella Mente eterna e infinita que hizo y gobierna todas las cosas” (Locke 411).

Las pruebas de que un Dios existe están ahí, solo hay buscarlas basándonos en el conocimiento.

José Manuel Guevara S.

Fuentes:

Locke John. Ensayo sobre el Entendimiento Humano. Tomo II GERNIKA 2000.

FUENTE http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4n.htm

Locke: Social Order
John Locke’s intellectual curiosity and social activism also led him to consider issues of general public concern in the lively political climate of seventeenth-century England. In a series of Letters on Toleration, he argued against the exercise of any governmental effort to promote or to restrict particular religious beliefs and practices. His epistemology is directly relevant to this issue: since we cannot know perfectly the truth about all differences of religious opinion, Locke held, there can be no justification for imposing our own beliefs on others. Thus, although he shared his generation’s prejudice against “enthusiastic” expressions of religious fervor, Locke officially defended a broad toleration of divergent views.

Locke’s political philosophy found its greatest expression in the Two Treatises of Civil Government, published anonymously during the same year that the Essay appeared under his own name. In the First Treatise Locke offered a point-by-point critique of Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia, a quasi-religious attempt to show that absolute monarchy is the natural system of human social organization. The Second Treatise on Government develops Locke’s own detailed account of the origin, aims, and structure of any civil government. Adopting a general method similar to that of Hobbes, Locke imagined an original state of nature in which individuals rely upon their own strength, then described our escape from this primitive state by entering into a social contract under which the state provides protective services to its citizens. Unlike Hobbes, Locke regarded this contract as revokable. Any civil government depends on the consent of those who are governed, which may be withdrawn at any time.

Property
From the outset, Locke openly declared the remarkable theme of his political theory: in order to preserve the public good, the central function of government must be the protection of private property. (2nd Treatise §3) Consider how human social life begins, in a hypothetical state of nature: Each individual is perfectly equal with every other, and all have the absolute liberty to act as they will, without interference from any other. (2nd Treatise §4) What prevents this natural state from being a violent Hobbesian free-for-all, according to Locke, is that each individual shares in the use of the faculty of reason, so that the actions of every human agent—even in the unreconstructed state of nature—are bound by the self-evident laws of nature.

Understood in this way, the state of nature vests each reasonable individual with an independent right and responsibility to enforce the natural law by punishing those few who irrationally choose to violate it. (2nd Treatise §§7-8) Because all are equal in the state of nature, the proportional punishment of criminals is a task anyone may undertake. Only in cases when the precipitate action of the offender permits no time for appeal to the common sense, reason, and will of others, Locke held, does this natural state degenerate into the state of war of each against all. (2nd Treatise §19)

Everything changes with the gradual introduction of private property. Originally, Locke supposed, the earth and everything on it belongs to all of us in common; among perfectly equal inhabitants, all have the same right to make use of whatever they find and can use. The only exception to this rule is that each of us has an exclusive right to her/his own body and its actions. But applying these actions to natural objects by mixing our labor with them, Locke argued, provides a clear means for appropriating them as an extension of our own personal property. (2nd Treatise §27) Since our bodies and their movements are our own, whenever we use our own effort to improve the natural world—the resulting products belong to us as well.

The same principle of appropriation by the investment of labor can be extended to control over the surface of the earth as well, on Locke’s view. Individuals who pour themselves into the land—improving its productivity by spending their own time and effort on its cultivation—acquire a property interest in the result. (2nd Treatise §32) The plowed field is worth more than the virgin prairie precisely because I have invested my labor in plowing it; so even if the prairie was held in common by all, the plowed field is mine. This personal appropriation of natural resources can continue indefinitely, Locke held, so long as there is “enough, and as good” left for others with the gumption to do the same. (2nd Treatise §33)

Within reasonable limits, then, individuals are free to pursue their own “life, health, liberty, and possessions.” Of course the story gets more complicated with the introduction of a monetary system that makes it possible to store up value in excess of what the individual can responsibly enjoy. (2nd Treatise §37) The fundamental principle still applies: labor is the ultimate source of all economic value. (2nd Treatise §42) But the creation of a monetary system requires an agreement among distinct individuals on the artificial “value” frozen in what is, in itself, nothing more than a bit of “colored metal.” This need for agreement, in turn, gives rise to the social order.

Civil Society
The first instance of social organization, on Locke’s view, is the development of the family, a voluntary association designed to secure the propagation of the human species through successive generations. (2nd Treatise §78) Although each individual in the state of nature has the right to enforce the natural law in defence of property interests, the formation of a civil society requires that all individuals voluntarily surrender this right to the community at large. By declaring and enforcing fixed rules for conduct—human laws—the commonwealth thus serves as “umpire” in the adjudication of property disputes among those who choose to be governed in this way. (2nd Treatise §87-89) An absolute monarch, by contrast, can only remain in a state of nature with respect to the subjects under its rule.

Securing social order through the formation of any government invariably requires the direct consent of those who are to be governed. (2nd Treatise §95) Each and every individual must concur in the the original agreement to form such a government, but it would be enormously difficult to achieve unanimous consent with respect to the particular laws it promulgates. So, in practice, Locke supposed that the will expressed by the majority must be accepted as determinative over the conduct of each individual citizen who consents to be governed at all. (2nd Treatise §97-98) Although he offered several historical examples of just such initial agreements to form a society, Locke reasonably maintained that this is beside the point. All people who voluntarily chooses to live within a society have implicitly or tacitly entered into its formative agreement, and thereby consented to submit themselves and their property to its governance. (2nd Treatise §119)

The structure or form of the government so established is a matter of relatively less importance, on Locke’s view. (2nd Treatise §132) What matters is that legislative power—the ability to provide for social order and the common good by setting standing laws over the acquisition, preservation, and transfer of property—is provided for in ways to which everyone consents. (2nd Treatise §134-8) Because the laws are established and applied equally to all, Locke argued, this is not merely an exercize in the arbitrary use of power, but an effort to secure the rights of all more securely than would be possible under the independence and equality of the state of nature.

Since standing laws continue in force long after they have been established, Locke pointed out that the legislative body responsible for deciding what the laws should be need only meet occasionally, but the executive branch of government, responsible for ensuring that the laws are actually obeyed, must be continuous in its operation within the society. (2nd Treatise §144) In similar fashion, he supposed that the federative power responsible for representing this particular commonwealth in the world at large, needs a lengthy tenure. Locke’s presumption is that the legislative function of government will be vested in a representative assembly, which naturally retains the supreme power over the commonwealth as a whole: whenever it assembles, the majority of its members speak jointly for everyone in the society. The executive and federative functions, then, are performed by other persons (magistrates and ministers) whose power to enforce and negotiate is wholly derived from the legislative. (2nd Treatise §153) But since the legislature is not perpetually in session, occasions will sometimes arise for which the standing laws have made no direct provision, and then the executive will have to exercize its prerogative to deal with the situation immediately, relying upon its own counsel in the absence of legislative direction. (2nd Treatise §160) It is the potential abuse of this prerogative, Locke supposed, that most often threatens the stability and order of a commonwealth.

Revolution
Whether any specific use of executive prerogative amounts to an abuse of power, is a question that transcends the social contract itself, and can only be judged by a higher appeal, to the divinely ordained law of nature. (2nd Treatise §168) Remember that according to Locke all legitimate political power derives solely from the consent of the governed to entrust their “lives, liberties, and possessions” to the oversight of the community as a whole, as expressed in the majority of its legislative body. (2nd Treatise §171) The commonwealth as a whole, then, is dissolved (and a new one formed) whenever there is a fundamental change in the membership of the legislature. (2nd Treatise §220)

The most likely cause of such a revolution, Locke supposed, would be abuse of power by the government itself: when the society unduly interferes with the property interests of the citizens, they are bound to protect themselves by withdrawing their consent. (2nd Treatise §222) When great mistakes are made in the governance of a commonwealth, only rebellion holds any promise of the restoration of fundamental rights. (2nd Treatise §225 ) Who is to be the judge of whether or not this has actually occurred? Only the people can decide, Locke maintained, since the very existence of the civil order depends upon their consent. (2nd Treatise §240) On Locke’s view, then, the possibility of revolution is a permanent feature of any properly-formed civil society. This provided a post facto defense of the Glorious Revolution in England and was a significant element in attempts to justify later popular revolts in America and France.

Political Theory

Hello all,

Since no one has done so yet, I thought I’d post some working thoughts I’ve had on a section of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. I’ve recently been going over it for my orals lists, and this passage sparked my interest in the different ways that systems of causation are made to relate (or not relate) to representations of consciousness or experience. The following refers to the chapter on “Power” (Book II. Chapter XXI); feel free to respond or disagree!:

Like his conception of personal identity, Locke’s concept of “liberty” is located in relation to an agent’s “interior” experience, but in this case the moral importance of this interiority is less clear since, according to Locke, the experience of volition and will in themselves are not enough for “liberty” to exist.  Indeed, Locke offers passages in which the lack of “liberty” is represented as being clearly legible to an external observer when comprised of certain conditions (e.g. falling), making the observed agent’s experienced will or volition irrelevant to the consideration. Also, it is never made clear if “liberty” itself is ever legible or if it is only inferred or experienced. Since for Locke “Necessity” persists nonetheless, this either integrates volition into its causal relations or makes it irrelevant (or perhaps even epiphenomenal?). That volition can be denied its aim, and that “liberty” thus does not always correspond with the will, is intriguing, but it is intriguing in Locke’s theory for a number of reasons:

1) In relation to necessity, the discussion of experienced “liberty” seems almost dismissible because it is so formalized. Whether or not an agent experiences a free exercise of their will, the laws of necessity are maintained. Joseph Priestley in his Essay on the First Principles of Government would later take Locke to task for this inclusion of “liberty” within a system that he sees as material determinism, but the implications of this inclusion remain unclear. 2) Because Locke retains “liberty” and its reference to  experience despite this, it suggests a moral or descriptive importance in the concept of “liberty”, but one that is not wholly clear. It would be easy enough to relate it to the state of nature that Locke discusses in the Second Treatise, or the “state of perfect freedom to order their actions” (II.4), except this freedom is never derived from an experience of volition in that text, but operates as a social relation. 3) At the same time, Locke very loosely constructs what might constitute the aim of an agent’s volition and so introduces a slippage between an intended motor-activity and, more generally, an intended object or objective for that motor-activity. Thus, the limits to a correspondence between volition and necessity are most primarily internal to the body and its movements (one cannot make voluntary processes that are involuntary) but Locke’s conception also allows looser constructions, as in those external situations that frustrate possible motor actions (falling) and social/political environments which restrain or constrain actions and objectives (prison). 4) This might be because Locke insists that the “Idea of Liberty, is the Idea of a Power in any Agent to do or forbear any particular Action, according to the determination or thought of the mind” (XXI.8). This focus on cognitive determination seems to allow for a movement between the agent’s experience of volitional action and the experience of more complex or detached objectives or desires, such the desire to not plummet in freefall. 5) The slippage into the social/political environments might actually prompt us to move to a Priestley-like political theory that constructs and secures formalized liberty as a social good even despite material determinism, yet this still doesn’t address Locke’s reference to the experience of liberty.

6) The incorporation of experience into the system of causal “Necessity” is uncomfortable because in Locke’s conception of involuntary actions or “Passive Power” of the body, the causal passivity that coincides with necessity operates on a level that would seem to be outside of conscious awareness: “A Body at rest affords us no Idea of any active Power to move; and when it is set in motion it self, that Motion is rather a Passion, than an Action in it” (XXI.4). The use of the word “passion” indicates the experiential and emotional response that is prompted by a stimulus, yet  it is only the mere response that we can experience, not its conformity with causal necessity. Locke certainly understands this passion causally (“For when the ball obeys the stroke of a Billiard-stick, it is not any action of the Ball, but bare passion”) even as this causality is out of the realm of experience, precisely because the play of the passions is materially responsive and non-cognitive. In order to theorize the causality of the passions, it seems one would have to discover how the material body receives stimuli and translates them into passions, and so one might have to dissect oneself or move to microscopic levels of examination to discover the physical stimulation of nerves by the external physical world that might result in this experience. The realm of causal necessity seems beyond the observational level of human experience in this representation, yet it is just this observational level of experience, concerning the experience (and even the external observation) of “liberty” that Locke insists on retaining. I am drawn to the persistence of experience in the discussion because it is at the level of everyday, phenomenological experience, which seems to have an import and truth-value that is both self-evident and unexplained, and that Locke attempts to incorporate it into causal necessity seems quite provocative. Experience remains as a reference point, as a moral reference, or as a compromised vestige but it still remains nonetheless.

**Another issue I don’t necessarily want to take up is Locke’s presumption of a clear correspondence between the experience of volition and causal necessity, which might be complicated by considering this study of agency in schizophrenics (The sense of agency, if you are interested).

In the UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills intends to assess “the benefits of postgraduate study for all relevant stakeholders” and “the evidence about the needs of employers for postgraduates.” Philosopher Simon Blackburn answered a request for faculty comments with a letter worth reading in full. A couple highlights:

(1) Our postgraduate philosophy education is primarily vital in ensuring the quality of the incoming stream of future teachers of philosophy. These provide the continuing educational resource for very acute and educated people to flow into very diverse channels of administration, business and other branches of employment, including what used to exist as and be known as “public service”, before that fell into the hands of people unable to conceive of it as anything other than a cornucopia of opportunities for corruption. If these last are your “stakeholders”, then we probably cannot convince them that we are of use to them, any more than music, art, literature or history could.

(2) Our future teachers will, in turn, educate philosophy graduates who can flourish in business: there have been many examples. But we don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their “needs” because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are. We merely note that conceptions of need that have given us such outstanding examples of business expertise as British Leyland, Rover and RBS seem strange instruments with which to assess institutions that enabled such legacies as those left by Bacon, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein. We are, to adapt one minister’s words, intensely relaxed about having assisted the country to this filthy rich legacy.

via Leiter Reports

Your Thoughts?

Organizes Characters By The Dungeons & Dragons Organization System

This chart shows the moral alignments of nine pop culture chararacters using the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. Rorschach as Chaotic Good? I think that Chaotic Neutral is more likely. And Neutral Good for John Locke at best.

Top row, left to right: John Locke of Lost, Dwight from Sin City, Rorschach of Watchmen.
Middle row: Indiana Jones, Niko Bellic of Grand Theft Auto 4, Tyler Durden of Fight Club.
Bottom row: Darth Vader, Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, and the Joker.

via John Farrier >> Neatorama

Extra Sources:

Popped Culture

Explanation of Alignment System

For faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge. Because, though faith be founded on the testimony of God (who cannot lie) revealing any proposition to us: yet we cannot have an assurance of the truth of its being a divine revelation greater than our own knowledge. Since the whole strength of the certainty depends upon our knowledge that God revealed it; which, in this case, where the proposition supposed revealed contradicts our knowledge or reason, will always have this objection hanging to it, viz., that we cannot tell how to conceive that to come from God, the bountiful Author of our being, which, if received for true, must overturn all the principles and foundations of knowledge he has given us; render all our faculties useless; wholly destroy the most excellent part of his workmanship, our understandings; and put a man in a condition wherein he will have less light, less conduct than the beast that perisheth. For if the mind of man can never have a clearer (and perhaps not so clear) evidence of anything to be a divine revelation, as it has of the principles of its own reason, it can never have a ground to quit the clear evidence of its reason, to give a place to a proposition, whose revelation has not a greater evidence than those principles have.

– John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

File Under: I think this is a monologue from season 6.

I was staying up way too late the other night and caught the Season 3 episode ” The Brig” on HD ( Why do I do this? I own all the seasons and can watch them at anytime! I guess there’s just something special about stumbling onto a program. ) Maybe because of the hour I started deducing this theory that can account for its ridiculousness. And yet, here I am, writing about it anyway.

In this episode, Sawyer finally does in the elusive “original recipe” Sawyer, Anthony Cooper… the man he sees as the one who ruined his life, by strangling him with a chain. This is because Cooper’s son, John Locke, cannot. But it’s assumed, Locke would if he could. Benjamin Linus, kills Mr. Cooper’s son, John Locke… the man he perceives who ruined his life, in a similar manner with an extension cord ( Season 5, ” The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”) . In turn, will Ben die, like Roger Linus, in an incident much like ” The Purge” ?

In the Season 3 finale, Jack Shephard is just about to make a suicidal move by throwing himself off a bridge in a drunken stupor, when he is stopped short by an accident on the road behind him. Christian Shephard, died in a suicidal drunken binge and threw himself into a fight he probably knew he couldn’t win (or at least, that’s what we were told).

So, this got me thinking… is this how things will end for the Losties? Will each of their demises ( if they take place) mirror those of their fathers/parents? Will Sawyer end up in a murder/suicide, possibly with Kate as his wife ? And will she die the same way as she killed her father i.e. in some kind of premeditated explosion?

There is another side to this scenario…

We saw Charlie’s mom in one episode but in ” Greatest Hits” she wasn’t there, especially noticeable absence during The Paces holiday/swimming lesson. Liam named his baby girl after Charlie and his mom in ” Fire + Water”. The way they spoke it sounded like she was no longer alive. Had Megan Pace given her life, possibly even in a sacrificial way, for her son(s) ? ( This is purely speculative…but it would be cool if we found that to be true somehow in Season Six).

David and Carmen are still around. So, does this bode well for Hugo?

Pierre Chang sent his son and wife away knowing that they would despise him, if it would save their lives. Miles finds out who his dad is and what he did for him. Miles, in turn, puts himself in a place of rejection by telling Pierre he is a time traveler to save his life ( and later, physically does rescue his father).

Does this work in reverse? Will Eloise get shot like she shot Daniel?

In this respect, is it fate or living by example?

I know… I know… I need to get more sleep.

• Just listen to the quotes of the founding fathers.
• Think to yourself, what is the constitution to you?
• How important are the bill of rights?

Glenn Beck could not be anymore right when it comes to this video clip.  Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams and all the other founders were educated in the works of John Locke, Niccolo Machiavelli, Aristotle and Plato. Do you really want to join the side of people who respect and turn to Mao Tse Tung and Karl Marx? You must stand up against these people who believe capitalism is a failure. Communism and Socialism has never worked. America and the free market system has worked. These people believe that the constitution is a living document, these people believe that the second amendment is not necessary anymore.

Some people may believe that the country needs to be fundamental changed but I know that most people don’t. How can the government spend any money that we don’t have? Like George Washington said, the act of borrowing money is a terrible thing. How are we going to pay for health care? The only way is more taxes. Do you believe the government can handle your money better than you can? We must preserve our Republic.