the X-MEN

SO.... I finally completed the download of the complete animated series of the X-Men last night. Very excited.

Does anyone else find it as interesting as me when your mystical childhood recollections are burst by revisiting something you once had a deep emotional attachment towards? It reminds me of the effects of a chemical we have when we are younger (can't remember the name of it)-- but it operates within our brain to make sensory experiences deeply intense when we are young. Ill have to do some research on that.

Anyway, the social philosophy of the X-Men is still quite relevant. In the first episode, Jubilee is sought out by a government agency that wishes to marginalize mutants (social deviants)/(insert your own marginalized group). Dr. Xavier is forced to see flaws in his blind optimism that though they are met with hostility by non-mutants, reason alone is not enough to break the hostile barrier into peace and co-existence.

As sort of a criticism to my own ideals, Magneto (in opposition to Xavier) views mutants as the next link in the chain of a superior human race (insert Nietzsche's Ubermench). It is the expression of the superior mutant force that should reign and direct the future evolution of the human species. [Bridge my ideals here with vulnerability.... ]

Xavier goes into the mental barriers of Sabretooth in episode 3. The animation is quite a bit outdated, but the concept of Xavier fighting with Sabretooth, inside his mind, against the monstrous subjects and manifestations of his personal emotional barriers to an enlightened understanding of himself and the world is still socially relevant. It is so amazing to see how the real, layered meaning of this series can go lost on a child but still hold a powerful sway over them, only to lose some of its luster in its rediscovery as an adult EVEN in light of now grasping its total and very relevant meanings.

I guess I just cant get past a lot of the cheese-ball lines and unimpressive animated effects given the technological progress we have made since 1988-1993. We can demonstrate so much more with technology in and of concepts nowadays with just the impartation of images, and their organization. I ripped Iron Man 2 a couple nights ago as it got released in Russia apparently. The development of even our movie special effects seems to bring the realization to us that our science is not that far off. You'll see what I am talking about if you go see the movie and observe what kind of an office Robert Downey Jr.'s character has to operate with. Science fiction has its way of speaking/writing technological advancements into our dreams and therefore into existence.

Aaaaand..... with that this may be my last blog. Time is coming to a close, and I am out of steam. I have been pressing so hard these last days that I just want to relax for a bit and enjoy the peaceful, stress-less reflection of a semester that still has more to teach me as I continue to remember it.

I have loved this blogging thing.... and I will definitely read all the writings of the class that I haven't gotten to yet and post comments as I am inspired. I'll probably even keep posting a thing here and there even though the grading is over.

It has been nice to know all of you, as the class room and library has allowed, and am only sorry my busyness hasn't allowed me to invest into your personal thoughts and lives more as I had hoped and planned at the beginning of the semester.

Maybe in the future...

~Sterling

Ayer's Logical Positivism

I know we are all in the common study of the History of Classical Philosophy, and the classical thought we deal with doesn't really get too deep into Empiricism (beyond its predecessors in the Atomists/Elementalists), but reading Ayer and Russell on the side this semester has been difficult for me. And so, in that struggle, I have tried to clarify (to myself) what I can glean from the meaning of these two and form some conclusions of my own, because much of my direction in philosophical study has its foundation, and relies, on what we can empirically know.

If you have read my other blogs you know that I have metaphysical, normative understandings of the universe that would already imply that I reject much of what the logical positivist has to offer.

In any event... This is my treatment of what I understand of Ayer's logical positivism. I'll be taking a class with Dr. Marcum this summer where I hope he illuminates my understanding here a bit.

Dr. Baird briefly touched on the Logical Positivists this semester (and it is because of his mention of them that I looked into it)-- So, I'll begin with how he characterized their movement:

~One thesis and One fundamental Claim: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic or empirically verifiable

Analytic statements such as those in math/logic/language are empirical: OR, they are Nonsense

Metaphysical statements are pseudo-statements and are not cognitively meaningful

Just so happens, though that the thesis: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic, empirically verifiable, or they are non-sense Is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.

So... onto Ayer:

1... For Ayer, truth is first defined as being meaningful. Ayer requires that which is meaningful to be relevant to the world as it can be experienced; what could possibly be meaningful if it is impossible to experience? Once one agrees that truth could not be truth unless it is perceived to be so, then it is only logical to exclude all other persuasions from its serious pursuit. This being Ayer’s foundation, inherited from Russell and Hume, he must reject metaphysics and all other propositions which can be neither proven true nor false by “some possible sense-experience.” Ayer doesn’t attack the fruit of the metaphysician’s field, rather he argues that it is impossible for a metaphysician to make any sense at all seeing as the sentences they use, or propositions to be more accurate, cannot meet a significant definition of such, as they have no experiential meaning and thus no means to be proven true or false. For Ayer, such propositions are “literally senseless.” Ayer wants to argue, now that he has corrected the past problems of philosophers, that the philosopher’s job is never to conflict with the hypotheses of science and is to champion the refinement of logic as it can be used to sharpen the propositions of scientists. Philosophers and their philosophies are warned of inevitable frivolity by Ayer if they do not liken to their only useful role as that of scientists of logic.

2... The original verification principal only required that in order to determine whether or not a sentence had “literal meaning,” the proposition it expressed must be either analytically or empirically verifiable. Ayer dances in rebuttal to his critics as he offers one hedge after another. Ayer admits that a given sentence, even one he would say is meaningless, inherently implies an expression. To this possible “meaning” of a sentence, Ayer introduces the equivocation of the terms: sentence and proposition so that he may substitute the word “statement” synonymously for “sentence” while reserving the word “proposition” to continue to refer to the expressions of statements which can be either empirically or analytically verified. However, the full apologetic move arrives when the very word “verifiable” wants definition. Weak and strong verifiability are introduced so that the author does not find himself in a trap where he must categorize all that which the scientific method has yet to verify as meaningless. Offering this hedge of weak verification allows Ayer to escape a logical black hole of contradiction by allowing a degree of meaning to phenomena which could be conceivably verifiable by experience. In the end, it seems as though the stress of the author’s own defense has him parting with logic where he backs his own right to make uncertain assumptions in the face of an always present uncertainty which therefore must be assigned a probability factor according to some derived potentiality of experience.

Brief Break from the Blogging Sweat Shop; On Tradition and Birthdays

So.... Yesterday was my birthday, yes, as some of you friends in class and "Facebookers" have noticed. I wanted to take the time here and thank you all for the wonderful birthday wishes. I have more to complete in this class, or I would be enjoying my family's Crawfish Boil right now with a bloody marry in hand. :))

Admonishment to you 21's and younger: The glory and celebration surrounding your birthday sharply fades at the 22nd birthday. No one tells you that this is going to happen....it just does.

Philosophically, birthdays are funny to me. Like Christmas. A birthday really is nothing more than the annual acknowledgment of the day that you were thrown into this world and that you happen to still be in this world. We have made much more cultural add-ons to the event, seemingly to make it also a celebration of wanting to make that person feel good, to affirm to them the reasons that we like them, or to make them puke and drool on themselves for our own amusement. Like, Christmas.... well, in my family at least :). The convention of Christmas has its pagan roots and arbitrary date, and weird, disconnected conventions that seem to do nothing with-- if you would ask a Christian-- its organic intention.

All in all, it is just peculiar how grown up traditions start to replace our intent...generation after generation, and that we allow this in-authentic practice for ourselves even with half and full awareness of it.

"Every tradition now grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic acts."

Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human"