#star wars so far #summed up in 3 minutes before the #UK launch tomorrow of the latest

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Watch What Happens to Your #Luggage at the #Airport ( #3mins )

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the book of #acts in #3minutes

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3 minute philosophy: #epicurus and #zeno

in summary

- two greek philosophers who lived around 200BC and became leaders of 2 semi-religious lifestyle organisations

- both epicuranism and zeno's movement - called stoicism - were important steps in the philosophy branch of ethics - that is what it means for something to be good or bad - whether these values are objective or subjective or whether they exist at all

- the actual definition of what is good is hard to pin down - we have some instinctual notion of what is good or bad  - but when you try to identify why this is so you're going to run into some disagreements

- epicurus was a hedonist which means he believed that good was defined as pleasure - quite literally good things are good because they are pleasurable and bad things are bad because they are painful - and that held true for all of human experience

- the epicurean lifestyle has been largely skewed in today's understanding because we tend to picture a hedonist as lounging back eating and drinking and whose every whim is waited on

- in actual fact epicurus was a negative hedonist - which means he practised hedonism not through the pursuit of pleasures but through the illumination of desires

- for him desire was a kind of pain and therefore it was bad by definition - in short the more you have the more difficult it is to keep it and when your pleasures leave all you have is a gaping hole

- epicuranism was therefore about being satisfied with the absolute bare minimum you need to be happy - so he and his followers lived away from society in a garden, ate only bread and rice and generally tried to do as little with their lives as possible

- they didn't fear death because part of epicurus's theory was that death was not a bad thing  - because the only basis for judging whether something is good or bad is how much harm it does to someone - and epicurus figured that we are not harmed by death because when you are dead there is nobody there to be harmed

- zeno and his followers  - stoics - saw things differently - they thought good was virtue and bad was vice 

- so they thought pleasure was a kind of vice and therefore pleasure was bad - that is why they were stoic

- zeno taught it wasn't the desire of pleasure that caused grief in our lives - but rather unrealistic expectations

- epicurists and stoics formed the two most influential moral systems of hellenistic greece and elements of one or the other permeate through almost all modern ethical systems of thought in the western world today

3 minute philosophy: #empedocles

in summary

- thales (the 1st philosopher ever) thought that the entire universe was made of water

- heraclitus thought everything was made of fire

- anaximenes thought everything was made of air

- after examining the ideas of his predecessors empedocles concludes the universe is made entirely of the classical elements - air, water, fire and earth

- he theorised that objects moved according to what they were mostly made of (e.g. fire always goes up and earth always goes down)

- later attempts to improve the theory by shoe-horning in other elements didn't work

- but he did establish the 1st periodic table of elements (such as it was)

- and what he did was the primordial origin of the theory of atoms

- and he was heading in the right direction with his theory of forces

- he identified two forces - love and strife

- (today we know about 4 fundamental forces - gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, weak nuclear) 

- love was the force that brought objects together and strife was the force that drove them apart

- he postulated on other proto-scientific theories that would be proved on the right line later (e.g. he postulated the universe was once condensed in a tight unmoving sphere constrained by the force of love and later exploded with strife into an expanding mass of stuff - very much like the big bang theory)

- (e.g. 2 - his theory of evolution - life 1st emerged as a bunch of disassociated body parts that came together in random ways to create fantastic creatures with random combinations - those more suited to survival due to their combinations of parts did survive)

- sources for this info also say he threw himself into a volcano and was carried into the heavens by an eruption and lives to this day on the moon

3 minute philosophy - #davidhume

in summary

- he was a 18 century scottish philosopher who was a key figure in what was known as the scottish enlightment

- his big thing was scepticism - the position that true knowledge is unattainable and so the real world - if indeed there is one - is unknowable

- because empiricism claims all knowledge is derived from the senses Hume concluded that the only statements humankind can make about the world are those that place human experience at the absolute centre of reality because human experience and reality is as close as we can get to the truth

- he was an atheist (although he couldn't say that at the time as it was punishable by death)

- he thought the idea of god was nonsense because there is no way of arriving at the idea through sense data and for Hume that was all the data that existed

- he put forward the concept known as bundle theory - the idea that features (or properties) of objects are all that exist - there is no actual object of which they are the features - he defended this approach by asking people to imagine an object without properties

- applying bundle theory to the concept of you means that you don't exist - Hume thought there was no such thing as self - in contrast to descartes "I think therefore I am" approach

- Hume was also a big fan of the emerging idea of the scientific method - the interpretation of emperical data as the basis of all knowledge

- but a problem through his life was the problem of induction - which is that all science is based on a logical fallacy 

- the induction fallacy states that just because something happened in the past doesn't mean we can assume it will happen again no matter how often it seems to happen (e.g. if all the apples you have seen have been green you still can't logically make the statement that all apples are green)

- obviously this is a problem for science as an idea underneath science is that it assumes that under the same conditions everything always happens in the same way and if an event can be reproduced then we have knowledge about that event

3 minute philosophy - #immanuelkant

in summary

- 18th century german philosopher most noticeable for his work on ethics

- ethics is the philosophical study of moral actions - not just about judging people per se but rather looking at right and wrong as concepts in themselves and how we might figure out the best way for people to behave

- there are 2 general schools of thought on this

- consequentialism - divides right from wrong entirely on the consequences of an action - in other words does the end justify the means

- deontology on the other hand says the consequences don't really matter as moral judgement is contained in the act alone - kant was with this approach

- and suggested an absolute unbreakable moral law that he called the categorical imperative - based on kant's idea that morality is derived from rationality and all moral judgements are rationally supported - so their is an objective morality just as rational thought leas us to an objective reality

- the imperative holds up regardless of context and circumstance - what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong full stop

- the imperative can be broken down into 3 maxims
1) all your actions must have universality (you should only do something if you think it would be OK if everybody did it all the time)
2) every human being must be treated as and end rather than a means to an end 9so you can't manipulate anybody no matter what - so you can never lie) - this stands in stark contracts to consequentialist theories that take into account the greater good
3) you should always behave as if you were the absolute moral authority of the whole universe

3 minute philosophy - #heraclitus & #parmenides

in summary

- both lived in greece before the time of socrates

- both agreed the world could be reduced to one thing

- but fundamentally disagreed on what the one thing was

- heraclitus thought everything was made of fire because a fundamental property of the universe was that everything was always changing and the only other thing that did that was fire

- fire therefore became the uncaused source of change in the universe and the incarnation of the will - fire was god

- parmenides thought the world was a huge unmoving sold chunk of stuff and went on to use logic to disprove that anything could move

- when heraclitus sought to disprove the argument by moving parmenides argued that just because his arm was in one place one second and another another didn't mean that anything had moved

- parmenides arguments were a pre-cursor to the proven scientific principle of conservation of mass and energy 

- a more philosophical implication is the theory of the block universe - the block of eternalist universe is the theory that time and space exist as a four dimensional block and every event from the beginning to the end of time is set - so they are unalterable - so there is no change

- we can't step outside the block and see this no change because by chance the laws of the universe have dictated we remember the past but not the future giving the illusion that there is something called time happening and that something is been written

 - this is called fatalism and combined with the idea that every event is caused by a prior event we get determinism - which is incompatible with the idea of free will

 - the determinist therefore claims that free will (the idea that we are in any way in control of our actions) is illusion because every thought we have is subject to cause and effect

- the opposing view - that we do have free will - is called libertarianism - but its a hard argument to make as it requires the idea of something like heraclitus's fire - and agency or  source of influence lying outside of causality

- this is often mocked by determinists as the little gods argument - that we are ourselves are unmoved movers which can kick off a chain of events without being subject to the laws of causality (which is a power absolutely nothing else in the universe appears to have)

3 minute philosophy - #plato

in summary

- he was greek and alive around 300 BC

- he conveyed his ideas via stories - sometimes about philosophers at a party

- central part of what he though is the "theory of forms" which he illustrates via the cave analogy

- the world in which we live is similar to living inside a cave and only seeing the shadows of real objects on the wall whilst the actual complete objects outside the cave were invisible

for plato every concept - whether material or abstract - had a true perfect form floating around there whilst we couldn't see it we could remember seeing it

so everyone is born with all the knowledge in the universe and learning is actually remembering

- so everything we think we know about - e.g. love - is in fact a half remembered shadow of the true concept of love which we knew about before we were born but have forgotten about

- he hated democracy (maybe because society had voted to poison his mentor socrates)

 - and partly because people have a tendency to vote for the biggest jerks

- he believed you could divide the human soul into three virtues - wisdom, courage and moderation

- and as he believed the state can have the features of an individual - just on a larger scale

- so he thought the state could be divided into 3 parts - the rules, the police and the workers (in his perfect society the rulers were the philosophers and society should be run by a commune of such)

3 minute philosophy: #thomasaquinas

after an clip of edison starts at 28 second mark - in summary what it says ......

roman catholic theologian who lived in 13th century

he was a fan of aristotle

he thought there were 2 ways to arrive at the truth
- reason or logic
- faith

he created 5 proofs that god exists - know as the quinquae viae

1) 1st mover argument - anything that moves must be set in motion by something else that was moving to begin with that thing was set in motion by something else and so on and so on - he argued there must have been a 1st mover - that which itself wasn't moved - otherwise nothing would have started to move to begin with

2) 1st cause - anything created must have itself been created - as nothing can create itself - but if nothing can create itself then nothing would have been created in the 1st place - so universe would have failed to exist - but does - therefore must have been a creator - itself not created - that caused the existence of everything else

3) the argument of contingency - things we observe today are not necessary to exist - but if nothing was necessary then nothing would exist - therefore something must be necessary - and that would be god

4) for us to judge anything good or bad we must judge it against something better - for this to be anything other than arbitary there must exist something which is the best possible thing

5) everything in the universe - whether alive or not - works towards some goal - but for this to work there must be some supreme intelligence directing the whole show

he was a great supporter of the technique of via negativa which seeks to understand god by eliminating those attributes that do not apply - essentially understanding god by understanding what he is not

3 minute philosophy: #pythagoras

in summary (some swearing in the video)

lived sometime before christ

possibly the only person to make mathematics into a murderous religious cult

he loved mathematics - literally worshipped it - he thought numbers were god

he is best known today for his formulation of the pythagorean theorem

"the square of the height and the width of a right angled triangle is always equal to the square of the hypotenuse"

his religious followers shared concepts such as pacifism and silence 

but they also proposed many of the basic concepts of modern mathematics like square numbers and the ten base 10 number system

he (or was it one of his followers ideas that he claimed as his own like many others?) also came up with the idea that the earth is round

3 minute philosophy: #aristotle

In summary aristotle:

- was a greek philosopher who lived around 280 BC

- he had a wide range of work - ethics, science, literary theory, political theory, rhetoric, medicine, theology

- some of his statements did turn out to be false (flies have 4 legs, women have fewer teeth than men)

- can be credited with the invention of formal logic - and a form of deductive logic - the syllogism (a way of figuring out new information from previously verified facts)

-  e.g. so if the premise "all philosophers are sexy" and "aristotle is a philosopher" are true then the conclusion statement "aristotle is sexy" is true by necessity BUT if one of the premises is not correct then the conclusion is not necessarily true (note it does not make the conclusion false - it simply means that despite popular opinion being  sexy is not a pre-requisite to being a philosopher

- reckoned everything in the world could be analysed in terms of 2 groups of features
1) incidental features - any feature that doesn't affect somethings placement in a category (e.g. a fish can be red or blue or yellow but no matter what colour it is it is still a fish) 
2) essential features - any aspect of something that is necessary for it to be that thing - so something without gills or fins which does not live in water is not a fish

- thought every statement that can be said about the world is either true or false - the statement can only be one or the other (though he did run into a problem with future statements) - eg whilst in a bar you say will pick up that women, your friend says she will throw a drink in your face (a popular response to this problem is to say the statements are in the future are neither true or false because they have not happened yet) - yet - if I do try my terrible corny chat up line with the women and she does throw a drink in my face then I can hardly say to my friend his statement was false

- defined each individual thing in terms of 4 characteristics - the 4 causes
1) the matter cause- the substance the something is comprised of
2) the form cause - the shape or structure the matter takes
3) the source or efficient cause - is whatever created it
4) the final cause - the reason or purpose for which it was created
eg - a watch 1) metal, plastic etc. 2) shape & mechanism these materials take, 3) watchmaker 4) to tell the time