Thread: Should Creationism be Taught in Schools?

F) Felicific calculus (i presume that's what you mean by 'algebra of the good'?) was Bentham's idea, because Bentham was pretty much clinically insane, Mill had nothing to do with it.

G) Mill's concept of utilitarianism is very very different from Bentham's, Bentham was a hedonist, Mill was a..lefty i guess, and their theories are tailored in those individual directions

H)having taken the time to address those points, it's probably worth mentioning that you;re talking about utilitarianism, noodles is not. He is talking about Mill's ideas of personal freedom, which are influenced by Locke, not Bentham, 'A man is free to do anything that does not harm another man' or something, it's really not that much of a refuted argument.

I)your efforts at philosophy generally seem to be taken from a surface knowledge of some people and some theories, without actually being completely sure what you're talking about, making it dull, and sucking.

I feel like i'm 'chasing you round the board' or something, it's nothing personal, it's just i think you should know what you're talking about if you're going to take that 'tone of voice' in your replies.

out of interest are you studying philosophy/self taught/how long you been looking into it?

J) oh yeah, where the fudge did limited budget come from? fair enough if that's a point you want to make in general, but i can't see why you've addressed it to noodles...

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Atom&#39;s Package @ Sep 16 2008, 04:37 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

H)having taken the time to address those points, it&#39;s probably worth mentioning that you;re talking about utilitarianism, noodles is not. He is talking about Mill&#39;s ideas of personal freedom, which are influenced by Locke, not Bentham, &#39;A man is free to do anything that does not harm another man&#39; or something, it&#39;s really not that much of a refuted argument.[/b]

Any chance you could briefly list a few of the main differences between Locke and Bentham?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Atom&#39;s Package @ Sep 16 2008, 09:37 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

F) Felicific calculus (i presume that&#39;s what you mean by &#39;algebra of the good&#39;?) was Bentham&#39;s idea, because Bentham was pretty much clinically insane, Mill had nothing to do with it.[/b]

No, then why were Mill&#39;s best known papers, Utilitarianism, and part of On Liberty direct responses to Bentham? Mathematics of the good is of course Bentham&#39;s concept but Mill leaned heavily upon it. Mill clearly did not doubt that pleasure was quantifiable. His response to Bentham was merely that pleasures vary not only in durability and intensity, but also in moral degrees. He put forth the idea that one pleasure capable of being morally superior to another as well. It was an attempt to improve on Bentham&#39;s position ethically; for it was mainly in its lack of subscription ethics that Bentham&#39;s philosophy was rejected. Note that Mill gives in his essay no criterion for higher or lower moral value in a pleasure. He does not solve the utilitarian&#39;s problem of incommensurate values, and in fact, if you read his work, you see he agrees with Bentham as respects his pseduoscientifc view of "pleasure," a quantifiable so far as popular opinion will allow,. His is an attempt to try to cure Bentham&#39;s ideas of the amoralism with the introduction of an unsubstantiated moral criterion for judging pleasure. The basic concept behind the Math of the Good remains however unrefuted within the work.

To quote-

"Questions about ends are questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is that, happiness is desirable and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as a means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine- what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill= to make good its claim to be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that sound is audible is that people hear it: and so on-. I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people desire it.- This being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each persons happiness is good to that person, and that the general hapiness therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons."

Yeah, he really jumps back from Bentham hard.Visible and desirable = analogous concepts? Don&#39;t think so.

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G) Mill&#39;s concept of utilitarianism is very very different from Bentham&#39;s, Bentham was a hedonist, Mill was a..lefty i guess, and their theories are tailored in those individual directions[/b]

That direction being to put utilitarian philosophy into practice. That is to say, tailor it for public acceptance. That was Mill
s chief goal in his early works no doubt. You must note that Bentham was a great friend of the elder Mill and a major player in the education of the younger. Mill&#39;s early work can, and is, seen mainly as an attempt at a more practical application of Bentham&#39;s work, and the digestion and beautification of it for the general populace. Of course he does differ radically in what means he would put forth but not in the basic logical schema that pleasure is quantifiable by given criterion (though as I noted he adds a moral one.) This concept of the quantifiable of pleasure, along with the concept that it is the most desirable phenomenon is his chief inheritance from Bentham and what leaves him a loon. To not see the considerable influence of Bentham on Mill not only denies the vast body of Mill&#39;s work but also his personal history.

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H)having taken the time to address those points, it&#39;s probably worth mentioning that you;re talking about utilitarianism, noodles is not. He is talking about Mill&#39;s ideas of personal freedom, which are influenced by Locke, not Bentham, &#39;A man is free to do anything that does not harm another man&#39; or something, it&#39;s really not that much of a refuted argument.[/b]

I was throwing up random judgments on Mill, yeah. However it was random quote as in context, or even out, it can hardly be said to apply to public education. There is a distinct difference between allowing all opinions to be heard and making all opinions part of an educational regiment.

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I)your efforts at philosophy generally seem to be taken from a surface knowledge of some people and some theories, without actually being completely sure what you&#39;re talking about, making it dull, and sucking.



I feel like i&#39;m &#39;chasing you round the board&#39; or something, it&#39;s nothing personal, it&#39;s just i think you should know what you&#39;re talking about if you&#39;re going to take that &#39;tone of voice&#39; in your replies.


out of interest are you studying philosophy/self taught/how long you been looking into it?[/b]

lol

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J) oh yeah, where the fudge did limited budget come from? fair enough if that&#39;s a point you want to make in general, but i can&#39;t see why you&#39;ve addressed it to noodles...[/b]

[/b][/quote]

because there is a difference between allowing everyone to speak their piece and speaking everyones piece for them

Bentham was the guy who kinda put a theory (he&#39;s basically credited with being the originator, the word at least was around beforehand) to the word utilitarianism, he was a bit mental and weird, believed that hedonism was the highest ideal, (i believe that J.S. Mill modified the utilitarian maxim from &#39;the greatest pleasure for the greatest number&#39; to &#39;the greatest good for the greatest number&#39; (that might be hearsay, don&#39;t hold me to it) He was basically a hippy as well kind of influential in the animal rights canon for being the first respected guy to really come out in favour of it.

Locke was more of a political theorist (it was him who defined person in the modern legal sense that now allows corperations to be defined legally as people [well, via several hundred years of tweaking, but his basis), very interested in the general way the world works, I&#39;ve only read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and to be honest skipped a lot of lectures on Locke, from what i can remember he argues that knowledge is innate, like slivers of green in a block of marble and we have to discover that knowledge somehow or other.

erm, locke is more boring and straightforward, he&#39;s more of an aristotle figure, likes empirical evidence in front of him to work with, Bentham is more airy fairy, a Plato figure, trys to work with logic and reasoning alone, often fails and comes up with weird stuff. he requested his body was stuffed, and i think it&#39;s now on display at King&#39;s in London (where malchick went, I never went and saw it though)

or are you looking for more specific differences relevant to this topic? because only Locke is relevant to what noodles said very vaguely, because he mentioned Mill who was Bentham&#39;s pupil, and who also said something that was relevant to this topic, which was influenced by Locke&#39;s idea&#39;s on personal freedom, not by Bentham. then Tim started talking about Bentham. i can&#39;t really make it more relevant than that without driving back to Dad&#39;s and finding my books and notes. or trawling the internet, which i&#39;m probably bored enough to do, but only if you&#39;re interested.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Atom&#39;s Package @ Sep 16 2008, 06:57 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

are you looking for more specific differences relevant to this topic?[/b]

Nah.

You&#39;ll see.

Cheers for that though. Intriguing that Bentham had his body stuffed...

Nothing like a good old philosophical pot stir. To be honest that you hold a lot of Mill&#39;s writings to be rubbish and his reliance on Bentham distasteful doesn&#39;t detract from the fact that his defense of free speech in itself is widely considered one of, if not, the best. I just wanted to point out that banning something just because you disagree isn&#39;t easy to justify.

Oh and no i don&#39;t think it should be taught in science classes because it&#39;s not a scientific theory. In the same way that evolution as a theory in itself should not be taught in religious studies unless you&#39;re explaining the furore it caused or the debate between those who believe in creation &#39;science&#39; and those who believe in evolution.

lol

Bentham did not "like to work with reason and logic alone." The man spent his entire career first trying to both qualify and quantify pleasure via objective messures and then go about creating an objective means for producing this so defined pleasure en masse. If anything shows in his work it is that he refused to accept or deal with pure reason and logic. Why else would all his arguments center around an attempt to empiricize and objectify something as subjective as pleasure? He gave pleasure a strict definition and then tried to go about creating criterion by which it could be empiracly measured.

Bentham like Socrates? Socrates (or more so Plato, the true voice) was foremost, a diagnostician and logician. Bentham&#39;s philosophy has logical holes you can drive a Mac Truck through. Bentham&#39;s faulty definition of pleasure reminds me heavily of Euthephro&#39;s definition of "holy" to Socrates, which Socrates in turn spends most of a work tearing apart with basic logic. Locke being like Aristotle makes sense, this however, clearly does not.

Locke thought knowledge was innate ? How so? Your description kind of sucks, so I&#39;ll give you the benefit of the doubt that that is why it seems like you have no clue what Locke&#39;s epistemological views actually were. Locke, in opposing the continental rationalists launched attack after attack at the concept of innate ideas. To quote Locke, "no proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of." (Essay I, i, 5). As for knowledge being "tied in marble," for Locke knowledge of all things came to one as light hitting a surface that absorbed it. Nothing in knowledge was innate, it was all the result affect. He was the creator of the phrase tabula rasa, the idea that a man&#39;s mind starts of fully empty and all knowledge, as well as the development of rational capabilities, are the result of the reception and sorting of empirical information. (It is with Lebinz that we see a similar view point of the mind that to acknowledges innate abilities of the mind.) Experience and reflection were for Locke the two ways by which knowledge was gained. I would not call that belief that knowledge innate. The idea of knowledge as innate in man is, going back, Socratic, although lots of others held that view in degrees along the way. Locke is not one of them. I suppose you could say that Locke did think knowledge existed, that he was not a skeptic, and so thought knowledge was in a way "innate," but no one in Locke&#39;s time had been a skeptic since the Greeks. I mean, it&#39;s not a relevant frame if that&#39; what you meant, and a very poor explanation.

Seriously, you can&#39;t accuse me of sucking and then be this bad of a retard a post later.

i will come back to this when i&#39;m less hungover, the plato aristotle thing didn&#39;t so much refer to content, just style, Bentham was airy fairy, didn&#39;t quite have so much connection with tangible reality, it may have been a bad choice of words, but i&#39;ve used those two people to umbrella two very different types of philosophy. (by working with reason and logic i almost more mean, not working scientifically with evidence, he was more seeing what he wanted to see, inferring the outcome rather than deducing. Plato see&#39;s something imperfect and infers there&#39;s a perfect template for it, aristotle see&#39;s a plant and deduces it&#39;s very similar to this one, but not to that one, it&#39;s about ways minds work.

bah, does that make sense, i should probably have not opened this topic at the moment.

oh yeh, shit i was thinking of Leibniz, he did the whole block of marble thing. Gay. Like i said i skipped a lot of lectures on Locke.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Esternogligen @ Sep 16 2008, 11:08 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

Sorry if it bothers you.[/b]

It doesn&#39;t bother me, I just find it quite intriguing that someone of seemingly rational mind would rather listen to fairytales than fact. It&#39;s like saying, "Well I can&#39;t recite pi to 25 decimal places, so I&#39;ll make it up instead."

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Trionix @ Sep 19 2008, 01:28 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Esternogligen @ Sep 16 2008, 11:08 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry if it bothers you.[/b]

It doesn&#39;t bother me, I just find it quite intriguing that someone of seemingly rational mind would rather listen to fairytales than fact. It&#39;s like saying, "Well I can&#39;t recite pi to 25 decimal places, so I&#39;ll make it up instead."
[/b][/quote]

What is fact?

"Doubt everything and find your own light."

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tim @ Sep 19 2008, 08:52 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

What is fact?[/b]

Do you ever find yourself to be desperately boring?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Trionix @ Sep 19 2008, 06:09 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tim @ Sep 19 2008, 08:52 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What is fact?[/b]

Do you ever find yourself to be desperately boring?
[/b][/quote]

I asked first.

Do you know who is responsible for the above quote? Is he to a dispenser of fairy tales?

Ultimately, if you can&#39;t substantiate your claim to fact over fiction where does you argument lie?

The concept of &#39;doubting everything&#39; is clearly and obviously how the scientific method works. Someone comes up with a theory, everyone doubts it and tries to disprove it, if it can&#39;t be disproven and can be replicated, it is accepted as fact, until it is disproven. Religion obviously fails miserably using that criteria.

Personally, I&#39;m not so egotistical to think that my &#39;own light&#39; is more important than thousands of years of humanity&#39;s most brilliant people working together using the above method in order to attempt to answer the most fundamental of questions we as a race have attempted to answer.

No, I don&#39;t know whose quote it is, I don&#39;t care either, because it&#39;s just another example of you trying to derail a topic in order to make yourself look clever and interesting. You&#39;re a try-hard man, and it&#39;s wearing pretty fucking thin.