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PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH 101–AGAIN?

October 16, 2018
HISTORY, IDEAS, PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS, THINKING AND THOUGHT
2 Comments

“I, TomDickHarryJoeMaryJaneAnnDorothy, do solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

WHAT IS TRUTH?

TRUTH

Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or standard.  Truth may also often be used in modern contexts to refer to an idea of “truth to self,” or authenticity, we can find in Wikipedia.

More?  Truth is usually held to be opposite to falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning.  The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy, art, religion, and science. 

Many human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life.  Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. 

Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars, philosophers, and theologians.  Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another, and the method used to determine what is a “truth” is termed a criterion of truth.  There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truth-bearers capable of being true or false; how to define, identify, and distinguish truth; the roles that faith-based and empirically based knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute.

So, “Tell the truth now.”

the truth 2

“I repeat.  Are you 100% certain, sure, absolutely positive?”  “100%!”  “Well, I looked him in the eye, and I could tell he was telling the truth, by God!”

The search for truth, write Richard Marius and Melvin Page in a popular textbook A Short Guide to Writing about History (2014) is based on three processes: the search for evidence or SOURCES; the evaluation and ANALYSIS of the evidence; and the PRESENTATION of one’s findings.

PRIMARY sources are NEAREST to any subject or topic of investigation: all kinds of materials written or other communications–including, even, sculpture and architecture, interviews, statistics, geography, military history, videos,

SECONDARY sources are ABOUT sources: books and articles by scholars–or even book reviews, documentaries, biographies. 

THEN: ASSEMBLE sources; EVALUATE sources (who, what, when, where, why); DETERMINE reliability (bias, prejudice, incompleteness). 

Good historians, the authors write, do not implicitly trust their sources, nor do they trust their own first impressions.  They do not either simply ask random questions: they systematically use questioning and make inferences. 

THEN: Historians fit together the evidence to create a story, an explanation, or an argumentation (p.20): the PRESENTATION.  The results of the findings–the “truth of the matter”–come in the form of DESCRIPTION, NARRATION, EXPOSITION, or ARGUMENTATION–the four common modes of communication or expression. 

In the search for the truth, they write (p. 48), “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities.”

A note about ARGUMENTATION: [Classical definition: “A mode of communication which attempts to convince or persuade by using ethos, logos, or pathos.”]  They state that argument is “a principle of organization that unites facts and observations to present a proposition to the writer” (58); arguments arise “because the evidence can be interpreted in different ways according to the assumptions of the historians themselves” (78).  

© JAMES F. O’NEIL 2018

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ROBERT FULGHUM: HAVE WE FORGOTTEN?

August 20, 2018
IDEAS, PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS, THINKING AND THOUGHT, UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
1 Comment

“All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” (1986)

In thirty-two (32) years since the book’s best-seller publication, have we forgotten, gotten lost (within family life, at work, in government, throughout the world)?

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ROBERT FULGHUM

Robert Fulghum grew up in Waco, Texas, received a Bachelor of Arts at Baylor University in 1958, a Bachelor of Divinity in 1961, and was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister, serving Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship in Bellingham, Washington, from 1960-1964.  He is currently Minister Emeritus at the Edmonds Unitarian Universalist Church in Edmonds, Washington. The Kindergarten book stayed on The New York Times bestseller lists for nearly two years.  The collection of essays, subtitled “Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things,” has been updated and revised.  There are currently more than 17 million copies of his books in print, published in 27 languages in 103 countries!  [See more in Wikipedia.]

Remember this: Play fair . . . Don’t take things that aren’t yours . . . When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together . . . Share everything . . . Don’t hit people . . . Clean up your own mess . . . Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody . . . Take a nap every afternoon.

“Crayolas are one of the few things the human race has in common.”

“Rock, paper, scissors: scissors cut paper; paper covers rock; rock smashes scissors.”

“To be human is to know and to care and ask, ‘What’s it for?’”

“We take what we know, which isn’t even the whole story, and we add it to what we wish and need, . . .  We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become.”

from the book Uh-Oh (1991):

“In high school, one learns that love is not forever.”

“A question with several possible answers comes to mind: If one man lives as though he would never die and another man lives as though he might die tomorrow, would either wear a wrist watch?”

“Will we ever have enough time?  What would happen if we only had enough time?  When will the time finally come?  Who knows where the time goes?  How far is it from time to time?  What time is the right time?  Will we know when our time has finally come?”

“Surprise is at the core of existence.  It’s true.  You never ever really know what’s coming next.” 

from the book Maybe (Maybe Not) [1993]

“Whatever we may think or believe, what we have done is our story.”

“Life is.  I am.  Anything might happen.”

“. . . since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and wonders shall never, ever cease.”

“At age ___, I begin to realize there are some things I will never have or be able to do.”

“The varying truth perceived by many witnesses is a fact of life.”

“Professionals don’t know everything.”

“. . .  [My navel].  It’s the mark of mortality.

“Never, ever, regret or apologize for believing that when one man or one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world may stop what it is doing and her.” 

“THE MYTH OF THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ALL THE FACTS OF HISTORY.”

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all i needed to know

“GIMME SOME A’ LOVIN’”!: HEALTHY FEEDBACK

February 13, 2017
AUTHORS, EDUCATION AND LEARNING, IDEAS, PEOPLE, PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS, THINKING AND THOUGHT, UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
4 Comments

Omne agens agit propter finem.    Every agent acts on account of an end.

To begin, let us focus on statements regarding human action from Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Contra Gentiles [I.II:1:6]: That is to say, every subject acts toward an end that is a good for him.

The act of love is the first of all acts and gives rise to all others.

Thomas asks whether love is the cause of all that the lover does.  His reply is brief yet incisive: “I reply that every agent acts for an end.  The end, however, is the good which is loved and desired by each thing.  Hence it is clear that every agent, whatever it may be, carries out every action from some love.”

The primacy of the person in Aquinas’ “moral universe” is evident.  The first affective motion is love (amor).  The priority of love holds not only for the passions, but also for the rational appetite or will.  Thus love is the most basic motion of the will and the principle of all moral action.  The absolutely first appetitive motion in rational beings is the love of persons.  It is this love that gives rise to all moral action, whether good or evil, since in all action the agent aims at the perfection of some person, either himself or another.  It is no surprise then to find Thomas explicitly stating this position: “The principal ends of human acts are God, self, and others, since we do whatever we do for the sake of one of these.”

BUT: “A subject isolated from sensory stimulus and social interchange begins to hallucinate rapidly and to lose all sense of reality.  Sadists who subject prisoners to solitary confinement understand intuitively that the cruelest punishment is to remove a man [or woman] from the community and thereby deprive him [or her] of his [or her] humanity.  Confusion results when community is lost.

HEALTH DEPENDS UPON THE CONVICTION THAT OUR ACTIONS COUNT.  I remain potent only so long as I get feedback which demonstrates that the force of my action is felt…I [obtain] the knowledge of the resonance of my actions, as well as the joy of knowing that my gifts are received and appreciated.

[I become] a responsible agent, with a sense that the future is open, [and] I understand myself to be essentially in a social context, and therefore my fundamental desires always involve other persons.”  –Sam Keen, To a Dancing God [1970]

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“CHAOS IS COME AGAIN!”

February 6, 2017
AUTHORS, IDEAS, PHILOSOPHY-ETHICS, THINKING AND THOUGHT
1 Comment

“…Perdition catch my soul // But I do love thee! //  And when I love thee not, // Chaos is come again.”  (Othello 3.3.90-92)

 Is life fair?  Lately, some view life’s unfairness, then decide that the world–including, especially, politics–is nothing but chaos.

J.B. [the poetic drama] by Archibald MacLeish, relates, for the modern audience, the familiar story of the Biblical Job.  Both have the main character asking the recognizable likeness of “Why me?” or “What did we do to deserve this?” or “Why does it always happen to us?”  The answer? 

“MacLeish’s Job answers the problem of human suffering, not with theology or psychology, but by choosing to go on living and creating new life.”  Job looks for love.  “Instead of giving up on the unfair world and life, instead of looking outward, to churches or to nature, for answers . . . look . . . for loving.”

“Why bad things happen to good people [now becomes] no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.” — Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 1981.

*Chaos is the confusion that exists before order is established in the universe.  (See Chaos theory; John Milton and Chaos.)   

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