ClumsyMonkey.net

Odin wrote:Sorry, just realize that I don't really know the CM lately, so I wanna know everyone's name. And since Doug (whatever his name is) is not responding I can spam in this thread all I want.

Btw, who's actually a philosophy student here?

It's rather hard to keep track of who's who, especially with avatars and nicks changing as much as they do.

I think doug is blue and copper right now.

I'm an engineering student, in case you were going to ask.

I'm currently planning on studying philosophy after high school.

What kind of careers are there in the philosophy field?

I'm hoping to become a prof. There's also a big demand now for ethical consultants for businesses. A lot of philosophy students end up as entrepreneurs.

Cool.

Yeah, most philosophy students either become profs or ethical consultants for not only business, but all sorts of industry, the medical industry for instance, has a high demand for people with philosophy background.

However, I'm not interested in ethics, I might end up as a prof. If this doesn't work out, my plan is to work in McDonalds and write my own philosophical manifestos on the burger warpping paper. I'll start my own "burger manifesto".

joe_canadian wrote:I'm currently planning on studying philosophy after high school.

Good plan! I did a philosophy degree (well, joint with maths but that got nasty and I dropped it as soon as I could!) and I really loved it.

SoozyJ wrote:

joe_canadian wrote:I'm currently planning on studying philosophy after high school.

Good plan! I did a philosophy degree (well, joint with maths but that got nasty and I dropped it as soon as I could!) and I really loved it.

What do you do now? I'm currently working for a philosophy degree and hopefully get into M.A. and PhD.

First off, I am not interested in getting into ethics board, I personally don't think I can have anything to add on to Nietzschean ethics so I won't take any ethics courses. Also I'm not interested in political philosophy.

Fields I'm interested in includes metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science and scientific philosophy. Can I do anything else with these other than being a prof?

My job's actually nothing to do with philosophy - I work in IT allegedly programming credit card software but actually team leading and trying to convince our customers that our product's not as full of bugs as it is!

I wasn't good enough to study that much more (I might have just got through a masters, but definitely no further) but I needed to leave home so I had to get a job. I still like to read philosophy books though and get some philosophy magazines and stuff.

I'm trying to think what the other people who studied philosophy with me are doing now. At my university you could only do philosophy joint with another subject (maths, physics, modern languages, theology, politics, economics, classics, psychology, physiology) so I think they tended to end up doing things either related to their other subject or totally unrelated.

I don't think i've really thought about philosophy related jobs. Maybe that's just because of the university I went to - if you were good at a particular subject and wanted to then you'd do more studying and go into academia and other than that most people went into city jobs making lots of money - IT, banking, law, accountancy, actuaries or some went into teaching.

odin - yes.

you can be a philosopher. they ponder from 9-5, 7 days a week. the pay is awful (nothing) however, unless you write a book.

or

you can be one of those starving guys who hangs around downtown talking about how nothing exists but minds or some other such idealist crud.

or

you can write song lyrics for britney spears.

To begin, there is no anthropological evidence to suggest that the human opposable thumb evolved before intelligence. At this point, anthropologists simply don't know which came first. Evidence points to these two features evolving side by side, so many think they developed around the same time.
Opposable thumbs are nice and all, but I'm just going to sit in a tree and use it to pick off my fleas until I think about picking up a rock and throwing it at the local gopher to produce supper.

As well, I don't see how emotion and objectivism/ libertarianism/ individualism are incompatible. Granted, I haven't read Rand much, but I have read Nozick, as well as Kane, and I think that rationalism is the very essence of emotions. Emotions are all about doing what we want (we things go the way we want them to, we get happy; when they don't we get sad/angry). Rationalism promotes the liberty of the self, and therefore the ability to do what we want, which should make us happy.

hey... anyone wanna make out?

ok now you're just being a tease

soccerchick wrote:To begin, there is no anthropological evidence to suggest that the human opposable thumb evolved before intelligence. At this point, anthropologists simply don't know which came first. Evidence points to these two features evolving side by side, so many think they developed around the same time.

Not true. The skeletons of many Australopithecus afarensis show opposable thumbs. How else would it be possible to climb and grasp trees otherwise? Yet their brain size was a mere 413 ml (on average). Compare that to a modern human, with an average brain size of ~1430 ml. Thumbs and bipedalism came first.

Opposable thumbs are nice and all, but I'm just going to sit in a tree and use it to pick off my fleas until I think about picking up a rock and throwing it at the local gopher to produce supper.

Yes. My point exactly. The body came first, the brain followed. We became dominant in no small part because of how we were built, not how we thought.

As well, I don't see how emotion and objectivism/ libertarianism/ individualism are incompatible. Granted, I haven't read Rand much, but I have read Nozick, as well as Kane, and I think that rationalism is the very essence of emotions. Emotions are all about doing what we want (we things go the way we want them to, we get happy; when they don't we get sad/angry). Rationalism promotes the liberty of the self, and therefore the ability to do what we want, which should make us happy.

"Should" is a very important word here. If a person "wants" to stay with an abusive spouse, are they really acting rationally? I don't think so.


PS: I'm reviving this thread because doug is actually posting again, and I'd like to see some response from him.

Yeah I screwed up. What I meant was the use of the opposable thumb as a tool. As well, I said "intelligence." We have no real way of knowing when we actually began 'thinking' like humans do today... brain size does not indicate intelligence levels.

As for the rest, I'm still thinking my way through ethical and political philosophy. If an abused person wants to stay with the abuser, it wouldn't be rational. But he's doing what he wants, and nobody else's autonomy and dignity is getting trampled, so I think I'd have to say that he can go for being irrational, if that's what makes him happy. He's obviously being irrational, but would a non-rationalist really care?

Brain size exactly DOES indicate intelligence levels. Greater brain mass allows for different levels of thought processing, and therefore thinking.

If somebody says they have a "brain fart", does the brain actually do that?

haha