Should i take an ethics or philosophy class?
1. If one of the two classes has in your opinion an outstanding teacher, choose that class. 2. If that is unknown, check the required readings lists for the two courses. If one list interests you more than the other, choose that class. 3. If that doesn't help, note that understanding basic fallacies is a good point which philosophy teaches. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fal... If you print this, and simply apply it to what you may encounter in various courses, that is about the best part of philosophy for most uses. Thereafter, ethics may be the better choice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics is also worthwhile printing out. What ethics and philosophy in general teach is that either one knows Truth, God, and/or believes in such teachings, or one is relativistically based. Would recommend "Philosophy for Dummies," Tom Morris, as a middle-of-the-road source for Western philosophy. That book gives you most of what philosophy has to offer, unless one is seeking original writings and scholarly in-depth argumentation and/or quibblings. Also fun: "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar," Cathcart and Klein, "Nihilism," Eugene Rose, and "A Philosophy of Universality," Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov. Reviews at http://www.amazon.com
When I was getting my PhD, we had a joint logic seminar with both philosophical and mathematical logicians. I would say the most striking difference is what part of the talk they are interested in.When a mathematical logician gives a talk in front of an audience that contains philosophical logicians, it often goes something like this. There is a brief introduction, including a couple of definitions. For the mathematical logician, this is just boring routine stuff, something you need to go through before you write down the theorem and gets to the interesting part, the neat techniques he or she invented to prove it.However, as soon as the definitions are shown, the philosophers raise their hands and want to discuss whether this is the “right” definition. For them, the definition is supposed to clarify what you are studying; the definition itself should captures some underlying basic truth. The mathematical logician just doesn’t care about that. He or she will rather be thinking something along the lines of “Clearly it is the right definition, because that is the definition that lets us prove this extremely cool theorem that I haven’t even gotten to write down yet! Shut up and let me get on with it!”Both philosophical and mathematical logic has several branches, that differ quite a bit from each other. However, just to get a feeling, a good example of philosophical logic is this: Intuitionistic type theory - Wikipedia, and a good example of mathematical logic is this: Forcing (mathematics) - WikipediaEdit: Some comments have made me feel I didn’t make myself completely clear. I did not intend to put down philosophers. Sure, I was describing the experience of the seminars from my point of view, but I thought the value of having good definitions would be obvious enough to make it clear it was written with a certain amount of self-deprecation and tongue-in-cheek. For the record, I think both approaches are valuable. I also think it is difficult to do both approaches at the same time, so having two separate disciplines is important.
What is different between philosophy and logic?
1 a (1): all learning exclusive of technical precepts and practical arts (2): the sciences and liberal arts exclusive of medicine, law, and theology (3): the 4-year college course of a major seminary b (1)archaic : physical science (2): ethics c: a discipline comprising as its core logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology2 a: pursuit of wisdom b: a search for a general understanding of values and reality by chiefly speculative rather than observational means c: an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs3 a: a system of philosophical concepts b: a theory underlying or regarding a sphere of activity or thought
Should I take applied ethics or intro to logic?
At my college. I can only take either one of the two this semester, and I REALLY like both. Applied Ethics: This course is designed to provide an introductory background to ethics and an in-depth study of the critical skills necessary to an intelligent analysis of contemporary issues. Emphasis will be placed on the systematic generation of options in order to determine choices for resolving dilemmas. Intro to logic: This course provides students with instruction in the principles of valid reasoning and critical thinking. Topics include deduction, induction, categorical propositions, categorical syllogisms, informal fallacies, construction and evaluation of arguments, the relationship between logic and language, and the differences between traditional and symbolic logic. Students learn to construct and evaluate arguments effectively, to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments, and to reason with accuracy, clarity, and completeness. Which one would provide the most benefit?
If i took a philosophy course in college, what would they teach? Is it science, i barely passed chemistry?
Its got nothing to do with maths or any sort of science, they teach you more about religions and culture and stuff like that, basically they just want to enrich your mind to think about things on a higher level, its more like social sciences like history etc. You'll get to know about all of the worlds different cultures, beliefs, religions and rituals, so its got nothing to do with either maths, physics or chemistry, if you're interested in learning about the convictions of the different types of people in the world and what makes them tick, then philosophy is for you :)
No.Philosopher and scientist are not mutually exclusive. The two categories overlap. However, they don’t always overlap. So your word ‘rather’ is rather presumptuous.If I have to choose between philosopher and scientist, then I would call Einstein a scientist. A philosopher that studies ethics instead of science could not be called a scientist. It is very obvious to me that Einstein studied science far more than he studied science.His ethical philosophy was very simple and commonly held anyway. So he was not famous as a philosopher. His real claim to fame was theoretical science.Other scientists have said that his special relativity theory has components of philosophy. H. A. Lorentz appreciated the way Einstein ‘added philosophy to science’. This may be because special relativity includes points of view, a subject often claimed by philosophers.However, this only means that Einstein added to science. Everything that he wrote was aimed toward people who wanted to do experiments. Special relativity gives specific predictions to experiments. Philosophers without science generally avoid the subject of experiments. So Einstnein was a far better scientist than he was a philosopher.Special relativity gives quantitative and unique solutions to physical problems. It provides unique predictions of experimental results, many of which have been validate.Precise calculations with electromagnetism are impossible without special relativity. Special relativity applies to physical clocks and physical rulers. Relativity seldom gets so abstract that it talks about things that can never be measured, even in principle. So it isn’t pure philosophy.
There are a lot of great philosophy courses at UCSB for non-majors. Philosophy 3 (Critical Thinking) is a great introduction to logic, proofs, etc. It’s a challenging course but super helpful depending on your eventual major (great for compSci, humanities, and more). Ethics (I think it’s Phil 4) is also a good non-major class/intro to philosophy. If you’re interested in philosophy broadly and not necessarily in taking a specific philosophy course, you might also look at religious studies (there’s a great class called Religion and Psychology that covers a lot of great philosophy texts/articles), also the History of Western Civilization course (cross listed in religious studies and history w/ Professor Carlson) is also a great primer on western philosophy. Also, there are lots of English courses that cover “philosophical” texts, since there’s a lot of overlap between philosophy and literary theory, etc. Same goes for film studies. Unless you literally just want to sit and read Socrates, you’ll cover some sort of theory/philosophy in almost any humanities course at UCSB. I would just pick one with a topic that interests you and then enjoy the professor’s application of various philosophy/theory to the specific subject. Usually that’s more interesting in the long run than an intro to Plato class. Hope that helps. Enjoy!