What does the enlightenment mean in the context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
In his famous 1784 essay What Is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant described it as follows: Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Kant reasoned that although a man must obey in his civil duties, he must make public his use of reason. His motto for enlightenment is Sapere aude! or "Dare to know."
When students today are told they need annotations, a companion book (or three), and a college course to understand "The Critique of Pure Reason", how did Kant's contemporaries make head-or-tails of it?
If Kant’s work had appeared in a vacuum, it might have had little impact. Kant himself said that Hume had “awakened my from my dogmatic slumbers.”And that really is the best answer. The philosopher David Hume had raised serious doubts in his philosophy, not just about religion, but also about natural science and the possibility of objective ethics. (“How can you get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’?”) Hume even challenged common sense, by attacking the notions of causation and inductive reasoning!!!Other philosophers, as well, had raised doubts about what common sense had previously told people was obviously true. The English philosopher George Berkley had raised doubts about the existence of anything outside the mind!In this environment, people who were college educated and literate were looking for answers. Hume’s impact on the “masses” may have been negligible, but to the intelligentsia, Hame had stirred up a crisis.Kant took the skepticism of David Hume head on —both in the area of metaphysics and in ethics (to which his answer was the categorial imperative).The point is, reading Kant was then, and is now, hard work… but if a person was motivated strongly enough to find an answer to Hume, they were motivated to “gut it out” and try to understand Kant’s defense of all that was rational, rather than give into Hume’s suggestion that the world made no sense at all.
How did Immanuel Kant contribute to the Enlightenment?
He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant's “critical philosophy” — especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — is human autonomy. He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system.
Utilitarianism by Jeremy bentham, quote, and source?
Here's the very beginning of Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Priniciples of Morals and Legislation (1781) Charpter One: "Chapter I: Of The Principle of Utility "I. Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light. "But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved. "II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever. according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government."
Do you feel that you chose the right college major to pursue?
Yep! But you’re probably wondering why I feel this way.Before pursuing a degree in economics, I was a music major. I did what I was told, which was to study what I loved. Instead, I wound up taking four years off from school. I wasn’t actually happy with music. When I went back, I originally wanted to get into finance so I could work with investments. Interestingly enough, that lasted only a week.A friend of mine was majoring in business and then he said he was changing it to accounting. I didn’t understand why, since I hated accounting. But he said he understood accounting and was doing alright in it. That’s when it clicked for me: I wasn’t majoring in economics because I loved it. Rather, I grew to love economics because I understood it and was doing alright in it. I can only imagine that my friend had the same thing happen to him with accounting.
Why are complex numbers taught in high school algebra? I'm a math major, so I assume that I'll see them again at some point, but why do we bother to teach a concept 90% of people will never use?
Imaginary numbers are extremely heavily used in anything involving science and engineering. Any non-trivial electrical engineering problem is going to use them for example. If you are in college, and you have a math teacher that doesn't show you want imaginary numbers are for, then you need a better teacher.Here's the real world.....If you don't teach imaginary numbers in high school, then that person is going to be out of the running for most jobs that involve science and engineering. It's important to train people in science and engineering because those fields are essential for economic growth. If you train 10 million electrical engineers or physicists then eventually they'll figure out how to use that training to generate economic growth. If you just train 10 million lawyers, they'll just sue each other, and you don't get any real growth.Here's more real world.....Yes most college majors may not require the use of imaginary numbers, but just talk to someone that has graduated with a Bachelors in French Literature and see how they are doing finding a job. Now ask someone who has a major that requires imaginary numbers (say a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering) and ask what that market is like.Here's even more real world.....All of the jobs that don't involve technical skill have been or are soon going to get shipped off to China or India. The only jobs that have any chance of staying in the US are high value jobs that involve technology skill because it will take China and India a few decades to catch up in the really high-tech areas. If you don't learn math, you are going to face a life waiting tables.And if that's not enough......Your generation is likely find the job market to be the worst that any generation since the 1940's has faced. My generation screwed up the world economy, and your generation is going to have to figure out some way of fixing it. I've got my job, and it looks like in a few years, I'll get my pension. You guys are getting royally screwed.Maybe in the old economy, 90% of people didn't have to use imaginary numbers, but that economy blew up, and we are going to have figure out what to do next. Now, I'm part of the generation that destroyed the world, but if you want my opinion, you aren't going to get any sort of economic growth unless you have a population that skilled at technology. Yes, let's face the real world....