Theme 1: Reflection

The first theme of this course was an interesting challenge since from the start of my studies as a media student I have always tried to be strictly analytical and follow already established norms.

This time I felt like I was given the possibility to put things into a different perspective and reconsider the role of philosophy realizing how easy is to link it to the media sphere.

Furthermore, after reading Theaetetus it is obvious how people in different epochs and times can have different points of views which are affected by the social norms, culture and language for instance. In his work, Plato gives his reader the opportunity to answer for himself what is knowledge the same way a midwife gives a chance to the newborn to come to the world. Theaetetus can be seen as a basis of what Kant later expands as ideas in his Critique of Pure Reason when he sets the beginning of the Copernican Revolution.

With the beginning of the mechanical world, questions are being analyzed based on the cause and the effect.

After the lecture and the seminar on this topic I realized that Kant’s attitude towards the metaphysics is different than the way I interpreted it in my first post. He is concerned about the discipline of metaphysics and the problems it discusses and he perceive it as a bunch of speculative theories. He feels as the metaphysics tries to analyze issues that cannot be verified by the senses.

He wants to accent on the investigation that one needs to do from his own human point of view and base it on the faculties and forms of knowledge. Those faculties are what make our world possible and understandable.

However, Kant does not really provides his readers with a thesis stating that this is the one and only possible answer. He rather gives and creates space for investigation so that one can think in terms of forms and not only in terms of facts as established up until then by the sciences.

After the discussion we had on the seminar I continued analyzing the questions we went through following Kant’s directions.

We discussed what the instincts are for instance. Can we consider and classify them as a priori knowledge or just as a product of the evolution? What is fear or anxiety? And is it really important for people to gain objective knowledge, which is independent from their senses?

We as humans have always put ourselves in the center of the world so it is impossible to imagine a way to look on the world objectively without basing your judgment on your own experience and abstract from your own being.

Anxiety and different mental illnesses have also been a topic for discussion during the seminar since they are states in which one cannot accept reality. People with such diagnoses cannot observe nor establish whatever surrounds them, as they do not do so using the faculties and forms of knowledge.

We were given a very interesting example with the so known “hell of oblivion” which is a term describing the first 3 seconds after a person wakes up. A person needs 3 seconds to realize who and where he is as he is in an absolute oblivion before that. This is an interesting example as I think that this really short fraction of time is the one when we are actually able to gain objective knowledge about the world without centralizing ourselves in it since we are unaware of who we are and what we do in that very same moment.

Theme One was useful and extremely interesting because it provided me a way to think outside the box and gave space for expanding my ideas and interpretations based on intuition. At first it was a real challenge to analyze what both authors really meant in their works but the lecture and the seminar made me assimilate it and link it between one another.