Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Discourse part 2
Rene Descartes discusses how it is better for someone to work on their own instead of working with a group. I believe he says this because so many people have their own opinions about what they want and it is too many ideas and it is hard for people to agree on the same things. So when you work on your own you go by your ideas and you do not have any conflicts. This also ties into the reason he does not believe that learning from books are good. Descartes discusses that books are composed of opinions from others that may or may not be true. He also discusses that the judgements that we have our not our own. Our opinions are based on what others(parents, teachers, friends) tell us.
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6 comments:
i definetly see where you're coming from with this subject of group work. I understand he is saying that with so many differnt opinions it causes chaos with group work. And with the part of Descartes thoughts on books if the books are written by many authors it can cause chaos in the time of writing the book. Also, no ones opinions are right or wrong hense books are majority on personal thoughts.
i agree with what you and descartes are saying about group work. Although there is that saying that two minds are better than 1, in most casees i do not think so either because when a group of people are put together, so many people are putting there opinions and thoughts in that it does not lead to a unified and perfectly put together final product. Everyone has their own different ways of doing things and of thinking, so if you have just your own thoughts and your own way it will end in something better. What i dont agree with you on thought is that you said that our opinions are based on what others TELL US. I dont think its necessarily what others tell us to think. I think that throughout our lifetime we experience, see, and hear so many different things and we make up our own judgements and opinions. i dont know if thats what you were saying or if i just understood u wrong?
I agree with the fact that Descartes believed that it is always better for one to work alone than in a group but through my own experiences I have found that working with either a group or alone has its advantages and disadvantages. When Descartes mentions how he doesn't believe that us learning from books is bad it kind of makes me question some things. All that we know comes from books so how are we expected to gain knowledge from something that is not factual??
I partially agree with what Descartes says about our opinions being based off of other people ideas and thoughts. I think that this is where the rules that he created tie in. Before discarding of what he had learned from others he instead comes to what he calls the 'truth' through following his rules. On the other hand, I believe that our opinions are also formed through our personal experiences. Everyone has a different life and different experiences and although the same two people might go through the same experience together each person has a different perspective and outcomf of it. Therefore, two different opinions are formed.
On the top of page 8 Descartes says "And this too, I thought that, because we were all children before being men and because for a long time it was necessary for us to be governed by our appetites and our teachers(which were frequently in conflict with one another, an of which perhaps neither always gace us the best advice), it is nearly impossible for our judgements to be as pure or as solid as they would have been if we had had the full use of our reason from the moment of our birth and if we had always been guided by it alone". By him saying this I thought that he was saying that the people around us and our environment did not necessarily "tell us" what to think but they do have some influence on how we think and who we judge.
Also I think that when Descartes was talking about learning things from books. I do not think that he was saying that it was bad I just think that he was saying you do not learn anything from them about the real world and how to survive it.
lively and thoughtful thread--it brought to mind how hard it is to define 'judgment' and say what counts as good judgment. not pure, since we were once children (as boamah points out), making it hard to untangle good autonomous judgment from well-cultivated judgment. (where would the line go?)
irony: a group discussion about a book that argues that books can't teach us, and, in any case, we can only really think alone.
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