Here is a shortlist of some topics related to positive philosophy for worth consideration. These are as follows:
-Domestic Violence: Causes and Solution
-Domestic Violence: Causes and Solution
-Peace and Social Justice-Media’s Impact on Society
-Children in a Problematic Society
-Group Consciousness and its Effect on Society
-Value Education and Teacher-Parents Role
-The Discussion on Right and Duty-The Problem of Communication
-Problems regarding Technology Developments
-Meditation at working Places-Pollution and Health Problems
-Literature and Its Role in Healthy Society
-Literature and Its Role in Healthy Society
-Spirituality and Science: A Healthy Approach
-Importance of a National Character Building
-Why We Do Philosophy and How?
-Role Models for the Children and Society
Prof. Daya Krishan said, “The philosophers, however, have not merely thought in a certain way but also thought that they thought in a certain way.”Philosophy is the New World-Cognitive progress, practical ethics, globalization, human rights. It is a critical reflection of the status of knowledge, values and communication. It tries to bring out the discrepancies and gaps, the ruptures and mutations etc. and tries to modify and transform that process.So, this is necessary to follow this type of positive attitude to solve these problems rather than a negative attitude which makes the problem more complex ,rather to solve it.
-Role Models for the Children and Society
Prof. Daya Krishan said, “The philosophers, however, have not merely thought in a certain way but also thought that they thought in a certain way.”Philosophy is the New World-Cognitive progress, practical ethics, globalization, human rights. It is a critical reflection of the status of knowledge, values and communication. It tries to bring out the discrepancies and gaps, the ruptures and mutations etc. and tries to modify and transform that process.So, this is necessary to follow this type of positive attitude to solve these problems rather than a negative attitude which makes the problem more complex ,rather to solve it.
Last Updated:07-07-2009
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Tips on Doing, Reading, and Writing Philosophy
Paper Key (specific tips for writing good philosophy papers including the most common errors made on philosophy papers)
Doing Philosophy
Philosophy is a rigorous discipline that demands precision, accuracy, and careful thought. Contrary to popular belief, philosophy isn’t merely about airing one's opinions. In a word, philosophy is about arguments. By arguments, we mean a logically structured set of statements or propositions that, when put together, entail some sort of conclusion. For example, the following is an argument:
(1) All C.U. students are brilliant.
(2) Jill is a C.U. student.
Therefore,
(C) Jill is brilliant.
Here, the truth of premises (1) and (2) make the conclusion, (C), true, i.e., it could not fail to be true if the premises are true. Premises are simply statements offered for consideration. Philosophy revolves around giving arguments for various positions one might take on the nature of reality (metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (epistemology), the nature of morality (ethics) or the nature of a particular subject like aesthetics or science.
There are two important distinctions that should be with respect to arguments like the one above. First, arguments are either valid or invalid. Though we often use the word "valid" in our common everyday language to label a person's point as good or strong, the term as it is used in philosophy is a technical term that refers to the nature of a deductive argument. If a deductive argument is valid, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. That is to say, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. An invalid argument is an argument whose premises do not entail the conclusion. That is to say, even if the premises are true, the conclusion may not be true.
The second distinction with respect to arguments in philosophy lies between sound and unsound arguments. If an argument is sound, then it is not only valid, but its premises are indeed true. An unsound argument is an argument in which one or more of the premises are false. Note that an argument can be valid, but unsound.
Here is your first test in philosophy: First, is the above argument concerning the brilliance of C.U. students valid?
If your answer is no, there are no more comments to make, for if an argument is not valid, there is little sense in discussing it beyond making this determination.
But, if our answer is yes, we can ask the further question as to whether the above argument is sound, i.e., are the premises true? Well, what do you think, are they true? Premise (1) is of course the controversial premise; premise (2) we will assume, is a given. Well, premise (1) is probably false, if we mean by "brilliant," incredibly intelligent. Unfortunately, there are most likely at least a few C.U. students that do not fall into this category of brilliance. The good news is that life is not just about being intelligent.
Now that we have the two basic concepts of validity and soundness under our belts, we can begin to do philosophy. To do philosophy well, you will have to think in terms of arguments all the time. This thought process can be a bit daunting for the neophyte, but after a while it becomes second nature. Along with this process of thinking in terms of arguments, you will also have to put your thinking cap on; philosophy, by its very nature, requires you to think hard, to make fine distinctions, and to be extremely careful with how you use words. Often, philosophers use common everyday words in uncommon ways. For example, the word "necessarily" is a word loaded with meaning for the philosopher, though not for the person on the street.
Reading Philosophy
Reading philosophy for the beginner can also be a daunting task. Because philosophers use language so carefully, one can often find their first reading of a philosophy article quite dense, slow and laborious. Philosophers like to condense their ideas into the fewest words possible needed to express them, so reading philosophy can be akin to untying a shoelace which has several knots in it. Unlike reading fiction or the newspaper, reading philosophy is often a grueling process. Adequately understanding what a particular philosopher is arguing may require re-reading the article several times. As with many sorts of texts there are values in reading the text quickly and slowly. If you know that you are going to read a text more the once, it is sometimes profitable to read through it the first time quickly, not getting bogged down too much with sections that are not readily clear to you. On the second time through you can slow down and digest the more difficult parts of the reading. The quick read-through often gives you context such that when you read through the article a second time, you already know what will later be said in the article, thus helping you to understand the difficult passages found earlier in the article. Above all, reading philosophy takes patience. Even if you read an article through several times, there may be portions of the text that are still unclear. Philosophy often leaves one with more questions than answers; hence, if you have in mind that you will develop a bulletproof personal philosophy at the end of one class, give that idea up now. Philosophers study for decades and often never reach a firm conclusion on some matters. Lastly, you will almost certainly come across words that you are not familiar with. Though it is easy to just skip these words, you will gain greater understanding and pleasure from your reading if you look unknown words up. You may have even come across unknown words on this web page like "neophyte." A great tool for the college student is an electronic dictionary, which can be purchased on CD-Rom and then transferred to your hard drive (if you have enough room). Good, unabridged dictionaries on CD-Rom can be purchased for about $25. This tool helps you to look words up quickly (if you're near your computer).
Writing Philosophy
As you can imagine, writing philosophy involves the skills of doing philosophy and reading philosophy. To write philosophy, you must learn to use your own language well. You must learn to use language precisely; you must master syntax (which includes spelling) and grammar. You must also learn to write stylistically, and not in the manner that you speak on a daily basis. Philosophy requires a formal writing style. You must learn to be well-organized in the presentation of your ideas. You must learn to present an argument, and then evaluate it, i.e., give your own argument for why you think the argument under question is a good or bad one. Philosophers are picky, anal, and fastidious when they write, and so must you be if you are to succeed as a nascent philosopher.
Reference
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/robertsm/tips.html
What is Philosophy?
Mark I. Vuletic
Last updated 28 February 2008
The Nature of Philosophy
The word philosophy literally means love of wisdom;1 this tells us something about the nature of philosophy, but not much. How does philosophy differ from other disciplines that seek wisdom? A look at the historical development of the field will help us to answer this question. On the standard way of telling the story, humanity's first systematic inquiries took place within a mythological or religious framework: wisdom was ultimately to be derived from sacred traditions and from individuals thought to possess privileged access to a supernatural realm. However, starting in the sixth century BCE, there appeared in ancient Greece a series of thinkers whose inquiries were comparatively secular. Presumably, these thinkers conducted their inquiries through reason and observation, rather than through tradition or revelation. These thinkers were the first philosophers. Although this picture is admittedly simplistic, the basic distinction has stuck: philosophy in its most primeval form is considered nothing less than secular inquiry itself.2
However, there are now many forms of secular inquiry, so what distinguishes philosophy from them? In the beginning, there was perhaps no distinction. But, as civilization advanced, two parts of philosophy became so powerful in their own right that they separated off, claiming for themselves the status of indpendent disciplines. Mathematics was the first, and split off very early in the game; science (or natural philosophy, as it was called even into the 19th century) was the second, splitting off much later. To modern philosophy is left whatever questions these two disciplines cannot solve (at least at a given time), including not only questions that are traditionally thought to be beyond the two (e.g. "What is the meaning of life?"), but also theoretical questions at their fringes (e.g. "Can natural selection operate at the species level?") and conceptual questions at their foundations (e.g. "What is science?"). Philosophy, of course, is best known for the first class of questions, which includes some of the most difficult and important questions there are, such as whether or not there is a god, and how a person ought to live.
Philosophy is characterized as much by its methods as by its subject matter. Although philosophers deal with speculative issues that generally are not subject to investigation through experimental test, and philosophy therefore is more fully conceptual than science, philosophy properly done is not mere speculation. Philosophers, just like scientists, formulate hypotheses which ultimately must answer to reason and evidence.3 This is one of the things that differentiates philosophy from poetry and mysticism, despite its not being a science.4
The Branches of Philosophy
The four main branches of philosophy are logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics:
Logic is the attempt to codify the rules of rational thought. Logicians explore the structure of arguments that preserve truth or allow the optimal extraction of knowledge from evidence. Logic is one of the primary tools philosophers use in their inquiries; the precision of logic helps them to cope with the subtlety of philosophical problems and the often misleading nature of conversational language.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. Epistemologists ask, for instance, what criteria must be satisfied for something we believe to count as something we know, and even what it means for a proposition to be true.
Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things. Metaphysicians ask what kinds of things exist, and what they are like. They reason about such things as whether or not people have free will, in what sense abstract objects can be said to exist, and how it is that brains are able to generate minds.
Ethics is the study of the nature of right and wrong, and good and evil, both in sweeping considerations about the foundations of morality, and practical considerations about the fine details of moral conduct. A moral philosopher may ask something as wide-ranging as whether actions should be judged by their intent or their consequences, or something as focused as whether or not a rape victim should have the right to get an abortion.
Many professional philosophers also double as historians, researching one or another aspect of the history of philosophical thought. Even those who do not conduct novel historical research typically see great value in the texts of thinkers as far back as the ancient Greeks, and study these texts both for philosophical insight and enjoyment. Arguably, history of philosophy may be considered a fifth branch of philosophy.5
As you can already tell, the different branches of philosophy overlap one another. A philosopher who is trying to figure out whether people ought to give everything they can spare to the poor is asking an ethical question. In asking this question, he might wonder whether or not standards of right and wrong are built into the fabric of the universe, which is a metaphysical question. If he claims that people are justified in answering that question either way, he is making an epistemological claim. At all steps of his reasoning, he will want to employ logic to ensure that he is minimizing the chance of being led into an error of reasoning by the great complexity and obscurity of the questions. He may very well look to some of the ethical writings of past philosophers to see how the most powerful thinkers who came before him reasoned about the matter.
Aspects of each branch of philosophy can be studied in isolation, but philosophical questions have a way of leading to other philosophical questions, to the point that a full investigation of any particular problem is likely eventually to involve almost the whole of the philosophical enterprise.
The Demands of Philosophy
Philosophical inquiry is very demanding, suitable only for those who possess a fair degree of courage, humility, patience and discipline.
Doing philosophy requires courage, because one never knows what one will find at the end of a philosophical investigation. Since philosophy deals with the most fundamental and important issues of human existence, and since these are things that most people initially take for granted, genuine philosophical inquiry has great potential to unsettle or even to destroy one's deepest and most cherished beliefs. Genuine philosophical inquiry also carries the risk of isolation among one's peers, both for the unorthodox views to which it may lead one, and for the simple unpopularity of critical thinking. A philosopher must be able to face both consequences.
Doing philosophy requires humility, because to do philosophy one must always keep firmly in mind how little one knows and how easy it is to fall into error. The very initiation of philosophical inquiry requires one to admit to oneself that one may not, after all, have all of the answers.
Doing philosophy requires both patience and discipline, because philosophical inquiry requires long hours of hard work. One must be prepared to commit huge amounts of time to laboring over issues both difficult and subtle. People who avoid philosophy often complain that thinking about philosophical questions makes their heads hurt. This is unavoidable: if the answers come easily to you, your inquiries are almost certainly superficial. To do philosophy, one must commit onself to pain. The only difference between one who chooses to shoulder the pain and one who does not is that the former recognizes that there is no shortcut to truth: every advance must be fought for tooth and nail.
These virtues are always imperfectly represented in any given person, which is why philosophy is best done in a community: the critical scrutiny of other thinkers provides an often necessary check on defects invisible to one's self.
The Rewards of Philosophy
But if philosophy is so demanding, why should anyone even bother with it?
In the first place, there is great utility in philosophical inquiry, even for someone who does not innately care about the pursuit of truth. Consider a random handful of classic philosophical questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of justice? What does it take for a belief to be justified? Is the world we see illusion or reality? The answers to such questions cannot help but to have a critical impact on how one ought to live one's life. Surely one should subject one's intuitive beliefs about these things to critical scrutiny, and work hard to come as close to truth as possible. Many philosophical questions are fundamental to human life; the only reason it often does not seem that way is that people simply assume they know what the answers to these questions are, without ever daring to make a serious inquiry.
This leads us to the second reason why one ought to do philosophy: to understand is ennobling. To go through life simply assuming one understands, is not. To be sure, one can be happy if one manages to make it all the way through life without questioning anything. Philosophical inquiry, on the other hand, can be disquieting, offering no guarantee that your hard work will yield the conclusions you hope for. Even worse, philosophy gives you no guarantee that your investigations will yield any conclusion at all: at the end of the day, you may find yourself not only minus the certainties with which you began, but also with nothing else to put in their place. If you do philosophy, you may well have to learn to live with perpetual uncertainty, while others, in their ignorance, happily profess perfect knowledge of things they do not understand at all. But it is clear who has the better life: far better to understand, even if the main thing you understand is the limit of your own knowledge.
And a final reason for studying philosophy is that, for all of the pains and difficulties associated with it, the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge is enjoyable. To be sure, it is a refined enjoyment, and it is often hard to see from the outside what the appeal is. But once you become immersed in it, it carries its own immediate rewards, and it is difficult to resist becoming addicted to it. I have experienced most of the same pleasures everyone else has,6 but in the end, none of them hold a candle to the pleasures of the mind: the sheer pleasure of studying and investigating, and sometimes even understanding.
Notes
1 From the Greek philia (friendship/love) or philos (friend/lover) and sophia (wisdom).
2 To say that philosophy is secular does not mean that it is anti-religious, but only that it is independent of religion. If one needed to be anti-religious or even nonreligious to do philosophy, the history of philosophy would be very slim. To say that philosophy is secular is also not to deny that there are many thinkers, arguably including most of the first philosophers themselves, for whom it is not always clear whether they are doing philosophy or theology: philosophy, like any other discipline, has gray boundaries.
3 In saying this, am I ruling out Continental philosophy by stipulation? I don't think so, at least not across the board. To be sure, Continental philosophers do not write like analytic philosophers, and I consider that a vice, but I am not sure that their rock-bottom commitments really are that different. The phenomenologists and existentialists I am familiar with seem to base their thought upon rational and evidential grounds as much as anyone else; even with postmodernists, I am not sure that the open disdain for reason and evidence is more than just talk.
Am I ruling out from philosophy anyone whose inquiries do not ultimately rely upon reason and evidence? Yes, and unapologetically so.
4 I need to make another qualification here. It is not that poetry and literature cannot overlap with philosophy. It all depends on whether we are talking about the mode of expression, or the source of the ideas in the first place. Camus, for instance, expressed himself very well through the medium of novels and plays, but the thoughts he expressed seem to have been worked out by appeals to reason and evidence. I would contrast that with, say, Whitman's poem where he is disgusted by how astronomers disect everything, and then wanders outside to be struck by the beauty of the night sky. I suspect Whitman was just articulating feelings, and not a rationally worked out position; however deep they may be, and however much grist they might provide for a philosophical mill, Whitman still was not doing philosophy.
5 Many introductions to philosophy also count aesthetics (the study of art and beauty) as a major branch of philosophy.
6 Two I haven't experienced are drunkenness and drug euphoria. Since our advanced ability to reason is one of the very few things that makes us different from the other animals, it is difficult for me to understand the appeal in using mind-altering substances to short-circuit one's own ability to reason. The mass appeal of drugs and overindulgence in alcohol seems to me to be an example of collective madness. In any case, both are antithetical to the spirit of analytic philosophy.
What is Philosophy?
Copyright © 2006-2007, Mark I. Vuletic. All rights reserved.
Reference
http://www.vuletic.com/hume/ph/philosophy.html
VALUES
By Monica Thapar
Each one of us must identify the values we want to live by. We need to take the time to know ourselves and penetrate layers of conditioning to arrive at our true selves
Value education is education in values and education towards the inculcation of values. Implicit in this definition is the conviction that value education is a universal phenomenon intrinsic to all learning and education, whether at home or in an institution. It is not. Neither teaches us to be critical thinkers or to regard ourselves as proactive beings in relation to ourselves, our community and humanity at large. Unwittingly and through habit we accept most things handed out to us by the media, the government and the polity. Unfortunately when there is so much talk about individual capabilities and potentialities, there is so little confidence on the part of the individual about his own power to make a difference. Our educational system is of little help. We are not trained to be proactive thinkers because we are told so little of the life values that are the basis for creative thinking.
What really is education? It is not literacy, nor information. Education is a systematic attempt towards human learning. All learning is subjective and self-related. Educational activity starts with the individual—Who am I? Where am I going? Where have I come from? It is only with an understanding of the Self that we can begin to understand our relationships with others and the environment.
Knowledge should not be made remote from individual reality and irrelevant to the individual. Knowledge can never be 'learned'. Knowledge is the fruit of experience and experience is the sensation of the individual. Individual experience is an internal happening and is the function of awareness. And one of the processes of knowing ourselves, of raising our awareness, is to be able to identify and clarify our values. Education in values is essential in helping each one of us directly encounter the values that we hold, understand them completely, so that we may order our relationships to the environment that lies outside us. Once we are clear about values we shall be better able to sift and control information of the natural world, make wise choices and be creative in our mental processes.
'Know thyself' is what each of us needs to do, yet modern life moves at such a pace that we seldom take the time to examine ourselves. We become strangers to our own selves. We follow the dictates of others blindly. Why should any debate be left to a few 'experts'? Why is not critical thinking an integral part of everyday life? It must be so if we are to create a sane society.
For this to happen we must be equipped to examine our values. These are our internal guideposts. Much of the great literature of the world—from Bhagavad Gita to Socrates to Hamlet—has dwelled on value choices and moral dilemmas that are bound to occur when your values are clearly defined. Values do conflict. Making value choices is not easy, but it is this very thing we must confront and make part of our lives if we are to be truly creative human beings. Moral dilemmas are only possible for those who have strongly held principles and it is through these moral dilemmas that new and revolutionary thought processes emerge and character develops.
Value conflicts are the strongest test of character. Yet, today, moral dilemmas are considered a waste of time, a domain for 'losers'. Ultimately we declare all value assertions unscientific and relative, hence dispensable. We do not realize that value conflict is healthy, necessary and by eliminating it we are also erasing all conviction. Confucius once said: "If a man carefully cultivates values in his conduct, he may still err a little but he won't be far from the standard of truth."
It is time to clarify these values that we speak of. It is up to each one of us to determine the society we will create by deciding upon the values we will emphasize today.
But first, let us be clear about the categories of values. These are three-universal, cultural or ethnic and individual or personal values.
UNIVERSAL VALUES
Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgement, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.
—Goethe
Universal values reveal the essence of the human condition. These arise out of the fundamental questions-Who am I? What is my essence? Who am I when I remove myself from my social and cultural environment? Is there anything in me that cannot be explained by heredity, environment and society?
It is universal values that indicate the essence of the human condition. It is through universal values that we link ourselves with humanity and the cosmos, it is through these that all barriers of time, place and ethnicity are eliminated.
These values are not manifest. They must be experienced, as one experiences a sunrise, the beauty of a flower, as one experiences joy, pleasure, bliss, awe, serenity. These values cannot be contained by words. That the Upanishads and the Bible have remained relevant today as they were centuries ago, tells us that at the core, there are some constants in human condition, that time has not changed. That we are still moved by the wonder of the Taj Mahal, the music of Mozart, the life of Hamlet, the perennial philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita speaks volumes about the mystery and timelessness of universal values.
Universal values can be experienced as life, joy, brotherhood, love, compassion, service, bliss, truth and eternity.
CULTURAL VALUES
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
—S.I. Hayakawa
Cultural values are the social values of the day. They are specific to time and place and can be used just as much as misused. These values are concerned with right and wrong, good and bad, customs and behavior. They are meant to maintain social order.
Cultural values are speculative and there is nothing wrong with speculating. But it becomes wrong when speculation becomes 'truth', when opinion becomes 'fact' and when prejudice becomes the 'cause'. When cultural values are elevated to the status of universal values, there is the risk of intolerance, oppression, demagoguery, brutality and aggression. A cultural value may serve a function in a particular situation and circumstance, but in no way can it be seen as the only or the best way of doing things. A spoon can serve the function of lifting food but so can a fork, a knife, a spatula or bare fingers. A cultural value similarly has limited relevance and the fact that it serves a particular function in a given society does not imply that it is the only or best way of doing so.
When seen in this light, cultural values have the advantage of becoming a source of insight into a time and society. Creative development of ideas often emerges out of an interaction of different cultural values and an understanding and respect for differences. Much of what we find exciting and interesting has in fact come from a meeting of cultures. The Renaissance came about from a meeting of the ancient Greek and medieval European cultures. Jazz is African-European music and the American Transcendentalists studied the Indian Vedas and Upanishads. The East heavily influenced writers such as Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham and Carl Jung. Gandhi drew inspiration from Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King Jr. was in turn, deeply affected by Gandhi.
If all one knows is one's own culture, there is narcissism. The study of other cultures gives us a wider frame of reference. And the study of other cultures is through its sacred (poetic, mythic, religious) traditions and not only through studying history.
Cultural values are reflected in language, ethics, social hierarchy, aesthetics, education, law, economics, philosophy and social institutions of every kind.
INDIVIDUAL VALUES
That civilization perishes in which the individual thwarts the revelation of the universal.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Individual values are our private principles, the result of individual personality and individual experiences. Parents, teachers and one's peer group shape individual values. Personal values determine the differing reactions of people to similar events. A crisis may dim one person's enthusiasm and land him in depression, while another may be propelled into greater action.
Individual values are reflected in individual goals, vows, relationships, commitments and personal preferences. These are often colored by memories of the past and therefore there are differences in the meaning attributed to a common experience. To one person children denote happiness and strength, to another they may denote bondage. Individual values are malleable, often contained in a time and memory warp. They can transform themselves into universal values when you practise awareness and living in the moment.
After clarifying our values, we must determine which of the three are most meaningful for us after considering the relative priority of each category, so that we may be able to confront these and understand our own psychological and social conditioning.
Beyond our ego (sense of self) and identity (sense of belonging to a group) that dictates what we know, think, feel and how we act lies the universal identity. Dissonance between ego and identity can create anxiety and alienation but acting upon universal values will not, for here it is authentic action emanating from an authentic Self. Universal values are at the top of the list. The others have their place but it is through universal values that we experience a sense of oneness with the human race.
Universal values must be our foundation if we are to enjoy a rich, profound and fulfilling life. Our personal and cultural biases limit and distort our perception of the universal wonder that is life. Even as the hands of a clock are powered from the center that remains ever still, so the universal values remain ever at the center of human life, no matter where the hands of time are pointing—past, present or future.
Life Positive, May 2001
Reference
http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/education/alternative-education/values.asp
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