Modernism

The Three Great Skeptics came in the mid-to-late 19th century and were against the theories of the enlightenment. As such, they rejected many of the things their worlds were built on - democracy, nationalism, capitalism, and so on. The common link between these three men is that they don't believe, as Hegel does, in a central narrative to the world. Everything is subjective. It is in a way the philosophical solidification of the romantic ideas Rousseau began espousing a century earlier.

Marx has already been talked about, but his ideology was essentially that the lower classes were constantly being lied to and manipulated by the upper classes. Between these two classes, there was constant warfare. And, he heavily implied, it was the geist of the lower classes that would eventually trump the upper class.

Nietzche believed that mainstream culture was corrupt and doomed. Morals are subjective. For example, the statements that “it is wrong to steal” or that “charity is good” are not facts. These things have specific history as ideas and aren't universally true except for specific cultures, and within cultures these ideas can change, as in the example of homosexuality, which was accepted in the Greek and Roman world, considered an evil once Christianity spread, and has once again become an accepted facet of the world, at least in most western countries anyway.

Freud was against the enlightenment because he thinks that we don't know what we want, that we're perverse and that behaviour and morality are all determined by subconscious drives. Sexuality & hunger are the main two. He explains the oedipus complex, the five stages in growth (all sexual in nature) and the Id, Ego and Superego. His essential claim is that we act to fulfil some sort of drive no one is aware of. It is the science of irrationality and anethema to enlightenment ideas. It's for good reason that Freud is considered a dead end in the scientific community, as his 'research' is full of holes. But the cultural impact of his ideas were great. 

Modernism is the theory of relativism. There is no centre, things are only defined by their relationship to everything else in the world. No one is equal, there is no model of perfection to strive for, however we can respect this diversity of such a worldview.

European Idealism

Empiricism is for the most part Anglocentric in its thinkers and flourished in Britain most notably. But in Europe, and especially Germany, it was idealism that was most influential.

Hegel believehis philosophical system that can explain all of history. A Christian, he takes the idea of the Fall of Man as a central doctrine of history. This integrates with Rousseau (who harkens back to a Golden Age pre-civilisation). All history is the attempt by everyone to get to heaven, or recreating the Garden of Eden on Earth. Has he been to Bahrain? Gilgamesh liked it. The whole of history is battle between good and evil (perhaps taking from Zoroastrian thought, or perhaps a coincidence). 

Geist is spirit. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the time. It is an immaterial thing. Attempts of history are the attempts of God to bring us back to Eden and, according to Hegel, when geist realises itself, we will be brought back to Eden. This orderly view of the entirety of history is simplistic, but the idea of 'zeitgeist' is a compelling one. One might describe the Arab Awakening and renewed will of the Arab people as the zeitgeist of their time.

Next is Marx, who called himself a 'historical materialist'. He is seen as a follower of Hegel but differs in that his ideas stem from economics. He thought geist was the spirit of the people. Turning Hegel's idea on its head, he suggests that it's not geist (that is, sheer will, like Smith's 'hidden hand of the market') that's getting things happening, it's the people who are doing things, who then call it geist. His is a materialist conception of history. What people actual do is make things, as he outlines in his theories that the history of society is the history of class struggle. It's exemplified in the famous statement of the Communist Manifesto: workers of the world unite!

Kant changed the way philosophers approached the universe. Previous to him, philosophers believed that the world was there and our mind perceives it (as Locke did). Kant states that rather, one's mind is everything and the universe is inside one's head. Bertrand Russell puts it “We see space and time because we wear space and time goggles” To put it another way, as three-dimensional beings we cannot cannot imagine an object that is 2D, or that does not exist in time or space. Wittgenstein pointed out that we cannot even imagine space except as on object inside of space.

Schopenhauer is of the generation after Kant. He thinks there's only one "numena": the universe as a thing in itself, the will to be, beingness as a thing. This Will is everything and, when we perceive something, that is a representation of it. In other words, the human mind shapes Will into representation Schopenhauer's ideas were being influenced by Hinduism, reflecting the contact Europeans were beginning to make with cultures beyond their continent.

Romanticism

Necessary ideal: to suffer is good.

Rousseau - father of romanticism – has thoughts on human nature: "mankind is born free but everywhere is in chains". Each person is impelled by inner desire to be free but civilisation constrains us all.

Rousseau's main idea: Social Contract in order to benefit from civilisation, we surrender our freedom for protection (an integrative idea). This is an unhappy condition to be in and a revolutionary way to consider civilisation. Classical Greek thought was that civilisation was Great. "Barbarian" literally meant 'dog person'. But Rousseau sees civilisation as constraining – it's the individual against society. Humans should be free.

Emile – novel where rational child destroyed by education system. Just another way that Roussea subverts the idea that to be civilised is good.

It was the late 18th century and France was beginning to expand as an empire.. France encountered undeveloped people, namely those of Tahiti. These are people in tune with nature, born free and living natural lives.

Another of Rousseau's big ideas was that of the General Will. He believed in small communities, that no country should be bigger than what you can walk in a day. But after the French Revolution, General Will is transformed into the Will of Nations, from which we get nationalism, and so nationalism and romanticism are philosophically linked in this way (nationalism also has connections to Hegellian theories I think)

Prometheus is a  Greek Titan who fashioned mankind from clay and stole fire from gods for mankind. In punishment he was chained to the side of a mountain where an eagle would come and eat his liver every day. Prometheus defied the Gods. This is a quintessentially romantic deed because he defies fate. The Cult of Prometheus grows around the creative class of this era, Beethoven dedicating his work to the Titan for example.

Byron was a romantic poet and possibly the first 'celeb' in the modern way. He was famous for his art and his poems printed all over Europe. He loved Venice, a romantic city, where he apparently fathered 700 bastards there alone. Venice, named after Venus, is also the city of casanova.

In Literature and Poetry you have Shelly, Byron and Keats, who states that "Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty / This is all we can know in this world". This is completely contrary view to that of empiricists. Truth is something subjective, not objective, according to the romantics. The debate between romantics and empiricists seems to be equivalent to the the form/function debate.

Enlightenment and Empiricism

Descartes - "I think therefore I am"

New rational philosophies and mathematics - the Empiricist ideal of the 'clockwork universe' - Newton.

Start of the printing press – Gutenburg. His printing press allowed the spread of ideas in a very new way, similar to the revolution of the internet. Original printing press was a bible-printing machine. Protestant reformation: Martin Luthor wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible in their own language, and so the spread of Protestantism helped to spread literacy. From there, the printing press allowed all sorts of things to be published en masse: novels, scientific treatises, even porn, were invented in their printed form within 200 years of the original Gutenberg press. There was an explosion of literature, especially in Holland, then the most free country in Europe.

Courants printed in Holland during the English civil war were the first periodicals. These were mostly propaganda

Press – Addison and Steel – involved in the early bourgeoisie trade and adverts. "Win Free Sex" as a template was first invented by these early journalists, whose papers advertised easy money ventures and the likes to make money themselves. So the recogniseable tropes of a newspaper were set, and can still be seen today in the contents of modern papers.

Empiricism – knowledge can only come from the 'five senses'. All comes from without. Everything can be analysed. Empiricism is opposite Idealism, where all things comes from within.

Thomas Hobbs was the father of Empiricism . Odeas of the state – non-moralistic empiricist view of human behaviour – humans live to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.

John Locke – people are tabula rasa at birth – blank slate. Once again, all things come from without. This would later be contradicted by the great skeptics, namely Freud.

Adam Smith – empiricist view of economics – seeking of pleasure/avoiding of pain – utility economics – everyone tries to maximise utility – his classical economic theories were the foundation of all economic understanding until Keynes turned his ideas upside down.

David Hume – Essay Concerning Human Understanding – How do you derive complex/abstract ideas from sense-data? He asks how we can synthesise ideas from simpler ones – something Wittgenstein would pick up centuries later, as to how simple objects form complex atoms.

Logical Positivism, Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 to one of the wealthiest families in Europe. He was a contemporary of Frege and Bertrand Russell, and his work on logic is related to both of those previous philosophers. He's an important philosopher, and one of his book, the Philosophical Investigations, was published posthumously in 1953 – he had died two years earlier – and is regarded as the most important book of 20^th century philosophy. His work can be divided into his early work and his later work. The Tractatus is one of his early works and was written during the first world war. It was published in 1922, ten years after Russell's great work, the Principia Mathematica.

By Wittgenstein's own words, the Tractatus can be summed up in a single sentence:

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what cannot be said at all should pass over in silence.

The point of his work, thus, is to define the boundaries of logic and of language, because language, by his definition, is the medium of logic. What are the limits of thought? This is the question Wittgenstein tries to answer.

He states in the preface that “its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it”. While it's difficult,

The book is split into seven short chapters. Each chapter is again split into smaller sections, so that you have chapter 1, then chapter 1.1, then point 1.11 and 1.12 and so on. Each 'chapter' and 'point' are at most only three or four sentences long.

Wittgenstein sought out to define the limits of thought within language in his book and masterfully uses as few words as possible to deliver his strong points.

So, Chapter 1 begins with the statement that the world is the totality of facts, not of things

I think what Wittgenstein means here is that 'things' are described as 'facts', and these facts determine how and what a thing is. For example, the thing that is a swan was originally named and categorised for the fact that it is white. Facts are the how of things that define them. More on that later though.

The chapter's ending statement leads directly into Chapter 2.

Wittgenstein states that 'the world divides into facts', and he goes to say that any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same. What does that mean?

2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

So there is half the answer. 2.1 states that we make for ourselves pictures of facts. Here, Wittgenstein is putting to paper the logic behind thought. Thought, and imagination, are the logical representations of facts within our mind.

Defining what an atomic fact is, he calls it a combination of objects, which are entities and things.

The object is a simple thing, while atomic facts link with one another, like a chain. The totality of this chain, that is, the entirety of these atomic facts is the world. You might think of it as objects and things being like the cells that together make up the human body, with the body being the totality of these cells. He even states that it is 'essential' of a 'thing' that it can be a constituent part of an atomic fact. A thing or object is thus defined by its relation to other things or objects.

So the totality of existent atomic facts determine which atomic facts, or chains of ideas, do not exist. The existence and non-existence of atomic facts is how we define reality. He calls the existence of an atomic fact a 'positive fact', and the non-existence a 'negative fact'. So one could say that the economic crisis is a positive fact, while the statement that dinosaurs are still roaming the earth today is a negative fact.

In 2.013, he states that everything is in a space of possible atomic facts. One can think of this space as empty, but cannot think of the thing without space. This is just another wording of the old 'No one is on the road' problem: We cannot think of there being nobody, we can only think of the lack of somebody in the space that is the road.. Wittgenstein's explanation goes:

Just as we cannot think of spatial objects apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connections with other things

Our understanding of things is based upon their interactions with other.

Objects, he says, contain the possibility of all states of affairs. They are essentially the building blocks of all complex ideas. The possibility of an object's occurrence in an atomic fact, is the form of the object. To put in another way, an object's interaction and differentiation with the world around it, is the definition of the object, or so I understand.

The object is the simplest form of substance in the world. It cannot be a compound – for example, you can have the object of a sheep and the object of a tree. But you cannot have a tree that is also a sheep. However, you can have a sheep standing beneath a tree, and that would be an atomic fact, as it is a combination of two simple objects.

Objects can only differentiated from one another by how they are different. Either something has unique properties which make it distinguishable, or there is a group of things which have most of their properties in common, and are thus impossible to distinguish from one another. Going back to our sheep example, a single black sheep in a crowd of white sheep is distinguished and defined by its colour, while the crowd of white sheep cannot be discerned from one another.

He defines how we picture things in our minds, calling pictures models of reality. The logical picture can depict the world. The picture agrees with reality or doesn't, it is either true of false. Thus can one imagine something that doesn't exist, such as a sheep that is also a tree. But to discover whether a picture is true or false we have to compare it with reality. It cannot be discovered from a picture alone whether or not it is true or false, probably because we can't imagine a picture without some basis in reality to begin with. As Wittgenstein puts it, there is no picture which is a truth a priori. This relates somewhat back to Locke's idea that we are all blank slates, and is a refutation of the in-born knowledge of God that Descartes pronounced.

For example, if I ask you to picture an alien unique to itself with no reference to the world you know, it is impossible. You cannot picture its form without it resembling some object you know, or the texture of its body without reference to soft or course. You cannot picture it being a colour outside of the red-to-violet spectrum we know. It is impossible to picture such a thing, because all our thoughts, however imaginative they are, are grounded in the real world.

Now we come to chapter 3, which states that the logical picture of the facts is the thought.

“An atomic fact is thinkable”, meaning that we can imagine it. We can't think something unlogical, because we would have to think unlogically. We cannot do that, because unlogic is incomprehensible to us. He says that to present in language anything which “contradicts logic” is as impossible as in trying to present a figure which cannot exist in space by its coordinates in geometry. Language is how we express logic.

I'm not sure I can quite come to grips with this, as if I were to ask someone “On a scale of one to ten, yes or no?”, my words would make no logical sense. Isn't that the same as writing an incorrect geometric proof? You're using the expression of logic, language, incorrectly, and it comes to be meaningless.

Talking about language more, he states that a propositional sign consists of words combined in a definite way. This sign is a fact, and the proposition is articulate. For example, “the sheep has white wool” is an articulate propositional sign that is a fact.

On the topic of names, he states that a name represents an object only. Names are primitive signs that do not describe how a thing is, which is what Wittgenstein's logical language is interested in. He is interested in the composition of a thing, which the name cannot define. For example, 'tree' is the name of an object, but it is the branches and the roots and so on that assert how a tree is a tree.

As only a proposition has sense, only in the context of this proposition does a name have meaning. For example, we can make sense of the name 'tree' when we say “a tree is a thing with branches and roots”. Otherwise, it is an arbitrary label.

For the remainder of chapter 3, he goes into the detail of what makes a name meaningless except as a label, and the logic behind a proposition.

Chapter 4 states that the thought is the significant proposition.

A proposition presents the existence and non-existence of atomic facts. To remind you, an atomic fact is the possibilities of the sum of the objects. These atomic facts can either have a true or false value.

Wittgenstein states that people construct languages in which every sense can be expressed, but without fully understanding how the words and language work, just as how we can make the sounds of our language without being fully conscious of how we're making them. Like Frege, he believed that language disguises thought, especially colloquial language – what Frege would have called colour.

Like Russell, he states that most philosophical writings are senseless. Most questions and propositions of philosophers result from the lack of understanding most of us have of language. Thus the deepest problems are often not problems at all. Personally, I don't quite understand how this makes sense.

5, Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.

In this chapter Wittgenstein talks more about the logic underlying the makeup of propositions, that is, sentences. I have to admit that the further I read into the book, the less it makes sense to me. This chapter deals greatly with mathematical proofs of 'truth-functions', which so far as I understand are the justifications for your propositions. but chapter 5's final point, 5.6, puts things in layman's terms that anyone can understand:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

What that means is that your perception and understanding of the world ends where your language ends. If someone from Rome of 2000 years ago saw modern technology, then went to tell his friends, he would not be able to properly describe what he saw because he has no word for computer or aeroplane. His understanding of these things are limited by his language.

Chapter 6's title-sentence gives us the mathematical form of truth-functions and states that this is the general form of proposition.

He gives more proofs as to this general form of the proposition and states now that propositions of logic are actually tautologies – that is, phrases that say the same things in different ways. But he defends these tautologies. They show the formal, logical, properties of language.

Chapter 7 is the shortest in the book, being only a sentence long. It states: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

If you can't form a logical proposition on something, then you can't express it. If it is unlogical, it cannot be propositioned, and it cannot be said. This seems to me to be a law of language and speech. Going back to that alien which has no worldly properties, I can only speak of it in terms of how it differentiates from everything else. But I cannot picture it, and I cannot describe it, therefore I cannot talk about it except in this theoretical sense. I must be silent about it, because there's nothing I can say.

Thus ends Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It is an analytical work picking apart the construction of thought and language in order to understand and talk with logic. It seems an evolution of Frege's work, which was robotic in its form of logic. Wittgenstein's logic, on the other hand, is more flexible in that it can make sense of every-day logic and language – what Frege called colour. In fact, logical statements and 'colour' don't necessarily seem to be distinguished by Wittgenstein, as they all follow some basic laws of logic.

There are no universal facts or objects. The world is the structure of your ideas

Engineeer background – you need rules and composite parts.

To understand what people are saying you can break down each of their sentences. We're none the wiser about the universe than we were 2000 years ago. We cannot work out anything, nihilistic. Nothing stands still. Cannot analyse what people say – plus psychology shows a whole kind of secret world of thought behind thought.

Feedback 23-03-2012

Very good

Back ups -- good to have them, though EVERYONE should be aware of them, even OB team

Great packages, although Westminster had some issues

Direction in gallery was great

Good teamwork

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Angus:

Well done, gg punching above your weight. Ambition today was decent.

Plan B is as important if not more than Plan A, in case it falls through

Atmosphere - little buzz because it's today's story
           - today was exciting

Dan - Should have seen the runner's face more, run towards the camera not away

Communication between NewsRoom & OB is crucial, both halves must know what's going on. NewsRoom must feed reporters all the facts possible, so that they can regurgigate them. The communication is so important - needed easily digestable, useable facts. Lou's PTC could have been better with comms.

Don't knock your own story or assume everyone knows what happened before this story - Lou should have not said "No major surprises".

Audio w/ Brine worked, even if there was no vision.

Should have challenged in studio guest more and used the time we had better.

NIB - Could not see Alistair Stewart's face. If we're talking about him, we should have him on screen.

Dan - could have been more and more about her - didn't need two PTCs from Dan. He should have been walking & talking in it.

Presenters - great job

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Chris:

We should have had a full time guest minder, should have pre-interviewed him and known what he had to say/had to press.

Feedback

Really well done.

Not everything made it and that is a massive problem. It HAS to make air and if it hasn't, you have to have stuff to slot in instead.

Well presented, nicely read.

The headlines are incredibly important. They are the difference between someone watching and someone turning off.

Headline writing is an art. Try and make things more interesting to make people watch.

Gay couple - news is about people. How everything effects people. When you've got someone, make the most of it. But did not use them to their best potential "They've lived together for six years and would want to get married..."

Same problem with the musician.

Need a bit of narration, sequences and quotes that stress the human interests.

Write to pictures! "This winchester couple..." - Shot of Jesus

Cardinal - couldn't tell where he'd said his stuff. George PTC could have been more interestingly shot.

OOVs - seemed a bit disjointed. The second clip was a bit bizarre.

Sport - very good, though problem with OOV timing. 'Run of two defeats' - two isn't enough for a run?

Music man - could have had more fun with it, seen him chatting about his art and such. Needed more sequences with him, and the same can be said of the gay couple.

Don't be afraid of trying things different - don't get bogged down in the grammar of news, experiment and make more of what we've got. Human interest is more interesting than facts. Use natsot and all you've got from

Need to home in more on what would make our viewers watch.

Be a bit more imaginative. Experiment.

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Angus - Rachelle and Nicola, good job. Jenny - should not have left the gallery right before the bulletin.

Stitching it together is not how we should have done. All too comfy. We fell off air. Should never happen again.

Two weeks ago, last week, very good. This week all too soft.

Headlines - "Why this Winchester couple want to get married" didn't line up with pictures/quote quite.

Beckett story - Should not have tried to remember it all. Would have worked better. More of a conversation as Flick is telling the audience the story, does not have to be as structured or formal as a PTC.

Outrage over politicians - Louis O'brien - no local angle. If going to use 'outrage', 'riot', etc, we have to live up to these words. Otherwise, don't throw them around.

Link to gay marriage - say quotes were published in Telegraph and also Radio 4. Confusion! Get set up shots, give us more about them.

OOVs - 1st one - Got a moving object - plane moving, in the sky, etc. Simple but decent.

Sport OOV - redid it and made it worse, missed the beat.

Phrasing - 'clearly delighted', 'clearly frustrated', etc, find a better way of expressing in sports VOs.

Hockey - sound editing needs to be smoothed out.

And Finally - we need to actually need to say 'and finally'.

Don't need to say "thank you and goodbye". Thanks for what? Don't thank.

In sport, we can use less coverage and more features - olympic hopefuls and such.

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Brian - We must embrace the chaos of the news room on wednesday. Our complacency was the problem today.