Here's the seminar paper..

Hume:

Hume is important because he developed empirical philosophy to its logical conclusion. He was a young genius, publishing his chief work, the “Treatise of Human nature”, while still in his 20’s. As such he kind of flew under the radar. This wasn’t what he wanted because he wanted to prove himself by providing brilliant retorts to any criticisms of his work. Since his first work fell flat he resorted to essay writing and tutoring. He re-released the treatise with much removed and under the new name of “Inquiry into Human understanding” which proved far more successful. The treatise is broken up into three sections, dealing with the understanding, the passions and the morals. He made the important distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’. Ideas are what are formed from impressions. The example in Russell is that we can imagine a winged horse without having seen one, this is the idea, but the constituents of this complex idea are made up from impressions. You’ve seen a horse, and you’ve seen wings so you combine the two. Without the impressions your ideas would not be able to take form. This is kind of in agreement with Berkeley’s doctrine that “all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive significance, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them” which put basically, as far as I know, means that general ideas are made up of many particular ideas, which then draw in other related ideas to form the general mass. Hume contends that when we have an idea of a man, it has all the particularity that the impression of a man has. The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each, abstract ideas are in themselves individual, and however they may become general in their representation. This has two objections. The first is that this is only applied to things and not words. Calling a cat a cat is no more specific because the word cat could essentially mean anything. The second problem is that Hume doesn’t take into account vagueness. Hume stated that “the mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.” However this is not applicable to the real world. Again, the example given in Russell is that if you saw a man who’s 6ft 1, you’ll retain an image or idea of him, but it’d probably fit a man who is a couple of inches shorter. Here his exactness is his downfall.

                Hume believed that there was no idea of self, because whenever you thought of yourself, you inevitably drew upon other perceptions, by which you judge yourself. There is the problem of whether the self exists because of this. However, we can say that unperceived things can always be defined by referencing perceived things and occurrences. We cannot know whether there is a simple self, and can assume that if there is such a thing it cannot enter into our knowledge.

Hume also focuses on probability, this is different from the probability of mathematics but instead focuses on uncertain knowledge, for example all knowledge as concerned with the future. Hume begins his justification by establishing seven kinds of philosophical relation: resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety and causation. He then divides these into those that depend on the ideas and those that can be changed without any change in the idea. Only relations that depend on the idea can give us certain knowledge, everything else is only probable. Here rise Hume’s theories about causation. Basically he is saying that causation cannot exist, just because we see something happen does not mean that, by this happening, something else is made to happen. There’s the example of the billiard balls, but essentially, we cannot prove that because the ball struck another ball this caused the movement, we can simply say that the two will be forever linked. 

There was some stuff about Addison but it's basically the same as what's in my lecture notes. Enjoy!

History of Western Philosophy week 9

James Addison was an essayist, who wrote for the spectator magazine. This is far different from the spectator magazine today and Addison wrote about fashion, travel and life in general in the era. He was one of the first real journalists, what he wrote was a mixture of fact and fiction about special events at the time. He would attend functions and just observe the people there, describing them in his very objective style, which gave no emotional depth to those described. Addison wrote in the Restoration, the period of British history just after the English civil war and, along with Locke and Steele, became the iconic writers of the period.

                The restoration is marked by toleration, compromise and politeness. This was shown by Addison with his description of the laboured methods of greeting and so forth. Addison also created Sir Andrew Freedport, who was the embodiment of people at the time, and a tool with which he could poke fun at society which he did in his usual dry, witty tone. He described people as only being motivated by pleasure and pain. The greatest value or aim in Addison’s world is pleasure, in every aspect of life. This was most likely a deliberate response to move away from the chaos and terror of the civil war.

                The economy of Europe that fuelled the gentlemanly exterior was funded by much darker means. The conquest of the Americas provided gold and slavery, as well as far increased trade. This market was originally dominated by the Spanish, which meant that the Spanish monarchic, catholic state went from strength to strength. Conversely, Holland becomes a protestant, free thinking republic and therefore a safe haven for intellectuals, where anything could be published. By 1680 70% of all books in the world were being published in Holland. Due to technological advances which made them an impressive military power, Holland waged war on Spain, all the time allied with England. English privateers, who were basically pirates, refused to sail under the Union Jack and therefore chose to fly the skull and crossed bones.  With their far more advanced ships, Holland and Britain brought down the Spanish empire and gained control over the Atlantic, which of course meant that far more trade would come and along with it ridiculous wealth. This newfound wealth actually formed the base from which the industrial revolution in England would spring.

                Adam smith asked himself why one country is wealthier than another. Previously religion had provided the answer for this, people believing that one country was more in Gods favour than another and would therefore prosper. Smith tried to liberate people from this supernatural reasoning and said that it was due to the level of economic freedom that a country has. He said that wherever you find a state controlled system, as Spain was at the time, the people will end up ruined. This is because the state will control every feature of production and demand a cut, leaving the people with nothing. Wherever you find a system with less state involvement, where people are free to be entrepreneurs then they will end up being wealthier.  He brought about the idea of “The hidden hand of the market” where people stick to what they’re good at and trade off with people who are good at other things to end up with the best result possible.

                David Hume believes that the mind synthesises ideas from various other senses and predetermined sensations, which is called synthetic reasoning. Humans have a pre-disposition to synthesise; your mind is a machine that synthesises complex abstract ideas from simple sense sensations. Causation is the problem with reasoning. The mind tricks you into believing that one event leads to another. Place a cannon ball on a cushion, when you remove the cannon ball there will be an imprint on the cushion. Hume argues that these are completely unrelated. Similarly, when pool balls are struck, the fact that when the white ball hits a red ball the red ball moves, doesn’t mean that it moves because of the white ball. You have not seen the cause of the movement; you’ve only seen the constant conjunctions. He believed that there was no guarantee that if you did it again, the same result would be achieved, just because the sun rose this morning doesn’t mean that it’ll rise tomorrow. This is well described in a quote “You cannot derive an ought from an is”, meaning that because something has happened before, there is no reasoning that it’ll happen again. The reasoning that because something has happened, it should happen again is called inductive reasoning and all science is based upon it. Based upon an inductive reasoning by seeing what happens and translating what will happen into other circumstances. Assuming that the world will still be there, even when you cannot see it is inductive reasoning with a degree of probability. With this vein of thought, nothing can be known for certain, many things however are known through inductive reasoning, with a backing of statistical probability.

Law lecture week 8, Freedom of information.

Freedom of information is the law that’s on the side of the journalist, press officers however, are not. Press officers act like human sandbags, their job is to control how much information is divulged to the journalists. Chris’s law is that the more press officers something has the worse it is. Freedom of information however allows us to get round this; there are over a hundred thousand different organisations which are bound by law to divulge information under the freedom of information act. Most will have a freedom of information page on their website where they document the kind of things that they disclose, this is known as the Schedule. The company must then divulge the information requested under the freedom of information act within 20 days. Defence matters are of course exempt from the freedom of information act for obvious reasons, by divulging the location of British troops for example, could cause serious loss of life or at the very least a threat to said troops. This is one of the main defences that companies use to avoid divulging information, they can say that it’s exempt, or that it is too expensive to gather. You can however appeal again for the information but if the information is very sensitive it’ll be fairly hard to gather. This is a good reason to keep appeals to the simplest phrasing, don’t go for over complicated requests. Similarly you shouldn’t investigate anything personal, for example, you cannot request knowing how many people earn more money than you where you work, then publish it. This would leave you wide open to malice.

                Examples of things uncovered using the freedom of information act include that the London authority paid out £50,000 to a child who injured himself climbing over the railing to his school. This is despite the fact that he was climbing over to burn down the school, however, since there was no sign indicating that you shouldn’t climb the railings the school was at fault.

telegraph article

The Daily Telegraph has long been known as the “Torygraph” both for its political leanings and readership. I’m not so much trying to prove this point but show how the telegraph engineers its content towards the readership. This is done in many ways, for example, the language used, the content of the articles and the general layout of the paper.

The telegraph appears to have taken it upon itself to be the last bastion of what a traditional newspaper should represent. This is perhaps most clear with its layout; whereas other newspapers have decided to rejuvenate their layout with new letterheads and adopting a more interactive, modern look, the telegraph remains very traditional in appearance. The majority of the front page is text, with only one or two photos. The headlines also tend to be more informative than sensational, there’s none of the outright fear-mongering that there is in the Daily Mail or the Sun. This, along with the fact that it remains most definitely broadsheet, relates to its readership. The majority of Telegraph readers are aged sixty five or over, when this is combined with being in the ABC1 bracket it paints a picture of someone who will appreciate the traditional approach rather than a modern look.

                Since there’s a more upper/upper-middle class audience the telegraph has different content in its articles to other papers, this isn’t always clear in the actual paper but the focus is different. For example, in a recent copy of the paper there was a half-page article on Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Hamlet, as well as an in-depth review later in the paper. This same performance was commented on briefly in papers whose readers were more in the C2 D E bracket, who won’t go to the theatre as much as the telegraphs readers. The telegraph also puts less stock in what’s going on in the entertainment world. There are no big gossip articles about TV stars, the only example I could find was a small article about Adele recovering from throat surgery. Even then, they put a lot of effort into explaining who she was, this is probably because the reader base is older than in other papers, where it would be taken for granted that the reader would know who Adele is.

There was another article in the same paper that really hammered the audience gap home and it was called “Our 4x4s need bigger car park spaces, say commuters”. This clearly illustrates the different target readership of the telegraph, the fact that they believe that enough of their readers will have 4x4s to make the article relevant shows the amount of money that their readership is willing to spend on cars. The adverts that the paper includes also shows how potentially well off the audience is. More often than not the advert on the front page will either be for high end jewellery or for very expensive men’s watches.

I think, therefore I am!!

Western philosophy in the 17th and 18th century was divided between British empiricism and continental nationalism. The Greeks were all about the thinking about how do we know what we know. Plato insisted it is knowledge preserved from a previous life. Locke believed that this knowledge was gained through experience. Empiracists believe the only source of knowledge is your senses, rationalists believe that you know things by figuring things out yourself.
Metaphysics:
Metaphysics believe that matter would still exist even if there is nothing there to percieve it, this brings about the classic scenario of "If a tree falls in the forrest and there's noone there to hear it, would it make a sound?". In my opinion it will, because there will never be absolutely nothing there to hear the falling tree. Idealism is the opposite, they believe that when objects are not being percieved they cease to exist, they also deny the existence of matter, and believe that everything is ideas.
"What I am aware of when i look at a chair is not the chair but how the table looks to me - it is the effect it produces in my mind when i look at it" - Berkely.
Rene Descartes:
Descartes opposed Aristotelianism and the traditional university education that was available at the time. He fought in many wars hoping that the action would give him insight, however, when this failed he embarked on a search for true knowledge. He did this by picturing a table in his mind, of which he cleared any ideas that he had in his mind and put back only those things which he knew to be absolutely true. The only rule that he believed worthy of the table were the rules of geometry becaue he believed that these would always be true, no matter what, even if there is noone there to percieve it. This led to the creation of the Cogito, which is "I think therefore I am", this is because in order to understand geometry he must be able to think. He dismissed any knowledge on the grounds of doubt. For example, you once believed in Santa (sorry those who still believe) and therefore what other crap will you believe? The way Descartes saw it was that you should doubt everything but the existence of God. This is known as the Descartes method. Since your senses are something that can decieve you, you should assume that some of what you can see is worthy of doubt. Cartesian philosophy contains 3 realms, mind/soul, matter and God. The first 2 are created substances while the third is the uncreated substance. Descartes epistemology sets off idealism, the thought of the idea of a perfect creation, but how could he have thought of such a thing? This thought of God proves the presence of God  - and God is perfect, therefore his senses wouldnt mislead him.
The Ontological Argument:
Descartes needed it to prevent the Cogito collapsing into solipismm. Kant says that existence is a neccesary condition for thought, not a result of thought. The problem with the dualist point of view is how the two substances interact. Descartes thought they communicatted at a specific point in the brain, which is rejected by materialists, who see matter as fundamental. Accounting for consciousness is a hard problem with this point of view though - described as the "hard problem"- how does subjective experience (heat, love, hate) arrise from the brain?
This is mainly about Descartes, expect Spinoza and Liebniz soon

Invesgative journalism

There are many examples of popular invesgative journalists today, ranging from Michael Moore to Louis Theroux. In any case the aim of invesgative journalists is to expose what someone, somewhere doesnt want you to publish, because it is in the public interest. However, if you're to be an invesgative journalist you must be carefull to avoid malace in your article. This is most easily done by avoiding investigating anything that you yourself are personally involved in. If you have an interest in a particular organisation or institution and choose to do an expose on them, you could be accused of malice or conflict of interest. There've been many examples of very important invesgative journalism cases broken by newspapers, for example Harry Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, broke the Thalidomide case. Nowadays however, most invesgative journalism is about financial issues, but this is probably due to the many many many financial issues in the world today. Invesgative journalism, especially at Winchester, also focuses on miscarriages of justice, and drawing the attention of society to these. In this instance journalists act as the last hope of the innocent, insofar as if the justice system is corrupt and an innocent person is jailed, they can write to journalists for help. When this happens, the journalist will review the case and send evidence of innocente to the Criminal Case Review Commision (CCRC), which was set up to investigate alleged cases of miscariages of justice. This doesnt necessarily ensure that justice will be done unfortunately. In the most part the case will be kicked back to you. The saddest fact is that the people who maintain their innocence will never be released, because since they say they're innocent, they will not be seen as rehabilitated. 

second WINOL review

Round two of the WINOL review process, my standing apology is still in effect to all older students. I'm sure my own efforts will be of the same level. I'd also like to repeat the statement that overall I thought it was good, better than last weeks, but with a few points. First thing I'll pick up on is describing the MP as a rebel, even though he states himself that he doesn't think of himself as a rebel... We had a discussion about whether or not this was libelous and I'm still undecided on that but personally, if he clearly and openly states that he doesnt think of himself as a rebel, I wouldn't label him such, but I'm probably wrong. There's also the fact that he libelled Ed Milliband, but who hasnt. Plus I thought he was grandstanding a bit but that's more his fault rather than the makers. This was the only real complaint that I have against it, the rest of the report was good, I was particularly impressed by how professional the piece about lasers sounded. That and the fact that I was wearing the same shirt as the sports guy.

Law lecture - copyright

Any work that you do belongs to you, for example, any article that you write belongs to you, you allow people to use it, usually in return for money. This is a mightily interesting concept. you can sell a copyright entirely, which is called a buy out, but if you sell it on you give up any rights to the material. This means that if you sell the entire copyright to an article the paper must only pay you once, but they can go on to use the article as many times as they want. The wierd bit is that this is applicable to buildings and such, though in the case of buildings it's usually a total buy out. There are ways round copyright though, this is known as FAIR DEALING/LIFTING. This revolves around a few key concepts, for example, there are no copyrights in the facts of news. Though the actual words may be copyrighted, the facts that formed them are free for everyone, you cannot copyright an idea. You can also get round copyright if you're doing it for the purposes of comment, criticism or review. This obviously effects book/film reviewing, where you can show a few seconds of the film that you're reviewing without being sued for breach of copyright. You cannot however pass this off as your own material though and the commercial availablity of the material must also be stated, for example say that the film is widely accessable or something. This is also the case with news footage, however you must talk over the footage, and credit the party that owns said footage. If all of these bases are covered than you cannot be sued because you've obeyed the rules of fair dealing. Copyrights do have an expiration date though, for literature, films and music scores the copyright expires 70 years after the authors death. For sound recordings (not scores) and broadcasts it's 50 years after the year in which the work was first created.

Confidentiality law lecture

There are three main areas of concern with confidentiality; these are stare secrets, commercial secrets and privacy. State secrets are covered by the official secrets act, commercial secrets are protected by common law confidentiality and privacy really accounts for secrets within family life. This also brings section 8 of the human rights act into play; this act entitles privacy of normal family life. An example of where Section 8 has been used is with Princess Caroline. Usually the royal family have no right to privacy, but in this reasoning behind this became fairly complicated. The paparazzi had obtained many photographs of Princess Caroline, who took the paper to court over it saying that they were a breach of her privacy. The paper went with the defence that the royal family had no right to privacy; the judge however ruled that they were in fact breaching section 8 because, in the photos it was clear that the Princess didn’t want her photo being taken. Since she wasn’t on official royal business it was a breach of her right to a normal family life. The official secrets act is mainly to protect the country/government/military/whatever from spying. This encompasses everything from government employees having to sign the official secrets act, which if they break will land them in prison, to the prohibition of taking photos outside military bases. This, along with common law confidentiality, works on the assumption that the government have the right to keep secrets as long as it’s not in the public’s interest not knows them.

                Confidentiality partly depends on the type of secret information at stake, and partly on the expectations of the person imparting the information, that it will be kept secret. A person is in breach of confidence if they pass on information which:
A) Has the necessary quality of confidence
AND
B) Was provided in “circumstances imposing and obligation”
AND
C) There was no permission to pass on the information
AND
D) Detriment is likely to be caused to the person who gave the information.

In order to break confidentiality all of these things must be accounted for, whereas in libel cases you must only tend to defame someone.

WINOL review

There is the overall feel of professionalism which is good, but there are certain aspects that let it down. It feels bad to try and pick negative things out because I know that I’ll be doing the same next year most likely at the same level. The faults I can pick out are just the small things which you would expect from a student-made project, like clunky changes and small editing issues. The main body of WINOL is good though, the material that they are reporting on is interesting and factual. The pieces to camera obviously lack the fluidity of say a BBC report, but it was still good. I especially like the little professional touches that are included, such as in the piece about the rugby club, the displaying of the quote onscreen rather than just reading it out.

                In any case, the general feel and approach was good. I hope that when it’s our turn to do this it’ll be just as good. Since everything is a learning experience I like to think I’ve picked up on some key details which will help with my own reporting to camera, but I guess only time will tell.

radio thing

So after thinking for a while on what should be the subject of my talk/speech/whatever this, I came to the idea of dogs. Probably partly influenced by the fact that I saw many dogs in and around town today and I kinda miss my own dog. In any case, as speaking about dogs as a species would probably be a big subject I’ll limit it to my dog, and her particular breed which is a Staffordshire bull terrier or Staffie. I’ll also probably talk about how Staffie’s have had a lot of bad press recently, mostly undeserved.

                Now I’ll admit that getting Maisie is what changed my mind about the breed. I had the same opinion that they were fighting dogs and were all fairly vicious and scary. This changed however when we visited Birmingham Dog pound looking for a rescue dog. When we set off we didn’t have a breed in mind, we were just looking for some scrappy little mongrel with leg on each corner and a wagging tail, but as soon as we walked through the doors our concept of our future pet became very fluid. The dog pound is huge and honestly what I can most liken it to is a prison. There are three floors and on each floor are many blocks of “cells” so that all in all there are about 300 dogs there… and out of these 300 about 250 of them are Staffie’s. I distinctly remember walking down aisle after aisle of these little cages and thinking “oh a Staffie… oh a Staffie… oh a Staffie…” and so on. Before we got one I remember I thought that Staffordshire bull terriers did indeed look scary, they are immensely powerful dogs with crazy amounts of muscle. The bite strength of a Staffie is 235 pounds of force per square inch, that’s about half as strong as a lion, and when you consider that Maisie is about a foot and a half tall it’s pretty damn impressive. It’s also fairly intimidating, especially when they throw you their delightfully ugly grin which exposes both their numerous and fairly large teeth, and the power-packs of muscle in their cheeks; now, I only see it as endearing. But yes, back to the dog pound. We’d gone through two floors of dogs and the sheer number of animals desperate to be loved is almost completely overwhelming. I noticed that my dad had wandered off so I went looking for him and found him kneeling on the floor on the third floor, in front of literally the last cage in the pound. Inside was a little brindle Staffie, who was so thin that her head looked half comically, half tragically too big for her body. The striking thing however was that she was silent. In a dog pound full of dogs barking their heads off, where they have to have radios on at full volume on each floor so that the dogs aren’t driven insane by the sound of each other, she was completely silent. Of course, as soon as my mum saw her it was inevitable that she was coming home with us and there’s the story of how we got Maisie. As soon as you have one all criticisms that you have of the breed go out of the window, they’re the most loving, loyal and just generally happy type of dog I’ve come across.

                However, other people’s opinions are harder to change, especially other dog owners. I have had people cross over the road so they wouldn’t have to walk their dog past Maisie, a friend of the family has even had someone threaten to stab their Staffie if it does anything to their dog. As this is the case I’m going to take this opportunity to get my soap box out and preach for the smallest of moments. I honestly believe that no dog is inherently vicious, unless it has rabies or something. It is all to do with what the owners make the dogs do. With the case of Staffordshire bull terriers, they’re made to fight by morons who think watching two dogs fight to the death is entertaining. The dogs are not to blame. The dogs are wonderful pets, which desperately need homes. Out of the 250+ Staffies in the dog pound, over half will have had to be put down because there simply isn’t room for them. And I guarantee that most of the empty cells will have been filled up with more Staffordshire bull terriers.