Theme 1: post-reflection

I have been very much impressed by the writings of other course participants following our previous week of reading; while I haven't read every single post, the once I have read did put forth some very interesting and different views on the material.

Myself, I thought The Problems of Philosophy was a pleasure to read. Compared to other texts in the field, Russel uses a straightforward and concise language, chooses his examples carefully and goes in-depth without getting too verbose. I was happy to get this chance for repetition, since some of the ideas were ones I encountered earlier during the semester while taking a course in epistemology and philosophy of science at Stockholm University.

That said, I feel like we the balance between how much we were tasked with reading and how much time was set of for reflection and discussion was way off, especially since the lecture and seminar was cancelled. I think reading a book like this, writing a brief reflection on it, even having the seminar and lecture we didn't get a chance to have, it just rushing it too much. I would rather have seen an assignment of reading just a couple of chapters and discussing them properly and in depth, alternatively reading a lengthier summary of the work and discussing that. The discussion, otherwise, is doomed to get skewed and not be particularly fruitful because everyone has focused on different things that felt more or less accessible to them.

Let me try on a thought: I feel like the way this course is planned very similarly to many other courses on KTH, specifically engineering-courses. To go over a lot of material in a brief period of time and then show, in some way or another, that you get the big picture (or at least parts of it). I can see the merit of this approach when it comes to the engineering disciplines – in those fields it's a great thing to have a superficial knowledge of a lot of different concepts, because when you find yourself in front of a problem, you may not know the solution, but know where to look for it.

In the case of philosophy on the other hand, I don't feel like you gain much at all from this sort of cursory introduction other than the awareness that questions like this have been discussed and familiarity with some of the terminology. The points that Russel, and other philosophers are trying to make (I'm getting bold here) are oftentimes sublime and not easily grasped by just reading through a text a single time. However, it is easy to feel like you got the point, at least that is my experience with it, having realized at later points how my initial interpretation of certain philosophical texts was completely off the mark.

I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to walk away from a book like this (and the Theaetetus dialogue for that matter) with a feeling of having gained insight, when you haven't been given the time to discuss and reflect properly. (With the obvious exception of it leading to the inspiration to pursue it further outside of school.) Tying this try-on-thought together with Russel's discussion of the value of philosophy, I think my point is that by reading a lot of material in a short time like this, not dedicating any serious time for discussion is actually diminishing the subject and not thinking about the way philosophical ideas are utilized, when the have value, versus how we use the knowledge that we get from engineering-courses.

I think that concludes my thought-attempt. I kind of like it, but then, I haven't reflected on it more that just briefly. I hope you'll tell me in which ways you think I'm wrong.