scaling arguments
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The discussion of Plato's Phaedo continues, presenting more arguments for the existence and immortality of the soul. One such argument is "the argument from the nature of the forms," which states that because the forms are non-physical objects and cannot be grasped by something physical like the body, it follows that they must be grasped by the soul which must be non-physical as well. This argument is followed by the "argument from recycli...more
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The lecture focuses exclusively on one argument for the immortality of the soul from Plato's Phaedo, namely, "the argument from simplicity." Plato suggests that in order for something to be destroyed, it must have parts, that is, it must be possible to "take it apart." Arguing that the soul is simple, that it does not have parts, Plato believes that it would logically follow that the soul is indestructible.
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The lecture begins with a continued discussion of the Cartesian argument and its weaknesses. The lecture then turns to Plato's metaphysical views in the context of his work, Phaedo. The key point in the discussion is the idea that in addition to the ordinary empirical world that we are familiar with, we posit the existence of a second realm in which the Platonic forms exist. These forms are the abstract properties that we attribute to phys...more
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This lecture introduces students to the study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective, the idea that like the body, natural selection has shaped the development of the human mind. Prominent arguments for and against the theory of natural selection and its relationship to human psychology are reviewed. Students will hear several examples of how studying mental phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective can help constrain theories in...more
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In this introductory lecture, Professor Lewin discuses basic units, dimensions, measurements and associated uncertainties, dimensional analysis, and scaling arguments. Further, he explains why a measurement is meaningless without knowledge of its uncertainty, using data collected by Galileo Galilei as an example. He begins to dive into dimensional analysis, reasoning that the time from an object to fall from a certain height is independen...more
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After a brief introduction to Plato's Phaedo, more arguments are offered in this lecture in defense of the existence of an immaterial soul. The emphasis here is on the fact that we need to believe in the existence of a soul in order to explain the claim that we possess free will. This is an argument dualists use as an objection to the physicalists: since no merely physical entity could have free will, there must be more to us than just bei...more
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Professor Kagan elaborates on the "argument from simplicity" and discusses in detail Plato's claims that the soul is simple, changeless and therefore indestructible. The final Platonic argument under discussion is the "argument from essential properties" in which the essential properties of the soul are addressed. At the end of the lecture the question of whether one needs to argue for physicalism is posed.
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The lecture focuses on arguments that might be offered as proof for the existence of the soul. The first series of arguments discussed is those known as "inferences to the best explanation." That is, we posit the existence of things we cannot see so as to explain something else that is generally agreed to take place.
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Professor Kagan puts forward the claim that Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilych is quite the typical man in terms of his views on mortality. All of his life he has known that death is imminent but has never really believed it. When he suddenly falls ill and is about to die, the fact of his mortality shocks him. In trying to further access how people think about death, Professor Kagan explores the claim that "we all die alone," presents a variet...more
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Scheme Memory Model - How Scheme Instructions Synthesize Linked Lists Behind the Scenes and Perform Operations on Them, Two Different Ways of Laying Out A List In Memory, One With Memory Aliasing and One Without, The Scheme Equivalent of "..." (Functions With Multiple Arguments), Writing A Generic Map Function, Modifying the Unary-Map Function to Handle Multiple Arguments By Adding A . to the List of Arguments, Extending Unary-Map to An N-...more
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This lecture reviews selected topics previously covered in lectures 1 through 5. This includes: scaling arguments, dot products, cross products, one-dimensional kinematics, trajectories, and uniform circular motion. Professor Lewin concludes by presenting a brain teaser to the audience. Sliding his fingers underneath a yardstick, towards the center, something strange happens: the fingers seem to make turns moving, they alternating slidi...more
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