Asif wrote:The point is classes suppress and reject free philosophical thought.....
This strange idea that simply learning about a subject, to build on what some other people have thought about it in the past so as not to "re-invent the wheel" or repeat the mistakes of the past, in itself, constitutes being indoctrinated by some kind of dogma is a pretty common theme that's been expressed by several posters here in the past.Terrapin Station wrote:Oy vey. You're the one who doesn't get it. There are limitations to anything for it to be considered that thing. That doesn't imply a lack of freedom within the boundaries of what it is to be doing the thing in question. It's not the case that just anything you might propose would count as doing a particular thing.
It's the "don't fence me in with your rules, daddio" attitude that we often have when we're young. I remember it myself. I remember writing an English literature essay in school that scored an F and the acerbic comment "barely a reference to the text throughout". It hadn't occurred to me that in order to say something meaningful about Jude The Obscure you have to actually read it. I thought my vast 17 year old life experience would do just as well. I remember studying philosophy in school and, since I wasn't inspired by the subject being learned, decided to write an essay on a completely different one, about which I'd learnt nothing, but about which I was sure I could say lots of insightful things that nobody had ever thought of before.
When we're young we're often convinced that every idea and thought we have was discovered uniquely by us for the first time, and we have nothing to learn from those crusty old dead dudes. My favourite quote on that theme is the old one from Mark Twain:
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."