Humans are particular in universal. This is the line that puts me into question as I review my notes. Before talking about that line, I would like to first talk about the background when Dr. Garcia said that line. For Plato, teaching is making the students recall what the students forgot. That means students know the knowledge all along. For Socrates, it is through encountering with others that teach students new things. That means students do not know all the knowledge. At this point, Dr. Garcia then said that humans are particular in universal.
While the line is putting me into question, I suddenly think of how science and technology has changed philosophy. Whether true or not, some of my professors say that the general trend of people is to decline the importance of history. One professor even said that people seems to have “national amnesia” on history. Now, let me relate this phenomenon to the line, “Humans are particular in universal.” That line connotes that humans do not know all the knowledge. Humans have limited learning and knowledge capacity. While science becomes broader and broader and technology becomes more and more advance, people then need to devote more and more time on science and technology to cope up with the changing times. This may have shaped some people to have the popular philosophy that history is of no use and past is past. Is this phenomenon inevitable then?
Levinas’ way of looking at time also puts me into question as I review my notes. For Levinas, time is an instant. The past is renewed at every instant. Every instant is new. Future is a surprise, because future is beyond our grasp. Future is also redemption and is full of hope. The best is yet to come. Based on Levinas’ way looking at time, it seems that there is also a sense of declining the importance of history. Has popular philosophy (that history is of no use and past is past) infiltrated formal philosophy?
On the other hand, philosophy is also changing science and technology. For instance, formal philosophy teaches us that we have to make quality and honest products and sell it at reasonable price, because this is responsibility for the others. In the end, that means there is an unbreakable cycle of action and reaction between philosophy and science and technology.
I remember one of our lessons in Th131 that the human person is a historical being because he is a continuum of past, present and future. Although, the person is only living at the present, the past and the future can still affect him. For example, in the future, he wants to be a doctor, so in the present, he is taking up medicine. On the other hand, if in the past, he made a mistake, then he can correct this to become a better future both now and in the future. In this sense, I think that history is very much important because we can learn much from it. We can avoid the mistakes from the past and also improve on the things that happened in the past. And it is saddening and at the same time disturbing that as you have said, history is being forgotten nowadays.
ReplyDelete-Russell Virata
Ph102C