Theme 1 - reflections

In this blog post I am supposed to post my reflections on theme 1. We have had two seminars and one lecture.

I have learned about the term Impact Factor, and I can see now why this can be useful in the future to find relevant journals with relevant papers. I have learned that there are a lot of different journals out there, and most of them have an impact factor of 1 or above.

We had a lecture by Leif which was supposed to be a kind of crash course in philosophy. I don’t really know if I know more now or before the lecture. The lecture started with the question “what is knowledge?”. Leif brought up the term “justification” and “justified true belief”. I have studied some logic, but this kind of made me more confused. It might have to do with that the lecture was held at three in the afternoon and I was tired. I think it will be a good idea for me to look at the lecture slides again.

We read the book The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel. It was interesting but a but hard to read for me as an engineering student I think. It is impressive that it was written 100 years ago. On Wednesday's seminar we discussed the book. Leif started by talking a bit about the book and about Bertrand. He mentioned a scene from Monty Python where philosophers are playing football. He said something like “to make philosophers try to learn playing football is as hard as to make engineers try to learn philosophy”. I agree to that in a way.