Philosophy Under Analysis: The Statistics

The following is a guest post from the graduate student Efron Prague.

I wanted to know about the composition of philosophy, and the ideas that underly it. In order to get a better grasp on philosophy, we need to learn how to correlate different values, analyze patterns that come up, deal conceptually with a wide range of data, and work on our way of thinking about the world. But we need to look at the numbers.

I talked to a number of students and experts and made a weighted influence function, performed a GRE regression analysis on the data, and fed it through a cross-point algorithm. The results were as follows:

REM  GRE    True    False

23         96       False   False
20        44       True       True
005     39          False True
294    200       True     False

Here's a visualisation of this combined with some other data gathered during the study:


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Friedrich Nietzscne (1848-1900)

The revaluation of all values. Nietzsche is a philosopher who has made stunning contributions to both literature and philosophy. People the world over have read his work with great interest, and go on discussing it to this day. Nietzsche is particularly clever on aesthetic, social, and moral issues. He is really a brilliant philosopher, despite what many people say. Sometimes people cannot handle his originality, and that he works with a provocative style.

Born in Roecken, the son of a pastor and a beautiful lady, the young Friedrich Nietzsche (known as Fritz to his parents) was a clever child. His father sadly went mad and died, an ominous harbringer of things to come for the young Fritz.

But this child was clever, and he made a group with his friends called 'Germania' where they would debut various choral and orchestral works, poetry and essays. He went to the venerable Schulpforta, where he was given a solid grounding in the classics and achieved a great deal. Upon moving to university, he went through a phase of hanging around with duellers and weird German sort of frat guys, and even got in to a bit of trouble for being under the influence after coming back from drinking beer. Bit he got his act together and had a brilliant academic career. He also served in the infantry and fell off a horse. He later hugged one late in his active life.

He had many good friends, although he was also deeply into being solitary. He sometimes had poor health. He had Carl von Gersdorff, Paul Ree, Peter Gast, and others close to him.

After becoming a professor at the young age of 24, Nietzsche continued his brilliant scholarly career in Switzerland. While his philosophical work was famously neglected during his active life, he did have a good academic career. Until, that is, he left due to ill health and became a true philosopher.

He wrote amazing books after that, I can't even begin. I have to prepare now for my day tomorrow. I love you, Friedrich Nietzsche.

980 × 490 - australianbanknotes.com.au

980 × 490 - australianbanknotes.com.au

980 × 490 - australianbanknotes.com.au

Poll into the Best Philosophers

Hello. I am interested in doing a poll into who is better out of Aristotle and Plato. Also, any preference between Descartes and Liebniz? Tell us your favourites sin the comments and also feel free to suggest your own questions.

I only have modest goals from this project. By creating the poll (which I hope to do soon, once I work out the technical specifics), I hope to gain a better idea of what the current academic community thinks about this. You might think this tracks the truth, or not, but this is where we're at.

I have another idea for how we could improve philosophy: listen a bit more carefully. Listen to other people's ideas and experiences, and don't just pretend you know all about their ideas and objections to your ideas. Not only will you become a better interlocutor, you may also learn a lot more along the way. I remember an assistant professor of mine was listening to the claims of another person and then this became the basis of a now famous publication. We have to listen to ourselves too. And this brings us back to the first guys to tell us that, the philosophers Plato and Socrates.