THEME 1: After-reflection

Before I begun reading the book that we were supposed to read for the first theme of the course I had a very vague picture of what philosophy is about. I found the book The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell a bit hard to understand sometime because of the complicated ideas that were presented; I felt that I missed basic knowledge about the topic that could have eased my reading.I had never read something similar before, I am only used to read romans and scientific literature so this was something completely new. I encountered a lot of problems while reading the text because of lacking knowledge of how to read texts like this one. But after a while I understood that it takes a completely different way of reading and much more reflecting over the meaning of paragraphs then try to understand every word or the purpose with it. Eventually after a long time of reading I got a bit clearer picture of the philosophy and Russell’s critic against it, and which also helped me to realize some of the problems with it.

The most interesting insight from the reading, according to me, was about the definition of knowledge. It is defined as a true belief, which sound clear and easy but after reflecting over it more and reading about it in the book it feels a bit confusing. Because there are also things that are based on a false belief and still considered as knowledge and this makes me think: what is knowledge? What do we know for sure?

Another way the problems with philosophy and in particular how we experiences things differently are illustrated by reading the other students’ blogs. Even though everyone read the same book and tried to answer the same questions the answers were completely different. That is explained by our perception and also sensation, how we experiences things, even if it comes down to such a basic thing as reading a book.

I think it is regrettable that the lecture and seminary that we were supposed to have this week with Leif Dahlberg were cancelled, because I think this is a topic that needs to be discussed. It would have been interesting to hear more of the other students’ thoughts about what we have read and their interpretations, even though everyone has written a blog post about it. Almost no one had written about how they experienced the texts or their own thoughts, therefore I didn’t find the others texts to interesting to read. I hope everyone gets a bit more personally and reflecting about the theme next time, including me!