First Week, Reflections

Theory

It was a very productive experience to have a chance to reread Russell's book and other philosophers works after a lecture on the subject of knowledge in the philosophical context.

It gave me time to read and think about the Plato's theory of Ideas and Aristotle's theory of Universals, as the only one work I could easily recall in my memory before this week, was Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'. Partly this was the reason to appreciate Bertrand Russell's views, as he mostly agrees with my favourite philosopher' ideas.

It is interesting to see the parallels between the Plato's school with his understanding of the difference between knowledge and true judgement and Russel's main concepts, such as knowledge of things and knowledge of truths,  knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

I tried to get a better understanding of Russel's criticism of such theories as monism and monadism, which are partly based on the idea of universals, while the lecture on Tuesday reminded me of the Descartes' foundationalism, Hume's empiricism and scepticism. Still, I made a mistake trying to separate the ideas of proposition and statement of fact that appeared to be the same thing in Russel's theory, as we learned during the seminar.

It was good to get visual examples and entertaining discussions on Wednesday, talking about the source of sence-data as our cognitive activity, and different kinds of verbal impressions (and list all of them as follows: Questions, Conditions, Propositions, Performances, Believes, Imperatives).

Works of Ayer and Austin, mentioned during the seminar, were unknown to me, so now I am getting familiar with the common language philosophy.

Practice

The search for the journal and the paper was quite exciting and complicated at the same time, as I tried to understand the principle of impact factor.

It shows the relative importance of a journal within its field, and can be calculated as A/B, where A and B are:

A is the number of times the article was cited by indexed journals during the specific period of time;

B is the total number of "citable items" (articles, reviews, etc.) published by that journal during the specific period of time.  

It will help me to find the relevant high quality research material in the future, along with Google Academia and Web of Knowledge databases, and it has already helped us to find really interesting articles on the subject of media and social networks which we are going to discuss further on Blogger.