Theme 1: Theory of knowledge and theory of science - Reflection

The first theme of the course threw me right into the web of philosophy and I have to admit that the texts, especially Kant's preface, were difficult to read and understand fully. Plato's text was more understandable as it was made up of a dialogue between people which I find easier to understand than long texts with less context.

I was given two questions that related to the texts and these questions helped me to understand more what I was reading. I feel like they gave me guidance and after I finished my first blog post I thought I had a fair understanding of the subject. However the lecture given later on proved otherwise. Lecturer Johan Eriksson gave an introduction to the subject before starting to analyze the texts by Kant and Plato. He talked about analytic (a priori) and synthetic judgements and then continued to discuss the possibility of a combination of the two opposites. I am still not sure if there is such a thing that represents synthetic a priori knowledge, but Kant tried to ponder about this by using Copernicus as an example, as I mentioned briefly in my previous post for this theme. In order to understand this we must free our minds from what is considered the truth.

During the seminar Eriksson did most of the talking and only a few of us students even participated at all in the discussions. I think that the way the seminar was setup didn't invite to a lot of discussion and the seminar leader seemed happy to further explain the concepts and the thoughts of the philosophers but I feel that he should have pushed us into talking, or at least asking questions, a bit more. However I do think that it is a bit disrespectful to not say one word during the whole seminar, because even if you don't understand much of the subject there is an excellent guide with us that can help explaining any issues. We are, after all, here to learn.