"All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal"

My title brings up an interesting point, not just a point, but a debate. Who agrees with this logic? Realists? Philosophers? If I had my say, I'd agree with the syllogistic logic that is shown. It makes sense, but there is room for argument because Jesus was a man, however he was reborn or brought back to life, so there is room for arguments on the counts that despite being a man, being immortal can be present.

I'm not going to lie, philosophy isn't my strong point but it has to be done. I was intrigued by Raphael's painting that Brian put up during the lecture, it wasn't just a symbol of philosophy and wisdom, but one of knowledge, something which immediately caught my attention. The two men in the middle are Plato and Aristotle, arguably two of the great legends of ancient philosophy. Exactly, they are now only legends. Possibly forgotten. Many theories have since been released which rejects their views, mainly the physics of Aristotle. It begs the question whether modernisation can take place on any form of knowledge whether it be football to in this philiosophy. Galileo for example was a scientist on the dynamics of moving objects, and Betrand Russell sees him a key person in the shift from middle age philosophy to what we call today modern science. It was Galileo who developed the telescope and it observed many things, including mountains on the moon (something which has rejected the physics of Aristotle).

One key interest during the lecture was the information on Descartes, or as I like to call him, "Des-cart-tees", a man who is widely regarded as "El Padre" of modern philosophy (pardon my Spanish). He was a mathematician of 'realism' and 'idealism' and claimed that mathematical problems only existed in the mind. Arguable, however he raises a valid point. What if the very world we live in is just a problematic issue of maths and the unknown? Who's to say that what we believe is false, and what is real is nothing but a mathematical problem? Descartes did this. He separated 'thought' and 'matter', matter exists whereas thought is some form of belief or the beginning of matter. Either way, Descartes completely abolishes the works of Aristotle, along with Galileo, Newton and Francis Bacon. Descartes used doubt to create the problem that what he believed to be true was in fact a lie. He used only facts as truths and didn't allow for thinking to cloud the realities.

It came to me at the end of the lecture, and something I asked myself later that night. As a society, do we react to daily life from our thoughts, or do we use truths to live in a Utopia?