More assignments for team IPO 2011

Frame the argument of the author of the quote and your counter argument to it.

1. The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience. It is viciously wrong to take the money of rational men for the support of B.F. Skinner—or vice versa. The Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man’s beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.
   “The Establishing of an Establishment," Philosophy: Who Needs It, 168
2. In the whirling Heraclitean flux which is the pragmatist’s universe, there are no absolutes. There are no facts, no fixed laws of logic, no certainty, no objectivity.
   There are no facts, only provisional “hypotheses” which for the moment facilitate human action. There are no fixed laws of logic, only mutable “conventions,” without any basis in reality. (Aristotle’s logic, Dewey remarks, worked so well for earlier cultures that it is now overdue for a replacement.) There is no certainty—the very quest for it, says Dewey, is a fundamental aberration, a “perversion.” There is no objectivity—the object is created by the thought and action of the subject.
   Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 126
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Essay assignment for Team 2011

1. History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them. - B. R. Ambedkar
2. “Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.” - Henry Louis Mencken

An assignment in Metaphysics

Hello there!
Time to start seriously preparing for the IPO 2011 to be held in May in Vienna. Students who are present for the discussions we have at Abhinav Vidyalay & Jr. College, Dombivli, have just had an overview of metaphysics from some very basic web pages like http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/ (Objectivism) or Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia to begin with. Metaphysics attempts to define (ontology) the world we live in - physical and mental, as also to address the fundamental questions concerned with existence, consciousness, mind, perception, etc.
The purpose of these discussions is not to train the students to do serious metaphysics, but only to make them aware o fthe various issues that it studies and hence to make an educated opinion about an issue when attempting to write an essay. Of course the olympians will need to go further and also learn about the various thoughts presented by various philosophers on the issue and try to frame their opinion in the context of these thoughts.
So here is an essay assignment:
"Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure." - Scott Adams