Monthly Archives: January 2009

Learn Japanese with the Gakuranman

Published January 30, 2009
Introducing…Me! Michael as the Gakuranman. This is my new teaching persona for the Live Video Learning platform eduFire.com. I have registered on eduFire to start offering beginner and intermediate classes in Japanese! If you’ve ever wanted to dip your feet into the language pool and try some, here is your chance!
Posted in Other | 6 Comments

Moral Naturalism

Published January 20, 2009
Moral Naturalism – The target of the Open Question Argument – seeks to identify moral properties with natural (worldly) properties. It falls under the Realist camp and is Cognitivist, so it says that our express independently existing moral facts objective of our opinions. Contrast this to the Expressivists we have just looked at who say […]
Posted in Philosophy | 2 Comments

Expressivism

Published January 19, 2009
Onto Expressivism (which comes under the Non-cognitivist camp). Here, philosophers are concerned with value. They don’t think that our moral judgments are statements of belief. No. Nor do they think they our moral judgements are truth-apt. There are no moral ‘facts’, according to them. All we can do is either approve or condemn some action.
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Moral Internalism vs. Moral Externalism

Published January 17, 2009
Before jumping into the Expressivist pool, we need somebackground on the debate surrounding Moral Judgement Internalism and Moral Judgement Externalism. Here it is. Do you think that we are necesarily motivated to perform actions or that our motivations lie contingently out in the world? How to best understand our moral convictions?
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Open Question Argument

Published January 15, 2009
Alrighty then. Time for metaethical mayhem! G.E.Moore’s Open Question Argument (the OQA, also known as the Naturalistic Fallacy) is famous and widely considered to be the foundation of Metaethics. Moore was a British philosopher who outlined his theory in Principia Ethica. The fundamental question: What is ‘good’? Let’s dive right in with the Philosophy revision! […]
Posted in Philosophy | 16 Comments

Textbook Reformations

Published January 14, 2009
So, as a note-taking session for my exam (today!), I decided to very briefly summarise the positions of major political parties concerned with the textbook revisions in Japan. I’m looking at things from an academic perspective to help clarify where the parties stand, so it is not meant to be uncontroversial.
Posted in Japan | 11 Comments

How to make people Angry

Published January 9, 2009
Professor Himonya (碑文谷潤教授), the ‘rude dude’, ‘zoomjap’ or ‘card crusher’. He’s perhaps best known in the English-speaking internet world as these things due to his hilarious DVD series entitled ‘How to make people angry’ and his bizarre facial expressions.
Posted in Japan | 30 Comments

Procrastination

Published January 6, 2009
Happy Belated New Year! My computer has been down (yet again), this time due to a graphics card failure. Having just got it back up, I found this great article linked by TameGoesWild: Procrastination. It talks about good and bad types of procrastination, so you can avoid feeling guilty on those days when Twitter or […]
Posted in Other | 8 Comments