My revision notes

Here are some revision notes that I created as preparation for the HCJ Exam based on the final lecture of the course:

Journalism exam revision

Freud

·        Id, Ego and Superego

·        The id is the basic set of instincts (acts upon pleasure principle to avoid pain)

·        The ego is the rational thought

·        The superego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways

·        Theories of being

Dreams are sources of insight into unconscious desires

·         Freud’s therapy methods- looking into a person’s unconscious

Existentialism

·         Husserl- Consciousness is intentional; and meaning is fixed subjectively

·         Knowing is a structure, with some ideas having more priority than others - depending on intention.

·         Reconsideration of Descartes and dualism

·         “ Cartesian reflections” - I think therefore  I am, better is “there are ideas”

·         Ideas and meaning are a structure of subjective values, of decisions.

·         What then is the source of these decisions - social, interactive, convenient, “close to hand” (ie habit of mind - life for a social being is essentially “inauthentic” (authentic - to be the author of one’s own fate).

·         The abandonment of the self-possessed individual - a bedrock idea of the enlightenment AND romanticism

·         Sartre “hell is other people”

·         Heidegger- “the structure of being”  - three fold structure

·         Idea of time

·         1.The past = guilt

·         2.The future = unknown

·         3.The present = dread

·         Existence is “Dasein” - a way of being, a structure of choices (even at the level of the phenomenology of perception).

·         It’s not what you do, it's the way that you do it; it’s not what you say it's the way that you say it -that’s what really counts.

Economics

·         Classic economics- Adam Smith “hidden hand of the market”

Free trade - The Wealth of Nations- markets stabilise themselves through free trade across the world

·         John Keynes- devalue the currency and issue money - this will bring unemployed resources back in to play, companies and consumers will have money in their pockets so people can be employed.

·         How achieved - government spending (issuing bonds);

Taxation only/ mostly to manage demand - to cut off inflationary expenditure (eg on luxury goods). Taxation NOT to raise money; but to

·         1.   Fine tune the money in pockets of particular groups of people so have high marginal income tax for rich people and give it to the poor.

2.      Manipulate behaviour (e.g. health and housing policy).

Hannah Arendt

·        Theories of totalitarianism

·         Everything is possible so people strive to seek as much power as they can as it is unlimited, however this power comes at a huge price as humanity will be destroyed

·         Terror is the most important method as it prevents the masses from rebelling against the government and you are punished for wrong thoughts or appearance. (for example target of the Jews and the master race of blonde hair blue eyed people during the Nazi regime). The combination of terror and ideology breaks down society as there are no laws or authority and people lose their human rights.

·         Hobbes who believed that society will always need a ruler to maintain law and order but consequently humans lose their human rights. People lose their individuality through Ideology but this must be embraced and celebrated and it is the masses who will fuel this ideology as they are weak and vulnerable.

Karl Marx and Communism

·         Thesis- Bourgeoisie

·         Antithesis- Proletariat

·         Synthesis- Socialism

·         Capitalism will try to survive by investing money in better technology and exportation but this will create unrest amongst the proletariat

·         Fall of capitalism and rise of proletariat is inevitable as proletariat will revolt against bourgeoisie

·         People would work together for the greater good of the state and government would wither away

·         Man is the productive animal and has the ability to shape society to benefit everyone and

·         History is written by the winner

·         People are like the Zeitgeist and they are the ones who will spark a revolution

Hegel

·         Subject of history is spirit and through time the spirit is seeking self-understanding

·         History ends when the spirit achieves full knowledge to become absolute

·         History is the failing of mankind to reach the Garden of Eden as paradise existed before the fall of man

·        Thesis- proposition

·        Antithesis- counter propositions and contradictions

·        Synthesis- combination or refuting of a proposition

·         Marx attacked Hegel’s idealism stating that the real dialectic was between man and the class struggle and the proletariat have nothing to lose but everything to gain

Rousseau

·         Rousseau believed in the beauty and innocence of nature

·         “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains”

·         Must return to primitive man as civilisation has corrupted us as individuals

·         However, in the Social Contract he admits there is no way back to primitive man as there are laws of society that control humans

·         His General Will outlined how mankind should create its own laws which it abides by. It would be governed by direct democracy with no governmental representation

·         The poor are the souls of the Earth as they fight

·         However this can be interpreted as an early form of dictatorship as anyone who refuses to obey the laws will be forced to be free.

John Locke

·         If you educate people properly then they will become rational and responsible members of society as they have the knowledge to understand how to behave.

·         People are born as a tableau baisse (clean table) and have no knowledge when they are born

 

Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)

·         Treat humans as ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. Men should be counted as equal when determining actions that affects the masses in society. This is a moral base for democracy.

·         Things exist in relativity to time and space and cannot exist outside our own perception

·         Your mind is the universe as it contains everything you know from perception

·         Time will stop when the Zeitgeist realises itself and has a revolution

·         Analytic statements= statements that have the subject in the sentence (an oak tree is a tree)

·         Synthetic statements= statements that have had words added to the sentence ( the oak tree is a beautiful tree)

·         A priori statements =  something that is understood without reference to anything else

·         Synthetic a priori statements=  a priori statements that have been developed to include extra knowledge that have no reference to the world ( there are other world that exist outside this universe) we exist in a world of some form but we do not know for sure if there is more than one universe

Descartes

·         “I think, therefore I am”. Mankind is only aware of his existence as he is able to perform basic functions such as thought and speech, he does not have to check.

Hume

·         We take in knowledge by what we can see, smell and hear around us (impressions)

·         We combine impressions to create ideas and this is known as the process of thought

·         Essay concerning Human Understanding- we construct complex data such as an angel from simple ideas such as a woman with wings

Hobbes

·         We get knowledge from our five senses and we seek pleasure to avoid the feeling of pain

·         For example, we see an object such as a chair but because we see a multitude of objects that look similar to the original object we can identify the object as a chair

·         We avoid pain as much as possible so we do things that give us the greatest amount of pleasure to block out the feeling of pain

Wittgenstein

·         “The Tractatus”, seven chapters

·         the world that we believe to be reality is made up of facts not material objects

·         language has rules which determine whether a statement is true or false

·         The world is all we know to exist

Russell

·         Zero can be regarded as a natural number

·         He argued that mathematics was a form of language and each number had its own individual class

·         The number 5 is a word to describe a class that contains all classes that have 5 objects and we know this through the method of counting. Counting creates a group or category that can be described using natural numbers such as 4 or 7.

·         Natural number + process (known as a syntax)= predicate (outcome which can be a larger or smaller number depending on the process)

·         Aristotle argued that it was not possible to have the number zero as the definition of zero was that zero was nothing, for example if there are no apples on a table you say "there were no apples on the table". But the number zero was something otherwise it cannot mean nothing. A number cannot be nothing and also something, therefore zero does not exist