All my life I have been thinking and generating a lot of conclusions about my surroundings including social, cultural, academic and emotional aspects but I had not been able to clearly question, recognize or distinguish between the premise of such thoughts. Those thoughts forged my actions and these actions, directly or indirectly, drove my social and emotional domains of life. I regret some things which could have been done, things which could have been said and things which could have been taken care of in a better way.
I would have been the same if I had not been introduced to the wonderful world of Philosophy. Many people have no idea what philosophy is all about. As far as I had known, the term philosophy often gave an image of a vague world of subjective opinions. I was not aware of what philosophers did and study upon. Initially, while I was attending the HS 221 — Introduction to Philosophy course at IIT Gandhinagar, I had been quite skeptical about the fact that instead of having a core technical engineering course in our curriculum we were being taught how to think and question the basic principles of life and surroundings.
The course and its learnings came to me as a surprise. Philosophical domains lead me to learn and practice comprehensive thinking and critically analyze situations. The discussion on arguments and its classification opened a whole new area of explanation and justification of situations, conversations and existence of a certain entity. I was able to justify, convince, question and disapprove opinions and decisions. I applied the techniques of Socrates into my daily life such as asking appropriate questions invoked truth and realization out of every human being. Although it was pretty difficult but there was a significant improvement in my behaviour, thoughts and actions.
As the course progressed, the discussion related to God and Perception leads me to conclude that the knowledge of God is a mere perception of beings. We studied various ontological arguments made in this regard by many philosophers. It is a natural instinct to fear the supreme being or admire the qualities a person lacks. Considering this statement, people have created and followed their own God. God can be justified as a form of art. Based on our understanding of God, we perceive them relatively therefore we perceive fictional things in our daily lives similarly. The aspects of Knowledge and Experience were also extensively discussed in reference to various situations. Knowledge plays an important role in exposing us to newer possibilities and conditions but we require experience to support and implement that knowledge. Experience adds and verifies knowledge as only knowledge itself leads to assumptions through which we try to simulate the situations in our minds.
We even discussed that science does not have any experience of how the Universe works. It progresses by making assumptions or theories based on the knowledge and then it uses methods to justify it. Science is a methodology in which we take a leap of induction based on certain data and knowledge sets to get a good justification or reason. We explored a central and ongoing debate in the contemporary philosophy of science: whether or not scientific theories are true. Or better, whether a scientific theory needs to be ‘true’ to be good at all. These theories are not exact conclusions but are might be true cases. The philosophy of science can be applied to the design thinking process. One of the courses running parallelly with HS-221 was Introduction to Design and Innovation. In its final project, we, as a group, had to make a working prototype on a problem statement. So we started off by primary and secondary research and based on that we had to make many design concepts. These concepts can be related as scientific theories and each concept had some flaws and a scope of improvement just like every scientific theory. The final concept is the one accepted after logical and sound arguments. But as a scientific theory, it is not true the concept although it might be one. Here we can easily get a corollary between Design and Science as both are a form of methodology.
Another exciting discussion that took place in the class was on true justified belief knowledge. For knowledge to be knowledge it has to be a truth, justified by a valid reason and you need to have a belief in it. Take an example of the statement that ‘Modi is the PM of India’. It is true that he is the PM, it is justified by journalists, bureaucrats and diplomats and we believe that he can be the PM of our nation on the basis of his work he did in the state of Gujarat. Hence the given statement is a piece of knowledge. This concept of knowledge helped me filter my thoughts and helped me strengthen my opinions over a fact or a statement. I started to question the correctness and validity of each piece of knowledge I received. I was able to form firm arguments to validate my conclusions and true statements. The notion of false knowledge was equally helpful in decision making and finalising a piece of work.
I have dreadful encounters with ethics and morality. I always stumble upon the decisions which requires an ethical or a moral approach. The decisions where every choice is hard to make and there is a loss of an entity, information or a person in every choice. The moral statements such as ‘Don’t do something to a person which you will not do to yourself’ puts one into a tough spot. But through proper, classified and justified argumentations, one can make a choice. Say, the arguments such as Utilitarian — considering the greater good, Deontological — which is run by the rules and situation is judged by the action, Consequential — the situation is judged by consequence no matter what the action was, Capitalism — selfish nature, etc. These arguments reduce the burden to a certain extent and gives various perspectives to an ethical decision.
I would like to conclude by stating that I, as a student, am now able to use philosophical concepts in other courses of study. Learning how to outline arguments from texts in order to question and criticize them is something I can use in the rest of my life to clarify positions. It matters how one perceive and analyze situations subjectively. Also, learning how to write a clear argument seems to be valuable not just in other courses, but it might be needed in other aspects of your life such as social, emotional, physical states of lives. I hope there is more for me to encounter through the learnings from Philosophy.