Monday, August 11, 2008
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Thurston Thatcher Hedgewick, the world's most respected doofinator, provides common sense interventions for climate doofusses in distress.
Climate Socrates
Plato and Socrates
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Interesting Links
- Climate Skeptic
- Drudge Report
- Global Warming: Official Pseudo Science
- Greenie Watch
- Hearland Institute 2008 Conference
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- Inhofe EPW Press Blog
- Is It Getting Warmer?
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- The Lavoisier Group, Australia
- Wikipedia on Socrates
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Climate Angst Links
Books and Readings
- "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds", Charles MacKay
- "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media", Patrick J. Michaels
- "Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming", Patrick J. Michaels
- "State of Fear", Michael Crichton
- "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)", Christopher C. Horner
- "The Satanic Gases", Patrick J. Michaels
- "The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World", Bjorn Lomborg
- "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years", Dennis T. Avery & S. Fred Singer
The Socratic Method
Perhaps Socrates' most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic (answering a question with a question) method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of elenchos, which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues.
To solve a problem you would ask a question and when finding the answer you would also have an answer to your problem. This led to the beginning of the Scientific Method, in which the first step says to name the problem in the form of a question. For this, Socrates is customarily regarded as the father of political philosophy and ethics or moral philosophy, and as a fountainhead of all the main themes in Western philosophy in general. (The method may have been suggested by Zeno of Elea , but Socrates refined it and applied it to ethical problems.)In this method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge.
The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. In fact, Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."