It is good to be different.

When I went to my first couple of lectures of my journalism course,  I was very sceptical of our first piece of reading to study: Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. As a girl from a small town, apart from local news and grand news of the outside world, I often denied any historical importance and therefore found it hard to understand the link between this book and the History and Context of Journalism module.

However, after much battle against my will to emerge myself into an additional fresher’s fortnight, I picked up Russell’s book and read about the many men who have often set the grounds for our beliefs and theories of the world. Although some philosophers such as Hume, I found very hard to get on with (of course not personally) as I think his sceptical mind of the world didn’t help his followers take confidence in what he believed, the two philosophers who I actually enjoyed reading about were Descartes and Spinoza.

Descartes was considered to be the founder of modern philosophers and one of the first empiricists. I learnt in the lecture that the reason for this idea is that he didn’t take any of his predecessors’ theories and adapted them for his own benefit, but he developed his own beliefs from scratch. I personally admire this as often when reading through the stories of the other philosophers I see distinct similarities, which became repetitive and therefore made the reading rather tedious and harder than it originally was. Individuality is greatly admired by me. As well as this, he is the originator of the famous phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’.  He backs this up by saying that even when someone doubts this theory, the very fact that the person doubts proves his or hers existence.  As well as this, Descartes claims that using the senses to prove something is pointless as they are forever changing, therefore man must use thought. I find this very clever, and that he was somewhat laughing at his predecessors and possibly saying something along the lines of  ‘so what do you make of that eh?’.

Spinoza was also one of my other favourite philosophers. This is mainly from a religious point of view. As a Christian, I very much agree and love Spinoza’s theories. Some that I agreed with are that if you learnt o love God, you begin to understand yourself and all around you, that God has no knowledge of evil because there is no evil to be known and that in God, there is no negotiation. The only thing mentioned in regards to Spinoza’s ideas that I found a little hard to take on board is that there is no free will, only by what is pre-conceived by God.  I was always taught that free will did exist but God just knew what you were going to chose before you did, but this is a debate that has baffled many for years more intellectual than myself, so I will not rise to the challenge.

Both Descartes and Spinoza found themselves in my favour, mainly due to their originality but, however quite naively, they are ones I actually agree with. Now, after reviewing all of the philosopher’s ideas collectively, I’m beginning to think maybe I should have been slightly more open minded…