The Phi Beta Kappa Society, widely considered to be the nation 's most prestigious honor society, is the oldest rank organization that recognize excellence among peers for the liberal arts and science in the United States.
The Phi Beta Kappa Society was founded at the College of William and Mary, a research institute located in Williams'Burg, Virginia, on December 5, 1776. The College was royally founded in 1693, by King William III and Queen Mary II. The group consisted of students who frequented the Raleigh Tavern. The Tavern was one of the largest in colonial Virginia. It gained some fame in the pre-American Revolutionary War Colony of Virginia as a gathering place for legislators after several Royal Governors officially dissolved the House of Burgesses, the elected legislative body, when their actions did not suit the crown. It was named after Walter Raleigh, an English landed man, writer, soldier, politician, courtier, and spy. He was a Protestant that became a landlord after confiscating lands from the native Irish. He rose rapidly in favor of Queen Elizabeth I and was knighted in 1585. He was instrumental in the English colonization of North America and was granted a royal patent to explore Virginia, which paved the way for future English settlements. A Masonic lodge also met at this tavern).
In the Phi Beta Kappa Initiation of 1779, the new member was informed, "here then you may for a while disengage yourself from scholastic care and communicate without reserve whatever reflections you have made upon various objects; remembering that every thing transacted within this room is transacted in secrecy and in confidentiality. Here, too, you are to indulge in matters of speculation that freedom of enquiry which ever dispels the clouds of falsehood by the radiant sunshine of truth..."
William and Mary, the founders of the College, were the co-regnants over the Kingdoms of Eng'Land, Scot'Land, and Ire'Land, namely the Dutch Prince of Orange King William III (&II) and his spouse (and 1st cousin) Queen Mary II. Their joint reign began in February 1689 after they were offered the Throne by the assembly of the Parliament of England irregularly summoned by William after his victorious invasion of England in November 1688, the Glorious Revolution.
The Glorious Revolution was the overthrown of King James II of England (James VII of Scotland) by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadholder William III of Orange. William invaded England with a Dutch fleet and an army led to his ascension of the English Throne, jointly with his protestant wife Mary II of England, James's daughter, in conjunction with the documentation of the Bill of Rights. This action signaled the end of several centuries of tension and conflict between the crown and the parliament, and the end of the idea that England would be restored to Roman Catholicism.
The Dutch Reformed Church was the largest denomination in the Netherlands. It spread to the United States, South Africa, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and various other World regions through the Dutch colonization. With Dutch naval power rising rapidly as a major force from the late 16th century, they dominated global commerce during the 2nd half of the 17th century known as the Dutch Golden Age.
There had been earlier Fraternal Societies in the College, including the well-known "Flat Hat Club, in allusion to the mortarboard caps they wore, founded in November 11, 1750, and twice revived there in the 20th century. The initials of F.H.C. Society stand for a secret phrase, "Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitio" (Brotherhood, Humanity, and Knowledge). The brotherhood devised and employed a secret handshake, wore a silver membership medal, issued certificates of membership, and met regularly for discussion and fellowship. William & Mary alumnus and 3rd American president Thomas Jefferson may be the most famous member of the F.H.C. Society. Other notable members of the original Society included George Tucker, professor of Law and Judge of the General Court of Virginia, and George Wythe, also professor of Law and a prominent opponent of slavery, and the 1st of the 7 Virginia signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Sunday, January 22, 2017
IMMANUEL KANT.
Immanuel Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contribution to other disciplines. He made an important astronomical discovery about the nature of Earth's rotation.
According to Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1897: "Kant pointed out what had not previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the earth's surface cause a diminution of the earth's rotational speed. The discovery attracted little attention until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy began to be taken to heart."
According to Thomas Huxley, biologist, 1869: "The sort of geological speculation to which I am now referring (geological aetiology, in short) was created as a science by Immanuel Kant, when, in 1775, he wrote his "General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or , "an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian Principles."
Kant laid out in "General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, 1755, the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Thus he tried to explain the order of it, which Isaac Newton had explained as imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a much larger spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested that other nebulae might also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the 1st time extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on science throughout his life. The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind." The flowering of the natural science had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a obscure tent. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems. Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time.The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Konigs'Berg, East Prussia. His mother, Anna regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigs"Berg. His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at that time Prussia's most North Eastern city (now Lithuania).
The Kants got their name from the Village of Kant'Waggen and were of Curonian origin. Curonians were known as fierce warriors, excellent sailors and pirates. They were involved in several wars and alliances with Swedish, Danish, and Iceland Vikings. During that period they were the most restless and richest of all the Balts. Curonians were an especially cultic people, worshiping several gods and their sacred animal, the Horse. In 1075 CE, Adam of Bremen, a German chronicler, described the Curonians in his "Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church"as the World famous pagan diviners:
"... gold is very plentiful there, the horses are of the best. All the houses are full of pagan soothsayers, diviners, and necromancers, who are even arrayed in monastic habit. Oracular responses are sought there from all parts of the world, especially by Spaniards and Greeks."
Immanuel Kant was the 4th of 9 children (4 of them reached adulthood). Baptized "Emanuel," he changed his name to "Immanuel" after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed devotion and a literal interpretation of the Scripture. Pietism was an influential doctrine within Lutheranism that combined Lutheran emphasis on Scriptural doctrine with the reformed emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life. Although it was active within Lutherans, it had a tremendous impact on Protestantism worldwide, particularly in North America and Europe.
Kant showed a great aptitude for self study at an early age and his education was strict, punitive and disciplinarian, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Despite his religious upbringing, he was skeptical of religion in later life. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum in 1732, a prestigius German school, while Johann Gottfried, German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic, taught there from 1763 to 1764. Theodor Gehr (died 1705), an official of Branden'Burg-Prussia, founded a Pietist private school in Sack'Heim (11 August 1698) using the Francke school of Halle (Saale). The school consisted of a Latin school, a German school, and a boarding school often used by foreign students. It also contained a wooden tower utilized as an observatory and a small church in service until 1853. It became a royal school of Frederick I, King in Prussia and was designated the Collegium Fridericianum in honor of Frederick . The Pietist school was the first in Konigs'Berg not to be affiliated with a Parish Church. Over 50 Baltic German students went to the school before attending university in the 18th century. Alumni were known as "Friderizianer."
Kant graduated from the Collegium at the end of the summer of 1740, aged 16, and then he enrolled at the University of Konigs'Berg, founded in 1544 as second Protestant academy (after the University of Mar'Burg) by Duke Albert of Prussia, and was commonly known as the "Albertina." Kant spent his whole career in this place. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as 'the pillow for the lazy mind." He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in negative light. The theory of "transcendental idealism" that Kant developed in the "Critique of Pure Reason" is not traditional idealism and the Critique's 2nd part even argues against traditional idealism.
Kant became a private tutor in the Towns surrounding Konigs'Berg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his 1st philosophical work, "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces" (written in 1745-47).
It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigs'Berg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometers (9.9 mi) from Konigs'Berg his whole life.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. At age 46, was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties -he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with the reasoned one, these being related by very different processes. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber." Hume had stated that experience consists only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as "cause", goodness, or objects were not evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy for the next 11 years. Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the "Critique of Pure Reason." Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself. He resisted friend's attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote:
"Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."
Kant published a second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Kant's health, long poor, worsened, he died at Konigs"Berg on 12 February 1804, uttering "It is good" before expiring.
Kant wrote a book discussing his "Theory of Virtue" in terms of independence which he believed was "a viable modern alternative to more familiar Greek views about virtue." The book is often criticized for its hostile tone and for not articulating his thoughts about autocracy comprehensibly.
In the self-governance model of Aristotelian virtue, the non-rational part of the soul can be made to listen to reason through training. Although Kantian self-governance appears to involve "a rational crackdown on appetites and emotions" with lack of harmony between reason and emotion, Kantian virtue denies "self-conquest, self-suppression, or self-silencing." They dispute that "the self-mastery constitutive of virtue is ultimately mastery over our tendency of will to give priority to appetite or emotion unregulated by duty, it does not require extirpating, suppressing, or silencing sensibility in general.
While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these pre-critical writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
According to Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1897: "Kant pointed out what had not previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the earth's surface cause a diminution of the earth's rotational speed. The discovery attracted little attention until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy began to be taken to heart."
According to Thomas Huxley, biologist, 1869: "The sort of geological speculation to which I am now referring (geological aetiology, in short) was created as a science by Immanuel Kant, when, in 1775, he wrote his "General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or , "an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian Principles."
Kant laid out in "General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, 1755, the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Thus he tried to explain the order of it, which Isaac Newton had explained as imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a much larger spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested that other nebulae might also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the 1st time extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on science throughout his life. The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind." The flowering of the natural science had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.). The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a obscure tent. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems. Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time.The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Konigs'Berg, East Prussia. His mother, Anna regina Reuter (1697-1737), was also born in Konigs"Berg. His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682-1746), was a German harness maker from Memel, at that time Prussia's most North Eastern city (now Lithuania).
The Kants got their name from the Village of Kant'Waggen and were of Curonian origin. Curonians were known as fierce warriors, excellent sailors and pirates. They were involved in several wars and alliances with Swedish, Danish, and Iceland Vikings. During that period they were the most restless and richest of all the Balts. Curonians were an especially cultic people, worshiping several gods and their sacred animal, the Horse. In 1075 CE, Adam of Bremen, a German chronicler, described the Curonians in his "Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church"as the World famous pagan diviners:
"... gold is very plentiful there, the horses are of the best. All the houses are full of pagan soothsayers, diviners, and necromancers, who are even arrayed in monastic habit. Oracular responses are sought there from all parts of the world, especially by Spaniards and Greeks."
Immanuel Kant was the 4th of 9 children (4 of them reached adulthood). Baptized "Emanuel," he changed his name to "Immanuel" after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed devotion and a literal interpretation of the Scripture. Pietism was an influential doctrine within Lutheranism that combined Lutheran emphasis on Scriptural doctrine with the reformed emphasis on individual piety and living a vigorous Christian life. Although it was active within Lutherans, it had a tremendous impact on Protestantism worldwide, particularly in North America and Europe.
Kant showed a great aptitude for self study at an early age and his education was strict, punitive and disciplinarian, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Despite his religious upbringing, he was skeptical of religion in later life. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum in 1732, a prestigius German school, while Johann Gottfried, German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic, taught there from 1763 to 1764. Theodor Gehr (died 1705), an official of Branden'Burg-Prussia, founded a Pietist private school in Sack'Heim (11 August 1698) using the Francke school of Halle (Saale). The school consisted of a Latin school, a German school, and a boarding school often used by foreign students. It also contained a wooden tower utilized as an observatory and a small church in service until 1853. It became a royal school of Frederick I, King in Prussia and was designated the Collegium Fridericianum in honor of Frederick . The Pietist school was the first in Konigs'Berg not to be affiliated with a Parish Church. Over 50 Baltic German students went to the school before attending university in the 18th century. Alumni were known as "Friderizianer."
Kant graduated from the Collegium at the end of the summer of 1740, aged 16, and then he enrolled at the University of Konigs'Berg, founded in 1544 as second Protestant academy (after the University of Mar'Burg) by Duke Albert of Prussia, and was commonly known as the "Albertina." Kant spent his whole career in this place. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as 'the pillow for the lazy mind." He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in negative light. The theory of "transcendental idealism" that Kant developed in the "Critique of Pure Reason" is not traditional idealism and the Critique's 2nd part even argues against traditional idealism.
Kant became a private tutor in the Towns surrounding Konigs'Berg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his 1st philosophical work, "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces" (written in 1745-47).
It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life -he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends he frequently met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Konigs'Berg. A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometers (9.9 mi) from Konigs'Berg his whole life.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. At age 46, was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties -he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with the reasoned one, these being related by very different processes. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber." Hume had stated that experience consists only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as "cause", goodness, or objects were not evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy for the next 11 years. Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the "Critique of Pure Reason." Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself. He resisted friend's attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote:
"Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."
Kant published a second edition of the "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Kant's health, long poor, worsened, he died at Konigs"Berg on 12 February 1804, uttering "It is good" before expiring.
Kant wrote a book discussing his "Theory of Virtue" in terms of independence which he believed was "a viable modern alternative to more familiar Greek views about virtue." The book is often criticized for its hostile tone and for not articulating his thoughts about autocracy comprehensibly.
In the self-governance model of Aristotelian virtue, the non-rational part of the soul can be made to listen to reason through training. Although Kantian self-governance appears to involve "a rational crackdown on appetites and emotions" with lack of harmony between reason and emotion, Kantian virtue denies "self-conquest, self-suppression, or self-silencing." They dispute that "the self-mastery constitutive of virtue is ultimately mastery over our tendency of will to give priority to appetite or emotion unregulated by duty, it does not require extirpating, suppressing, or silencing sensibility in general.
While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these pre-critical writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
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