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Jenny is a frighteningly bright Philosophy student, Tim is her flirtatious slacker of a flatmate. Come here to follow the life adventures of these two absolutely not stereotypical Cambridge students. You'll learn very little in the process, but I'll get better at watercolour.

Sunday 13 February 2011

The Empirical Mind



Formal Hall: a place where misunderstandings between disciplines get cleared up... or not.

16 comments:

  1. Never really understood where arts funding comes from really. Love the Milton in the background by the way!

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  2. I like to hypothesise that it comes from eccentric philanthropists whose wives cheated on them with mathematicians, like the mythical Alfred Nobel.

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  3. Well, thank Sir Humphrey for the grants and funding : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvNw0P5ZMbA&feature=related

    ;)

    Love Milton too!

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  4. And this one too, which countains this wonderful truth : "Subsidy is for art... for culture. It is not to be given to what the people want. It is for what the people don't want but ought to have."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO_vwvNK4Ic&feature=related

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  5. ooh can't wait to watch these. But first I must finish my essay :(

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  6. Come on... it is only five minutes... Give in the temptation... come on, eat the apple, Clémentine (this joke just made my day).

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  7. What subject is your scientist doing? Fieldwork and coding? Surely some kind of superscience! Or a really tedious branch of geophysics...

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  8. nope, she's a social scientist... probably doing ethnographic research or semi-structured interviews or something

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  9. Social sciences... the ultimate oxymoron. Et quand je dis moron, je pèse mes mots.

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  10. can you tell I'm currently writing an essay on research methods

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  11. ;)
    Sorry, I'm a little bitchy today - I'm pissed off by the article I'm writing (for GA).

    Anyway, social sciences are well and good, but in no way are they sciences. Studies fits better. C'est la même chose en français : pour moi, une science humaine = médecine, pas la psychologie ou la sociologie.

    Poor Jenny, BTW. It would be pretty funny to include field work in philosophy : "35% of the panel agreed with the kantian option, 25% with the aristotelian answer, 25% had no opinion, and 15% thought the answer was yellow."

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  12. ha sorry to make you suffer :D

    There's definitely a branch of modern philosophy that does empirical research by asking people to solve ethical dilemmas. But I can't remember what it's called.

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  13. @Andrew Meteorology

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  14. in ethnography, you don't do statistics and you don't really code the data. you just take notes and then write books about them :) (we're not functionalists anymore)

    but what she says makes me think of archaeology, in which we do fieldwork, use 'data' and can actually code it. We use it statistically to see patterns in the archaeological record and deduce their meaning. and then we can also write about phenomenology if we feel like it ^^


    Agathe, the Arch and Anth student ^^

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  15. Found this site through your comment on Phil Nel's blog. "What did you THINK of today" is sort of brilliant. I remember being in grad school (for playwriting) and rooming with a guy who was finishing medical school ... conversations like that were regular occurrences.

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