Colegas; achei interessante divulgar aqui a carta de despedida (ou quase) de John Corcoran a seus estudanres, com a sua expressa permissão. Entre outras coisas, a insistância de Corcoran sobre a inseparabilidade entre a lógica e a ética é um ponto tocante da carta. Mais professores que pensassem assim fariam um grande serviço ao ensino.
Abraços, Walter. ================ Farewell letter to my students John Corcoran Dear Students, I am saying farewell after more than forty happy years of teaching logic at the University of Buffalo. But this is only a partial farewell. I will no longer be at UB to teach classroom courses or seminars. But nothing else will change. I will continue to be available for independent study. I will continue to write abstracts and articles with people who have taken courses or seminars with me. And I will continue to honor the LogicLifetimeGuarantee™, which is earned by taking one of my logic courses or seminars. As you know, according to the terms of the LogicLifetimeGuarantee™, I stand behind everything I teach. If you find anything to be unsatisfactory, I am committed to fixing it. If you forget anything, I will remind you. If you have questions, I will answer them or ask more questions. And if you need more detail on any topic we discussed, I will help you to broaden and deepen your knowledge—and maybe write an abstract or article. Stay in touch. I want to take this opportunity to say something about my intellectual development and to leave you with some advice. In the four years I was a graduate student, I went to almost every philosophy colloquium. I met several famous philosophers and I asked each one: “What is your one piece of advice for a philosophy graduate student?” Paul Feyerabend was the only one who said anything memorable. His advice was to find some fundamental problem that could serve as an anchor or focal point for a lifetime of philosophizing. Sometime later I realized that I already had such a problem: What is proof? This question gives rise to a series of epistemic, ontic, linguistic, logical, mathematical, and historical questions that still energize me. Although I had had creative spurts and productive learning experiences even from childhood, as I look back I feel that for the first 25 years or so of my life I was being hindered by something—it felt like driving with my brakes on, or carrying useless baggage, or slogging through a muddy swamp. What set me free was overcoming my inclination to be loyal to the beliefs I happened to have. I had been afraid to doubt. I remember discussing my fear of doubt with two of my high-school pals. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I saw how destructive that fear was and overcame it. I now realize the power of creative doubt. I now see that doubt is not to be feared and shunned; stubborn belief is the scary thing. It was only after working on the problem of proof that I came to discover that doubt is often productive: without the ability to doubt, some kinds of knowledge are made more difficult or even impossible. Doubt is often a prerequisite for knowledge. In order to find a proof of a given proposition—even one believed to be true—it is sometimes useful or even necessary to doubt it. This is also the case when it is required to determine of a given argumentation whether it is a proof. Are the premises really known to be true? Does the chain of reasoning really show that the conclusion follows from the premises? A crucial property of proofs is their capacity to remove doubt; if one lacks doubt, detection of proof is inhibited. But how can one doubt what one believes or even knows to be true? It seems paradoxical to say that people can doubt propositions they believe or know or believe they know to be true. But mathematicians do this every day, and so do non mathematicians. Maybe the frequency of creative doubt in mathematical beliefs was one of the reasons Plato found mathematics so important in philosophical training. In mathematics we often prove propositions that “do not need proof”. The experience of creating a doubt or having a doubt removed is empowering— like the experience of grasping an ambiguity or detecting an implication or perceiving a non sequitur. Experience of this sort produces self-knowledge and overcomes alienation, especially the debilitating alienation generated by indoctrination or by loyalty-motivated self-deception. Instead of putting energy and emotion into protecting preconceptions that had been imposed on me from outside, I was free to investigate anything and to follow any path wherever it took me. I could use my time to formulate questions and hypotheses and to deduce consequences from any hypothesis and from the negation of any hypothesis. I became an autonomous member of the community of investigators and thereby became collegial with people that had been ideological enemies. This train of thought pervades my signature piece “Argumentations and logic” and it continues the advice formulated in my two instructional articles: “Critical thinking and pedagogical license” and “Inseparability of logic and ethics”. As I have related elsewhere, I discussed this theme with Alfred Tarski. He said that the biblical motto “Truth sets one free” was almost exactly backward: a better motto would be “Be free to find truth”. Thinking that I was mysteriously and gratuitously granted belief in the truth was a terrible burden. As you know, my courses were mostly introductory, having no prerequisites and presupposing no previous knowledge. I tried to reconstruct the subject-matter from the ground up. I stressed the priority of self-education over authoritarian indoctrination and the superiority of learning how to think over being told what to think. I tried to assist students to connect with the reality that logic is about: thus they could become autonomous judges of the adequacy of the current state of logic. One of our class mottos was “Ridicule the ridiculous”. I encouraged students to discover and accept their own temperaments: to become autonomous members of the community of investigators. Not every student is ready for freedom and not every institution approves of it. Over the years I had been fortunate to have benefited from many great institutions and many dedicated students. But I treasure the University of Buffalo and its students above all. As I have said more than once before, after I settled in here at the University of Buffalo, I had a feeling that I had arrived at my academic home: that this is my kind of institution; these are my kind of colleagues; these are my kind of students. There was confidence, dedication, and competence without conceit, affectation, or pretension. I am grateful to you and all of the talented and energetic students that have made my years at UB so rich. I will miss the Buffalo Logic Colloquium and the fun at the dinners and parties afterward. I will miss seeing you. This above all: To thine own self be true. Acknowledgements Stephen Brown, Otávio Bueno, Lynn Corcoran, William Demopoulos, Thomas Drucker, Idris Hamid, Forest Hansen, David Hershenov, David Hitchcock, Leonard Jacuzzo, Renato Lewin, Samuel Litwin, Hassan Masoud, Joaquin Miller, Sriram Nambiar, Anthony Preus, Stewart Shapiro, Walter Simpson, and others. =================== -- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Prof. Dr. Walter Carnielli Visiting Scholar School of Historical and Philosophical Studies Room G06 Ground Floor Old Quad Building The University of Melbourne 3010 VIC Melbourne, Australia Website: http://www.cle.unicamp.br/prof/carnielli ------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Logica-l mailing list [email protected] http://www.dimap.ufrn.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/logica-l
