Skip to main content

Good show at the Baltic Sea Competition

On the auspices of the UNESCO Philosophy Day (19th Nov), Finland organizes a Philosophy competition for countries around the baltic sea. Since 2008, India also sent entries to this competition. Students are supposed to write an essay on 1 out of 4 topics given in a supervised span of 2 hours. The local organizer is then supposed to select 2 of the best essays and send them across to the Finnish organizers, who then go throug ha rigorous process of filtering the essays, quite similar to the International Philosophy Olympiad and declare the medals. Those who miss the medal by a very short difference are given an Honorable Mention. The result for this year has been good for India with Chitra Adkar (SYJC Ramnarain Ruia College, Matunga) getting Bronze and Prathamesh Kubal (SYJC, Abhinav Vidyalay & Jr. College, Dombivli) getting the Honorable Mention. Details will be shortly put up on the organizers web sites.

The topics for essay this year were:
1. ”The misfortune of a republic is when intrigues are at an end; which happens when the people are gained by bribery and corruption: in this case they grow indifferent to public affairs, and avarice becomes their predominant passion. Unconcerned about the government and everything belonging to it, they quietly wait for their hire.”  - MONTESQUIE, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748
2. "Some people have thought that it is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do, in this absolute sense. They acknowledge that what we do depends on our choices, decisions, and wants, and that we make different choices in different circumstances: we are not like the earth rotating on its axis with monotonous regularity. But the claim is that, in each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable. The sum total of a person's experiences, desires and knowledge, his hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing him, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable." - (Thomas Nagel, "What does it all mean?", 1987)
3. "Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect, for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which is contemplative philosophy corresponds with the cause in practical science becomes a rule." (Francis Bacon, "Novum Organum", 1620)
4. "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1670)

Comments

All Time Popular Posts

Annual Day 2023

 After a long hiatus due to covid we finally got most activities on track. The Annual Day function is always a big deal for everyone at Abhinav. It has been a tradition my mother started that the Annual Day will be not a Teacher-managed event, but a Student Initiative. Since when I was a teenager, I was part of this and today 10 years after she passed, I still strive to make it work as she would have. After some hesitation, we began working in early January. I wanted to use an outside choreographer just so that teachers will not be burdened. (They are already struggling with post-covid learning difficulties) But then, an outside guy could never do justice to the Abhinav style of doing things. We always keep in mind that the cultural program should be enjoyable to everyone in the audience and at the same time should display as many of the diverse talents that our students have, as possible.  It was a great relief that my G3 students came to the rescue. Almost all of std 9 and many of st

Are Self-Driving Cars Taking Over Humans?

- Arya Dharmadhikari(Std X, Abhinav Vidyalay) The 21st century has played an important role in the advancement of technologies. This development has even revolutionized the Automobile industry. We have developed from fuel-efficient vehicles to Hybrids and EVs and now we are enhancing self-driving vehicles. Tesla, Waymo, Volvo, GM, BMW, Mercedes are among the few companies that have started testing self-driving cars. The leading among them is Waymo, which has developed level 4 autonomy which we will discuss in the next section. So before reaching levels of autonomy we should understand what self-driving cars are and why we require them. What is a self-driving car? A self-driving car (also called an autonomous vehicle) is a car that is competent in driving itself without any human intervention. The car has sensors, cameras, lasers, radars, GPS, LIDAR through which the Artificial Intelligence senses the surrounding environment, this helps the car to navigate on its path and to detect sig

Dark Matter

  ~Anvi Patil(X th A Abhinav Vidyalay) In the universe, there is about 25% of dark matter and 70% of dark energy but only 5% of it is visible. What is Dark Matter? It is a non-luminous material, which holds two galaxies. This cannot be called a black hole because it does not bend light. Then the question arrives, as it is non-luminous, how did we detect it? As it is not visible, scientists have found indirect methods to find more about it. One such method is by using the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope . Gamma rays are released when two particles of dark matter collide, Fermi telescope can be used to detect this collision. This topic was discovered by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, he discovered that galaxies were rotating at a faster rate than usual. A dark region seen in the foreground of a star field. This dark region could be a dark cloud of gases like hydrogen, left over from the formation of our galaxy Dark matter is called ‘dark’ not because it is ‘black’ but because it does not