All trains are late. I am late. Therefore i am a train...

Today was my first lecture on the History and Context of Journalism (HCJ), so naturally we started by studying Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. During my pre-reading I found that i kept asking myself: "What does this have to do with Journalism?". The thought crossed my mind that this was a test - an elaborate hoax - designed to sort the milgramian obeyers from the intelligent, probing people who would know that you would never need a fifteen pound book on philosophy for studying journalism. Nonetheless i felt that the ignorant group better suited me, so happily parted with my cash at the university book shop (I say happily - it was perhaps more reluctantly with a hint of enthusiasm.). It turned out that I was right. Phew.

"So did the lecture itself answer any questions?" I hear my current total of zero subscribers cry with a boyish enthusiasm. Actually, no it didn't. But it was interesting, and I learnt a lot.

The most interesting point, for me at least, concerned Aristotle. Most people will know that he is one of the most important figures in western philosophy. Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great, he wrote on many important areas: metaphysics, ethics, politics, logic and physics amongst many others. Coming at the end of the creative period in Greek thought (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) he remained as unquestioned as the Church, and both in science and philosophy he was the greatest authority.

It was nearly two thousand years before any philosopher came around who could be regarded as his equal. This only came with "the new conceptions that science introduced". Galileo was one of those to challenge his authority. Aristotle explained, for example, that a cannonball would go up and then would come down. That one force would act on an object, then a second. Galileo proved beyond reasonable doubt that two or more forces can act on any single object at once. He realised that if one of Aristotle's theories could be disproved then perhaps so could others. The development of his famous telescope helped to further disprove Aristotelian theories, in particular, those which state the five elements and the heavenly spheres.

With Galileo's discoveries the floodgates opened. Interestingly, Newton was born on the same day Galileo died and seemed to be the next scientist who further disproved his theories. (Galileo was actually born on the day that Michelangelo died! - What are the chances?) Both Francis Bacon and Hobbes were great philosophers who were "virulently hostile" towards Aristotle's theory of syllogistic logic. They found it useless and unnecessary, and Hobbes even claimed that the years spent reading Aristotle's philosophy at Oxford were a waste of time.

Descartes, according to Russell, is the founding father of modern philosophy. His cogito: i think, therefore i am is still important today. His philosophy that mind is more certain than matter is the basis of many modern day philosophical theories. He states that "all things that we conceive very clearly and very distinctively are true". This effectively blew the majority of Aristotelian theory out of the water. Descartes claimed that he wanted to clear the debris of Aristotle and Catholic dogma, both of which had been seen as true for thousands of years until the arrival of the scientific advances and the great minds that came with it.

Aristotle was undoubtedly a great thinker. His ideas remained unchallenged for so long, that when he was finally disproved he became a joke amongst philosophers. Even though he'd been dead for nearly two millennia when he became a laughing stock, you can't help but feel sorry for the guy.