BOOK 1 MPKT-A SUMMARY

Afrah Alatas (1406641792), Chemical Engineering International Program

CHAPTER 1: CHARACTER STRENGTH AND VIRTUE

Character is one of the most important thing for every individual to life, grow and
develop themselves. Character development is influenced by several factors,
which are education, life experience and experiment, sacrifice, and social-
cultural environment. Because of these factors, every single individual has
different character. Imagine if people life without character, it will be very hard
for us to deal and solve some life-problems. We, as a college student who also
roles as the agent of change, need to have a strong character, in order to build
and develop a better nation.

The characters that we have today, are need to be strengthen. There are six core
of character strength, they are (1) wisdom and knowledge, (2) love and
humanity, (3) trust, (4) justice, (5) self-control, and (6) transdency.
In Universitas Indonesia, there are nine character values that students of UI
should apply in their real life. Those nine values are honesty, justice, trust,
dignity & respect, accountability, togetherness, transparency, academic freedom
& scientific autonomy, and compliance to law. These values are developed based
on the previous six strong characters. It hopes that the nine values can build a
better individual of UI students.
The first value is honesty. Honesty relates to spread the truth, not lying, being
wise and not doing a corruption. The second value is justice, which means that UI
student should treat other people fairly and not discriminate based on their
ethnic, race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. The third value is trust.
Trust means that all of UI students have to be reliable for doing every single task
they do. The fourth is dignity and respect. Both are close to be able to do their
commitment, and respecting what other people have done.
The fifth is accountability. Accountability means being responsible for doing
every single task they do. The sixth is togetherness. We know that all of UI
students come from different ethnics and culture background. No matter where
does he/she come from, what religion he/she believes, tolerance should be kept
tightly, in order to create a harmonic environment. The seventh is transparency.
Transparency means that UI students have to be able in accepting and criticize
knowledge information. The eighth is academic freedom and scientific autonomy.
Academic freedom means we have to uphold the freedom of spreading thoughts,
knowledge and opinions in UI area or in another academic forum. The last but
not least, is the compliance to law. It means that not only UI student have to
allow the rules, but also all kind of activity held in UI should follow the
regulations available in UI.
As a conclusion, character building is very important for people to live their life,
unless they wouldnt be able to deal and solve problems in real life. The goal of
character building is to create a stronger character that leads to a better
individual.
CHAPTER 2: PHILOSOPHY
Basically, philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems
concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and
language. It comes from Greek words, philosophos meaning wisdom lover. It is
from word philos (wisdom), and sophos (lover), which its basic word of sophia
which means love. In philosophy, a question why is used to appear. For
instance, when a little kid asks Why should we exist?, or a question like Why
do you believe the existence of God? is used to be asked. The aim of asking
these kind of questions is to build a critical thinking by being able to answer
kinds of fundamental questions. There are two characteristics regarding to
philosophical question, which are (1) What do you mean? and (2) Why do you
think it is true?.
In real life, we can get another example, like when you are asked to draw a view
and you draw mountains with a sun. Then, someone asks you Why do you draw
this?, or Why do you think this is a view?, and most of people will answer that
When I was a kid, the teacher taught me that mountain is a kind of view, so
thats why I draw this. Another one is when you are asked to draw a duck, then
someone asks why did the duck is facing to the left. For instance, some people
answer it by saying that they see a duck is identical to the number 2 (two)
shape, and since they used to write it, then they draw it like creating a number 2
shape first, and then completing the rest of the drawing to get a duck picture.
Another possible answer is, when some of the other say that drawing a duck by
facing to the left is easier rather than facing the duck to the right. Of course,
everyone has their own reason regarding to their drawing. Those kinds of
questions actually have no a correct answer, it depends on peoples answer.
However, philosophers are not always accepting our answers. Then they will
check the justification critically. From this step, we can see that philosophers
always see the relation of justification with its truth. It is said that if a claim is
true if it is supported by a good justification, but will not be true if it is supported
by a bad justification.
From those examples, then we can say that by learning philosophy, people will
be able to think critically and deeply. Besides, people will get a new knowledge
by learning philosophy. There are some advantages by learning philosophy,
which are (1) Improving our arguing skill, (2) Improving our critical, radical and
reflective analysis, (3) Helping us not to only jump to the conclusion, (4)
Persuading us to be open-minded from other peoples feedback and any other
peoples perspective, and (5) Training us to be ethical when making a decision,
so that the worst possibility can be minimalized.
According to the previous paragraph, it can be stated that philosophy is tightly
related to other field, which one of those is the relation to science. Can you
imagine how does it relates to science? It is like when a scientist, for instance, Sir
Issac Newton, invented his popular and most influencing physics laws, the
Newtons Law. He could create them because of his critical thinking, when he
firstly wondering why does an apple can fall down from a tree. Then he tried to
find some ideas to get the answer of his big question. As result, his Newtons law
can be improved until nowdays it is still used in basic physics studies in all
around the world.
As a conclusion, in my opinion, philosophy is one of the most crucial thing in our
life. Every single thing in this world should have a strong relation to philosophy.
Philosophy can be built by thinking critical and radical, being open-minded and
doing things systematically, and it will result a better quality of life for people.

CHAPTER 3: LOGIC
Logic is known as one of the branch from philosophy. It comes from the Greek
word, logos which means thoughts. Logic is generally held to consist of the
systematic study of the form of arguments. A valid argument is one where there
is a specific relation of logical support between the assumptions of the argument
and its conclusion. Generally, logic is defined as the study of the principles, laws,
methods and ways of thinking to differ between a correct reasoning and the
fallacious ones. Reasoning itself is an activity that is aimed to get knowledge,
where that activity involves a conclusion drawing process. In other words, logics
give ones knowledge and skill to test the accuracy of a reasoning critically and
to avoid doing other fallacies reasoning.

There are two types or reasoning, they are deductive and inductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning is a logical process in which a conclusion is based on the
concordance of multiple premises that are generally assumed to be true.
Deductive reasoning is sometimes referred to as top-down logic. Its counterpart,
inductive reasoning, is sometimes referred to as bottom-up logic. Where
deductive reasoning proceeds from general premises to a specific conclusion,
inductive reasoning proceeds from specific premises to a general conclusion.

Deductive logic results a conclusion which is not based on empirical observation.

This is different with inductive logic which is based on empirical observations.
Inductive logical usually results a generalization of a new knowledge based on
real cases that have similarities. According to the three characteristics of
inductive logic, we know that inductive logic cannot give an absolute certainty.

Sometimes, logics can be wrong that lead to the logical fallacies. There are two
types of logical fallacies, the formal fallacies and the non-formal fallacies. Formal
fallacies, is known that the invalid conclusions are caused by violating some
logical theorems. Whilst, the non-formal fallacies are caused by some languages
factor or the relevance in each premise and its conclusion. Some of the logical
fallacies are occurred in daily life, since the lack of knowledge and misperception
of the information.

As a conclusion, logic is a foundation of how we processing things around us,

such as data, information, news, opinion, argument, and advice. In order for
human being to not mistaken the information they have received, they need to
analyze it first, and make sure the information is valid, so that it can be
consumed safely for the benefit people around us. Despite the true or false of
the information, humans may have a tendency to perceive and processing
information poorly, and that leads to the misinterpretation. That phenomenon is
called fallacies. We need to avoid fallacies, because we do not want to harm
people around us with any outputs as the results of fallacies.

CHAPTER 4: ETHICS
Ethic itself is basically a part of philosophy, which comes from axiology branch.
The word ethic itself comes from a Greek, that has a meaning science of
morality. As a part of philosophy, ethics come to ask a question about morality,
for instance how should someone live their life?, or which action is good or bad
in some certain situation? or why should everyone have a good attitude?. So, in
other words, ethics is a part of philosophical inquiry, which are the capacity of
think critically, deeply and analytically regarding to the moral judgements from
individuals action.

Every country in the world has different ethics and morals agreement. They
have different perceptions about the ethical boundaries itself. Ethics is a bundle
of norms, principles, or a way of thinking which lead to a great behavior from a
particular group. Moreover, it relates with a moral principle which will define
whether the thing we do is right or wrong. Those two worlds are closely related.

Among the disagreement and agreement of ethical principles with other

countries, there are some basic common values on deciding what is right or
wrong. For example, killing people randomly is still considered as a wrong action.
Helping people is considered as a good action. Ethics is a guiding principle,
relating to the moral issue. If we follow good ethics, people will consider us
having a good morality. Morality depends on the individual choice. It will really
depend on the peoples community, like certain religion or culture. Ethical
behavior relates to the individual acceptance on the society.

Ethic is a way of how you act and behave in a certain place. It is related with our
manner. Ethics were based on morals, norms, culture and tradition that evolves
into a particular unwritten rule. We will find a different ethics as we travel around
through different places. Thus, it is very important for us to be able to adapt in
any certain situation, because if we dont aware of our surrounding ethics, we
could be excluded from the society. Moreover, sometimes some problems are
solved by certain rules depend on the ethics or cultures that used on the related
place which the problem occurs.