User:Nerd42



Hi, I'm Nerd42. I do alot of crazy type stuff. Like see http://nerd42.net/ or my blog or maybe, if you like nonsense, my Illogicopedia page. When I was a little bitty boy I thought Star Trek was soooo kewl cause it had robots and lasers and aliens and stuff. But now I continue to find Star Trek relevant as I've grown up because of the prominent role played by philosophy in the show, particularly in the field of ethics. So I thought I'd dedicate my user page on Memory Alpha to making some comments about some interesting places that philosophy is found in Star Trek.

Also, I'm working on a page about why I hate Phlox so much.

The American Right
Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy (like in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) is parodied heavily by the Ferengi as portrayed in Deep Space Nine - especially in the character of Quark. Quark represents economic conservatism, while Odo on the other hand represents social conservatism and the dialogues between them are the dialogues of the two disparate halves of the American political right wing.

The Nature of Personhood
In TNG The Measure Of A Man (episode), we get a highly relevant discussion of personhood and at what point something becomes a person worthy of rights instead of an object of property. A must-see for anyone interested in issues of personhood such as abortion, human cloning or destructive human embreyonic stem cell research. The conclusion reached isn't nearly as important as the dialogue itself.

Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic
In ENT Bound (episode) we get a wonderful illustration of Hegel's master-slave dialectic: the situation in which the masters need the slaves, but the slaves don't need the masters, so that in fact, those who are nominally the "masters" are in fact in slavery to those who are nominally "slaves." The episode reveals this to be the case for the Orion slave girls and their male "owners." Even though the females are bought and sold in slave auctions, other than who they personally belong to, they in every respect manipulate and control the lives of their owners by pheromones and suggestion. The Enterprise crew finally realize this as Harrad-Sar reveals, "Captain, you've been operating under a misconception: it is the men who are the slaves, not the women."