Peter Singer, All Animals are Equal
Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
Parmenides
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Άφοβον ο θεός,
ανύποπτον ο θάνατος
και ταγαθόν μεν εύκτητον,
το δε δεινόν ευκαρτέρητον
Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.
(The Tetrapharmakos)
Nietzsche
Confucius
Epicurus
Aristotle
So it has been all windy and rainy and cold this week and today i was thinking, “I WANT MY SUMMER WEATHER!” then I realized that in six months I will be in Seattle. So I should be getting used to the rainy weather. Which I am pretty sure I am fine with the rain, it is just the cold that I am sick of by now.
Shall I write about my day? Well… I woke up late, took too long of a shower, made it out to Cheney just in time to walk all the way to the PEA building for yoga, which would have been fine if I didn’t want to get there EARLY so that I could read up on Philosophy for my quiz (more of that later). And I gotta say, yoga with a sun burn was hard, but now yoga where every movement sends peel-y skin falling off my body is just embarrassing. I had a collection of dead skin on my mat by the end of the hour. Not cool, skin. And the peel-y look makes me look diseased. I am so over this.
Then philosophy, and the thing about my professor is he has a class at 11:30 and has to eat lunch so we don’t start class until 12:15 (rather than noon) which is perfect because I don’t leave the PEA until 11:50 and the walk from there all the way to Kingston (whoever decided to renovate Patterson this year is an enemy of mine!) takes me at least 10, sometimes 15 minutes. Anyways I had a few minutes to skim through the twenty-some pages of the quiz before he got there. WIN.
Meh, I don’t know how well I did on the quiz, it greatly depends on if he gives me the “it is pretty close to the general idea” points instead of the “it was a quote in the book and you didn’t know it” minus… And then we talked a bit about Plato. He was one cool cat, from what we learned. He has a story about “the cave” and it is rocking. I drew a picture of it in my notes… Here is a less shitty version I found online:
So basically he talked about how these slaves didn’t know what wasn’t real (the shadows they saw and thought of as “reality”) until one prisoner saw the “real world” with the flames and the sun and water and went to them and told them that they were not really living and such. So, naturally, they killed him. But it was an analogy to how the Athenians killed Socrates because he had thoughts that were too great from them and was mighty knowledgable for his time (he was killed for “impiety.”) But it was also like, we are comfortable with being ignorant (and don’t realize how ignorant we really are) until we gain knowledge, or accept the knowledge I suppose. Cuz once the slave say the fire, he could not go back with the others and view the shadows as “real” because he knew there were objects behind him that were “real.”
We also talked about the Forms, which was pretty cool too. Terry asked us: “which one is more real: the idea of a circle or the circular wheel of the bicycle?” and Ya know, most people would say the wheel because it is tangible and visible. But Plato said no deal, because the wheel is imperfect, destructable, and all that jazz. Whereas the IDEA of the circle in our mind is perfect, and cannot be broken and will always exist. He also said that the IDEA of the form is what created the OBJECT. We always know the idea of the circle, even before we know what a circle is or that it is even called a “circle.” All the Forms stuff is rather confusing and if you are reading this I do not do the argument justice because what Plato does say makes more sense that the bits and pieces I am recalling.
Anyway, that is pretty much what I learned today. I am pretty excited with the Philosophy class :)
