Thursday and Friday classes

My Introduction to Philosophy classes on Thursday continued with the ancient Greeks and began looking at Plato. I always start with the Euthyphro as a lead in to the Apology and so can ask the quiz question: If Jesus came to your door and you recognized Him both as Jesus and God and He asked you to sell all that you have, give the money to the poor, and go follow Him, would you go with Him or would you argue with Him? Imagine this scenario as a hypothetical case where you know it is really God - no doubt. What would you imagine yourself doing? The movie I showed a bit of in regard to this was Brother Sun Sister Moon. For my History of Philosophy I class on Thursday we went into more detail on the pre-Socratics since we have twice as much time to cover them. Thales and the others were seeking the Arche. We continue to do that today and it seems Quarks are what we consider to be the basic building blocks of everything. For the quiz question I asked what you thought would be the best quiz question for the day? (I love this question. It often gives me better results than when I ask a specific question.) Today, Friday my Logic class met for the first time and we followed the syllabus pretty closely - as a result there were two quiz questions. The first was, what are the ten commandments. The second was why do comics use so many curse words (many of them see to) when they can be just as funny without doing that?

First day of classes

Today both of my Introduction to Philosophy classes met for the first time as well as my History of Philosophy I, and the semester is off to a start. All three classes spent most of the time reviewing the syllabi and the test and term paper requirements. The quiz question for all three classes was also the same - a memory test: What are the ten commandments? Notice I have my own notes from years when I compiled the results of the quiz here but I stopped adding to the statistics once it was clear that class after class was consistent. Today's results fit these averages as well. We will talk briefly about this next class. I think it makes an interesting point about the nature of our memory, and our ability to recall things. Two of the classes had to suffer through a rendition of Conan the Barbarian the Musical. Try to forget it if you can! But it makes an interesting point displaying what we might consider the primal nature of virtue - the heroes were those who could crush their enemies. What changed that led to moral progress? I also discussed the difficulties in language, meaning, and even the alphabet.(See my previous blog post for some links I used for that.) All of this is too brief for as interesting a topic as it is.

Comparing alphabets

There is no short way to describe ancient alphabets. I was going to put maybe four up on the board to make an interesting comparison but they link into one another forever. Still, here are a few alphabets of interest. One to be familiar with is Greek Another is Hebrew And Arabic But what about Babylonian? Or Hittite? Which might be Phoenician. Akkadian