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.