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

End of Session

The end of the summer sessions is this Saturday. My last Logic class was today but I plan on being on campus around 9 on Monday for those still trying to add points to their grade. But my official office hours are over until classes start for Fall Semester. My syllabi are updated and posted. The main effort from now until the deadline for grades to be turned in will be grading the remaining term papers and last essays sets from my on line courses. Please get those in as soon as you can. Thirty term papers to grade in one day is - not really possible.

Start of the new session

While it amounted to only one class on Thursday so far, we have entered the second five week session for the summer classes. My two ten week on line courses continue as they have for the last five weeks but in addition I now have two hours of logic Monday through Thursday on main campus. This should still enable me to make my office hours in Eagle River from 1 to 2:30 PM if you stop by.

Maleficent

We saw the movie Maleficent today on the advice of some good friends. It will be difficult to avoid spoilers in talking about it, but I was very interested in how this movie took a different - can you think Postmodern?- view of this story. It reminds me of Wicked (the musical) and how it did the same thing with that story. Key moral of the narrative is the nature of true love. It is persuasive especially with the cultural climate regarding love today. This version of the story is convincing, that by comparison, the nature of true love is exemplified in a much different way than what the old version depicts. Boy does that have a lot to say about how our culture has changed! It is loaded with fairly typical black and white contrasts that do no damage to the tried and true (though arguable ethnic) conceptions of good and evil. But the sex roles have certainly taken a serious hit, and this is what feels right. There is also an element of Avatar here in the juxtaposition of two cultures. One is natural - magical even of course - and colorful. I half wonder how many of the same CG crew that worked with Cameron worked on this. James Howard did the music. I note especially the appropriate difference in the last song One Upon a Dream. So everything beautifully fits the opposite interpretation of this classic and does so because our culture is ripe for it.

Summer

We had an amazing start, weather wise, to this "summer" with much warmer weather than usual. But it has cooled down quite a bit and is even lower than average in temperatures at the moment. But as a result, we are very green and the air is full of sweet perfume from an abundance of flowers. Really quite perfect I think. Classes, meanwhile, have started as usual though it seems there are fewer students this summer. But either way, this is a time when I can catch up on my reading and try to get books read before they are due at the library. It is important, I think, to keep up my fluency in the vocabulary of various aspects of philosophy as well as keep up to date on the newest and most exciting things developing. At time it seems impossible to keep up.