Thoughts on blogs

I just wrote a blog about my thoughts on the writing process. While I’m at it, I figured I could do the same for the blog project. Confession: I didn’t appreciate the blogs until the last few weeks of class. I really wish I had made time to read other people’s blogs more consistently throughout the year instead of just whenever I had a spare moment. It’s really interesting reading other’s last few post from the past two weeks and getting their thoughts on the different presentations, their own paper, and the writing process. Especially in the seminar-style class, we have to understand the different perspectives of our peers for a fuller understanding of what we read and discuss in class. The blogs are a great way to do that.

Some things that could have made the overall blog project go smother: I really liked the few times we were given a couple of prompts to choose to write on. It gave the blogs more direction and purpose, instead of regurgitating a rambly summery of the reading. Also, I wish we had discussed what we wrote in our blogs together as a class. That way, the blogs don’t seem like a separate individual assignment but becomes part of an ongoing discussion of everything we are learning. (This might be more effective with prompts to respond to for blogs to maintain coherency in discussion.)

Also, I'm really annoyed that each of my posts thinks it's ok to switch font halfway through -_-

Thoughts about the writing process

Commence rant: I really, really, really hate presenting. A lot. It’s close to the top of my list of skills that I need to develop. End mini rant.

Other than my discomfort in presenting to a class, I really enjoyed the process we went through to write our papers. I like that I was broken down into so many parts because it forced me to slow down. I couldn’t just write this paper in two days with a third day for revisions like all the other papers I was writing in the midst of this process. I was able to break it down and allow ideas to develop instead of trying to put them all together at one time. Ok, even the part I disliked the most was still helpful by making me evaluate the main points and flow of what I had actually written. Another reason I really liked the way we approached this paper is it invited me to be more involved in the writing. By reading and hearing about other people’s papers, and having them read and evaluate mine (regardless of whether it was the initial abstract, the draft, or the presentation), it was no longer just a paper. Instead, it caused me to ask why it matters to us. What is the value of what each of us is writing and how can it apply to us?

"Point of View"

So I found this saved on my computer from a few weeks ago and realized I never posted it… oops.

Some of my fellow University Scholar friends and I sometimes joke that our major is a glorified undecided program. When I tell people that my concentrations are Classics and Literature with a little Philosophy thrown into the mix, they never fail to ask – “So what do you plan to do with that?” I usually wish I had an answer to give them with definite post-undergrad plans. But this article makes an important point on why I love the University Scholars program and the “useless” classes I choose to take. Four years is pretty short, and I don’t want to spend that time filling my head with facts and information – I have the rest of my life to do that. Instead, I want to learn how to THINK. I want to be able to take everything I learn and determine why it matters. How does what I learn apply to how I live my life or the world around me? I could choose from any number of majors or concentrations, and the most important aspect of any of the classes I take will be what I choose to do with it outside of the classroom. Coles summed it up nicely when he said “[his student] challenged us to prove that what we think intellectually can be connected to our daily deeds.”

Ethics--Books 8 and 9

This is just some basic stuff about friendship I'm reviewing for a segment of my paper:

Books eight and nine of Nicomachean Ethics begin with evaluating what makes a relationship a friendship. The most prominent quality is a friend wishes good will for the sake of the other. Also, the good will must be mutually recognized and reciprocated. This good will is closely tied to the practice of moral virtues. Aristotle identifies three relationships between friends. The first two, friendships of utility and pleasure, are short lived and exist for the purpose of an exchange between the friends. They happen accidentally arising from a need that the involved parties can meet. This is not a perfect friendship, but is merely a shadow reflecting the relationship between true friends. A perfect friendship is based on each person’s qualities of excellence. It is enduring because its foundation is set in characteristics that do not change.

Within a perfect friendship, the benefits of a utility or pleasure friendship can also be present. Because true friends love for the sake of the other, they will naturally be inclined to offer benefits like in an associations of utility. Also, out of love for the goodness of the person, they will receive pleasure from each other as well. Aristotle describes the importance of friends as such: “friends help young men avoid error; to older people they give the care and help needed to supplement the failing powers of action which infirmity brings in its train; and to those in their prime they give the opportunity to preform noble actions.” In this way, friends contribute to eudaimonia not just from the benefits and pleasure received, but also because, like in the polis, it provides a structure under which to practice virtuous actions.

Comparison of the Cave and Ethics

Plato and Aristotle both come to the conclusion that intelligence is the highest capacity of man. But it is not easy for man to achieve this highest potential. Plato says a man must be forced out of the metaphorical cave of ignorance by being turned towards using his intelligence. When initially untied, “if he were compelled to look at the light itself, wouldn’t his eyes be pained and wouldn’t he turn around and flee toward the things he is able to see, and believe that they are really clearer than the ones he is being shown” (Republic, 515e)? And again upon leaving the cave, “when he came into the light, wouldn’t he have his eyes filled with sunlight and be unable to see a single one of the things now said to be truly real” (Republic, 516a)? Every time the man is brought closer to seeing reality, it is painful for his unadjusted eyes to take in the light and he does not go willingly. It is a difficult thing for him to let go of the security of the beliefs he maintains, even if they are in ignorance. It is painful to his eyes to look upon something greater than what he already knows, and the intelligence is not obtained easily. Aristotle also acknowledges that cultivating intelligence is not an easy task. He says “moral virtue… is formed by habit… and none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by nature, for nothing which exists by nature can be changed by habit” (Ethics, 1103a15). A habit takes time to form and reflects a behavioral practice. Moral virtue, as Aristotle says, is not in our nature, so it is something that must be intentionally pursued. Intelligence, as the highest virtue, should be a habit man strives to form if he wants to live a good life, but to do this, he must struggle against his natural inclinations until it becomes a habit.

Although there is difficulty in cultivating intelligence, Aristotle and Plato both agree that in doing so, man enhances the best part of himself. Aristotle compares the best part in man to something of a divine nature, and claims “the gods enjoy a life blessed in its entirety; men enjoy it to the extent that they attain something resembling the divine activity” (Ethics, 1178b25). Plato also calls “the virtue of wisdom… something more godlike” (Republic, 158e). The comparison of intelligence to something of a divine nature shows that it is the best part of man. It is the highest human capacity because it allows man to transcend his current condition to become or understand things higher than himself, enabling him to live a good life in its fullest capacity. Man is naturally drawn to wanting eudaimonia, for if one does not live a good life, he does not have a life worth living.

 

 

Happiness and Intelligence—Book 10

     In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle seeks to explain what it means to live a good life. He uses the term eudaimonia, which is understood as being happy in a sense of living well or flourishing. He says that “happiness is activity in conformity with virtue, [so] it is to be expected that it should conform with the highest virtue, and that is the virtue of the best part of us” (Eth. Nic., 1177a10). Happiness is self-sufficient and is an activity desirable for its own sake, which is what makes it in conformity with virtue. The activities that matter, namely, those that contribute to eudaimonia, will be those that are grounded in what Aristotle calls the highest virtue. He describes the highest virtue as something in which “its very nature rules and guides us and which gives us our notions of what is noble and divine; whether it is itself divine or the most divine thing in us; it is the activity of this part when operating in conformity with the excellence or virtue proper to it that will complete happiness” (Eth. Nic., 1177a15). He goes on to define intelligence as the highest possession we have in us, the highest attribute man can obtain, and the best part of him. From this, it can be understood that for man to be able to live well and possess a life of eudaimonia, he must cultivate his intelligence. It can be taken a step further to say that the completeness of one’s happiness, or eudaimonia, depends on how well one uses his intelligence in a manner that aligns with Aristotle’s description—it must rule and guide us towards appropriate things and work towards excellence and virtue.

Virtue in the Community

Here is a quick run down of virtue:

The word that Aristotle uses for virtue is arête. If this were literally translated, it would mean excellence. Virtue is the way in which man acquires eudaimonia. Or, it is this characteristic of excellence that allows man to live a flourishing life. There are two types of virtue according to Aristotle, intellectual and moral. How do we attain the characteristics of virtue? In this case, the outworn phrase “practice makes perfect” actually fits. It is through habituation, repetitive actions, which makes it part of who you are and perfect the virtue to its fullest capacity. You know you have acquired the virtue you are practicing when you take pleasure in doing it. Because when you take pleasure in it, it is a sign that it is natural to your way of acting. The thing to be careful of, though, is that vice works the same way. You can acquire a vice by habituation of those actions, and worse, you’ll even begin to take pleasure in doing them.

So how do we know what actions to be putting into practice? What determines the virtues we should be aiming for? Or in other words, what is excellent? Aristotle gives part of the answer, imitation. We should look at people who have these virtues that we want and do the actions they do. Makes sense, but how did they know what was virtuous? This is way the community is essential to being a virtuous person. It is society that determines appropriate habituation. It is the society that dictates by its laws and social expectations how a man should act. The man who does these actions best and most consistanlty has virtue by the standard of that community.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1

It was in rereading this first book that ideas started forming for what I wanted to write about for my paper topic. Aristotle will talk a lot throughout Ethics about the Good, what it is to man, and how man achieves it. When I first read Nicomachean Ethics last semester, I thought it was odd that Aristotle would frame this discussion with mentions of politics at the beginning and end of Ethics. But in rereading it and looking at the translator’s notes, I realized that I had a misconstrued interpretation of what Aristotle meant by politics, so I went back to look at what the translator had to say since he has knowledge of both the Greek and English languages (surprise! It’s a little sad that it took me the second time reading this to look it up).

So here it is: Politike is the science of the city-state (polis) and the members of it. It is not constrained to our narrow “political science” sense of the word, but also in the sense that a civilized human existence is only possible in the polis. Therefore, politike involves not only politics as a science of the state, but our concept of society as well.

 

So what does this mean in the context of serving as the opening and closing framework of Ethics? This is part of what I will be exploring in my paper, but if I had to make a preliminary guess… Society, or any form of community really, is necessary for man to reach the highest good. Man flourishes within the structure of community because he is able to put into practice much of the things the Aristotle discusses throughout Nicomachean Ethics. This is why Aristotle devotes an entire book to the importance of friends, because that is another form of community in which man can flourish and grow. (This is a little rough in terms of accuracy and depth, but writing a blog post about it has helped solidify ideas about what I want to write about.)

Symposium: The Five Speeches

As a means of review for myself I’m going back to the five speeches:

Phaedrus says that Love is the oldest of all gods. He claims that “because of his antiquity, Love is the source of our greatest benefits.” This is because love is the inspiration of honor and virtue and is the spirit of self-sacrifice. (In part because a man would rather die than appear as a coward in the eyes of his beloved.)

Pausanias distinguishes between heavenly love and common love.  The object of common love is women and young boys; the object of heavenly love is young men. He advocates laws to rule the proper way to love in society. He thinks that love is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for either depending on the actions behind it.

Euryximachus is a physician. He makes the distinction the distinction of bad and good love (balance and harmony) into a cosmic principle and ergo universally applicable. He says love is everywhere and is the driving force behind everything. This definition acts as a transition from the narrow definition of love as physical desire (Phaedrus and Pausanias) to the intellectual love.  As a physician he speaks of the healthy and the ill and advises from a foundation of practice.  

Ariststophanes is a comic playwright and tells a humorous tale to frame his account of love. He defines love as the "desire and pursuit of the whole”.  He recognizes that love is a need whose satisfaction is more than physical and that love is a longing to regain a lost happiness.  

Agathon is a tragic poet who gives the party. His contribution is the admission that love's object is Beauty. He says love is the force of bringing things together. Unlike Phaedrus, he believes love is the youngest god. 

Symposium: Socrates' Speech

This is a short account of Socrates’ speech on love (or rather, his retelling of a conversation he had with Diotima on the subject).

Socrates argues that love or desire is relational and expresses lack or deficiency. If love is love of some object, then love desires that object. One desires only what one does not have, so love is not beautiful but is desire of beauty.

Socrates then tells how Diotima described the nature of love. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor evil. He is an intermediate state—half man, half god. He is like opinion (Intermediate between ignorance and episteme). He is the true lover of wisdom because wisdom is beautiful and beauty is the object of love. Men are lovers of the good which they want to possess perpetually. Perpetuity is achieved through procreation. Thus, Eros is procreation: physical, spiritual and philosophical (that of wisdom).

The correct way to begin to love is to love beautiful bodies, ideally he should start with loving just one body. Next, he will reduce the love of a single body and appreciate the beauty of all beautiful bodies. Then he should reduce the love of beautiful bodies to love the beauty of minds. Next is to find beauty in laws, observances and kinship and to let go of the beauty of bodies altogether. Then he will find beauty in the forms of knowledge (general not particular branches). Finally, he will be “turned towards the great sea of beauty and gazing on it he’ll give birth, through a boundless love of knowledge, to many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas.” 

It is in this way that “when someone goes up these stages, through loving boys in the correct way, and begins to catch sight of that beauty, he has come close to reaching the goal.”

Symposium

Since I had already finished reading Symposium over spring break, I had the time to do some extra reading in the introduction provided in my copy of the book. I found a few interesting things to consider as I continue to look at this dialogue. For starters, here is some background information on this piece. The banquet did occur; Xenophon reports on it as well as Plato.  Agathon had won first prize for his dramatic play and guests were invited back to the house for a party. A symposium is literally a "drinking together"--in other words a drinking party. This is unlike Plato’s other dialogues in that Socrates does not question the others in the dialectical fashion as seen in Plato’s other works, except briefly. Instead the various speakers take turns, as it were, each offering what he knows from his own perspective and then Socrates presents a view that can place the others within a grander scheme.

This is the part that I found most interesting: the dialogue centers on a series of speeches praising eros, a term usually translated as ‘desire’. Eros is the name for one of the Greek gods of love (we would be more familiar with the Romanized name, Cupid), which lends to the definition of the term eros a ‘passionate sexual desire’. So why do we get the translation ‘love’ instead of desire? In the words of Christopher Gill, whom I have to thank for this introduction in my book, “Some of the speeches, especially Socrates’, suggest that sexual desire is an expression of certain deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.” This actually helped me a lot to understand how Socrates’ speech fits in with the speeches at the beginning. A wide range of definitions of love were explored, but Socrates says “first, that Love is of something; second, that it is of something that he currently needs” (Plato, 200e). The initial accounts of love weren’t necessarily incompatible with that of Socrates’, but the different views of love they gave were just facets of what Gills calls “deeper and more universal types of desire or motivation.”

Allegory of the Cave... Continued?

I first read Plato’s allegory of the cave last semester, and now I seem to see allusions to it in much of what I read for other classes. For example, in Dante’s Pradisio, Dante the pilgrim uses much of the same language as Plato in describing his quest for understanding of the ultimate truth (or what Plato called the Good, as represented by the sun in his allegory). I’ll focus this comparison in canto two of Paradisio.

As he sets off on his journey across the Ocean of Being, the pilgrim warns those that would take the same path: “Don’t try the open ocean—turn and see your own familiar shores, for you’d remain forever lost, should you lose sight of me. I venture across waters never sailed by man!” (Dante, Parad 2.4-7). Just like the prisoner freed from his chains and compelled to embark on a journey upward, the pilgrim must go on a journey that few men ever attempt on their own. The pilgrim foresees that it will be challenging and at times painful to leave his shore of familiarity.

We follow the pilgrim on his journey out of his ‘cave’ as his preconceived notions are challenged and his intellect is stretched. Finally he reaches the point when he “saw [he]’d reached a place that turned [his] sight toward something to behold in awe” (Dante, Parad 2.25-26). This is the moment when he sees what Plato calls the sun in his allegory, just like the prisoner led out of the cave who has his gaze turned towards the sun. Dante describes the moment as “struck by the warming sun, what underlies snow is denuded of the cold and white, so now—yourself remaining what you are—I wish to fill your intellect with light, light so aflame with life that cannot cease” (Dante, Parad 2.106-110). The snow is water stripped of the accidental features of white and coldness. Likewise, upon beholding the light, the intellect is so filled and enlightened that it experiences true and unveiled life in its purest/simplest state and not hidden behind the walls of the cave.

The Allegory of the Cave

     In the Republic, Plato says there are three parts of the soul: the rational, spirited, and appetitive. He explains that the rational part of the soul represents the highest form of human capability, and he uses the Allegory of the Cave to illustrate how one comes to develop it in its fullness. Plato’s Allegory serves to illustrate how one comes to fully develop one’s intelligence, which is in alignment with the rational part of the soul.
    In the cave, prisoners are bound and permitted to only see the shadows projected on the wall before them, cast by the light of the fire shining on puppets. In the cave, the chained prisoners represent the starting point of mankind’s mind. They are only able to perceive illusions that are a crude reflection of what is real. A prisoner is loosed from his binds to see the puppets that the shadows are cast from and the fire that illuminates them. The freed man is then forced out of the cave into the light of the sun, where he will begin to see shadows and reflections of objects, then gradually as his eyes become fully adjusted he will perceive the objects themselves. Only a few will escape to see the visible realm and see the fire and objects casting the shadows, but they will lack the knowledge to explain what they now see. Eventually he will be compelled to look at the sun and recognize it as the source of illumination of everything he sees. Here everything is illuminated and represents knowledge and understanding. The last thing seen is the sun, which is the ultimate good; it is the source of light and all things that can be known in the intelligible realm. If The Good is the source of illumination of intelligence, then it is necessary to seek the things beyond the cave in order to develop the rational part of the soul. It is in the intelligible realm and knowing the Good that man reaches his highest possibility.

The Sophists

     This post covering the sophists is a little late. Frankly, I spent so most of my time reviewing Prodicus for this particular set of pages, so I had done mostly a cursory reading of the other three. So after listening to the presentations over Protagoras, Gorgias, and Hippias and having some time to think about it… Who am I kidding? Even after thinking about it I can’t get them to fit under a nice category of unifying thoughts and ideas. I suppose I should have seen that coming though, since while researching Prodicus, I found out about the sophists belonged to no organization, shared no common body of beliefs and founded no schools.

     So who exactly were the sophists? Simply put, they were teachers. They would go around teaching their students (not without expecting proper payment from the students, of course) on just about any topic imaginable. Although they are well known for their rhetoric and being able to teach it. This plays into the purpose of what they were teaching. Possibly the greatest criticism against this group is that they were more interested in being right than in the truth. Granted, nearly everything that we know about them comes from Plato, who wasn’t their biggest fan, so the information we have about the sophists has an unfavorable tint. Although they did find themselves an important niche in society. There was a demand for higher education due to the growing wealth and intellectual pursuits. As politics grew, there was a need for the development of specialized techniques of persuasion and argument. Also, there were new questions (or the same old questions recurring) about morality, religion, and political conduct. The sophists both responded and contributed to these demands. Because the niche they were filling was so broad, each of the sophist contributed in their own way with topics that interested them, which I suppose is why there is so little unity in a common body of beliefs.

Tomorrow I will be giving a presentation on Prodicus, so this blog post will be dedicated to a quick recap of what I have found.

When I first started looking for information on Prodicus, most of the places that I started out looking had him slipped under and only talked about him in the context of the category of Sophists. So it seemed like a reasonable place to start was finding out more about the Sophists and who they were. The term came from the Greek word sophistēs, formed from the noun sophia, meaning ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning’. What did they do to warrant this title? In the fifth century BCE, they were educators who toured the Greek world offering instruction in a wide range of subjects, with emphasis on skill in public speaking and the successful conduct of life. Alright, now that we have a general idea of what Prodicus was up to, we can start looking at his life and how he fits under this category.

Prodicus was born in city of Iulis, in the island of Ceos, an Athenian colony off the coast of Attica east of Cape Sunium, and he lived approximately from 465 BC – c. 395 BC. He came to Athens quite a bit as an ambassador, and while he was in Athens he often taught rhetoric. He became wealthy from this occupation because he would have students pay him for the lessons. Prodicus' topics of instruction were rhetoric, the origins of religion, and ethics and virtue.

 

Several of Plato's dialogues focus upon Prodicus' linguistic theory, and his insistence upon the correct use of names. He specialized in the precise definition of words and subtle distinction between near synonyms, he paid special attention to the correct use of words and the distinction of expressions related in sense.

 

Concerning the origins of religion, he denied the reality of the gods and was called an atheist. Prodicus said the names of gods were originally applied either to things which are particularly important in human life, such as the sun, rivers, kinds of crops etc., or else to the people who had originally discovered things of that kind. He was understood as meaning that in fact Demeter is nothing but corn, Dionysus nothing but wine, and so on. He interpreted religion through the framework of naturalism and recognized a close connection between religion and agriculture.

In contrast to his radical views on religion, the moral stance expressed here is thoroughly conventional. All that has survived of his writings is a paraphrase by Xenophon (Memorabilia II.1.21–34) of his moral fable of the choice of Heracles between Virtue and Vice. A young Heracles about to enter adult life is met by two women at a cross-road. One calls herself Happiness (Eudaimonia), though she must admit her critics call her Vice (Kakia), who describes an effortless road of endless pleasure in this life. The other is called Virtue (Arètè), who describes a long road of hard labor in which man must earn what he wants through his efforts in order to truly enjoy it and thus deserve rewards from the gods in the afterlife.

Anaxagoras

Earlier this week I got ahead of myself and skipped a reading. Oops… So I’m going to backtrack and look at Anaxagoras.

Anaxagoras claims that all things are made from ingredients, or as phrased in our nifty Presocratics Reader, “homogeneous stuffs.” He explains how the ingredients function thus: “Anaxagoras says just the opposite of Empedocles about the elements. For Empedocles claims that fire and earth, and things of the same rank, are elements of bodies and that all things are compounded of them; but Anaxagoras says the opposite. For he claims that the homogeneous stuffs are elements—I mean, for instance, flesh and bone and each of the things of that sort—and that air and fire are mixtures of them and of all the other seeds; for each of them is a collection of all the invisible homogeneous stuffs.” Translation: everything is made up of ingredients that, when separated or brought together in different combinations, make up the perceivable world as we see it. Whereas Empedocles thought everything was made up of varying combinations of the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air), Anaxagoras claims that even those are formed by baser ingredients. I’ll borrow from the information in the introduction here, but apparently the Nous set forth and put in motion the original mixture of all the ingredients. From that point on, they are able to mix together to form the world as we see it.

The slip up I made with reading ahead actually worked out quite nicely, because I read Anaxagoras in the light of later theories. Leucippus and Democritus had their atomism theory that all things were made up of combinations of what they called atoms. I won’t make the automatic jump to say Leucippus and Democritus based their ideas directly off of Anaxagoras’ ingredients, but it’s interesting to see how a concept can change and develop from one philosopher to the next.

Leucippus & Democritus

I'm back!! It's funny how I take a one week break from writing for a busy week, and next thing I know it's several weeks later... 

Today's reading was about Leucippus and Democritus. A big chunk of the reading covered Leucippus' theory of atomism, which was continued by his pupil Democritus. I actually found it fascinating how their theory sounds very similar to things we talked about in my high school science courses. (You know, back when science was I thing I was required to take.) I could go on to talk about what they said about atomism, but it would be at risk of put putting on display my ignorance of anything science-y.

So instead I’ll skip to the very end. In aphorism number 54, it says “cheerfulness arises in people through moderation of enjoyment and due proportion in life. Deficiencies and excesses tend to change suddenly and give rise to large movements in the soul. Souls that undergo motions involving large intervals are neither steady nor cheerful…”  Upon reading that, I immediately thought of Aristotle when he says in the second book of Nicomachean Ethics “there are, then, three kinds of disposition: two are vices (one marked by excess and one by deficiency), and one, virtue, the mean.” Aristotle was looking at virtue as the true way to achieve eudaimonia (or happiness in the sense of well-being and flourishing). So it seems that Aristotle borrowed directly from Democritus (I’m assuming it was him) the idea that the extremes cause imbalance, so true happiness is found in moderation.

Pythagoras

Before I start, let's get this straight: I don't math. So I sat down my friend Clara, who happens to be majoring in the mathematical arts, and subjected her to a reading of the entire seven pages devoted to Pythagoras in our little book. This is what we came up with together.

Pythagoras wanted to be able to explain the entire world by rules that he could understand. He had such a mathematical mind that the method he used to make sense of it all was numbers. From there, he was able to apply it to life, nature, and the kosmos.

So we started with the last aphorism, the one with the lists that looked like a first grader's exercise in recognizing opposites. Pythagoras was so insistent in applying his "rules" to understanding the world, that he took the things that are confusing about human nature, picked them apart, and then defined them. In the words of my own math nerd, Clara, "we like concrete definitions, things that are true and solid." Well there you have it folks, it took math to get the ball rolling on the purpose of philosophy.

At this point another friend from the realm of math joined us to make sense of aphorism 18. We decided that, apparently, Pythagoras doesn't math either. On the advice of the math kids in the room, "he needs to define limited and unlimited and be clearer"... and "he can't just say stuff." Although it did end with the redeeming comment, "and numbers, as I have said, constitute the entire universe."

In conclusion, based on the number of characters and words, (which are even), I will receive an unlimited grade on this assignment. And then multiply it by 10, because apparently that is the perfect number.

Xenophanes

What I found most interesting about Xenophanes was his views of god. He starts by completely rejecting the traditionally acknowledged Olympian gods. Everything that everyone has grown up being taught about the gods depicted by Homer and Hesiod, Xenophanes discounts on the grounds that the poets “have ascribed to the gods all deeds which among men are matters of reproach and blame.” It makes sense—how is it that the divine, something that supposedly transcends worldly things, embodies all of the things that make man base? I think Xenophanes was on the right track here. He even continues to tear down these man-made gods by showing how the Olympians are only a reflection of men themselves; for instance, they were born, which means they had a beginning and thus there was a time in which they did not exist, and they had distinctly human characteristics and lead human-like lifestyles. If the gods that the Grecians were worshipping were merely reflections of themselves, then those same gods would be very different to other peoples to reflect their own life. If the gods are so fickle and mutable to the world around them, they don’t project a nature that transcends earthly things.

Thus far, Xenophanes has been doing all well and good in not going along with the popular views without thought, but he rejected them after pointing out the flaws. Then he looses me. He tore down the views of the gods of the poets, which he replaces with his own god, which lacks as much evidence as what he just denied. He says there is one greatest god, not like mortal in form or thought. The god is immutable and immovable, all seeing, hearing, and thinking, working all things through his mind. I’m not saying he’s wrong or right. He just lost me in the shift form needing evidence to ascribe to Homer and Hesiod’s depictions of the gods, to creating his own version of god without any evidence to support it.

Although on a side note, I think it’s interesting how man seems to intrinsically know there is something greater than himself. Xenophanes knew that the Olympian gods were no better in their exploits than man, and they didn’t adequately represent the higher things of this world. So instead, he grasped for whatever was in reach and fashioned his own idea of a god to try to fill the void.