Subject | On Philosophy |
Created | 10/24/2010 7:29:00 AM |
Posted | 10/24/2010 7:19:00 AM |
Blog | Philosophy is the art of appraising different belief systems and, if you’re up to it, of pulling them apart (think ‘vivisection’) to see what makes them tick.
The philosopher creates a skein of conjecture. He wraps himself in this in order to see the world differently.
Sometimes he forgets to take it off, or even that it is there – hence the analogy of an ivory tower in a maze of meaning, broadcasting unintelligible jargon.
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Note:
I finally got the urge to dig back into my lost MySpace Blog. Why? Well I knew I’d made some notes on Plato’s The Republic, it was just a matter of digging them out. Not as easy as I expected. Successive waves of MySpace retrenchment made them inaccessible. If you’ve lost one, you could do worse than check out Jim Younkin’s notes. Anyhow I did the procedure.
I found I had 600 posts waiting to be recovered. MySpace emailed them me in one zip file. I unzipped and tracked down the relevant bits.
Plato’s The Republic
I’ve had a copy of this for years (Penguin – battered paperback) but never read it. As I was taking philosophy class in MMU at the time, I decided to brush up. To be fair, I wasn’t unfamiliar with Plato – I’d read Timaeus and Critias, Protagoras and Meno, Gorgias… in fact pretty much the full Penguin Classic collection. I’d just left The Republic for… later, I guess.
My starting position was the ‘blue’ post above. As I read I made notes which are below:
The Republic
Philosopher Kings and Forms (to the Corruption of Philosophy)
The Prejudice Against Philosophy
The Good as Ultimate Object of Knowledge
The Simile of the Sun
Moving onto the Cave
For fun I include the following (depending on your definition of fun).
Hermeneutics