Blog Round Five: Hive Mind Jive - Class Today + More Paper Ideas

Today was an informative class period. Plus, we had desserts. Desserts make everything better.

Anaxagoras is an okay guy. He reminds me a lot of Kant. The aphorism that is most similar is number 20, which reads, "Owing to their [the senses'] feebleness, we are not able to determine the truth." This is just like Kant's nouminal and phenomenal world. The nouminal world is the world as it truly is. The phenomenal world is the world as it appears to us, through our perceptions. According to Kant, we cannot know the nouminal world because we continually perceive the world. By nature, we can only know the phenomenal world. Anaxagoras, like Kant, emphasizes limits on human reason. The truth which is beyond our understanding is the Nous. And while, we have a part of the Nous inside of us, we cannot truly know the nature of it. The Nous we observe can only be as we perceive it, and not as it actually is.

I wish I could talk about Anaxagoras more, but there weren't a lot of aphorisms to read, and there isn't too much to infer from what there is. The people who presented today did very well, but I felt bad that there wasn't too much in the primary source for them to use.

Switching gears now, I'm going to move over to my conference paper. Pythagoras and moral philosophy! There's a lot of books in Moody library about Pythagoras, so I'm not in want for materials. The first thing to note is the Pythagorean declaration, "All things known have number." This is the first major part of my paper; establishing if things like epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics can have number. Can they? Well, it's hard to assign a system of order to (sometimes) vague and intangible concepts. In terms of metaphysics, Pythagoreans asserted that there were patterns of numbers in the universe, and that the whole kosmos follows these patterns. For epistemology, numbers are part of our perceptions; we will be more likely to identify a pattern in the world, and its discovery can enable us to learn.

Ethics is the difficult category here. In order to link musical chords and moral philosophy, ethical criterion and their qualities must be linked with music. There must be something about the qualities of Justice, Love, or Humility that are obvious to the Fourth, Fifth, and Octave chords.

I think I've got my work cut out for me. You know, it would really suck if I were to find that I couldn't actually write about my paper. You know, no links, no source, etc. I'd laugh for a bit. But I think I'll be able to find something good and make a good paper out of it.

-Andrew