Blog Round Four: Dance 'til You're Sore - Empedocles Postgame + Paper Idea

So yeah. I thought my presentation went pretty well today. Maybe I'm biased, but I was happy with the presentation and the performance. I'll admit that halfway through my preparation I realized that I was working on the Metaphysics of Empedocles instead of the Epistemology, so I ended up having to modify half of my work to fit the presentation that I gave today. Luckily the metaphysics and epistemology are pretty well related, so it isn't too weird for me to talk about the metaphysics.

Final thoughts on Empedocles: Honestly, I liked him a lot. He's pretty cool. What I liked the most was his account on how we come to have knowledge. " For by earth we see earth, by water, water, by Aither, divine Aither, any by fire, destructive fire, yearning by yearning, and strife by mournful strife." Through the expression of the classic elements in our own bodies, we can come to observe and know other expression of the elements and how love and strife influence the different shapes. It's total crap and there's no way to prove it, but it's fascinating nonetheless.

Now onto greater heights! Today in class we talked about how we will be presenting conference papers at the end of the semester. I am not in want of a topic. My mind immediately went back to Pythagoras and his discussions on music. I want to see if there is a link between music and moral philosophy, using Pythagoras as a base for the concepts of music and morality. I don't know if there is even a link there, but this is too interesting of a topic and too good of an opportunity to pass up. I'll make another blog post once I've done some preliminary reading. I need to find some new sources for this because the parts about music aren't covered too well in the reader.

- Andrew