Final paper

Ok, I am struggling about the final paper now.

After my presentation, no time left for you guys to ask questions, but I still find some place to be improved by myself.

 

The first one is my thesis statement. I was trying to put all the things I have learned from the first and secondary resources into one paper. So sometimes it seems their relation to each other is weak. And my topic is "whether the true friendship could exist on the social media", but I also talked about other two kinds of friendship and how could they exist on the social medias. So maybe I still need to think about how to make my thesis statement better fit with my whole paper. 

Second is the use of primary resources. I used lots of secondary resources and my own discussions in my paper, but it lacks the supports from the primary resources, or just provide a weak and unsatisfied support. So what I am doing on my rough draft is to make the support from the primary resources much stronger and more convincing.

Third is the logic in my whole paper. Even though it is not really a big problem comparing to the formal two, during my presentation, I still think it messed up. So what I am going to do is to write down all the topic sentences together, and rearrange their relations from each other. 

 

How to be a better person ( kind of a summery)

We discussed the reason why we choose philosophy as a major, and I wrote one blog to response that question. For me, the answer is quite simple. I want to be a better person. But how?  After studying philosophy for three years, I gradually find out that it is impossible for us to grow up as a better person only through higher education, even though we are studying philosophy.  So what? Giving up what we are studying and to take a major that could make our life much easier in the future? Not really, the cues are buried in the philosophical theories and the ancient wisdoms provide us answer.

I would say the most important part of an adult, obviously we are all adults, to be a better person is to make virtues of friends. I am a person that is easily influenced by the environment, especially the people around me. In other words, my close friends usually have the most influence on my decisions. And I would feel really ashamed and guilty when my friend thought that what I had done is not good, or even bad. (That's why I really agree with the symposium. It works on myself.) And people usually get together with the group that is similar to them, so they tend to be acted as the same as their friends. 

And, the second essential element for an adult to improve him-/herself, is the community. We live in one unit community and we share lots of characteristics with the people who lived in the community. In Tessa's discussion, bystander effect has a lager chance to happen when more than one person on the spot. We tend to think we are wrong when the majority have the different reaction with us. That's an interesting psychological phenomenon, the community we lived in could shape us both in a good or negative way. 

Lastly, I thought, the law could play a role in the process that we become a better person. Obey the law usually makes us to be a "good citizen". But is the good person means the person best fits into the frame that designed by the society or the "governors"?  The pre-requirement is that the law we are obeying is justice. But how could we judge whether a law is justice? Or could we just say the person is not a good person even though the law he/she break is justice?  The law is not a way to judge people, even though it always a role like this. But I would prefer to say the law is something that could guide people. Its influences on people should be similar as the religions. People who hold a true believe hardly break a law.  It is hard to say the law of ancient Greek is just or unjust. I used to think the law in ancient Greek is quite unreasonable, as it allowed the citizen to "kill" Socrates. And I was quite confused why Socrates did not choose to leave. Finally, I understand, that is because of his belief and the love of his hometown (yes, he loved his hometown sincerely and deeply) lead him to obey the law and accept the outcomes. Laws could never be perfectly justice, and the existing law somethings are best fitting the current situations. And also, on the way of improving the law, we also improve ourselves, better understanding the law, and better understanding of the community we are living. 

Something about my presentation and final paper

    I am working on my final paper and presentation these days, and find some interesting topics that I could share with my lovely peers and professor.  I need to write down all of them in case I will omit some of them when I design my PPT.
    
    First, I would love to share Confucius basic view towards friendship.  At the beginning of the paper process, I felt really anxious with bringing Confucius into my paper. Even though I learned the ancient Chinese philosophy one year ago, we never had a discussion focused on friendship before, we talked a little bit, but that is. And, for me, the ancient is like another foreign language, and I have to explain these ideas to my readers in English. But I feel really lucky I accounted Confucius in when I was revising my rough draft. Both Aristotle and Confucius view virtues as an essential part of the friendship, but different from Aristotle, the"company with each other" may not be that much necessary in Confucius friendship. Confucius brought up a view that friendship could span the limitation of distance and time.  For example, we could "communicate" with the great writers and poets I believe that this view could complete the theory of friendship in Aristotle in the modern society. Social networks are especial blogs and twitters increase the possibilities that two people who shared the same or similar virtues "meet" each other, and became "friends". Social networks play the role as a connection between these two virtue people, and help them "communicate".

    Second, social networks as tools of communication could help to maintain the existing friendship.

    Third, even though the previous two points are established, true friendship has really weak possibilities to develop based on the social networks. Here I would like to distinguish "sharing lives" and "share about life". "Sharing lives" are a term refer to one exactly participates in other's life. For example, our roommate sharing lives with us everyday. On the contrary, our friends who are "knowing" what we did during everyday through the social networks such as Facebook, twitter and even through the texts and emails we sent out. That is also an interesting topic which I thought I need to do more work on.

Making up blogs is quite annoying, but I do want to share something about my love to this class

I have to say I didn't have a good feeling on seminar before this class. The seminar in my mind is quite boring. Everybody has to do the required work before the discussion. And to the most of the time, at the end of discussion, mostly I would say, I gain nothing but spend about one hour to attend the "meeting". Usually we will be assigned in different topics or different readings, and also have to do a presentation on an assigned day. But nothing has to be worried about, as actually nobody would listen to your resonation as what you presented may have no relationship to theirs. Luckily, our presentations are separated to different days after professor's lecture, you do not have to present to the tables and chairs. Anyway, it would be really awkward when you just reading through the PPT slides, and find everybody was just playing on their phones or.....sleeping. Well, I did the same thing while others were doing the presentations. 

But I really love the seminar form for this class.

First of all, we have RUBRIC! Those papers really help a lot. They make the preparation for everything simple. Whenever I got stuck, I would read through the rubric and find the breakthrough.

And I like the conversational requirement for each parts of our work. To tell the truth, I never really read through the whole intro of the works we have to do last semester. The requirements are just too long to read. However, with the conversational style, the introduction and explanation become easy to follow.

The most important thing is that we have food during the class. My main motivation to take this class every Tuesday and Thursday is Stephanie's homemaking Brownie (just kidding). But it makes our class more similar to the situation in the Symposium. We share food and meanwhile share the thoughts. Taking a class is something really serious: students are sitting on their seats and listing to professor's lectures; the whole room is silent, nobody would talk or interrupt the professor, until professors began to ask questions, and point someone out. Our seminar is different, as this classroom really contains people from different majors and everyone has unique thoughts and understanding upon the topics. This kind of mixture makes this class more interesting and enjoyable.

And the last thing I really enjoyed is that we could hear from our peers. Not only through the peer review(the process of critique), but also we share our papers by the presentation. Philosophy is not only about learning but sharing right? By listening to other's presentation, I gain some new understandings that I never thought before, or have a new attitude towards a specific current issue. Well, I do not think I could gain that much more by just listening to the lectures and the presentation based on the reading materials. 

I really want to participate in another class like this one during the next year.

A response to Leo's Question on Thursday's class discussion

As a transfer here in Baylor just for one year, and an Asian international student, I would love to use my personal experience to response Leo's question about the friendship between students in different ethnic groups.

The question is why Asians always be friends with Asians, blacks always be with blacks, and whites are playing with whites.
Well, in my personal opinion I would say the main reason is that making friends with the people similar to you is more comfortable. And even among the same ethical group, people are tending to find friends that are similar to them. We are growing up in different families, which mean we have different living habits and cultural background. Even though Chinese share the similar  living style with Vietnamese, the living habits gap is narrower that the gap between Chinese and African Americans. Family education counts a lot. In most Asian families, I believed that children are required to sleep and get up early, which is believed to be good for our health. Also, Asian students may more tend to share with each other. A friend of mine means that a person could share all my secrets. However, most of the Asian students are "shy"during the class, which due to the education system in Asia, most of the classes are lectures, and it would be considered as offend to the teacher to interrupt the lecture even though one has a question.  So, when communicating with the foreigners, most of Asians are good listeners, rather than a speaker.

I have an African American roommate last semester. I was not getting along with her during the whole semester. I thought the main problem is the different living style. She loves to listen to music while studying,  and what worse is that she listens to the music through the TV, which means she could not wear a headphone. And she gets used to sleep with the TV on during the night. I sometimes complain to my Asian friends. All of them felt her behaviors are unbelievable, however, when I told these to another African American friend, she doesn't think that was not such a big deal. From then, I gradually find, with a consistent ethical, you have a larger chance to find someone matches your life style.

Well, things are same within an ethical  group. When I was studying in Sichuan University in China. Most of my friends came from the northern parts of China. Because northern parts of China share the similar eating and drinking custom. While, the southern parts of China share the same customs. The more common things you share with each other, the easier or more chances you would have to become friends with each other.

If we have to use Aristotle's friendship to explain this, I thought it dues to the "pleasure". You can share the pleasure with each other because the people you are getting along with shares the same or similar topics with you.

Divergent and the class discussion on Thursday

Yesterday, after enjoying the sunshine and delicious barbecue in Cameron Park, my friends and I decided to watch a movie to end our days. We chose Divergent, which is rating 7.5 on IMDb, and we thought it would be a better choice than Rio 2 (well, guys thought so, I was not).  Well, I really enjoy the love story between the handsome hero and heroine. However, it is not a really good movie in my view. I really should watch Rio 2, animation could always make me feel excited.

The reason why I put this movie together with our class discussion on Thursday is that I though it reflect the relationship between the moral and intellect. First of all, I don't believe, a person could be morally good after just taking a couple of class in the moral fields. Because, at least, taking class for some students is not a sake of self-flourishing, instead, is sake of finishing the requirement of their degrees.  For the students who taking the classes for the sake of graduation,  it is really hard for us to expect that they would be more morally at the end of the semester. And the for the students who taking the classes for the sake of self-flourishing, maybe we could expect they would be morally mature, but only expect.

Education could only be a way to improve the morality in one, but would nor determine one's morality. And at the same time, even though education could help the "students" establish and improve their morality, the effect of the higher education such as universities and college would be really weak. On the other hand, the environment where one grew up, and the family education and primary education one received since one was young would be have essential influence on one's moral development.

Most of the "evil" person in the movie or in the reality, they were doing the "evil" things based on their believes. Well, I mean the really evil person, not the "bad" people.  The really "evil" people choose to do the "right" things they believed to be right. In the movie, the women who choose to maintain the world system that divided people into five main factions, and to kill the people who is not fit in to the system, divergent, which means they would destroy the system, would be seen as just do what she believed is right. She said couple of times in the movie, "Human nature is not good for keeping peace". Well, maybe that is true, but she is on the track that prohibiting all the human natures, which is not moral good in the common sense. Why would they think in this way? Why would they control one group of people to kill another group of people, just because thy believed that the last group of people would destroy the existing system, which seems not that much reasonable but in their mind perfect? This woman is in the group of "wise". They know everything, and they have the most advantaged technology. Her intellect could say in a really high level, and she know what she is doing, and also she believed what she is doing is totally right. The moral wrong action is based on her wrong belief.

However, for most of the bad people, we could say, they just not totally understanding what is good and what is wrong. Yes,  they know, but they don't understand. For this group of people, education may work on they, but not the education we received from the universities and classes, but the education from the society. That why I thought Baylor could get the credits for this point. First of all, in this Christianity environment, most of us are expecting to behave good and seek for the goods of each other. And we have to attend chapels. We are expected to attend mission trips and mission services. Baylor provides the students various opportunities to learn from the societies. But, at the same time, this is just an expectation.

Moral education should be an obligation of the family, school, and society. And I believed the family environment and the education in primary and middle school should account more. It is really hard for the higher education to help re-establish one's moralities. However, it can do some improvement based on one's existing moralities.

After finish reading Friendship for the first time

ps: This should be a blog post three weeks ago, I just find out today that  I kept it in my draft.......

According to Aristotle, “friendship” is not similar to the modern meaning; the meaning of friendship actually has a more widen meaning in his work. There are three kinds of friendship, one is the friendship based on the “useful”, once the function of one party disappeared, the friendship would dissolve. One is the friendship for pleasure, which the feelings play the role of deriver. The third one, which Aristotle is highly honored, is the friendship between the good people who are alike in their virtue and good in themselves. The third friendship is a complete one.

The discussion of what we seek in the friendship impressed me a lot. The difference between these three friendships is that people in the fulfilled one are mutual benefits and the love between them is without qualification and they love each other due to the shared virtues and who they are. And then, he discussed the difference between the goodwill and the friendship, and held the view that the distance would not dissolve the friendship without qualification (I think it refer to the complete friendship or the friendship he said is “fullest sense”.), but it would break the activity. I always ignore the most basic, however, the most essential things in a relationship: communicate frequently and accompany with each other. These are the characteristics in one friendship, whatever the species they are. People need to be loved and love in a relationship, and they are pursuing the pleasure and the happiness.

Two different view towards pleasure in book X

At the beginning of Book V, Aristotle provides us two opposing view on pleasure. 

Eudox presents the people who hold a view that "Any good thing is more worthy of choice when one good is added to it than its own." Thus, he believes that happiness is the most worthy of choice and  with it the good of other virtues increased.On the contrary,  people represented by Plato think that "pleasure is not the good". Later on, Aristotle compare hearth with happiness. Different what people would consider about heath, the criteria of happiness are different from people to people. For example, business person might see "wealthy" as a standard of happiness; students would regard high GPA as a measurement of happiness(some of my friends do). Also, as what Aristotle discusses in Chapter 4, pleasure is not a process. We can easily feel happy and suddenly in a down mood. There is no start and stop point foe happiness. Meanwhile, Aristotle says pleasure is not a replenishment.[I am quite confused here, as I keep reading, I realized in some tense, Aristotle do think pleasure is a replenishment....] And as he states at the end of Book V, happiness is the end of human affair.

Something interesting I found in book V: the foreign pleasure.

 According to Chapter 5 "Foreign pleasure produce much the same result as pain, since they ruin the activity, though not in the same way". But to what reason people have to do the thing that make them painful. Well, in my own understanding, this foreign pleasure is a pleasure in a long run, but a  pain in  a short run. For me writing is the last thing I would do during the whole day, so I just finished 10 out of 18 blogs now. Writing is always my short whether in english or in Chinese. I am a friend who has the same problem as I have, but she is a good writer now. Practice makes perfect, and at the same time practice needs efforts and usually being lots of pains especially at the beginning.  Same to work out.  The process of work out is painful, but in the end it would help me keep fit and healthy. 

Maybe that would be the reason why even though the foreign pleasure is painful, some people would still not avoid it. 

Learning philosophy is like mountain climbing

About three years ago, when I read sophie's world for the first time, I was attracted by the magical and wonderful philosophy wonderland. Since then I step on a road that do not allow me to turn back. These days, when I finally realized that I will be a university senior after two months, I begin to feel anxious about the future.Which major should I choose to apply for a graduate school? What a kind of person should I be? Will I continue to study philosophy in next three or seven years? Those questions are bothering me, and make me feel really hopeless. Then I recalled what we had discussed few weeks ago in class, about following our soul and about the mountain climbing.

China has a totally different high education system to the USA. It is even harder for a student to choose a major in college than to get the admission from a school. As once the major was decided, it nearly means that this major would follow a student in the rest of four years or his/her whole life. So, people usually think the major one chooses would determine one's job , and it is the keystone for the success.The decision I made really shocked lots of my friends and high school teachers. They keep asking me the same question in the past two years: "what could you do with a philosophy major?". To be honest, I really have no idea about what could I do when I get the philosophy diploma. But I do know, I am normal and had a clear head when I did the decision. I want to be a better person, at least a better person in my own eyes.

However, would my life be even easier if I choose to study another major? The truth is maybe not. Everybody is a philosopher in their own life, we have our own philosophy to deal with the issues we meet everyday. Even though, a philosophy major may not equal to wealth, but by studying it, I do be much more wealthy in how to live my life. Who knows what would happen in the next decade. Maybe,I would be the lucky girl who owning a philosophy major but earn millions of dollars! Well, just like the mountain climbing, the climber would never know what the top would look like, until the reach the pitch. I would never know what philosophy could bring to me, until the day comes. Anyway, I love learning it, that is enough.

Aristotle BOOK II: developing a virtue of character vs developing a skill

The developing a virtue of character similar to developing a skill or art in the following ways:

First, we acquire the virtue and the knowledge of the skill by using it, but before we used them, we have already had them. For example, before we practice playing tennis, the coach told us how to use the rackets and how to hit the ball. While we practise, we gradually apply the theory we learnt from the coach to the exercise. Finally, we became skilled tennis players. It is the same with the virtue. We know what courage is before we do the courage actions. Meantime, when we do the courageous actions, our courage increased and we became courageous people. On the contrary, if we do not practice in a correct way, slightly we may become bad tennis players or the discourage people.

Second, akin to developing a skill or art, the origin and means of the development of each virtue are the same as those of its corruption, but the activities that flow from them will consist of the same things. Because of the correct and scientific practice strategy, he became an outstanding tennis player. As a consequence, he could be most able to practice most efficiently. Another example is the temperate. We became temperate owing to our abstaining from pleasure. As we became temperate, we are most able to abstain from pleasure.

However, these two processes have differences. Of developing a virtue, agents don't have to own the virtue's worth in them, but just do the actions. Nonetheless, for developing a skill, the players have to absorb all the knowledge in their own mind. For instance, we may describe a person as temperate because he does temperate actions. Nevertheless, we can't describe as a tennis player just because he was playing tennis. Besides, two more things are required and playing important roles in developing a virtue, one is the agent acts in a certain state from rational choice and rational choice of the cautions for their own sake; one is the certain state from a firm and unshakeable character. Those two characteristics are absent in developing a skill.

Five Important Things

I think the five important things that Socrates learned from Diotima are:

1)Love is neither beauty nor good. Love is something between good and bad, beauty and ugly.

2) As love is neither beauty nor good, he is not a god. Instead, Love is a great spirit that between mortal and god. Love is a massager that commute between mortals and gods. 

3) Love is the son of Poros and Penia. On the one hand, he always living with Need, but on the other hand, he is eager to beauty and good. Also, in nature he is neither mortal, nor immortal. He is between ignorance and wisdom, so he is one that love wisdom.  

4) Love is wanting to possess the good forever. What love wants is the reproduction and birth to beauty. Because the reproduction and birth could give the mortal immortality. 

5)Love is a process that begin in a lover's youth. A lover should correctly learn and experienced "beauty" in a following sequences:first, he should love a certain body and beget beautiful idea there; second, he should realize that all the bodies are presented the same and one form of beauty; third, he should become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and gradually think body is not an essential thing. After that, he would think that a human soul is much more beautiful than the bodies. Then, he will gaze the beauty of activities and laws, and no longer think beautiful bodies are important. Finally, he would see the beauty of knowledge and be looking mainly not at beauty in a single example.And he will catch the beauty in its nature. The last kind of love is immortal and would be beautiful to everyone.  

(It said that this is the scene when Alcibides was entering the room)

Do you think Alcibides  understood any of  these lessons?

I thought at least he understood. In Socrates' speech, we can know that Socrate did not agree love is a desire of beauty. But in the formal  five speeches, every speaker in some degrees thinks that love is a desire. Alcibiades, I am not sure weather he is a lover or a be loved in the relationship with Socrates, do not want to talk about love in front of Socrates. At least, it seems that he was jealous about the fact that Socrates sit on the same blank with Agathon. And, it also seems that, Socrates was not a satisfied lover or be loved. So, what Alcibides praised is Socrates, and provided lots of evidences to say Scroates was really act as wha he said.

Extra credit;   Is  Alcibiades actually drunk or only pretending to be? 
I think Alcbiades only was only pretending to be drunk.
1)In his words, he directly show his love to Socrates. He was trying to us "drunk" to say all these words, because people always said that after drunk, one would tell the truth.
2)And he was keeping stress that he was drunk. I don't think a drunk person would admit he was drunk so easily.
3)Near the end of his speech, he could still remember what he said at the beginning, and want to add more into it. And finally, he was trying to pursuit Agaton keep a distance from Socrates, in case to be betried. In this way, he was trying to say that even though Socrates seems to be a "expert" in love, he is not a good lover, which echo his beginning.His speech is quite logically,and not like a drunked speaker would say. 

 

My favorite dialogue of Plato-----Symposium

I have two reasons to say Symposium is my favorite. One is those five speeches are talking about "Love". Another is this dialogue companioned with me during my whole freshman year, well actually what companied me is the storied about the human nature. To make myself be more familiar with other four speeches, I decided to write outlines for them.(The five speeches that we have already talked about on Thursday.)

Praedrus, whose names means "shining forth", believed that love is an ancient god. He thought that virtues are from the "shame". And he thought that only by love could human being gain happiness. Everyone would feel more shame to do "bad" things in front of their lover. And a person would only sacrifice himself or herself for lover. However, he seems to believe everything is good.

Pausanias, his name means "to stop, to pause". He put love into two different categories, one is heavenly love which only involves men, and common love which involved women. For him, only heavenly love is deserved in pursuit. It is more to the soul. However, common love is more like a physical staff. He also believed that love itself is neither good or evil. All the judgement of love is based on the action, whether it happens in a good way or evil one. He also thought that love should produce virtues.

Eryximachus, the doctor, whose name means "belch fighter", and who really treat Aristopharves's belch during the speeches, believed love is everywhere. He agreed with Pausanis that two different kinds of love are existed on the world. Also, he uses the opposite body conditions, health and sick, to illustrate that.He believed love is something to make everything in harmony, which seems that he thought love is a kind of force that runs everything.

Aristophanes, whose name is "the appearance of the best", he told us a story about the human nature. His speech is my favorite one in this dialogue. Due to the human nature we have, Aristophanes believed that love is the pursuit of wholeness and the complete. We used to be part of the whole human that have two heads, four hands and legs, and seem to be round. Love is the process to find our perfect another part. So love involved lack, what we are looking for is the thing we lost before.

Agathon, whose name means "the good", is the party giver and just won the victory in his first tragedy. He gave the his understanding of the characteristic of love. He held a view that love is the youngest and "soft". Love only lives in the softest part of human, the heart. And also love owns the good and beauty in himself.

Although all of the speakers have limitation due to their own perspective, but the next speech in some kinds improved the former one. That's the reason why Socrates kept silence during the whole speech. In the end, he began to challenge Agathon's speech. In fact, he challenged all five speeches at the same time.

Escape the Cave

About one year ago, in my “An introduction to philosophy ”class, I read the Plato’s cave for the first time. I still remember how I felt when I finish all the discussions in class. I felt that the structure of the world is like a Matryoshka doll; it is impossible for us to find what the “Truth” is, and we have no ability to know whether we have already lived in the real world. Caves are everywhere.

But this time, when I read it again, I am curious about how could we escape the cave, or actually caves.  Through the conversation, we know that, Socrates used this analogy to explain the difference between the educated people and the people who haven’t received the education. Everyone has the potential to “realize” and ”see” the truth. But we need the opportunity. For the man who was dragged away, he got the opportunities to be free and see the “actual” world. His cognition changed incredibly changed since he turned his head to see the light, and walked out to see the sun, the real sun in the sky. That is the power of education. But meanwhile, his wisdom seems to be ridiculous to other prisoners. He tried to pursue them walked out the cave, but they insist the cave is the real world. I really want to know what will happen to the man that step out the cave. Will he insist the truth he believed, or he will finally agree with his partners, and live in the cave again, even though he knew that all the things in the cave are illusion.

That reminds me the movies called The Shawshank Redemption. One scene shocked me when I watched the movie. The old man who lived half of his life in the prison chose to end his life after one week he was released.  Like the prisoners in the cave, the prison for the old man is the really world. That is the most horrible thing a prison could bring to the prisoners. They lost their hope, and believed that the little caves for them are home. To realize the real world is painful, so most people would love to choose a "easy" model of life, rather than the hard one. 

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Other things:

There are many ways to do the education. One is that you push the “knowledge” into one’s mind; another is you guide one to the “knowledge”. Most educations belong to the formal one. But the latter one is painful.

Maybe education and knowing about the world is more about courage,rather than the ability. 

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An animation version of this conversation.

An outline of Democritus’ Ethic

As the direct words said by Democritus himself of Ethic is rare, it is really hard to identify his ethical thoughts. What I do, is based on the reading of other philosophers’ comment about him and propose my own comprehensions.

Aphorism38 and 53-61 are directly talking about Democritus’ ethics. I may separate them into two parts, one is about what the meaning of life and what he thought people should do themselves, another part is related to the community and how people treat each other.

        

Something about the first part:

The goal of life, according to Democritus, is the cheerfulness, he also called it “well-being”. It is a state in which the soul continues “calmly and stably”.

(68A1) 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.

Democritus thought people should live in a self-controlled life. We can’t let our emotions and feelings occupy our “soul” to break the “peace state”.The interesting thing in this part is the explanation of brave: “Brave is not only he who master the enemy, but also he who masters pleasures. Some are lords of cities but slaves of women”. Democritus’ view of self-control reminds me about Kant. Maybe I could use Kant as a relation to this part.

About the second part, how people treat each other:

The only aphorism I thought that related to this topic is 38(68B164). It indicated that we have the tendency to get together and live in a community.

My understanding is that in the relative “micro world”, atoms build us. Atoms move owing to the void. And the “macro world”, we are the “atoms” of our community, and we tend to “delete” or “shrink” the “void” between us.

(That is my basic view about that. I thought I need to read more materials and have a better understanding.)

That is now what I learned about Democritus’ Ethic.

Parmenides of elea

Similar to all the previous philosophers, Parmenides of Elea had his own view about the "natural end" or "the origin of the universe". Parmenides' "origin of the universe" is quite unique. It is no longer a physical exist that we could feel by experience or through our senses. Thales' water, Anaximander's Apeiron, Anaximenes' "air", Pythagoras' "number" and even Heraclitus' "Fire"(logos), we could experience them or "feel" personally, and they were involved in changing. Compared to the aforementioned philosophers, Parmenides' "what-is" is more abstract and more confusing. In Aphorism 8, Parmenides explained his metaphysics "what-is" to us.

According to him, "what-is" is not opposed to "what-is not", and what-is is "ungenerated and imperishable a whole of a single kind, unshaken, and complete". That is the most part I like Paemenides, for at least his "origin" is not a thing that is under a start and an end. Once he completely explained "what-is", "what-is" is the start and the end, because nothing else could form it. But where it makes me feel confused is that, he denied the common view that "what is not " opposed to "what is", for me it seems like, all the things are involved into "what-is", "what-is not" is naturally a part of "what-is".

It is not concluded in the readings, but I guess for the ethic of Parmenidies, he would agree that the principle we followed should not rely on our "sense-experience", and the principle should be same for all the societies and pass through all the generations, for "what-is" won't change with the flying time.


(To say something disappoints me in Parmenides, I thought there would not be a physical exist in his "what is ", but he described it as "the bulk of a ball well-rounded from all sides". Thus, Heraclitus is still my favorite ancient philosopher so far, as I prefer "Fire" to "ball".)

[phi3301]Pythagoras and early pythagoreanism------We share the soul

#1 (21B7) Once he passed by as a puppy was being beaten, the story goes, and in pity said these words:"Stop, do not beat him, since it is the soul of a human, a friend of mine, which I recognized when I heard it crying."(Diogenes Laertius, Live of the philosophers 8.36)

When I looked at the name of Pythagoras, the first thing came into my mind was the Pythagoras theorem. Wait!I am pretty sure that this is a mathematical theorem, and Pythagoras was a mathematician. Why we put his name into a history of philosophy? To put this in a nutshell, Pythagoras thought that number was the key to understanding the cosmos. And it seems that he was trying to use "numbers" to explain the world.

Among all the materials, I found two interesting things about Pythagoras:

                -----His opinion about the soul

                -----Some of the doctrines that Pythagoras ordered his followers

First is his opinion about the soul, the related aphorism is #1,#8,#10.He thought the soul is immortal. And he believed that the soul could transfer from one to another, so the kind of people who knew everything was existing. But, in his immortal soul theory, a soul has to pass to an animal before it could arrive in another person. That's really interesting. It seems that we not only share the soul with our ancestors and our offsprings, but we also share our soul with other animals! Here is my question, why we have to pass our soul to another animal before my soul rest in another person's body? This doctrine maybe is adopted from the Egyptians, and Pythagoras could be the first person to introduce this kind of theory to ancient Greek. Even though it was not mentioned in the text, but maybe we can assume that, if Pythagoras lived in modern society, he would definitely be a biocentric. Every kind of animals including human beings are equal, as we shared the same souls.Just like the aphorism #1 goes, the pig holds the soul of my friends. I could tell it from the cry.

Another interesting thing was the doctrine that Pythagora ordered his followers. The related aphorism was #13. And I found more doctrines in The History of Western Philosophy (Russell). I'd like to share some of them, which I thought were really strange and funny:

           1.To abstain from beans

          2.Not to pick up what has fallen

          3.Not to break the bread

I am really curious how the Pythagoreanism made their bread?　Were they just baking the bread small enough to allow people to eat them up in one bite?

Animals have their own gods

"(B15) If horses had hands, or oxen or lions, or if they could draw with their hands and produce works as men do, then horses would draw figures of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would render the bodies to be of the same frame that each of them have." (Eclement, Miscellanies 5.110;tpc)

To be honest, I have no idea about Xenophanes' thoughts right now, as most of his work were poetry. I do think poetry is the most beautiful genre in the world, but at the same time, it is the most difficult to understand.

Luckily I learned something about his life.I know he was born c.570 BCE in Colophon, a city that close to the home of the Milesians and the home of Heraclitus. Perhaps that could explain why some of his views were influenced by the Milesians, and some of them have an effect on Heraclitus. Also, but as the text said it was unlikely, the ancient tradition indicated that Xenophanes was the teacher of Parmenides. And he was a philosopher, as well as poet.

And I do find something interesting when I read the book. In Xenophanes's opinion, every kind of people shares the same right of belief, and even the animals would share the same privilege of religion. As he said, if animals could have the ability of drawing, they could create their own "God": the horse-like God or the oxen- like God. Anyway, their God would not be the human-like God. Thus, he explained that the supreme God exists, but different from what Homer and Hesiod claimed, God is non-anthropomorphic. God was anthropomorphic only because human could draw and paint. 

I can't agree more with Xenophanes' perspective. And even though I hold the view that morality is objective, I believe every ethnic group could have their own God. And force other people to follow "your God" and advocate that only "your God" is the one that exists are the most crucial things around the world. That is part of the freedom of belief, that you could draw down your God in your mind.

[PHI 3301] The Milesians

It is really interesting to read something about the Milesians, the "earliest" philosophers. Maybe for us, who study philosophy, interested in philosophy or just curious about philosophy, the value of the Milesians is not their thoughts, but how they think and how they proved their thought.

I really like the story which is about Thales fell into a hole while thinking. It is funny in some aspects, and also it reminds me about what the philosophy is, and what a philosopher does. Different from the ordinary people, philosophers always think about something seems to be useless. Nevertheless, just these useless thinking built the fundament of philosophy. As what we read from the book, the original philosophy is born from the observation. Through the observation of the natural phenomenons and human activities, Thales believed that the basic stuff was water, and Anacimander though the originating point of the world was apeiron. Different from both of them, Anaximenes do not believe that the basic stuff was aer. And they employ their basic stuff to try to explain the world and the relationship among phenomenons. Their thoughts moved from the living to a more abstract and more unrealistic subject: How does the world construct?

It is obvious that the Milesians conducted their thoughts from the real world. They were more about explaining. And philosophy in that era was a combination of various subjects, which is definitely different from the philosophy we say today.