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.