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.