Hi again!

So, my apologies for having postponed posting for so long. School has been really busy, and my life outside of that hasn't been exactly sane. There have been so many thoughts rolling around in my head that I couldn't even sort them out enough to write them down. The more I think and learn, the more I am convinced that there is so much that I don't know and don't understand. Even things that I thought I was certain of, that I knew inside and out have been discovered to be other than they seemed. Yay for chaos. I catch myself wondering if I will ever reach a point where I feel like I can see, where I can rest. I'm not entirely sure that I want to, because quite honestly, as tiring as all this is, it is quite fun. I am learning so much. Still, it might be nice to reach a place where I can catch my breath and take the time to catalog all the things that I am learning.

This semester we are reading about learning and knowledge. When I found out that the title of the semester was "On Learning and Knowledge", I thought it would be something like how we learn. Hah. well, I guess we did think about that a bit, but so far most of the semester has been about whether it is possible to learn anything or to know anything. Talk about confusing and mind bending. Oy. So far, we've read Plato's Meno, Aristotle's Metaphysics (only Zeta, thank heavens...it wasn't in English, it was halfway between English and Greek--Eek, as the translator called it), Augustine's On the Teacher, Aquinas's On the Teacher, Descartes's Meditation on First Philosophy, Blaise Pascal' s Pensees, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Really interesting reading, but quite a bit of it. It really is amazing to watch how things changed over time. Plato started out saying that we never learn anything entirely new, but that everything that we "learn" is simply being remembered from our past lives, and Locke says that we are a blank slate when we are born (tabula rossa) and our only source of knowledge is sensory. Hume takes this even further to question our ability to really know much of anything because he can't figure out how we make the intuitive leap to cause and effect. Right now I'm reading Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and I think he's trying to solve that problem, but I haven't gotten far enough to tell (in fact, I have to finish reading him today...and that, of course, is why I am posting. Isn't procrastinating useful).

It is insane trying to stay sane while reading so much that calls into question the very basics of human reasoning and human identity. I'm still pretty sure that I believe what I did, but I am a bit less sure why. Or else more sure why, because I've seen the madness of the other side and that is part of why I believe what I believe. One thing that I realized is that the existentialist worldview is something that had bugged me for a really long time, but because I didn't know enough about it I couldn't quite figure out what it was that was driving me nuts. Last year, a couple of my friends and I wrote a paper trying to address the need for chivalry in our culture. We all could see where we were trying to go, but unfortunately, we couldn't quite put our finger on it (which led to a rather frustrating time writing that paper). Now, with all the reading we are doing about the basis of existentialism, I am realizing that that is part of what we are trying to attack. We were trying to come up with an alternative to Sartre's Nausea (which is basically about what happens when you truly believe existential skepticism). I'm still not quite sure where that takes me next, but I am sure it will...

Anyway, given the amount of Kant I have to read before I sleep, I think I will end this long and rambling post here...

Or perhaps here....