THE DEBATE

During class we did a debate Kierkegaard vs. Nietzsche.
Planned attacks : if you don't put your faith in god you will face the existential dread of not knowing what will happen when you die. Nietzsche ultimately faces this dread and dies at a young age. God gives you the ability to know that your soul will continue on in the afterlife. Nietzsche wants you to celebrate the present and be happy with what you have now. But what if you have nothing. Your poor. Your a nobody in society. What do you have to celebrate about in the present? Religion gives you companionship.

Nietzsche did avoid job of attacking the story of abraham and how he waited so long for a son when ultimately by god he was told to kill his son.

Random notes/ rebuttal: god gives you answers that help yourself persevere through the tough timed. He gives us a purpose to lead our lives toward. He gives us the reward of an afterlife.
If they we're to say christianity is weak I would have said: christianity is not weak. An irreducible part of what it means to be human is to be weak. We suffer temptations, we look for strength in answers. But people who put their faith in god will not be driven crazy in their inability to find strength and meaning on earth.they have realized that god will help them lead a happier life.

Coming from my agnostic point of view both I believe I side more with Nietzsche. I just find it hard to picture a god in the sky creating the earth and making decisions for us. Afterlife just doesn't seem possible. I find it hard to believe of Jesus body rising to the heavens after the 7( I m not sure ) days of being dead.

Also I feel that you shouldn't put all of your trust in someone that you have never never seen before. Yes people claim miracles of god talking to them or they claim of seing the light when on the verge of death. Is it really god?

Your happy place

Whenever your sad, frustrated, or angry your always told to go to your happy place. Everybody has different happy places in our mind. For one person it could be to completely empty it and close their eyes. For others it is standing on a beautiful white sandy beach. With the sand in between their toes and the sound of the waves hitting the shore.

I finally found my happy place last year at a summer camp. We were in the Boundary Waters between the border of Canada and Minnesota. There you have a series of great lakes and beautiful scenery all around you. All you can hear is nature. No motor boats. No construction. No honking or sirens. You are able to relax and just let your mind think.
One day when we we're on the lakes we we're supposed to do a solo expedition where we would be split up along this one lake. I was put on the middle of a small island with a cliff of about 15 feet to one edge. When you sat down and closed your eyes you would just be taken away. The sounds and smells that you experience were par to none that I had ever experienced before. There we're wild blueberry bushes where I was which tasted amazing.

So whenever someone tells me to go to my happy place I will think about the Boundary Waters and just remember the beauty of it all.

Kierkegaard

Existentialist- Don't care about origins but about the dread of death. We are just a small piece in this large universe. In the long run of our life what did we really accomplish. Our existence is more important than what we have in common objectively with all other human being ( our essence)
First: senses are our first confirmation of our existence.
Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious
            Human.           Telos
Morality stops us from moving on to the religious stage where we are able to accept death and we are ready for it.
Story of Abraham and how god told him to kill his only son even though he wanted a son so dearly. You have to do what you have to do to reach the religious stage and that if you kill your son you have faith that he will enter salvation and god will keep his promises.

Sophies World

1. I always find myself thinking about who I would be with a different name. Would people think of me differently or would people see me as the same. Does power sometime come with names. I feel like your name is your identity it is the first thing people think of when they think of you.


2.One of the larger themes of Sophie's World is that everyone of all ages should ask questions that normally we don'd. Don't just take things for what people say they are but explore what our senses and our perceptions tell us what it is.


3. Gaarder keeps telling us about how we are reading a book about characters in a book that is being read by a girl who is being written about in Gaarder's own book.
4. I think that  he wrote to her to make her aware of philosophy. He believed that we can be better if we ask questions and think about things.
5. Gaarder values free will which is the apparent ability of agents to make choices. free from certain kinds of constraints. Another thing that I believe he values is curiosity. We should question not only our existence but why other things are here in the world.
6. Sophie is under the illusion that she has free will but really she doesn't. She is being written about in a book and her path was made before her and that there is nothing that she is able to do about it.
7. The book says that imagination is a good thing. It opens up the mind to new ideas and new places. You can do anything you want in your imagination. People as they grow older start to lose their imagination and imagination makes things alot more fun.
9. A funny passage in Sophies world is when her and Alberto are trying to get the computer to work. They have this technology people today know how to use it but it is hard for them to do. They keep telling it to search things but the computer doesn't understand what they are saying.

10. A world means different things to different people. To Plato  the world is a trustworthy place aand that it strives to be ideal, perfect, and complete.
14. He critisizes philosophhy when he talks about Socrates . People think that vast amount of knowledge is the most important thing when considering philosophy. But what Socrates says is "The only thing I know is that I know nothing". 
15. The origins of Gaarder's criticism comes from Socrates teachings and that in philosophy people only care about how much they know.
16.I believe that he presents the information on the philosophers in a linear view. It showed how each philosopher built off each other through time.
17. pg 355 The author exhibits the symbolish of the Hegal river of philosophy progressing through time. 
18. pg 426 2nd paragraph. "Evolution has a direction...across the aeons of time". Evolutions was supposed to happen. It was our fate to go through evolution and become humans. Our brain has evolved this way for survival.

Digital Age

IN class we talked we watched a clip of a movie that showed how today technology is all around us and we are usually connected in more than one way. In a study they did it showed that kids who thought they were good multitaskers really aren't and their reaction time went down while talking on the cell phone or paying attention to other stuff.

Descartes vs Hume

Hume: Empiricism- knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.
(1711-1776)
Believed in desire over reason
Laws to nature; searched for order, harmony, and lawfulness in all nature, physical and human, in contrast to Descartes who believed in deductive reasoning (p.136, From Socrates to Sartre) 
Attacked the basic assumptions of religion and the Christian belief
Humans are active beings, driven by desires and feelings


Descartes 

• “I” or ego--basis of Descartes’ philosophy
• To Hume, the idea of an ego is a “complex idea”, because our emotions and sense perceptions are complex
• The idea of having an unalterable ego is a false perception--we have never experienced things simultaneously, meaning that we do not have a uniform, simple ego

Hume would try to attack descartes theory of i think therefore i am. One way I think to attack this is to say how do we know that we are the ones thinking and making our own decisions. What is there is a demon or person who has planned out our path for us before we started out.