Build Your Own Philosophy, Period 2, 3/1/10

[tyler_gone]

Can it be that a white horse is not a horse?

Tyler still looked like crap as the students filed in today. Red nose, wastebasket full of snotty tissues at his side, the whole bit.

"Hi," he said wanly. "Hope you aren't all still hung over from the Bahamas. Your midterm is due today, so I assume you're all ready to hand in your papers and talk about one of the philosophers discussed in class. If you aren't, make something up fast."

"If you want to grade grub, the extra credit question is to analyze when a white horse is not a white horse." He looked into the scrum of students. "You," he said. "Present your paper first."

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Re: Midterms [3/01]

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah took a breath, and presented her (short but pretty complete) paper on Socrates.

"Socrates gave his name to the learning method we call Socratic; basically, he kept asking questions until someone gave up and said they didn't know something. Before they got to that point, though, students could figure a lot out for themselves, by answering the questions he asked, most of them 'why' or 'how' or 'what if?' Encouraging people to think it through for themselves, you know?"

"He started professional life as sculptor, but got into education early, and had a reportedly very unhappy home life with his wife Xanthippe. He was in the army, and performed with courage, reportedly, and never got into seeking political office like a lot of prominent Greeks. He defied the reign of terror of the Thirty, a small group of dictators, in 404, by being the one citizen out of five who refused to help fetch an unjustly condemned prisoner for execution. He was supposed to have been really obnoxious about it, too."

"That kind of thing got him in trouble later, when he was accused of, 'firstly, of denying the gods recognized by the state, and introducing new divinities, and, secondly, of corrupting the young.' He was even more obnoxious at his trial, being unwilling to plea-bargain or offer to pay much of a fine, and saying the court should give *him* a public office, and because of that, the judges got fed up and condemned him to death."

Dinah took a breath. "He said that whether death was a dreamless sleep, or a new life in Hades, where he would have opportunities of testing the wisdom of the heroes and the sages of antiquity, 'in either case he esteemed it a gain to die.' Aaand he refused to escape from prison when a friend tried to arrange it. There was a delay of a month before he was executed, and he was reportedly pretty upbeat about it the whole time, then took hemlock as ordered, and died." She was quiet a minute, then confessed, "I always thought of philosophers as ivory-tower types, only thinking. But I kind of think Socrates's life gives a little more... weight, to his ideas. He lived by the ideas he tried to teach. That's worth something more."