Today Poppy and I studied all day. She is working on her paper and I on Chinese. Now I need to find some articles online for her about immigration, immigrants, law etc.
Just today I finished reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. It was an old book of my dad's. I don't think he read it b/c he always made marks in the books that he read and this one was unmarked. Now, since I have read it, it is marked from beginning to end. (I wrote a short poem long ago about his books once. I'll find it sometime.) It was pretty easy reading as far as philosophy goes. It was a pretty good book.
One thing that I was struck by as I read it was that almost all of the philosophers in it had a kind of arbitrary prejudice against the possibility of the supernatural. Why do they have this untouchable dogma? Science is wonderful, but it tells us only about the natural world. It can't tell us about many things, including whether it is conceivable for things to happen supernaturally. It was really interesting to see Herbert Spencer weaving an entire system of how evolution explains everything only to discover that it can't explain consciousness. They labeled this, "epiphenomenon." This word somehow seems to me similar to the word supernatural.
One thing that was notably missing from this book was all of the thinkers from Aristotle to Bacon. It seems a little far-fetched to say that no one thought about anything from after 322 B.C. until the 1560s A.D. What about Augustine? What about Aquinas? The author said that he didn't like the scholastics, so he didn't include them. (Aquinas was a scholastic philosopher.) His definition of scholasticism was "the philosophy of the medieval theologians, in general, the divorce of speculation from observation and practice." The definition seems a bit biased against scholasticism, but I don't know; maybe it is accurate. I need to study scholasticism for myself. Aquinas was important because he was the one that introduced Aristotle's ideas into the very Platonic church. He thought that it was a good idea to observe the world around him. Maybe if it were not for his influence, the renaissance would not have come when it did.
Now that I am finished with that book I will get back to The City of God by St. Augustine. I am about 2/3 through. But I will not read very much now because I decided that it is more important for me right now to study Chinese, help my wife with her paper and do some other things.
2 comments:
I think science include many perfect things!In my mind science is a kind of view that full of magic!Such as northern light!
I am into the sea.I enjoy breathing the air on the sea!I felt free and brave!I am full of fancies in front of the sea!It is wonderful!
Maybe it is the true feeling from my heart!
The problem is that philosphers and scientists seem to think that nothing good really cam out of the Middle Ages, when in fact, some of the best thinking was done in taht time period. I mean, do you learn more form Augustine about life, from Confessions, or do you learn from an agnostic, creation-evolutionist, orthodox, hindi, jew? Forgive the hyperbole.
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