After reading “Theseus & The Minotaur” and “Euthyphro” please do a journal entry smmary on:
Summary:
1) Record the page numbers of a section discussing a Core theme, labeling the theme.
2) State the author’s position on the theme.
3) Record two or three reasons supporting the author’s view.
4) Explain in your own words how the reasons do or do not support the author’s thesis.
Attached are the instructions and the readings.
Journals
Your reading and practice will be assessed through the keeping of a reading and assignment journal. This could be accomplished through a variety of media, e.g., through an iPad note application, which you can email in, or in handwritten format, which you will submit twice during the year. In this journal, also include any and all official assignments, like syllogism practice. You can keep your notes from class in there. Also, include notes about convocations you attend, with three prominent stars at the top of a page where you write about what you attended or completed for extra credit.
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, once argued that we do not properly feed and exercise our minds. We spend enormous amounts of energy and time in physical training, while actively avoiding mental training. This assignment seeks to reverse the mind atrophy brought on by years of textbooks and standardized curriculums, strengthening your active reading skills.
Freshman core is themed around the Good, True, and Beautiful. Every reading we engage with addresses these themes, often in counterintuitive or surprising ways. Your task in the journal exercise is to identify one section/portion of a reading where a Core theme is discussed or argued or defended. Provide the page numbers for the section of text.
Once you’ve identified a Core theme in the text, you must state what the author claims about the theme. What is the author’s thesis? Or, what do we learn about the Good, True, or Beautiful from the author’s discussion in your selected text? State this in one sentence in your own words.
Once you’ve identified a section of text discussing a Core theme and offered a one sentence summary of the author’s view on that theme, you need to identify why the author thinks that about the theme. What reasons does the author provide to support their thesis/view? Provide two or three reasons supporting the author’s view.
One caveat: Many of our authors will deal with multiple Core themes throughout their texts. Your task is to narrow in on one such section of the text, answering the appropriate questions. If you find yourself confused as to which theme best fits a text, often an arbitrary choice for one theme while engaging the questions will help clarify the author’s intent.
Summary:
1) Record the page numbers of a section discussing a Core theme, labeling the theme.
2) State the author’s position on the theme.
3) Record two or three reasons supporting the author’s view.
4) Explain in your own words how the reasons do or do not support the author’s thesis.
There is an example of the assignment on the back of this paper.
Journal Example
“The Value of Philosophy”
1) p. 7 – The Beautiful
2) A beautiful or great life is one that is reflective.
3) Reasons
1 – Man is NOT the measure of all things (reflection shows that the world larger than the self)
2 – Contemplation allows one to see as “God” might see (contemplation brings freedom from prejudices)
3 – Contemplation/Reflection brings peace (citizens of the universe).
4) Explanation
The reflective/contemplative life is the beautiful life by transforming our lives to see the larger world around us. It is common place for us to see all things in light of our experiences (R-1). However, this means that everything we understand is prejudiced through our own experiences (R-2). Seeing everything through our own experiences leads us to conflict with other people and ideas. When we seek to reflect upon these differences, we come to understand how other people and ideas “make sense.” We can understand, even if we disagree with, the other viewpoint showing us the world as God might see it (R-1 and R-2), allowing for conversation/peace between viewpoints (R-3).
Myth of Gyges
1) P. 4 – The Good
2)
http://wlasseter.blogspot.com/2011/04/plato-of-gyges-ring.html
But Gyges, the text tells us, has an odd reaction to this marvel; he sees it, wonders at it, and goes down. All philosophy begins in wonder so in that sense Gyges is acting philosophically. His entrance into the chasm is like Socrates’ initial katabein into Peiraeus. Gyges is entering into that chasm from whence the world initially emerged and there he sees wonders (thaumata). Included among those wonders is a bronze (not silver, nor gold) horse (the symbol of power and masculinity) with windows in it (like the windows of the human body but also resonant with the Odyssean horse that brought the ruin of Troy). Within that horse is a giant (swollen, bloated, or godlike) naked (defenseless and stripped of worldly “clothing” as in the myth of The Judgment of Souls) corpse (the image of death). And there it is that Gyges finds the ring.
What is the ring?
Contrary to our initial reaction (and Tolkien’s parallel imagery) the ring in Plato is not an object for good or for evil even though Gyges uses it for evil.
Most telling is that Gyges first discovers the properties of the ring while sitting at the monthly meeting of accounts before the king of Lydia; “to make the monthly report to the king about the flocks.” He is a thrall to another man, under the rule of laws and society and a thousand other chains that weigh him down. The ring allows him to be free of all of that – a “blank canvas”, as one student put it, on which he now has the freedom to create good or evil. The ring seems to be the power to throw off societal chains (modes, mannerisms, beliefs, expectations) and thus be seemingly free. It is polytropic thought, seeing “outside the box”, seeing “behind the curtain.”
Yet mythologically speaking, the monthly report to the king is like the judgment day itself. Here he must make an account, an Apology to the king of the world and to his fellow men, of how he has kept the innocents. His escaping into invisibility here is, then, an escape of his own judgment for in leaving the flocks behind to enter into the chasm of the earth he has risked their demise and devourment by the wolves that plague them daily. The ring allows him to escape such judgment, to fool both gods and men, to seem just rather than be just. Turning the focus of the ring outward toward God and community he must reckon with his mistakes and make an honest accounting of his own failings. Turning the collet inward, toward himself, he (seems) to be able to escape the responsibility of being alive.
The power of the ring seems to put us, then, like a stage hand in the creation of life’s myth; once we throw off the power of law & custom wouldn’t we have the ability to construct myth, influence the decisions of others, craft movies, music, stories, lies, identities? Wouldn’t we be like Leonardo di Caprio in “Catch me if you Can”? Running from the straight laced law, perhaps, but enjoying every minute of our escape. In such a state we could be a tremendous force for goodness. The Ainur, for instance, were not of Middle Earth and could travel great distances very swiftly. But in such a state we would, perhaps, also be far more tempted to really destructive evil (vs. the small petty evils that the normal, law-bound man indulges in). After all, Saruman, as well as Gandalf, was an Ainur. After all Heinrich Himmler was an ubermensch.
Ultimately, it seems the ring represents, not a power that corrupts (as Tolkien’s ring seems to inevitably do, thus suggesting a slightly different philosophy than Plato), but a neutral power that allows the wearer to slip the bonds of human societal norms and thus allows him to do tremendous good or tremendous evil.
But the horror of the myth is that our “invisibility” is mere illusion itself. Trying to escape from responsibility and pain makes us, as Tolkien noted, like shadows. Glaucon views justice not as harmony, or as joy, or as beauty but as something onerous to escape. It is a compromise between suffering the worst evil and doing the greatest evil. To adopt such an attitude, Plato’s myth suggests, boxes one into a diseased vision of the world as monotonous, unending, and bound to the prison house of a materialistic earth.
The Value of Philosophy
