Very Challenging Assignment....Indeed

My philosophy professor is quite sneaky. He figured if we can explain feminism and empiricism to children...then we should be able to explain it and understand it ourselves... Not only is he sneaky..he was pretty smart to use this as a teaching technique.

I thought about this assignment all week. It was a very simple assignment. Have a bunch of college students explain something to children. How hard could that be. But I soon remembered that this was philosophy we were talking about, and I first had to decipher the philosophical text I was assigned to read (ugh!). Well it was far easier that Kant I tell you that and since I am female and I somewhat a pragmatist (i didn't know this until this assignment) it really became much easier for me to tackle this.

I do have some thoughts on feminism that are probably not so feminist. Please do not take this the wrong way, I am a strong believer that women are smart and shouldn't be discriminated against in the workforce, and in general, because of their gender...however I have learned over time that men and women are different -- period.

Each gender has strengths the other does not. While I believe we should teach our young girls that they can accomplish most anything. We should not send them out into the world thinking they are physically equal to men. We are not. I learned this through practicing martial arts. I trained just as hard has the men. However, when I went up against a new male member of the dojo with no training, their punch and strikes were powerful. While mine may have been powerful for a woman of my size and level of training, I could not match that of a man. That is not a deficit for women it just is. Women go through hormonal ups and downs monthly and all through their lives. We have to deal with it. These are not faults, these are just the facts of life and our biology and if we would approach it that way, maybe feminists would not be seen as anti-men. Whew!

Wholly Philosphical Disaster Professor Foster!

OMG! This is exactly what frightened me about taking philosophy...reading text on Kant had my mind running in circles. I do have a slight reading comprehension problem so I take plenty of notes and re-read passages to insure I understand what I am reading. The reading material this week just had me running in circles and confused. I think we were studying the rationalists and empiricist's theories on knowledge...I think. I completely enjoyed our assignments previous to this even though some of the concepts and material were a little confusing I was able to digest the information and spew out coherent responses on both the discussion board and blog. I didn't even do that poorly on the quiz.

Well I'm off to take the quiz now...wish me luck....

Skeptically Speaking

News media were asked not to show this and other "disturbing" images of 9/11. If we have no direct access to information we can not have knowledge -- I suppose these are the words of a skeptic.

Today we have so much information to sort through to be educated, to make informed decisions, to understand the world around us and to interact and manage the people we co-exist with that we have no other choice but to believe most things until we have reason to be skeptical. We have been trained to seek out information related to current events from mainstream media sources (television news, newspapers and magazines). We grow up learning that if news media icons such as Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric report on something it must be true. However we really can not arrive at true justified beliefs through mainstream sources and would probably have to be directly involved or experience an event to claim knowledge of anything.

Emerging from "The Cave"

Over the course of one's life we will at one time or another discover that we too have been in an a dank dark place similar to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. A place not so far away from a reality that had we only freed ourselves and taken a few steps, we might have been able to experience it earlier. Sometimes we are not ready to be exposed to a new level of reality, sometimes we need to be lead to the reality, and sometimes we may want to retreat back to the "cave" where all we ever knew and understood is still there waiting for us.

We must approach life with an open mind, seek out mentors that can help us discover new levels of reality and understand that exposure to higher levels of understanding may not feel totally comfortable in the short term, but will become our reality over time and prepare us new life discoveries.

What a great idea...

I have always wanted a reason to blog...I think maintaining a blog for this course is a great idea. I am excited about this course because I am entering a world I know very little about. I am hoping this course will teach me to look at things in new ways.