Thursday, March 30, 2006

Philosophy

One of the nice things about having a blog is the ability to post whatever you're thinking and no one can interrupt you (unless some hackers take down your blog or it gets pulled from the server). I am going to now excercise this privilage regarding the philosophy class I had today.

Some of my classmates, especially the females, actually I'm guessing mostly, no basically no one else other than the females, may have thought that my behavior was odd and that I am wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.

I am only guilty of one faux paux, as far as I can see. At the end of class I expressed a possible interpretation of the text concerning Arisotle's statement that women should be ruled by men in the context of the household. I stand by my interpretation possible validity. I conceded that if there was a priniciple prior to the one given by Aristotle and it was a principle which he held or which his position rested on, and these principles led to a contradiction, then obviously his position would be logically unteniable. My mistake, after granting this truth, was to explain why I thought Aristotle might actually be right, rather than merely keeping my mouth shut and give the impression that I merely thought the arguments given against the Philosopher by our class weren't quite up to snuff.

My apologies for not keeping my mouth shut. To tell the truth, my opinion isn't very firm on this issue. And the arguments which were being presented against Aristotle were more passionate than reasoned. They were given in a very, how you say, moralistic tone (moralistic meaning "uttered from atop a soapbox"). This turned me off and made me less likely to concede a point. But it is dinner time now. I really don't think women are dumb. Unfortunately, the women in class today got a bit carried away and gave some rhetorical arguments when logic was called for. I'm gonna go eat.

3 comments:

Emily said...

If things were too out of hand, Alex or (at least) Barrett would have spoken up. As it was, Alex was mum, Barrett was downright supportive and Peter was angry at you. Please don't misrepresent. It was hardly a feminazi man-bashing party. The guys were involved, but we (rather justifiably) took your assertions a little personally. I mean, what's with the whole "give a woman a family/child and she'll lose all rationality to her overabundance of emo" theory? Now really, Boyer. It's not typical of you to spout such stuff - and if that's was reasonable rhetorical argument you certainly had ME fooled.
I think you DO see why a dimishing of women's rationality would be a belittlement of her human nature. We were assessing the text, which is different than interpreting it, and it seems obvious that exactly because such belittlment fell from his principles, as our own experience (as you admit in this post - "I really don't think women are dumb.") didn't provide for it, that the whole thing had to be false. Aristotle doesn't ask us to violate our experience - truth is the equation of thought and thing. If there's nothing in the thing to support the thought, than, well, as Mrs. Gustin would put it, the theory is "outsky"! Simple as that. I imagine that Aristotle will be wrong many times in the Politics - he wasn't infallible, you know. I just don't want to hear, "Well, it's okay since he's consistent with his principles" every time that happens. His principles might well have been gathered from a flawed bunch of experiences, and despite that there IS an objective truth here, and, well, if indeed lower rational powers in women is really what he found to be a principle, he just didn't find the truth this time. You can't win 'em all.

tasik said...

Score:

Kakashi: 0
Em son of Harris: 0

Em proves Aristotle's point that women tend to let emotional power overrule deliberative power. Kakashi disproves Aristotle's point that men do not.

And some people keep their emotions under control and therefore keep their mouths shut, since at a certain point there is nothing that can be reasonably added to a given discussion. At that point one can only sit back and watch the flames until the fire dies out.

Kakashi said...

And tasik misconstrues my point.

Tasik: -20