Stuck between classes... life...
Here's a little description of each of my classes this semester so far:
Contemporary Moral Issues. Ok, I think I might like this class a little later in the semester, but for now we keep hearing about what various XXX sites say on their front pages, completely uncensored. *shudders* I'm scarred for life. Yes, we are dicussing pornography... whether it is morally problematic, why, etc... It will be a generally straightforward ethical logic class, however, so I think I'll enjoy it quite a bit by the time it's all finished. We'll be talking about the death penality, physician assisted suicide, and abortion as well, and those are issues I think I can get into and agrue about.
Advanced Ethics: Moral Psychology. Same teacher as the moral issues class, but the class is a more advanced model (I'm only taking the lower-level one because I have to take it sometime). We've been reading an article about "death" and why or why not it is a bad thing that we die.
"If death is the unequivocal and permanent end of our existence, the question arises whether it is a bad thing to die.... On the one hand it can be said that life is all we have and the loss of it is the greatest loss we can sustain. On the other hand it may be objected that death deprives this supposed loss of its subject, and that if we realize that death is not an unimaginable condition of the persisting person, but a mere blank, we will see that it can have no value whatsoever, positive or negative" - Thomas Nagel
What we're going to talk about that I'm really looking forward to is the age-old question, "What is the meaning of life?" I am curious as to what conclusion eberyone eventually comes to.
Aesthetics: Philosopy of Art. This class is boring me out of my mind. We are trying to determine "what is the definition of art?". And regardless of what anyone offers, the teacher always has a counter-example. So today someone poses the idea that art is subjective, and something that I call art, you may not. She rejects this outright. He says that someone might consider this chair he's sitting in to be art, whereas someone else might not. Essentially, the argument boils down to "since the chair isn't in the setting of the art world (it isn't in a museum), then it isn't art. Put the same chair in the art world, then it is art." This however, is cirular reasoning to the fact that we already stated that something is not art simply because someone puts it into a museum. It had to be art before then or no one would have put it in the museum in the first place.
Freedom, Determinism, and Responsibility. This has always been an issue I have pondered, so I am really enjoying this class. Right now we are talking about Hume and how determinism and freedom can both occur at the same time.
Mmm... Banana!
