On journalling and blogging I'm finally back in my office and, for the moment at least, reliably connected to the internet. If anyone wants to visit my office, now is the time to do it. As time goes on, I'll eventually begin creating small piles of papers all over the floor and the room will take on a lived feel, much like a hamster nest. Until then, it projects the sort of effeciency and professionalism that one might feel in a physician's office.

As I mentioned in class, the purpose of the journaling option is to provide a good way for students to not only demonstrate knowledge of the class texts and increased comprehension over the period of the course, but also to communicate with peers.

According to the National Research council's report on how students learn, teaching needs to be geared specifically to the sorts of mastery that a student is supposed to acquire. In a philosophy class, understanding is a more important goal than To acquire this sort of mastery one must actively engage in relevant activities. Memorizing facts to take an example can get in the way of the sort of learning that would constitute competence in philosophy.

This grading option will hopefully allow these different facets of successful learning to be achieved. In short, its my way of trying to be "guide by the side" instead of a "sage on the stage".

In future posts, I'll try to use less trendy, if not more comprehensible, jargon.  ¶ #

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  Ahhh Euthyphro This dialog could easily have been read but either intro to philosphy students or intro to ethics. Its a tragic dialog, Socrates does not discover new insights into pious action, he does not open Euthyphro to a disciplined search for truth and he does not gain any new tools for his defense against charges of impiety.

The Euthyphro revolves around the question, "What is piety?". Given that Euthyphro doesn't have the self-awareness to find a problem with prosecuting his own father, there probably isn't much hope for Euthyphro giving the answer. That he hears voices and people get sick of listening to him tells us more about his character. He's often considered to be a sort of everyman, too willing to accept convetional attitudes towards right behavious. Questioning his own actions isn't something that he avoids, its something that he doesn't even consider.

Plato doesn't want to give us an answer. The socratic methods should lead to confusion, not the repeated assertions of knowledge that Euthyphro gives us through the dialog. By the end of the dialog, Socrates has not managed to change Euthyphro at all, he doesn't have time to finish the conversation. Neither has Socrates shown that unjust prosecution is improper.

Euthyphro claims first that pious things and acts are, by definition, loved by the gods. This is a difficult position to hold for a polytheist, as different gods might love or hate different things. But Euthyphro is sure that his own actions are loved by all the gods.

But is a thing pious because the gods love it, or do the gods things because they are pious? Saying the god-loved is the pious and the pious is the god loved is a circular definition, and empty because it doesn't give us any tools to identify actual pious things.

Next, Socrates gets Euthyphro to describe piety as the part of justice that deals with the gods. But, Socrates asks, what would achieve by caring for or serving the gods. Surely, we don't hope to make the gods better. The gods can't be pleased with something because they are benefited by it, because the gods can not be benefited by human things.

This dialog is traditionally read as presenting a dichotomy, the presentation of two exclusive, exhaustice and equally unappealing options. Either the pious is determined by the whim of the gods, and can't be figured out by man, or else the gods answer to a higher law, and are thus superfluous.

I'm having you read this both as a taste of an aporetic dialog, but also because it demonstrates something about how Plato saw the search for knowledge working. Euthyphro is one of Socrates' greatest failures. Finally, there's a take away message here regarding how we should talk about proper behaviour in our own culture, but I feel the need to be properly Socratic on occassion, you need to figure this out for yourself.

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