Today in class we finished reading the Euthyphro Dialog. It is now time to turn our attention from reading and discussing toward writing. Unlike discussion which is all about sharing many different ideas, writing is about developing one idea (hopefully that you brought up or thought about in discussion) until it is so clear that it accurately explains your thoughts to others. Much like discussion, however, writing is meant to be an expression of your thoughts and a reaction to the text.
For the Euthyphro writing assignment, you will be able to write on any topic you choose. This is both a blessing and a curse! On the one hand, you will be able to write about a topic that you find interesting. On the other hand , you will be responsible for coming up with a good prompt which is no easy task! This blog post will help you come up with a good paper topic.
As a way of thinking about a paper topic, think about the things that you learned while reading the Euthyphro dialog. Respond to this post with one thing that you learned and explain it.
15 comments:
mind of ventura
personally what i learned was keep an open mind. Euthyphro had to do this to keep up with socrates. he absorbed the information that he got and was able to apply it to his argument. this way he could keep his head and not lose himself in all of socrates' complicated analogies. however socrates also kept an open mind. he acted as a quizical student and questioned everything until he could get a definite answer. however the open mind he had was one of attack so euthyphro would hav to take those attacks. poor man...
A really big thing I learned was that there are so many different ways of defining things that there is no way you'll find an actual concrete definition. There are some things that can be defined only in specific circumstances, but Socrates has already proved to us that an example does not define an idea. We will never know what piety is - we can only assume that the accepted idea is the truth and apply that to life. We will never know what beauty or love is. We will never know HOW to define something because one person will define things one way and the next person will do it in a completely different way. Philosophy is complicated like that. It's also beautiful like that. It opens up the mind to infinity possibilities, and allows you to see things you'd never seen before. To write down all these things without going on a rampage of run on sentences and misplaced punctuation would be quite the task.
Learning the "answers" that are simple or straightforward just may not be it. In the past, I've taken these "answers" that I sought too lightly, and didn't consider what they actually meant. I figured that I've understood them because they were so simple and easy to follow, but i didn't speculate enough. Now I completely understand, that, "It's not enough to to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well."--Rene Descartes
----Fahmida Ferdousi
(continuation) and from reading the Euthyphro dialog, analyzing Socrates' and Euthyphro's discussion truly inspired me. :)
----Fahmida
From reading the Euthyphro dialog I've learned that you must be more careful about what you say. If your not, you could be giving the person a wrong idea. However, there are no set defintions that are the only way to define something (such as "piety"). Although, having said that some definitions are also incorrect and, could be considered a example instead of a more open definition. That is why you must be very careful when your saying something.
one thing that i learned was that philosophy is a bunch of qestions that are stated to find the turth. i knew this before but reading the dialog made it sink in because my old idea was like "why are we here", now i think about what socrates said. i also learned how to spell "socrates".
I learned the definition of truth, and how important it is to philosophers. Something is true only when you can use as a "meter stick" to measure the trueness of other inquiries. Philosophers seek truth while others seek to be convinced. For a philosopher his target is not to convince someone by having a "convincing" ( possibly fallacious) argument, but to convince them because what he is saying is the truth.
The most interesting thing that I learned is that philosophy does not essentially come up with definite answers. In the end Socrates and Euthyphro come to absolutely no conclusion as to what the definition of piety is. What I got from this is that philosphy is a way for one to question ordinary things; such as definitions of ordinary everyday words like piety. Thus through philosophy one is taught to believe only what they know is actually truthful.
-Santiljan Vukaj
Candy Lin
What I learn is that sometimes the "right answers" are not nessecerily the right answers. Something can be the "right answer" in your mind but that doesn't mean it's the right answer for the question. Different people view things differently and have a different "right answer" for themselves. Unless you can prove your answer, no matter how much faith you have in your answer, and how convincing statements you make, it's still not the right answer.
What I learned from this was that, when it comes to questions of philosophy, there are no right answers or wrong answers, only incomplete answers. Every answer one can give can lead to more questions, and before you know it, you're moving in a spiral, starting at the center and constantly moving outward, slowly learning more but never having the full answer and never ending.
-Louis
A thing that I have learned is things cannot be judged as good or bad. It seems that people dispute and don't agree on all things including judging actions actions. An example of this would be Euthyphro's case of indicating his father for murder. It is probable that Euthyphro finds the murder to be bad while his father would find the murder to be good.
Judging this are like "beautiful-ugly" arguments and they differ from "measurable" arguments. It is apparent that "measurable" arguments can be solved easily as the true answer to the argument is based on pure facts. However, for "beautiful-ugly" arguments, the answer to the argument aren't based on facts but on people's opinions and criteria for things. An example of this would be the example that Alex said in class. While most people think that Megan Fox is beautiful, some people may not. I think that people would judge whether Megan Fox is beautiful or not based on their "rubric".
Sorry, I forgot about the blog post.
I am so sorry I forgot about the blog post. What I learned about Philosophy was it revolves in circles and sometimes has no answers. Philosophical questions can not really have answers, but can shed alot of light on a subject. Euthyphro and Socrates debated the definiton of piety for so long. Although they did not arrive at an answer they gained a much better understanding of piety, by assessing its qualities and by defining examples of piety. Philosophy is very useful for finding such deeper meaning.
Oh snap blog post slipped my mind.Sorry about that
But jsut to express my feelings and stuff
I learnd that not everything is as easy as it seems. SImple defintions have much mroe meanings then a hard defintion like peity. It seems so simple but once you disect the word and split it meanings, it leads to full on hard deffintions with multiple meanings.
Nothing is as simple as it seems and if you find one thing wrong with anything, the whole meanings of anytihng crashes down
Can you measure piety like the big or small? The problem is how you know if something is pious. If you can measure something to see if it’s big or small, or weigh something to see if it’s heavy or light. How would you “measure” piety? Is the same principle going to apply like with the big and small?
Well, when you judge if something is either big or small then you can just measure the object and problem solved. Since big vs. small have a criteria people don’t argue often about it, and if they do argue the argument can be “solved” or the answer can be easily found out.
Is piety like this? Does piety have criteria or can it be measured? Actually no, piety cannot be measured so it doesn’t have criteria. This makes piety more like the beauty vs. ugly judgment where there is also no criteria and unable to be measured. This makes disputes between beautiful and ugly much harder to resolve. In Euthyphro, Euthyphro’s definition for piety was, “Well then, what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.” (7a). this whole sentence is based on the word “dear to”, and in for something to be dear is just like for it to be beautiful exceeds your opinion of something beautiful. For example, if something is dear to you then it may also be beautiful and lovely to you.
Since we concluded in the previous paragraph that piety falls into the beauty vs. ugly judgment, does this in some way define piety? No, it does not since it has no criteria. Now that we know what type of criteria piety has there is an obvious difference between the judgments of beauty vs. ugly and the judgments of big vs. small. The second one has a criteria and way of being measured while the first one does not have any criteria.
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