Saturday, March 19, 2011

Aristotelianism is the Devils's Philosophy

This has been a productive, if strange, day. I spent just over six hours in my office. My time was spent cleaning out files, going through piles of paper on my desk, and "filing" reports and such by scanning paper documents into PDF files, which I then put in the proper folders on the server.

As we (my wife worked, too) emerged into the warm air (it hit 84 here today!), I got the urge to have some ice cream. But first, I wanted a hit of architectural energy, so we wandered through some neighborhoods that have begun to be "upgraded" after 20-40 years of getting stodgy. Fortunately, we saw few new behemoth mansions constructed after "tear-downs" and, instead, saw some very nice updates to bad old design.

But then we found a frozen yogurt place, not an ice cream spot. (Dallas is horrifically unsophisticated when it comes to ice cream appreciation; Boston has it all over us here.) The stuff (and various toppings) are charged out at $0.40 per ounce; apparently, between the two of us, we got a lot of ounces. Our two modest-looking paper bowls came to over $9.00. But it was good...espresso, orange, pomegranate, and vanilla flavors in my bowl.

Then, we went into Borders Books, which is shutting all their stores and, therefore, is having a sale. So I bought a book, of course. It was cheap and seemed to be entertaining. It's called 50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know. It has 3-4 page "treatments" on a laundry list of "must know" topics, ranging from Aristotelianism and Relativism to Secularism and Liberalism to The Social Contract and Quantum Mechanics. I read about four topics tonight and decided this is not, despite its looks and implicit promise, "easy reading." You have to be deeply interested to follow each summary clearly. Comparative altruism and the Golden Rule are not easy topics to digest, even in bullet form.

But I have to admit I'm very interested in reading Plato's The Republic and learning more about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas now that I've read a few chapters of this book. And, scanning the book, I have decided I really do have an interest in learning about the divergent views of Keynesians and monetarists and the reasons for their adoption of their divergent approaches to economics.

Enough for tonight. I promise not to do any nude pole-vaulting tonight.


2 comments:

YourFireAnt said...

Sounds like you are going back to freshman year in college. ;-)

Westminster Kitchen Renovations said...

Thanks for thiss blog post