Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Quiz Feb4

Remember, Section #6, I'm arriving at about 1:15 pm today. Go ahead and form discussion groups if you like, see if you can find midterm group partners/topics...


M 14/T 15 - Aristotle (LH); WATCH:Aristotle on Flourishing: How to Live a Good Life? LISTEN:Aristotle & flourishing;How Do I Live a Good Life? (HIp); Terence Irwin on Aristotle's Ethics (PB). Podcast

1. Complete the statement, identify the source, and explain the meaning of "One swallow..."

2. What was Aristotle's word for happiness, success, or flourishing?

3. Did Aristotle think we could learn to live a good life? Did he think it virtuous for individuals to focus exclusively on the pursuit of their own self-interest?*

4. In the Raphael painting School of Athens, what does Aristotle's body language imply about his philosophy (and Plato's)? 

5. What did Aristotle think we could do to increase our chance of flourishing or succeeding as human beings?

6. What reliance, ironically invoked by some Aristotelian scholars for centuries after his death,  is contrary to the spirit of philosophy?

DQs:


  • What do you think Aristotle's body language in School of Athens means? Which side of the painting, his or Plato's, would you be on?
  • Why didn't Aristotle think children could be fully happy, fully "eudaimon"? Who are the happiest young and old people you know? Are their forms of happiness different? 
  • What's been the happiest moment of your life, so far? Or the least happy? At the time, would you have said that your life was happy? 
  • What's your idea of "the good life"? Do you consider other people's well-being to be any concern of yours? Is it a neglect of human potential to live merely for material values?
  • What is "the right kind of character"? What does it mean to you to "become a better person"? Is that something you actively strive for? Do you think everyone can, and should? 
  • Do you recall a time in childhood when you asked, a parent, a Sunday School teacher, or some other adult the question "Who or what made God?" Did you receive a satisfactory response (from your present point of view)? Was the response an appeal to authority  - the authority of the Bible or some other sacred text, the interpreters of your faith, or of your parents?



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An old post-
Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - Aristotle & God

We have Aristotle on two tracks (the Little History and Philosophy Bites) today in CoPhi. God's* on 3d (pinch-hitting for Lucius Outlaw and last year's America the Philosophical* discussion of the historical role of African-Americans in philosophy, if you're interested).

(*The God, or a god? An important distinction, as Bill Murray noted in Groundhog Day: scroll down...)

Aristotle‘s in the Pythons' philosopher's song too, though he's even more sober than his Ionian predecessors. He rejected his teacher Plato’s metaphysics, returned to the cave of the phenomenal world to take a closer look, avoided universalizing abstractions and CAPS (preferring forms in things to transcendent and remote FORMS "above"), and inspired the name of our annual Spring speaker series in the philosophy department at MTSU, the Lyceum.

(We actually now also have a *Fall Lyceum at MTSU, inaugurated last year by Carlin Romano.)

The best quick & graphic way of illustrating the difference between Plato and his student Aristotle, I’ve found, is by pondering Raphael’s famous painting School of Athens [annotated]. Pay close attention to the hands. "On the other side [of Plato] stands Aristotle, the man of science and common sense, who points earthward in contrast with Plato's gesture toward the heavens. In Aristotle's arms Raphael put Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics..."

A new history of western philosophy takes that painting to heart. The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, by Arthur Herman, traces its implications for centuries of philosophers who lined up to squeeze into the School behind either Plato or Aristotle.
They began as student and master. They ended as rivals. Plato is supposed to have said, “Aristotle kicked me,as foals do their mothers when they are born.”All the evidence, however, suggests the crucial break between them came after Plato's death. Aristotle entered Plato's Academy in Athens at age seventeen, probably in 367 BCE. When he left, he was in his forties...
Why they broke is a fascinating story reflected in centuries of divergent influence. If I were going to have to line up in that painting I'd have to pick Aristotle's side.

"How Aristotle Invented Science"-a slight overstatement, but not compared to Plato the armchair philosopher.

Aristotle was more eloquently poetic than scientific, though, when he said one swallow doesn't make a summer, and a few moments of pleasure don't add up to a happy life. Nor does a "happy childhood." We must be in it for the long haul, and must see our good as coordinate with that of others including those who'll succeed us after we're gone. It's all about eudaimonia ("you die" is a helpful mnemonic, aggressive and hostile though it sounds, and though it really means you live.)

It's probably for his ethics that Aristotle is most widely renowned, but Bertrand Russell for one was unimpressed. "There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind, in so far as he is aware of them, do not move him emotionally." (Hold that thought, when we talk about the problem of evil.)

(Yesterday was the anniversary of Russell's death, btw. Strange occasion to mark, I suppose, but any excuse to check out Maria Popova's brainpickings is worthwhile.)


Aristotle was a naturalist, noticing our continuity with the rest of nature. Like trees and plants we flourish when well-nurtured. Unlike them, we must take charge of our own nurture in order to reach our potential and achieve The Good Life in tandem with our peers.


It's so ironic that the middle ages made Aristotle "The Philosopher," i.e. the unquestioned Authority. That was indeed "against the spirit of philosophy."

Terence Irwin's podcast interview is compelling listening, for those unaccustomed to a Yorkshire accent (or whatever it is). He makes the same point I just did about coordinating the personal and the public good, and "identifying one's own interest with other people's interest" etc.

He also helpfully corrects overly-simple reductions of Aristotle's ethics to a dogged middle-of-the-roadism. Avoiding extremes doesn't mean choosing the blandest, milk-toastiest possibility. No, his Golden Mean means doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason etc., and that could very well turn out to be something exciting. Or scary. (Like going after ISIS? What would Aristotle say?)

Don't confuse the ethical Golden Mean with the geometrical Golden Ratio. "The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, golden mean, or golden section, is a number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances..."

Aristotle's version of God, on the other hand, may just be too bland for your taste. It's not a he or she, or really even an it as we typically understand things.

To Aristotle, God is the first of all substances, the necessary first source of movement who is himself unmoved. God is a being with everlasting life, and perfect blessedness, engaged in never-ending contemplation. IEPThis is a remote and impersonal God, who won't intervene in our affairs and could really care less about them.

The God implied in the Hebrew Bible book of Ecclesiastes seems fairly indifferent to human suffering & flourishing too, and unpromising with respect to the old dream of Sunday School heaven and immortality. Jennifer Hecht glosses it smartly in Doubt:

Koheleth brushed aside the dream of an afterlife with a simple appeal to reason--Who knows this?--and the conclusion that humans have nothing above the beasts in this regard...But it doesn't follow that simple happiness is unavailable in this life. The recipe's pretty simple too.

Love your spouse. Get some work to do, do it with all your might; enjoy the simple pleasures of food, drink, and love. Everything else is vanity. But, it's a form of vanity we can live with. The search for true love, solid friendship, good work, and daily delight might just be enough. Enjoy your life. A person could do worse. The search for happiness on this orb is anything but a "dismal" undertaking, as someone sadly suggested. You could ask Aristotle. It's the end and aim of life.

Not everyone agrees with Aristotle about that, of course. For some, the end and aim is to serve and glorify God (and maybe reap the reward of that elusive afterlife after all). Their god knows and cares about human striving, and presumably abhors gratuitous suffering.

But there's the rub that's rubbed raw in our Philosophy: The Basics reading today: the perennial problem of evil or suffering, or the worry that our world is too full of woe to lay at the figurative feet of an omni-being. And even if we think we can disarm some of the problem by deploying the timeworn Free Will Defense, we leave "natural" evil (killer storms, quakes, disease) unaccounted for.
We also read today of David Hume's posthumous objections to weakly-analogical Paley-ish Design Arguments. Human artifacts are one thing, the products of complex time-borne natural phenomena seem to be something very different.

But natural selection, the "blind" and unpremeditated evolutionary process whereby organisms thrive when they develop adaptations suitable to the conditions of their environment, can be considered a form of Design without a Designer. We should ask and try to answer: Is there an important difference between intelligent design and natural complexity?

Must there have been a universal First Cause? But what caused the cause? That question is neck-and-neck with the problem of evil, in turning out many a young non-theist. J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, for instance.

[T]the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian
I think I've heard just about every imaginable response to this question, through the years in my classrooms, but I'll ask it again:

If you believe in God, how do you attempt to reconcile or understand the full extent of human suffering? (Think of particular instances such as the "agony of a young child dying of an incurable disease," or an innocent gunshot or terror victim, or someone killed in a storm and their survivors.) Do you see it as part of a divine plan we just have to trust, or a deep mystery we shouldn't think too much about? Or do you believe in a God who is less than omnipotent and is just doing the best He/She/It can to bring about a harmonious and just Creation?

If you don't believe in God, is that in whole or in part because of the Problem of Evil? Or something else?

Or maybe you're like Charlie Brown's antagonist Lucy, who once responded to his Socratic query about the meaning of it all that "I just don't think about things I don't think about." Didn't seem to make her any happier, not thinking. Did it?


Walk Magazine (@WalkMagazine)
'You get close quickly when you walk side by side' says Clare Balding - we could not agree more! #walking ow.ly/He3Jg

Aristotle would like this:
In a hut in southern Germany and an apartment in New York City, about ninety years ago, two philosophers tried to sort out a family of ancient problems concerning experience, knowledge, and our place in the world. Working independently, they developed a similar idea and used it as a launching pad for more.
The way to make progress on those problems, they thought, is to treat our practical engagement with the environment as primary. “In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement.” We encounter ordinary objects “as things of doing, suffering, contact, possession and use.” When we engage with such things, they are “not thereby objects for knowing the ‘world’ theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so on.” “They are things had before they are things cognized.” The move to understand things theoretically only comes about when there is some interruption or “deficiency” in our ordinary dealings. A common error in philosophy, however, has been a kind of “intellectualism,” treating all our contact with the world in terms of concepts and representations, assuming that “knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things.” The irony is that such intellectualism makes knowledge itself impossible to understand. If we forget that knowledge is derivative from more basic kinds of engagement with the world, we end up “making knowledge, conceived as ubiquitous, itself inexplicable.”
These are central themes also in Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor’s new book, Retrieving Realism. As Dreyfus and Taylor see it, philosophical work in the modern period (in the philosopher’s sense of “modern,” which starts around 1600) has been plagued by a mediational view of how we relate to the world. “Only through” intermediaries can we have contact with things outside us. A few hundred years ago the mediators were supposed to be image-like sensations or ideas. Now they are often sentences, or internal representations of the kind envisaged in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The mediational approach, for Dreyfus and Taylor, is one that people adopt without entirely realizing it. Working within it, however, leads to many errors and misguided debates. It leads to a dualistic sorting of the world’s contents into mental and physical, and with this comes an acute problem of how the two sides could be related. But from the early twentieth century, a better view has slowly developed, according to Dreyfus and Taylor, especially through the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They show us how to have a theory of contact with the world without mediators, through a “reembedding of thought and knowledge in the bodily and social-cultural contexts in which it takes place.”
Compact and engaging, Retrieving Realism is more approachable than its weighty subject matter might predict. The book begins from an assertion of the “embedding” of thought and knowledge in its bodily and practical contexts, and then argues against a range of views that try to insist that our contact with the world must somehow run through representations, language, or concepts. Instead, our basic contact with the world involves a kind of “absorbed coping.” The authors are not entirely hostile to the idea of representation of the world in our minds and in language, but those phenomena are secondary. Recognizing this, for Dreyfus and Taylor, enables us to recover from the morass of mediationism the idea that we live in, and can know about, a world that exists independently of us. That is the realism that is being “retrieved.”
The point that not everything we do makes use of theories and concepts might seem obvious—clearly we also eat and drink and walk on things. But Dreyfus and Taylor think that philosophy constantly invents new ways to falsely intellectualize our relationship to things that we do. Philosophy itself does not subside once we see these issues clearly; philosophy has tasks beyond merely diagnosing errors. We have to work out how to negotiate differences between cultures and between different methods of knowing the world. This work will go better when those differences are understood against a common background of dealing with the world that we all, as humans, engage in.
• • •
The early twentieth century was indeed a time when the philosophical landscape shifted, but Dreyfus and Taylor give a one-sided account of the events of this period. The two figures at work in my opening vignette were Heidegger, in the hut, and John Dewey, in New York. Heidegger’s Being and Time was published in 1927. A few years earlier, Dewey published Experience and Nature, revising it in 1929. This was not Dewey’s first book, as in Heidegger’s case, but the fourteenth of (too) many, containing ideas that had developed from Dewey’s first years as an “idealist” philosopher, through the classic debates over pragmatism in the first years of the new century, to this mature position... (continues)

58 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Mariem Farag #12
    I believe there is a God out there. How could there not be a God? How could all of this be a cause of evolution. I just don't quite believe that to be realistic at all. I believe everything is created to reflect his image. As of the question, "Who or what made God?", no human mind will ever be big enough to fully understand that. We are created by him, therefore we automatically think that everything has to have a beginning (creator) and an end. We believe that, because that's all we know here on Earth. We are just humans. We can never answer questions that are beyond our human mind. God doesn't have to have been made by something or someone; he doesn't have had to have a beginning. I know this sounds confusing to us, but that's just how it is. Not everything has to work the same way it does here on Earth. "If there is a loving God, why would he ever allow suffering?", a question we all have asked once before. Let me just get this straight, God NEVER CAUSES suffering. He may allow it for reasons he knows, but never does he cause it. God only allows suffering at certain times to make us seek him like he seeks us, because most of us want to seek a God when we are in deep suffering not when we have a perfect life. God gives us the free will to do and believe in whatever we want. Life is full of suffering. We can't blame God for it, we can only ask him to prevent it if it is in our best interest. Nothing is impossible for God. It is impossible for our human mind to grasp why God is permitting a certain suffering. Suppose God reveals to you that he allowed your daughter to die in that car accident so that he can bring you and your wife together. You might be so angry at God that you might divorce your wife, and that would of course defeat the whole purpose. This is just a simple example. God doesn't reveal the details behind your suffering, but he does tell you to trust him through it all. What is happening to you now might seem so heavy on you and make you question a reality of a God, but trust that it has a purpose that is too big for us to understand. We can NEVER fully understand God. God is the only hope in my suffering. I see suffering as lessons and paths that lead me to where God wants me to be, therefore no matter how tough it may be, I always see a light at the end of the tunnel.
    This short video explains why God permits suffering a lot better than I can ever explain it. Please check it out.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ps36TV_vI

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  3. Jimmie Blake (Sec. 12)...I found Aristotle's point of view to be more interesting than Socrates or Plato because he embraces the surrounding world. This is all we know, so why not embrace it?

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  4. Jimmie Blake (Sec. 12)...Also, I do not have a group to work with yet if anyone is interested or needs a third person for their group. I would like to work on How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy, but I am open to anything at this point.

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  5. Jeri Radford (12)11:46 AM CDT

    (12)

    I believe, because of the way Aristotle's hands are placed in School of Athens, it shows how he believes we are the way we are because of practical reasons. Meaning, what has happened in our lives and others that affect us, parents for example, are the reason we act the way we do and respond to other commotions in certain ways.

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  6. The good life has a lot to do with the influence your surroundings has on you as an individual. A positive environment can create a good, happy life, but negativity can impact your life in horrible ways if you let it.

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  7. Lucas Rogers 122:34 PM CDT

    I definitely consider how people feel and have concern over them. It can make you feel better about yourself when you help others.

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  8. Alexis Arriaga2:42 PM CDT

    I found an interesting video that goes more into detail about the meaning behind the School of Athens fresco painting.

    https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/high-ren-florence-rome/high-renaissance1/v/raphael-school-of-athens

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  9. (#8 TR)
    2. Why didn't Aristotle think children could be fully happy?
    Generally most children are happy, joyful, and carefree. However, I agree with Aristotle that a child could never be fully happy. I would say most children cannot even describe happiness. How can you know what is truly happiness if you haven’t lived long enough to feel the pain and suffering that goes along with it? I almost would say children are experiencing ignorance rather than any sort of happiness. No worries, fears, or the satisfaction when you don’t have any to speak off. It’s all just sunshine and rainbows.

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  10. Haley Harwell, Ashely S., Mikayla Briggs
    Today we talked about how we really agree with Aristiotles view of living with virtue creates the good life. We brought up how good character attracts good character. Community is important to having a fulfilling life.

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  11. Our group decided that the "good life" is found by finding balance and keeping an optimistic and positive attitude. By staying positive you can achieve a more fulfilled life. (Morgan Blair and Megan Cortes)

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  12. Grady Burnham (11)5:20 PM CDT

    Grady
    Brad
    Blake
    Money can buy happiness, but it can't be the only source. The good life should come from things that can't be taken away such as relationships and memorable experiences. You should be considerate of others well-being, but you shouldn't let that hinder your happiness; i.e. "people-pleasing"

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  13. {8}
    Karol saleh
    What's your idea of "the good life"?
    My idea for the good life is 1. accept Jesus as a savior to my life.
    2. lovely family
    3. good education
    4. good health
    5. nice place to live in.
    these are my life of a good life, i think without the, no body can live a normal or even a good life. but the important thing no matter how, is to accept jesus as you savior and your God.

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  14. Sec. 12 Rushdi, Yada, Sierra
    Today, my group discussed that " the good life", could be obtaining ones goals and in some cases living comfortably in your means. We also said you can real full satisfaction in life. You will always want more and more. So you can live happily and live a good life. But you will always look at that one person that has more and say you want what they have.

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  15. (#8) QUIZ QUESTION:
    What/Who does Aristotle consider to be "the first of all substances, the necessary first movement . . . unmoved." ? Does this being embody anything?

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  16. (# 8) 5. Do you recall a time in childhood when you asked, a parent, a Sunday School teacher, or some other adult the question "Who or what made God?" Did you receive a satisfactory response (from your present point of view)? Was the response an appeal to authority - the authority of the Bible or some other sacred text, the interpreters of your faith, or of your parents?

    I do remember asking any adult that was near during Vacation Bible school about God. Who was this person? What meaning did he have to us humans? For years until this present day the question as always came up when I'd see an adult of some knowledge. The answers always varied. As a child it was, "He's our way of life. Our guiding light to heavy." Now it comes off as, "There is more than one God, there are many Gods in this lifetime but, they're all the same with different faces and names." Nothing was of word from the Bible or any sacred text. It all came from the mind, from the perspective of another who's belief may or may not be the same of another. To this day, I still question the one we call God, receiving answer after another.

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  17. janet, austin, and karol (8)
    What's your idea of "the good life"? Do you consider other people's well-being to be any concern of yours?
    our idea of a good life is staying positive, believe in god, good education, and good family.
    we think about other people's concerns because we are not living alone in the universe.

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  18. Tyeisha and Unesti (8)
    What's your idea of "the good life"? Do you consider other people's well-being to be any concern of yours?
    Our idea of a good life is when you feel like your life is a blessing more than a burden. When you can wake up every morning with a smile just knowing you can take another breath; A good life is not defined by materialistic things but rather how happy/content you are with yourself. Unesti considers other's well being part of her concern because she wants everyone to succeed and be happy, but to me, other people's life is not any of my concern.

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  19. Justin fox6:15 PM CDT

    Justin, Kali, and mariem
    Self-awareness and understanding what happiness means to you are essential to being happy. Appreciating the little things is also important.

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  20. (#8)
    3. What's your idea of "the good life"? Do you consider other people's well-being to be any concern of yours?

    My idea of "the good life" is to have a society that can agree to disagree and a stable government can bring society together. I do consider others well-being to be a concern of mine because caring for others is a part of being human. In order to be healthy and happy one may need that type of environment to surround them. Today's society is worried about themselves and becomes concerned with the less important and allows that to define their happiness.

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  21. Katelin Simmons10:52 PM CDT

    (#12)
    My group decided that the good life was the things that you could control going your way and considering other viewpoints to help broaden ours.

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  22. (12) we believe in a heaven and a hell. Fatima loreal Kali meriem

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  23. (#8) In response to DQ3, I believe that the good life is amassing a decent amount of physical wealth. This is not necessarily the only way to achieve the good life as it can vary based on the perspectives of each and every individual. I believe that we should consider others' well beings/concerns to an extent. More specifically, it should be contemplated but it should not be the final factor in making your decision(s).

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  24. Anonymous5:06 PM CST

    Amy Young #4
    Why didn't Aristotle think children could be fully happy?
    He said that children are just beginning their lives, and so haven't had a full life in any sense. True happiness, he argued, required a longer life.

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  25. Erick Morgado8:37 PM CST

    Erick Morgado #4
    Extra Quiz Question
    - Explain Aristotle's Golden Mean.

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    1. Caleb Morton (#6)

      Aristotle's Golden Rule was the middle point of one of his described virtues that balanced between the two extremes, such as the extremes of cowardice and recklessness for the virtue of courage.

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  26. Why did Aristotle think children couldn't be fully happy?
    Children haven't yet experienced life, so they can't be happy according to Aistotle's definition of happiness. His definition of happiness meant the overall achievement from a long life. (#4)

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  27. Sean Byars Section 6
    Why did Aristotle think children couldn't be fully happy?
    Aristotle believed that true happiness could only be obtained by looking at one's achievements over the course of a long time. Thus, children being children, could not have had enough experience to be truly happy according to Aristotle.

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  28. Sean Byars Section 6
    Quiz Question: Who proved Aristotle wrong concerning his belief that heavier items fall to the ground faster than lighter objects?

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    Replies
    1. Katharine Khaoone - Galileo Galilei, when he supposedly dropped a wooden ball and a cannonball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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  29. Katharine Khaoone - #4
    DQ #2: Why didn't Aristotle think children could be fully happy?
    - Aristotle believed that children couldn't be fully happy simply because of their age. He says that since they are in the early stages of life, they have yet to fully experience everything yet. Our book says "Children are just beginning their lives, and so haven't had a full life in any sense. True happiness required a longer life." While I definitely understand his argument, I also think that no one really knows ones' life story. Someone in their teenage years could definitely have already gone through a lot of struggles/events than someone in their middle ages.

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  30. Adam Martin #4
    1. Aristotle's body language implied that he was more concerned with observing the world to figure out how it works rather than to merely think about it and try to rationalize it.

    2. Aristotle didn't believe children could be happy because they hadn't blossomed or achieved eudaimonia. They must be able to achieve something greater in life to be truly happy, according to him.

    3. I believe the good life is one in which you have control over your artistic and emotional pursuits, regardless of the material benefit.

    5. I did ask my parents who made God, and I always received the answer that time does not affect Him the way it affects humans. They used the Bible as their justification, and this does not sit right with me currently.

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  31. Beshoy Aziz8:41 AM CST

    Beshoy Aziz (#6)
    No one made God because God is UNLIMITED, and if he wasn't then he is not a God. Even if we assume that there isn't a God, then who created the universe? Big Bang? So is it easier for us to believe that something came out from nothing (Big Bang Theory) and not believe that God created us? Also, if you believe that Big Bang is scientific and has evidence, then you're wrong because there is not one evidence that support it. scientists just Believe that this might have happened because it's their "only" explanation of how the universe came to be. so basically Big Bang/ evolution is another religious idea that scientists believe, and we call it science. Even if Big Bang miraculously happened, then how did we evolve? Did we evolve from Bacteria? and how did that Bacteria came to be? So there is no evidence to support the Macro-evolution as well. We can not use the Fossil Record as evidence because these Fossils are dead and we even don't know if they had offspring or not. so in order for us to be here right now and do what we're doing, we had to be created by a very powerful God that is unlimited.

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  32. Akmal Ishmetov section #4 extra quiz question:
    What did Aristotle meant by Golden Mean?

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    1. Extra Quiz Question:
      In the video Aristotle flourishing "how to live a good live?", what was his Nickomachean ethics book based on?

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    2. It was basically an early self help book. Aimed to help "cultivate the virtues", to reach the golden mean.

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  34. Stephen Martin (4)
    Why didn't Aristotle think children could be fully happy, fully "eudaimon"?
    Aristotle's view of eudaimon requires growth over your entire life, and beyond. A child simply hasn't lived enough to build a full character.

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  35. Chad Andrews - #6

    Quiz Question: (T/F) Aristotle believed that your moral education, or upbringing, plays an important part on reaching the golden mean of virtue.

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  37. 6 Brock Francis
    DQ 4
    My idea of "the good life" is when someone reaches their own perception of peace and happiness. I believe that each and every person can only control his or her own happiness, so they can only be held responsible for their own well-being. I believe that if a person lives only on material value then he or she is definitely missing out on a lot of the happiness of life.

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  38. 6 Brock Francis
    Supplement question
    Why did Aristotle name his book The Nicomachus Ethics?

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  39. I found this video to be helpful in explaining Aristotle's thought process and virtues

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFPBf1AZOQg

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  40. Devin Mahoney (6)
    Quiz Questions:

    - What was the name of Aristotle's school established in Athens?
    - What 'Great' historical figure was Aristotle a tutor to?

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    1. Sophie Raffo #611:50 AM CST

      The Lyceum was his school. He tutored Alexander the Great.

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  41. Anonymous11:33 AM CST

    Devin Mahoney (6)

    http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/aristotle/

    I really enjoy the opening line of this article. I have always had a strong affinity towards this quote from Benjamin Franklin, “Happiness depends more on the inward disposition of mind than on outward circumstances.” I have lived by this philosophy (or attempted to) most of my life. I believe you are capable of creating your own happiness and overcoming challenges through positive self development.

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  42. Sophie Raffo #611:47 AM CST

    Quiz Question:
    What does Aristotle say is halfway between foolhardiness an cowardice?

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  43. How did Aristotle distinguish a life between bad and good?

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  44. Section 6
    Quiz Question:

    What was Aristotle's definition of a Virtue?

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  45. 6.
    I believe that there is no such thing as a good life that is general for everyone but that everyone has their own version of the good life.

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  46. Cassie Franse1:02 PM CST

    Of the two virtues mentioned in the video (Courage and Generosity), which one do you struggle with? (6)

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    Replies
    1. Possible discussion question.

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  47. Caleb, Robert, Courtney P. (#6)

    We discussed the "happiest moment in our lives". We ask could name happy moments, but we sorta agreed that even these big moments didn't create truly happy lives.

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  48. Cassie Brock and I discussed weather or not we could be truly happy in life. Do we need to be in a community to be happy?

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  49. 8. Devin, Mike, Lace discussed how we feel that children are the truest form of happiness and that life has taken it away from some of us.

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  50. Sophie Raffo #61:06 PM CST

    Sophie, Courtney M., and Spencer
    We discussed our ideas on what makes us happy and if children experience true happiness.
    Our group decided that life's purpose is doing what makes you happy, whether that be attaining material things, or giving back to others. It all depends on the person, and their idea of happiness.
    We also discussed the fact that children can obtain true happiness. They have not yet experienced the responsibilities of adulthood, so in that point in time they are truly happy.

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