January 5 [First day of Class]
January 5
What an interesting first day of classes!
I got to my climate science class early, to make sure I got a good seat. Sometimes professors bring in clouds and stuff, and it's good to have a front seat where you can see them really well. I didn't think there would be any today, 'cause first days are usually reserved for passing out books and the class syllabus, as well as to go over lab safety.
Runaway lightning clouds are a danger to everypony.
They do things a little differently on Earth, though. You get your books before class starts, rather than have the teacher give them out. Peggy said I was lucky that someone else had done that for me, since the bookstore charges too much for the books.
Anyway, since I was early, I started looking through the book until the professor showed up. The beginning was kinda basic; really, foal's stuff. Types of cloud, the water cycle, fronts and prevailing winds and atmospheric convection, that kind of thing.
Something really funny happened when he was reading the attendance, though. He went through it alphabetically, and he read off the name “Crystal Dawn,” and looked right at me when he said it. Then a girl in the middle of the class with curly brown hair raised her hand and he was really surprised.
Also we didn't go over lab safety at all. Maybe that comes later.
Philosophy class will be fun. We have a lot of books for that class, 'cause we're covering ten different philosophers. I'm looking forward to it: it will give me an insight into how humans think. And philosophers are the ultimate thinkers. They have cutie marks a talent just for thinking. How wonderful would that be?
We have stories about wise ponies, like The Good King, who learned important lessons that maybe weren't as obvious as they should have been.
The class syllabus says that we are going to discuss one philosopher a week for the length of the course. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Rene Descartes, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Karl Marx. The first three are Greek, and then the rest of them aren't. I'm not entirely sure how humans count years, but there's a big gap between Socrates and Rene Descartes. It will be interesting to learn why.
I had time before my Equestrian class to have lunch in the dining hall, so I did. Joe was there, but not Christine, and I also saw Rebekka who lives down the hall from us. She always has kind of a dreamy look in her eyes.
The professor of Equestrian is an older woman who wore strange earrings that looked like slugs, complete with eyestalks. Not many ponies wear earrings, and not very many would think of wearing slugs.
She told me that I would be helping out with an advanced class, where the students were only supposed to speak Equestrian.
Of course they were all excited to see me, but their pronunciations! They were trying hard, but they kept mangling words. It took five minutes to get them all to pronounce terripae correctly, and it's best not to reflect on what they did with my name. Ugh.
Still, it was nice, and they got better as the class went on. They had just had a month-long break to celebrate Winter, and the professor said that they were all out of practice.
I was in a pretty good mood when class got over, especially since instead of rushing off, a bunch of the students stayed after to talk to me. They were all happy that I was there, and asked all sorts of questions about my home and how I liked it at Kalamazoo College and how was it different than an Equestrian university.
We probably could have stayed discussing things for hours, but I knew I had to get back to my dormitory room to get my new computer. They were important to have, and I didn't want to miss my appointment with the computer installer.
The man who installed it was named Mark. He had spikey hair (it's difficult to tell humans apart because they cover most of their bodies with clothes which they change all the time, and their skin color and mane color isn't very diverse so you have to pick up on more subtle clues like face shape and manestyle).
It's different than Peggy's. Her computer folds up, but mine is too big and it had lots of separate pieces. It's voice activated for most things, but it still has a button board that I have to use sometimes. The buttons are small and can't be pushed by hoof, although I can poke them with a pen held in my mouth. He told me that I would have to train the voice activation and that it would get better the more I used it.
He showed me how to turn it on, and then how to navigate around and open programs that can do things for me. The computer has a mailbox that lets me get letters from other people or ponies, and we had to set that up, and he also showed me how to get to Facebook. I could make bookmarks, so that the computer would remember what I wanted and it was quicker than having to put in the whole address to get the program.
I didn't get much time to work with it. Not long after he left, Peggy came back from her classes, and then we went to dinner together. The same sentry was at the podium, and she still insisted on seeing my plastic badge before I could go in. I can see how it would be difficult to know everyperson who is in line, but I am the only pony. It seems like that would be easy to remember.
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Did the syllabus point out that Aquinas was before Descartes?
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Oddly, no. The syllabus didn't list the 'active' dates of all the philosophers, just some of them.
Anyway, the BC/AD (or BCE/CE) dates would be confusing regardless.
What kind of pony is Silver Glow? I assume pegasus right?
6987858
Yup, pegasus pony.
You can discuss Karl Marx all you want. I would bring up Adam Smith in the debate so much I would piss off the teacher. Wealth of Nations is an amazing book and should be required reading.
Did that with my anthropology class. There was a video we watched about some weird cult that was Satanism mixed with Catholicism with a hefty dose of voodoo. I discussed the video from my Christan point of view. Made a D in that class. Did not bother me at all.
6987858 That was stated first chapter. Guess ya forgot, eh?
Wait Karl Marx was a philosopher?! When I was in school he was called something else and that was only nearly 20 years ago.
6987895
Of course, as was Adam Smith. Newton could also be classed as a philosopher too, and so forth.
Philosophy, at it's broadest, is about thinking, after all.
6987895 eh... You know how it is. Anyone who ever had a popular idea, for any reason, is generally considered a philosopher.
Marx appealed very strongly to the lazy and greedy, and so became popular.
She is going to be disappointed by cloud class, I can tell.
I entered slightly curious.
I now await the chapter begging forgiveness for shamefully expecting a poorly written fic. This is awesome!
Well this one is a cute story.
All you need to know about philosophers:
And they didn't even cover weather control in the initial briefing? Hoo boy. All kinds of things just bubbling under the surface.
How long until she realizes that the badge is not for identification, but for recording? At least, I assume that's what it's for, since they do that for the cafeteria at my college.
As a semi-NEET/diogenesian/good-for-nothing La Boheme-esque philosopher, I'm most fond of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero's On the Republic and On the Laws, the 4 books of Confucius, the Discourses on Livy and Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Honorable mention to Simulacra and Simulation, The Loom of God by Pickover and God and Golem by Weiner.
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Bugger. Beat me to it.
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If you went into a class without a mindset to learn or see new perspectives, but merely to troll the course with preconceived notions, then why waste your own time just to get a lousy grade and learn nothing?
6988012
Maybe we should get the pegasus' opinion on
climate changeglobal warming.6987892 yea my memory has been shotty the past few days
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What really bothers me is that not a single analytic philosopher made the syllabus.
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6987895
That Marx's theory continues to be so divisive highlights why it's important to study him. Most modern humans aren't Cartesians or Platonists or Aristotelians or whatever, but no one thinks they're "not philosophers" just because they disagree with them. Learning about ideas you might not agree with is an important part of the humanities. I was a philosophy major and spent most of my time arguing against whatever we just read - that's fine, it's about formulating the argument and addressing the substantive points, not dismissing someone out of hand because you don't like their proposed system of government. Putting Marx on the syllabus doesn't mean the professor is going to try to turn the class into Marxist Communists any more than they'll try to turn them into Platonists or whatever else.
Plato's Republic is both impractical and absurd, doesn't make him any less a political philosopher. And knowing at least the basics of Marx is way more useful for understanding contemporary stuff in a wide variety of disciplines than knowing Plato is. He's one of the most influential figures of the modern era.
6987895 He was as much a philosopher as he was an economist, which is to say, he made messes in both disciplines. I'd class him as a kind of theologian, but then, I'd say the same of Kierkegaard and Sartre, so YMMV. Marx seems to have spent most of his career working as a journalist, so you could always class him as that.
6987149 Thanks for explaining. I can see why we don't have those liquid-tooth-decay machines here in the UK, we're all too healthy!
Obviously that's not entirely true. But a machine for dispensing fizzy drinks, seriously? That scores 9/10 on the Americanometer.
6988398 No. History is full of rotten, horrifically seductive bad ideas, *especially* Plato, Rousseau and Marx. Leaving untrained unguarded young minds alone in a room with those thinkers without adult supervision is as irresponsible as leaving a pack of cub scouts alone with a rack of 22 long rifles in the woods.
All too true.
The whole "self-managing weather" thing seems like something they'd cover in the preliminary orientation. If nothing else, it would keep pegasi from trying to fly up to cloud only to realize that Earth puts them much higher than Equestria does. Silver may want to read that book more carefully, especially before she asks the professor when they begin the practical portion of the class.
All I'm going to say about the the philosophy course is that it's going to be very interesting for both Silver and the professor.
As for the Equestrian class, it's a good thing that Silver's there. It feels like this would be a case of the blind leading the blind without her, ingraining mangled pronunciations that could end up insulting any pony they met.
In all, this seems to be going quite well. For now. I'm not assuming something will go horribly wrong, but I can see the possibility.
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I would agree. Like most of the world's religions.
However, the professor is the "adult supervision". It's not up to a lone student to decide he needs to troll the professor's course, and sign up with no intention of objectively learning new ideas (learning does not mean agreeing with). I responded to him based on the specific context of his post, not just "I disagreed with my prof."
But hey, he's fine with having wasted his own time and tuition (and academic future) to get a D for his trouble, so differn't strokes for differn't folks, eh?
It is called the Dark Age! Take a sacry tone to read it, it gives a better effect.
6988472 Are you for real? Plato and Rousseau are two fundamental when studying philosophy and while Marx wrote in a very
polemicist tone, the importace of his idea for many discipline (Philosophy, Political sciences, Economical sciences and History) make him too a must for philosophy course.
As for the dangerous aspect, I fail to see how promoting things like ethics and equality is bad.
6988787 Absolutely. Plato's Republic underlies every tyranny of the last two hundred years with assists from Rousseau and Marx. And ethics is more of an Aristotle/Aquinas gig.
Someone asked about the absence of analytic philosophers. No
epistemologicalempiricist philosophers, either. One of the artifacts of idealistic vs. logistician or technical philosophy is that the latter tends to be falsifiable and thus they have a shelf life. The more literary philosophers have a narrative, and thus the existentials and idealists and Marxists coast on charm and heroic stances long past their actual merit expires.6988818 You really have a problem if you think Plato and Rousseau promotted Tyranny. And an even bigger one if you think that they are the one who influenced the tyran of the last centuries. They were far more influenced by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Smith or Nietzsche. Not to mention the fundamentalist who follow prophet.
As for Marx, I admit that is idea of the "people dictatorship" is somewhat dangerous, but I do beleive it is oo ludicrous.
Beside, the only actual Marxist revolution was in Cuba, one out of so many isn't too bad.
All in all, banning the study of major philosoph beacause you disagree with them is a bad idea.
And a tyranical one
As for your other critic, Aristotle and Kant are both touching the subject of Epistemology, in fact, the term "epistemology" is attributed to Kant.
6988905 Rousseau was the animating spirit of the Terror. Marx was the explicit justification for the political murder of a hundred million, and the enslavement of billions. And I'm more inclined to blame Heiddigger than Nietzsche for the Nazis, given that he was an enthusiastic party member, while Nietzsche's acolytes largely fled the party to the States along with the Weberites.
Machiavelli and Hobbes, along with Locke and Montesquieu, were the philosophers of the American Revolution, what you would say of that says more about you than them.
6988928 Rousseau's idea were indeed used as a basis by Robespierre and a few others, but they didn't apply it. Rather, they took some part and even transformed it.
And while Marx name's was used to justify some totalitarist regim, none of these regim were actually following is idea.
Well, the american "revolution" (it is more an independence war then an actual revolution) didn't exactly gave us a regim free of all tyranny. Being critical of it is actually a good thing.
Anyway, Machiavelli's Prince justified crime for the sake of "the greater good", while Hobbes promotted tyrany for the sake of security.
6988978 Hobbes developed the concept of sovereignty as the monopoly of force, which along with Locke's concept of social contracts is the "very low foundation" which underlays civil society. Almost all "bad philosophy" is the result of naive moral revulsion at these base, vile and necessary foundations. The need to be a hero has been an incredibly toxic driver of much bad thinking over the centuries.
And if you're going to read Machiavelli, read the Discourses on Livy. That's his actual thinking, the Prince was dumbed down for the consumption of tyrants. The Discourses was written for Machiavelli's fellow republicans.
Heh heh heh...
6989009 There is no "bad" philosophy, at least not in the way you mean it. A philosophy can be bad if it's logic is faulty.
Plato and Rousseau's ideas stand on solid ground. You may not share their visions of humanity and prefer Hobbes' darker outlook, but their ideas also include social contract and foundment of a society. I do not agree with Hobbes' view, and recent study in sociology tend to demonstrate that violence and greed are behavior that are not inherent, but aquired.
The same go with Marx by the way. Is theory on the class war is sound, is solution to it is extreme, but rational. And is proposed economic system is functional.
And far more realistic then our actual system that rely heavily on an impossible perpetual growth.
There is many way to look at life, but you should not dismiss those who try to do it in a positive way beacause you yourself are cynical.
6989058 And on that dismissal of the tragic view as cynicism, let me recommend the best ponies-and-philosophy story on fimfiction, McPoodle's The Best of All Possible Worlds
6989078 Been there, done that. In fact, it was the first pony fic I ever read.
On that note I maintain that if you start thinking that a positive outlook on life is naïve, you are cynic.
35 pages and growing about the merits of western philosophy based on a story about a pony going to school
THIS WHY I LOVE THIS SITE!!!
The internet is probably going to be a big shock for him now that he has a computer.
Somepony is about to be very disappointed when she discovers that this is one of those "Wands away, quills out!" courses.
6987326 ask your swiss bank account and tell me
Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietche oughta be wiped from the board so far as "philosophy" is concerned, as well as with other concerns.
I wonder what will happen when Crystal Dawn finds out about horses in the human world, and about how humans use them...
6988398 Ahh I can see how I wrote that it might look like trolling. It only happened on that one video. To see parts of what you cherish being perverted into worshiping what is most foul was obscene and nauseating. I did not trash the people, merely discussed how they were wrong. I will not compromise my religious beliefs.
By the way I aced all the tests and man did this turn into a philosophical discussion.
"If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything" -Alexander Hamilton
I think we all agree that MLai should really read Celestia Sleeps In and Onto the Pony Planet for a better example of Admiral Biscuit's writing.
I think it is interesting that the younger one is, the more likely he or she is to take to thinkers like Marx. I think it might have something to do with the notions of fairness and justice that are hopefully ingrained in you by your parents. The earlier Marx is introduced, the closer one is to those formative values of equality and sharing.
That's not to say Marx's ideas are childish, just that his views appeal greatly to those that are sheltered, naïve, or without need. It is curious go me that parents still drill sharing and equality into their children when the economic realities of our modern world means they are being set back by such teachings.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sartre....
Gonna be interesting to see what Silver thinks of those two. Talk about foreign thoughts compared to what we know of pony culture, and Silver Glow's mindset in particular.
I'm loving the way your writing this. Great job of highlighting all the little things nicely, like that musing on bring in clouds while waiting for the climate class. That should be particularly interesting give you mention very very few Pegasi take part in this exchange.
I enjoy that the comments for this chapter turned into philosophy chat. But not as much as the story.
I'm curious where Silver Glow found Aeurope on a map, though...
Using Karl Marx in a philosophy class should be grounds for getting your tenure yanked. He wasn't a philosopher, he was an economic theorist-- and a terrible one at that.
6991456 In their defense early political economy was intimately intertwined with philosophy - Adam Smith was definitely a philosopher who ended up founding the first functional economic school, depending on what you think about the Physiocrats, I suppose. And Marx did start out as a heretical Hegelian. But he himself conceived himself as a practitioner of scientific socialism, as muddle headed and superstitious as his scientism was in the application.
Some of the idealation about seems to be more about socialism itself rather than Marx himself. Marxism in the original wrapper was notably apocalyptic in a technically eschatological sense, whereas people tend to talk about Marx in a squishy sparkly fashion as if he were Saint Simon or Fourier. Do instructors assign To The Finland Station anymore?
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I love that there is a spirited, meaningful discussion of philosophy going on here.
When I was in college, I took a philosophy course which covered many of these philosophers. What it was not was an indoctrination class; rather, it was a critical thinking class. We'd read each philosopher's particular brand of philosophy, then we'd discuss it. One particularly memorable discussion, which I think was during Descartes, was whether his theories would still apply to a literal brain in a vat, whether they could apply to a self-aware robot, and whether it actually made any difference if you were a dreaming brain in a vat, or a real person.
I don't think it's right to ignore philosophers just because their theories are currently controversial for whatever reason. Rather, I think it's constructive to understand why they thought what they thought, and what the implications of those thoughts were, for good or ill. It's also instructive to see how in some cases, their 'pure' philosophy was changed politically or popularly.
It's also interesting to know the reasoning that led any of them to where they got. Differing beliefs in the supernatural/gods/God, the nature of humanity, the 'science' of the mind and human behavior; all those things factored into their philosophy, for better or worse.
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Now why would you think that?
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