VictorianLady

By the way, have you been reading "The Crow's Cry"? Does the plot seem too slow? What do you think of the characters?

Euclidian geometry? *is traumatized* I think I have to take a statistics class next semester, too. (I'm getting my fun classes in now, apparently.) Next semester it's math and ed. and technology for ed. people. And maybe economics. I do get to take a freshman-level arts introduction class, though, so maybe that will at least be entertaining. Good luck on the campus teacher. I'd wait and hope too!

My philosophy professor quoted Chesterton on mystery during a discussion of Calvinism and Arminianism. I was proud of him.

Can you chat now Toria? I'm on gmail now!

aye up, Sis
did you get my e-mail?

Oh yes, he certainly merits an entry. Half the entries were made up on the spot anyway, with no history and never being used again. (especially those under H. Freckles felt sorry for H because it hadn't had any entries, so she wrote up six in a row.)

On Chesterton: Good for you for bringing that up! Your teacher needs you in that class. On experts, he is (as usual) right, although they can have good points without seeing the significance of their work.

On the baby's sensory perceptions: Good point. But, while the baby can certainly sense being hugged with his physical senses, is love primarily related to the senses? As far as I can tell, it has far more to do with soul than body (e.g. a touch can serve as a warning of pending punishment or as an expression of love; the sensation would be the same, but the meaning would be far different). The sensory impression of touch makes a difference because it generally communicates love, not because of the touch itself. We see this especially as children get older: they know whether or not they are loved, and it has more to do with communication between souls, not communication between bodies. If you are faking love for them, they know, and it makes a difference in how well they learn.

I'm glad you enjoyed them.
And that poem was actually supposed to be touching or sad, but I don't really see how... I suppose it that it was so long ago, and I'm a modern reader. Anyway, it made me laugh too.

Been thinking more about the whole Montgomery-epistemological-thingy. Pascal was right--learning does begin with the emotions. Yes, babies first learn through their senses, because their reason is still developing. But they begin using logic at a younger age than we probably give them credit for, categorizing the things that they discover through their senses. Reason helps them make "sense" of the world--otherwise they would not remember the things that they see, touch, taste, hear, or smell. Reason is more important than the senses in learning, because otherwise we often don't remember what we're being taught.

But emotion is more important even than reason. Babies have to want to learn. Even at that young an age, their emotions are already functioning to some extent, which is why it is dangerous for babies not to be held. Babies who are ignored by their caregivers, except to deal with basic needs, often end up dead or mentally retarded. If they are loved, then they are curious, and they want to learn about the world around them, which they eventually use logic to categorize (e.g., "These things bounce if I throw them, but this thing breaks, so I'll put it another place.").

The problem with depending on facts to reach truth is precisely the problem Montgomery was pointing out, although he drew a different conclusion--when people don't want to believe facts, they will ignore them or try to destroy them. That is because knowing "facts" isn't enough to make a person believe them. The heart, that is, the emotions and will, has to come first, or the facts are useless. The devil knows "facts" better than any of us, and they haven't helped him in the least. That's why it's not enough to factually believe in God for salvation--we have to believe, with our emotions and will. Facts can draw us toward God, the ultimate source of truth, but they can't automatically make us reach him. "Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life."

At any rate, that's my long-winded spiel. The Bible already had the solution to the epistemological problem, but it took me a while to see it. As usual.

that's fine sis! I'll be on all day.

can you chat for a bit? if yes meet me on gmail.

Hello...

well I guess I'll be home for awhile. I went to the doctor's yesterday and he said now I have a slight case of pneumonia.

Thanks, VictorianLady.

Congratulations on your paper!

Have to agree about college discouraging extracurricular learning. I'm still trying to sort out all the epistemological sense and nonsense I've been getting in philosophy class. I know empiricism is messed up, but Descartes' rationalism is just crazy (although I prefer r. to e.). And the whole "How do we learn?" question is a big deal in my education classes, too--the textbook is very empiricist. It's funny--I don't think my professor quite expected me to start using his philosophy lectures to analyze my ed. psych. course. But ed. psych. people, who are probably using John Dewey's ashes as snuff, apparently believe that all learning comes through the senses. Which isn't strictly true, but it does seem as if our learning as babies comes that way. That's what I do sometimes in my ed. psych. class--sit and analyze what philosophical perspective I'm being taught from, and trying to figure out if there's a better way. At any rate, if our first learning comes through some way other than the senses, I haven't figured it out yet. Epistemology is a tangled mess, and it's tangling up my head.

Now I'm having a little trouble remembering.... I think his repeated insistence on empirical evidence got to me after a while. I'm sure Montgomery isn't an empiricist proper, but empirical "facts" aren't the point at which I start thinking. I guess it seemed to me that he was arguing that the problem with the modern world is a lack of attention to facts, and I'm not sure that, at the heart, that is the source of our problems. If people today are overly focused on the inner life, does it necessarily follow that focusing on facts will solve our problems? Sometimes it seems as if the people who are most focused on "facts" are those who also get most focused on themselves. Postmodernism, even with its enshrining of that same inner life, has pushed some people to look outside of themselves. I suppose modernism and postmodernism have done a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and some have finally realized that something is wrong. However, things are so wrong that they only make things worse in trying to fix them. The modern world is so torn up by people going where the wind takes them that many don't really understand what it means to live as a part of a community. Frankly, I'm inclined to think that many of today's self-indulged churches would be different if that sense of community hadn't been lost. And liberals throwing city-wide May-day festivals isn't going to put things back together.

Postmodernists are right in that our worldview does color our thinking. Modernists boasted that they were the ones focused on facts--that they were questioning in order to arrive at facts. Postmodernists may want subjectivism, but modernists didn't. And where did they end up? I'd also have to take issue with his insistence that the intent of the writers of the Constitution should decide how it is interpreted. The writers wrote it, but they did not always agree with each other on how they thought it should function. Some more conservative (i.e. limited government) writers have suggested that we should actually be more concerned with what the states intended in adopting it. If a bill is written by a congressman's staffer and gets passed, no one cares what the staffer was thinking. What is more immediately important is what the bill literally says and what the intentions of Congress were in passing it. We don't talk about the original intentions of staffers; why should we treat the Constitution in a totally different way? At least that's the argument, and I think it bears a good deal of weight, especially considering how things have turned out.

The stuff above is a long way of saying that certain things in the transcript I read didn't go down quite right, but that I agreed with most of what he had to say. Wonder what he would think of Pascal's argument that knowledge begins with the emotions? Now there's an epistemology for you.

Well, the Tao was basically the order of the universe. It included everything from the four seasons, the course of the sun and moon, the passage of time, life and death, etc. The philosopher Zhuangzi once said, "if I could tell you what Tao were, it would not be Tao," meaning it was hard to pin down what it was. It just was. In Stephen Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time," he said that what scientists try to do is to pin down a set of rules that govern the universe. Strange as it may sound, to me, it seemed like they were also trying to find the Tao.
Not sure if it's anything like how Lewis used it, but seeing as the Tao may include anything and everything, Lewis could probably get away with anything.
I can't wait till the semester's over (though it's still a long way away...), then I could finally get my hands on the books I've been wanting to read for so long!

If I decide to give Chesterton a try, what would you suggest?

Amen.

By the way, exactly how did those other professors disagree with Montgomery? I noticed a few things in his speech that I might possibly argue with, but what parts bothered them?

But it does seem to go further than mere similar standards. As you've noticed, some clauses are awfully similar, even down to the wording of it.
And I've always meant to read The Abolition of Man, ever since my father mentioned that he stopped reading it when Lewis started talking about the Tao. Of ancient Chinese philosophies, I like Tao-ism the most (not the really messed up modern religion! but the philosophy before that).

Hey sis,
I can't sleep! any ideas?