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I got my Descartes quiz back today. I thought it was not so great, but I ended up with an A- on it. Not bad, considering the crap I thought it was. The quiz was open book and handwritten notes, so I basically took my notes and put them into complete sentences and organized those into paragraphs. Not much mental effort expended.
I don't think I missed much in Modern Philosophy on Friday. I could still follow lecture today, even with being behind in the reading. But with Leibniz, the ideas keep popping up everywhere.
Just finished reading Montaigne's essay "On coaches," which is less about coaches (coach in the sense of wheeled vehicle, not a person who directs a sports team) and than it is about what it is to be noble. Or to display gentilesse, as Chaucer would put it. Montaigne also condemns the treatment by the Conquistadores of the people they encountered in the New World, highlighting the nobility of the kings of Mexico and Peru in the process. Somehow it was all more affecting than anything I read in the Latin American history class I took a couple years ago, and plenty of cruelty was on display there. Montaigne's own feeling about it comes through, and it is not a position we today might expect any given European of the time to have. But perhaps that's the snobbery of time, thinking that compassion for "the other" (for lack of a better term; Montaigne certainly would not have used it) is our special province. That, or we tar them all with the same brush, all the easier to make demons of them; nuance and subtlety be damned.
Today I was terribly indecisive about lunch. But on a whim I ended up having a gyro and tea at Petra.
Saturday at Flying Star, Alanna and I discovered a magazine called Giant Robot. The article about the to-fu headed figures was especially amusing. And on the way through downtown afterwards, we discovered how absolutely brilliant APD officers are. One of them driving a squad car casually ran a red light while trailing one foot out the open car door.
I don't think I missed much in Modern Philosophy on Friday. I could still follow lecture today, even with being behind in the reading. But with Leibniz, the ideas keep popping up everywhere.
Just finished reading Montaigne's essay "On coaches," which is less about coaches (coach in the sense of wheeled vehicle, not a person who directs a sports team) and than it is about what it is to be noble. Or to display gentilesse, as Chaucer would put it. Montaigne also condemns the treatment by the Conquistadores of the people they encountered in the New World, highlighting the nobility of the kings of Mexico and Peru in the process. Somehow it was all more affecting than anything I read in the Latin American history class I took a couple years ago, and plenty of cruelty was on display there. Montaigne's own feeling about it comes through, and it is not a position we today might expect any given European of the time to have. But perhaps that's the snobbery of time, thinking that compassion for "the other" (for lack of a better term; Montaigne certainly would not have used it) is our special province. That, or we tar them all with the same brush, all the easier to make demons of them; nuance and subtlety be damned.
Today I was terribly indecisive about lunch. But on a whim I ended up having a gyro and tea at Petra.
Saturday at Flying Star, Alanna and I discovered a magazine called Giant Robot. The article about the to-fu headed figures was especially amusing. And on the way through downtown afterwards, we discovered how absolutely brilliant APD officers are. One of them driving a squad car casually ran a red light while trailing one foot out the open car door.
