GREETINGS!  Here is your web philosopher (M.A. in Philosphy from Villanova University)  holding her favorite Christmas present, a Philosophy Game...to play with after being exhausted reading Aristotle's Metaphysics.  

Identity covered to protect the GUILTY! 

Scatches on both arms are from daughter's cat who doesn't like me, despite the fact that cats are usually the phiosopher's choice of pet.

Here Now!

Page on the impossiblity of an infinite regress..

http://www.philosophyclass.net/infiniteregress.htm

NEW:     PAGE CALLED  "KANT CAN'T"  (from the unlikely book "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery.) now can be seen at:

http://www.philosophyclass.net/kantcant.htm

Students:  Aristotle told us something like this: that youth is in a perpetual state resembling intoxication.   (And he never saw a modern university frat house !)

 (Aristotle said wisdom is knowing the causes of things.)

Information on this site:    email of your web philosopher (M.A. in Philosophy at Villanova University):    philosophyclass@gate.net

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"The truth will make you odd."   Flannery O'Conner.

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NEW features starting: 3/ 2009 - Essays on various subjects by "Joe", Senior #1 Apprentice to your Web Philosopher. Look left on the navigation list for his pages.

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"Shame on you, Sartre!"  - read right below:

When asked if he supported the death penalty for "political crimes," Stalin’s acolyte-on-the-Seine was characteristically blunt: "Yes. In a revolutionary country in which the bourgeoisie has been swept from power, the bourgeois who would foment a riot or a plot would deserve the death penalty…A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it and I see no other means for this than death (emphasis added); it is always possible to get out of a prison; the revolutionaries of 1793 probably didn't kill enough people." (Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Bernard Henri-Levy. p. 344)

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  "For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.":  Thomas Aquinas

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. Famous quote:  from the German philosopher, F. Wilhelm Nietzsche -1844 - 1900

(influenced by Hegel).

"What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger."

(According to one of my Prof's in Grad School, Nietzche should have not be considered a philosopher, for he has no "SYSTEM".  He said he taught by aphorisms, and aphorisms are not philosophy.)

Any questions should be emailed to philosophyclass@gate.net

Picture on background is a collage with Stalin in the middle.  See other page for the whole picture.

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GERMAN IDEALISTS

(Remember philosophical Idealists as opposed to philosophical Realists)

  Immanuel Kant  1724 - 1804

Kant, Ethics:  Treat a human being as an end in himself, not a means to an end. 

 G. Hegel  (Absolute Idealist)  1770 - 1831 .  (The universe is an idea working itself out.)

 Sigmund. Freud 1856 - 1939 (influenced by Nietzsche) -

 I once asked one of my Profs why they didn't consider Freud a Philosopher instead of a figure in modern psychology.  He said that was a "good question" which it still is.  Any Answer???. 

Read about Nietzsche's influence on the 20th Century: (press below)http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/#7

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Here is a  famous quote of Rene Descartes (1596 - 1660). Do you remember it?

One of our students has supplied us with his quote in the original French.

 "Je pense donc je suis."

Pascal

"The heart has reasons that the mind does not know of."

One of our students gave this belief of BlaisePascal (1623 to 1662) in the original French:  

"Le coeur a ses raisens que la raison ne connait pas." 

  Blaise Pascal