Tuesday, May 3, 2011

PhilosoFantastic!

I think the area in which this class helped me the most is differentiating between true philosophical concepts and mere opinions. Sometimes we propose something when talking about a philosophical theory and don’t realize that we may just be speaking about a subjective experience that has little to do with the particular concept we are talking about. There have been many times, including the reading of Deleuze and Guattari, when I have found myself totally disagreeing with whatever author we happen to be reading until I have a strong grasp of their whole theory. Usually when this occurs I find myself agreeing much more than not with the theories, and found what philosophers proposes to be much closer to what I believe than I originally thought. I think there are many times when our conversations took a strong tangent because an idea was brought up that, while interesting, didn’t really apply to the theory we were discussing. I think there are also times when we have long disagreements that turn out to be just differences of word use and vocabulary. It almost feels like the more philosophy I do the more complicated it gets and the harder it is to find the words to convey my actual thoughts. While I might find it easier to differentiate between opinions and concepts, I have found myself being more plagued by differences of vocabulary and such. I have had extensive conversations in which myself and my interlocutor have thought we were disagreeing, but by the end of it discover that we actually agree. Too often do we find an issue with a small point or phrase and then ignore the rest of what someone is trying to say because we can’t get past that point. I found this when reading D&G however once I had finished the book and looked back at certain problems I had I found them to be elementary. Once I was able to grasp the greater mission of their text I was able to understand the smaller points they made from their own perspective.

I want to talk about our senior projects as well. I really enjoyed everyone’s papers (even those I thought I wouldn’t) and I loved the variety of topics we covered. We all had complex yet well thought out ideas; I just wish we had had more time to discuss them! I also wish we could’ve had more class discussions about our papers while we were writing them. It took us a lot of effort to convey what we really wanted to say to each other, but by the banquet we were spot on. Good job guys!

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