When I decided to take this class, it was a bit of random choice.

As I said on the first

day of class, I am a psych major and it was only after hearing a passing comment
that my teacher made in my abnormal psych class that I considered taking this
class. I never would have considered it beforehand, thinking that it wouldnt be
something that would interest me. But I think this class was my favorite out of all of
them. I never realized how much philosophy I do in my own life and learning about
the different philosophers made me realize that, what I had considered purely
psychology was so much deeper than I had originally thought.
Picking one philosopher out of the many we learned about was hard for me. I
enjoyed learning about all of them and seeing history through a different lens than
before. However, I did have much more of an interest in the medieval philosophers
than modern ones. I felt like these guys accomplished a lot while working with only
the simplest forms of technology of their time. They formed the basis of knowledge
that we take for granted today. Id heard about Plato and Aristotle before this class
but if you had asked me what I knew about them, I wouldnt have been able to tell
you. I only knew their names from someone mentioning them in passing, which is
how I think most philosophers are known to the greater public. You have to admire
someone who would stand up against the status quo, questioning the idea of
existence and knowledge even though they could have been persecuted for their
beliefs.
I really enjoyed learning about Socrates and Plato in particular. Its hard to separate
the two for me since everything we know about Socrates is through Platos writing. I
think I would have gotten along with Socrates because I think he had an ingenious
method of pissing people off by making them see their own fallacies and steering
them to the truth. I admire this method and wish I could have had the chance to
converse with him. For Plate in particular, I was amazed by his idea of forms. At
first, I thought that his idea of forms was a rudimentary attempt at describing
consciousness but after learning more about him, I can see it was much more than
that. Its amazing because in our day and age, we dont question something as
simple as the change from a seed to a tree because we now have the technology
and science to explain it. But they didnt. Philosophers like Plato, Xenophanes,
Parmenides and Aristotle only had crude ideas of what we now call science and a
facsimile of the truth.
In terms of modern philosophers, I really enjoyed learning about Hume and Kant in
particular. Descartes second mediation, Cogito ergo sumI think, therefore I am
was absolutely brilliant but once he tried to prove god that exists and his idea of
dualism, I lost interest. I discovered that a lot of my own personal philosophies were
a little more humian in nature, that impressions are more powerful than ideas. For
example, Ive always thought that words were just amalgamations of sounds that
weve attached meaning to and put together to form full and complete thoughts. I
also think that he wasnt wrong when it came to the idea of fearing nihilism. But
still, I felt like Hume was missing something. Kant gave me that feeling of
completion more than anyone before him had. It wasnt the day we talked about
Kafka, that I started getting really depressed about the reality of our world. It was
an eye opener and I feel more accomplished for becoming aware of it, rather than
living in ignorance.
In general, this class made my head hurt from thinking so hard but I enjoyed every
second of it. I think I am going to take more classes in the future and continue to
think about philosophy.