December Update

December Update from Tina.m4a.zip

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An audio update from Tina! I have long feared to record myself. Now, as part of my New Year Resolution to expand my comfort zone, this update predominantly takes in the form of public audio!

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What I’ve done:

1. Finished reading and discussing The Nature of Things by Lucretius

2. Finished The Philosophy Book

3. Highlighted potential topics of philosophy and organized them by time period

4. Updated once and for all the Philosophy Quotes page.

5. Finalized and tested The Survey

6. Connected with my friend in Kenya, asking him to help me survey pandemic-related challenges faced by him and people he loves.

I have continued to:

1. Listen to Letters by Seneca the Younger on Audible

2. Read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

I will (in January):

1. Craft a short MR announcement script and prepare a simple visual demonstration of my project.

2. Organize responses I will receive from the survey to various challenges. Then, I attach related philosophies that can be of service to people to better combat those challenges.

3. Finish The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

4. Start reading a new philosophy book

Topics I will likely explore:

Ancient Philosophy (700 BCE-250CE)

• The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao (Laozi)

• Happy is he who has overcome his ego (Siddhartha Gautama)

• Man is the measure of all things (Protagoras)

• When one throws to me a peach, I return to him a plum (Mozi)

• Nothing exists except atoms and empty space (Democritus and Leucippus)

• Death is nothing to us (Epicurus)

• He has the most who is most content with the least (Diogenes of Sinope)

• The goal of life is living in agreement with nature (Zeno of Citium)

The Medieval World (250-1500)

• Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi)

• To know nothing is the happiest life (Desiderius Erasmus)

Renaissance and the Age of Reason (1500-1750)

• Fame and Tranquility can never be bedfellows (Michel de Montaigne, on solitude)

• Imagination decides everything (Blaise Pascal)

• No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience (John Locke)

The Age of Revolution (1750-1900)

• Society is indeed a contract (Edmund Burke)

• The greatest happiness for the greatest number (Jeremy Bentham)

• What sort of philosophy one chooses depends on what sort of person one is (Johann Gottlieb Fichte)

• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world (Arthur Schopenhauer)

• Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign (John Stuart Mill)

• Act as if what you do makes a difference (William James)

• Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom (Soren Kirkegaard)

  • The Concept of Anxiety

The Modern World (1900-1950)

• Man is something to be surpassed (Friedrich Nietzche)

  • How the “Real World” at least Became a Myth

  • Thus Spake Zarathustra

• Men with self-confidence come and see and conquer (Ahad Ha’am)

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana)

• It is only suffering that makes us persons (Miguel de Unamuno)

  • The Tragic Sense of Life (1913)

• Believe in life (William du Bois)

• Only as an individual can man become a philosopher (Karl Jaspers)

• Life is a series of collisions with the future (Jose Ortega y Gasset)

  • The Revolt of the Masses

• To philosophize, first one must confess (Hajime Tanabe)

• Existence precedes essence (Jean-Paul Sartre)

• The banality of evil (Hannah Arendt)

• Think like a mountain (Arne Naess)

  • The Sand County Almanac

• Life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning (Albert Camus)

Contemporary Philosophy (1950-Present)

• Society is dependent upon a criticism of its own traditions (Jurgen Habermas)

• Philosophy is not only a written enterprise (Henry Odera Oruka)

  • Sage Philosophy (1994)

• In suffering, the animals are our equals (Peter Singer)

  • Animal Liberation (1975)