Philosophy

[Millane]

i did a search and all i could come up with was some thread discussing political philosophy so heres a REAL philosophy thread for us all to enjoy. It doesnt really matter what you want to talk about, whether it be a specific philosopher or just some concepts you dont understand or even those big questions you ponder over when you cant sleep...
well ill start off, i pretty much just love philosophy, it is the only subject at school that i really enjoy, this year were studying 14 authors (or rather 14 different writings of these authors)
they are Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Sartre, King, Murdoch, Plato (yes again its not a typo), Descartes, Turing, Armstrong, Plato, Popper and Kuhn... thats right that bastard Plato pops up three times throughout the yeafr
anyway we have done the first 7 and i must say, although i didnt agree with most of them, i really enjoyed studying them... in particular Epicurus' "Letter to Menoeceus" i found to be the best of the first three, and of the next four 'modern' philosophers i enjoyed Nietzsche and Murdoch the most then Sartre and then Martin Luther King, who although expressed his views well, didnt grab me like the others....
Anyway ive been studying Iris Murdoch tonight so she is the freshest on my mind, she is a neo-Platonist in many ways (she believes in a transcendantal reality and for her and Plato this is the world of the Forms) one of the things i really liked about her was her unique views, it is something very remarkable for a modern philosopher to believe in the world of the Forms and the form of the Good not as metaphors or as concepts but in the literal way Plato meant them. She believes that humans are naturally selfish and that if we can realise the form of Beauty we suddenly become selfless and everything else becomes less important compared to the thing of beauty. She believes Beauty can be seen in Art and Nature, this means that HB could be listening to a piece of classical music and become selfless or that i could be listening to a Manson song to the same end or Falagar could be reading a great piece of writing in Game or any number of things... I guess why i really liked her views was because she has intergrated a 2000+ year old Philosophers views with her own 20th century life, also theres nothing better than sitting down to a good piece of Art and becoming 'selfless'
anyway please talk away