From the Q&A, Part 2

The second question I had posted to myself within the Q&A offered this week is actually somewhat correlated to the concept of the other post on the subject. In having considered what style I thought was more significant, I began wondering exactly what it was that I thought to be the best form of transportation within the conveyance of philosophy. Taking the extra time to think about this I have come upon very little success, for there are just realistically so many possibilities.

However, there is one genre that I have always fallen back on with respect to shear appreciation of some concepts that I have witnessed within the genre itself, and that is animation. Now I must say quickly that when I mention animation, I am not talking about "anime" for I find that this generally has a different goal in mind, and thus is considered a different genre. But consider the movie that came out this past year titled "The Illusionist" (I know, you probably haven't seen it, but you should try it some time), it is a film that achieves a monumental derivation of of thought, emotion, and sense of how to live life; which when it comes down to it is like a definition of philosophy. More importantly though, this concept coordinates with two genre's that would seem at first, to be incapable of transferring this philosophy: Art and Sound, without Word or Language. It is this fact that I think sways my decision in the end to say that Animation currently takes he cake as the true conveyance tool of philosophy.

The Literary - Philosophy Continuum

One of the discussion topics that was brought up in class yesterday was whether or not Literary and Philosophical styles of writing were their own respective categories, or rather that they belong on a continuum of technique. Having taken a little time to contemplate this, I have been wondering about both sides quite a bit.

On the front of keeping them separated, I think that it would be more simple for the hope of trying to organize the situation at large. I say this because with the advent of being able to categorize any piece of work by simply declaring that it is either a piece of pure philosophy or an unspecified example of literature, we would be able to get through a lot of examples very quickly for not many works would fall into the pure philosophy category. The only difficulty this process of organization presents is the potential complication of setting the dividing line of what designates the pure philosophy form.

However, the potential to fix that problem is the second option that we had contemplated in our discussion, which would be to organize all of it onto a continuum. This seems at face value to make the most sense, for continuum's are very favorable of organization like this, where there is not necessarily an issue anymore of what the middle ground anymore. The real issue with this concept though is that there would be some serious difficulty in attempting to actually construct this continuum, and it would be very non-descript in its conclusions beyond simply giving an answer to the problem.

Thus, it appears that neither option is the wiser without further adaptation and quite a bit of effort to give elaborate examples; that is unless the goal was to achieve some simple argumentative conclusions. So I ask you oh fruitful blogging community, what do you think? can the continuum / non-continuum argument offer itself as a useful tool to us in this class? and which would you prefer?

From the Q&A, Part 1

On the Q&A for this week I found myself asking my two questions a slight bit more introspectively than I usually do, and having taken some time to consider the things that I asked, here is the first of my thoughts. The first question I had asked of myself was whether I found myself leaning towards literary style or pure philosophical style in my desired interpretations of knowledge and meaning. Do I prefer the literary illusion? or is raw knowledge, non-confounded, straight to conclusions better?

What I have decided is that it is certainly the literary talent that holds my attention the best when I am attempting to accept a new piece of information, but at the same time scares me a slight bit more. The reason I am intimidated by this style is that I believe the possibility of a swayed decision is much more likely, and that the bias' that may be created in a literary work are much more difficult to ignore. However, this still does not ignore the fact that I simply learn better and with much more ease if I can follow a story that derives meaning rather than just reading through the rule book.