Reflection and Application 4

In Sophie's World there seems to be more and more references to Hilde. The questions keep piling up and I can't help but feel so unimpressed with it all. It seems as we go deeper into the book, it becomes less and less sure on what it wants to be, At first it was a sort of informational fiction type of work, with the plot of Sophie receiving these strange letters being enough to attain my interest. But as the book goes on making these idiotic references to Hilde and her father being 'magical', with a talking dog and the mirror blinking, and then altogether containing whole chapters full of context making the 'main plot' seemingly unimportant. It also strikes me as funny that Hilde is somehow vital in all this as well because at first the very existence of her was more of an afterthought than a plot point. This 'story' has becomes so mixed with both historical context and deluded plot it's hard to tell what it even is anymore. I'm having a hard time getting through each chapter, and I hope that it'll soon make LOGICAL sense because if it uses any sort of 'magical' explanation for all this in a philosophy book I won't be happy.
Since we finished Inception in class today, I've been reflecting on my own dreams. I find it rather funny how they depict dreams in the film as being completely clear and (sometimes) rational, while my own dreams are often fuzzy and delusional. Also, if it's okay to get into this subject, but I doubt dreams are some kind of 'window into the subconscious' as Freud would say. I personally see dreams as nonsensical bits of information the brain feeds to us at night. That's why Inception is so idiotic to me. Although an entertaining movie, its concepts are off. I don't think we can control ourselves in dreams, sometimes it's not even US that we're controlling. Sometimes we're controlling a different person, sometimes we aren't even a person. Sometimes we're watching a moment unfold, or sometimes we're walking down a long hallway that leads nowhere, or sometimes we are on a journey on the desert that suddenly turns into the tundra without any explanation (in fact we probably don't even care). What I'm explaining is that dreams are not ever mapped out to its very last detail. I feel that they are very convoluted and in the end don't mean anything whatsoever.

Reflection and Application 3

Once again, in Sophie's World it continues to get weirder and weirder, regarding human beings as magicians, talking about time periods from long ago as if they were only yesterday. Personally, I don't like the way it's going. When I first started to read Sophie's World, I thought it would be part of the realistic fiction genre. When it started it was realistic enough, mostly just explaining philosophy in a textbook like format, but as it went along and now, half way through, it's become deluded with it's story. The plot points of Hilde and her father have yet to be explained as anything other than magical, and the strange events around Alberto seem to happen without Sophie questioning it for more than a couple pages. Sophie herself continues to disappoint me in the way that she's still stuck learning about philosophy rather than thinking of her own ideas. With so many 'magical' things happening around her, like the mirror blinking at her and the letters appearing out of nowhere, I would think that she could at least think about the her own perception of reality just a bit. In later chapters, rather than focusing on plot points that seem magical and ludicrous, I would appreciate it if we could look inside Sophie's mind. That is, if she thinks of anything other than learning.
In class, we've been talking more about fate and free will, in other words soft determinism. Mostly this is because watching The Adjustment Bureau called for another lecture. This time, I came out with thinking about fate in another way. I used to think, as said in my first post, that fate was actually comforting to me because it means that nothing is ever wasted because of it, that I believe in fate. With the viewpoint I have now, however, I think along the lines more of a skeptic in philosophy. I think now that even if fate existed, how would I even know? I think that if it did, I would still uphold my views from my first post, however I think that there is no possible way of ever knowing that fate exists. Personally, if I were to learn of fate, or of something like the bureau controlling my life, I wouldn't want to stray away from the path. I would want to do what I'm supposed to do. In The Adjustment Bureau, Norris only realized that fate existed because of a slip up in the plans, because of an accident. He wasn't ever supposed to know that fate existed, and maybe neither do we.

Reflection and Application 2

In Sophie's World I noticed that it's been more focused on the religious aspects of philosophy for a while now. It’s not that religion is a bad aspect to cover, it’s more so that it’s so much related to philosophy that I can’t help but point out and applaud that it focused a whole chapter to cover different religions. Religion came into being with philosophy as its core: to find out where we came from, who created us, and what the purpose of life is. However, Sophie herself, once again, does not seem to take part in anything she learns. I find it annoying that she continuously avoids applying philosophy in her own life. Instead she becomes obsessed with who Hilde is and how ‘strange things are happening to her’. I want to instead learn her own views on religion, on fate, on what god could be. I want her to not only learn philosophy but tell us her views, her ideas. In the book she thinks about the ideas that Alberto gives her, but tells us nothing of her own. I want that to end. I want her to either tell us of her own thoughts, or form her own.

Not only in Philosophy class, but in my Honors Literary Humanities class we’re learning about religion. Although in HLH we’re learning about the Hindu religion specifically, I can’t help but connect it to my philosophy class. When learning about the different deities and when reading the Bhagavad Gita I think about its purpose and why it/ they were created. I think about how the religion of Hinduism changed the world and the life of those who practiced it. Hinduism is a polytheistic/ henotheistic religion, centered not around one specific god, but on many who make up the spirit of Brahman. Those who are Hindu often center their ‘worship’ only on one deity. I think the concept of many deities instead of one all powerful god was created as to explain the many aspects of the universe that, at the time, may have been hard to explain. Where does wisdom come from, or how can one get wisdom? I feel as though Hinduism helps people find these answers easier. I’m not saying that their religion is the ‘easy way out’, I’m merely saying that Hinduism is an amazing religion, made of many aspects of life. I think the reason I prefer eastern religion to western is because of this vastness.