English is my favorite subject. I especially enjoy creative writing because of being able to create my own stories. What I love the most about it is having some meaning in each story and the audience learning about it as they read. This I see relates to art and humanities altogether--how the viewers are moved by what is before them whether is is a piece of art, reading philosophy or literature, or seeing a play. Creative writing is my way of contributing art to the world. I believe it is very useful because it serves joy to other people reading and that helps make the world more interesting. The stories can be about anything. Some are able mystical lands or some are even about a different time period. Whichever the story may be about, it always has a message and it's great to see people admire a story that they enjoy.
HannahTropicana's Blog!
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Creative Writing
English is my favorite subject. I especially enjoy creative writing because of being able to create my own stories. What I love the most about it is having some meaning in each story and the audience learning about it as they read. This I see relates to art and humanities altogether--how the viewers are moved by what is before them whether is is a piece of art, reading philosophy or literature, or seeing a play. Creative writing is my way of contributing art to the world. I believe it is very useful because it serves joy to other people reading and that helps make the world more interesting. The stories can be about anything. Some are able mystical lands or some are even about a different time period. Whichever the story may be about, it always has a message and it's great to see people admire a story that they enjoy.
Loreto, Mexico
Last year, I got to go with my family to Loreto, Mexico and it was a very fun trip. We got see and experience new things and enjoy the nice weather. When we were there one of the things I loved was the art. It was art I have never really seen before. When we were walking around the shops, we went into a little pottery store and I saw all sorts of painted pottery and it was all so beautiful. There was plates, cups, figures of animals, and pieces to hang on the wall. There was so much and we spent a lot of time looking through it all. There was even a man that was making art out of beads in the store. He made lizards, snakes, and turtles to hang on walls or set on tables. Those were very pretty as well.
I thought this related to humanities a lot because I love seeing the different art all around the world. It shows the history and culture and I believe each piece of art has a meaning to it.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-Abraham Lincoln, 1863
This is one of the most famous speeches in American history. It is not only dedicated to the soldiers who died on that Gettysburg battlefield, but it was dedicated to the soldiers still living--to work towards freedom for their nation because it is what was right. Abraham Lincoln's speech gave the union hope. It gave people the strength to keep going to fight for their rights that they deserve.
I believe this has a lot to do with humanities because speeches I believe are considered a work of art. It is even more amazing to have a speech like that encourage an entire nation to keep going. We've seen people look at paintings in a museum and be moved by that. It's amazing to think back then people reading or even being there to hear this speech from the president and to be moved by a well written speech. It also was great because it represented them. What I like about humanities is how the work of art, literature, or anything that relates to the audience.
Claude Monet's "La Grenouilliere"
On Page 38 in Investigating Modern Art I've always loved this painting. While this book focuses on modern art and this is a realistic painting, I enjoy it because of the historical look to it. History has always been my favorite subject so I really like seeing the different time period in this painting. I think all art is really pretty but, this realistic painting has to be one of my favorites because it looks like it takes place during the summer, my favorite season, and also it just looks happy. It seems like a joyful afternoon on the lake and I always spend my summers swimming as well. This is a painting I would love to hang in my house because of the time period and the positiveness in it.
New York Times Philosophy Article
Critic's Notebook; I Think, Therefore I Am, but There's So Little Time
By Richard Bernstein
Published: July 2, 1998
It may be true, as it is often said, that people don't read anymore. Certainly it is true that, outside of a few academic departments, very few of us are reading the classics of philosophy, for example, Immanuel Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'' or Rene Descartes's ''Discourse on Method'' or Jean-Paul Sartre's ''Being and Nothingness.'' Given that the edifices of thought built by the likes of Kant and Descartes are among the great achievements of the human mind, that is a shame.
What to do? Shortcuts to philosophical understanding have existed for decades in the form of such books as Bertrand Russell's ''History of Western Philosophy'' (which is sometimes so dense that only another philosopher could understand it) or the works of Will and Ariel Durant. These books satisfy a need, even though they represent a kind of secondhand knowledge. We feel that to be educated persons we ought to know at least the main lines of thought of the seminal minds from Socrates to Wittgenstein. But their works are long and difficult, and who has the time?
Now, into our world of short-lived thirsts for knowledge comes a series of attractive little paperbacks by Paul Strathern with titles that perfectly capture the need. Mr. Strathern, an British writer who is not, it would seem from the dust-jacket description, a professional philosopher, has written a series of books called ''Plato in 90 Minutes,'' ''Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes,'' ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' and so forth, continuing with Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre and others. The books have been published by Ivan R. Dee in Chicago, which advertises a list of others for the near future.
I've read a few of Mr. Strathern's volumes, and, I find them hard to stop reading, in the way that potato chips are hard to stop eating. They are seductive; they satisfy a certain appetite; they can be consumed on the run; but they are so short of a full meal that one wonders about their ultimate values. In a world where many a scholar has spent decades studying every one of Plato's dialogues, the idea of Plato in a 90-minute, bite-size morsel seems a sacrilege, the intellectual equivalent of a flat stomach from just five minutes of easy exercise a day.
But no, that is going too far. Mr. Strathern's books are well-written, clear and informed; they have a breezy wit about them. Each of these slender volumes combines a quick, lively biography of a particular thinker, a summary of that person's main ideas and, perhaps most useful of all, a bit of historical contextualization, a few lines on where each person fits into the grand scheme of Western thought.
His ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' for example, contains a very concise description of the radical skepticism of David Hume (whose own 90 minutes are on the list of future books), which Kant was trying to surmount in his ''Critique of Pure Reason.'' Mr. Strathern's first lines on Descartes tell the reader that at the end of the 16th century, ''philosophy had stopped. It was Descartes who started it up again.'' What Mr. Strathern means is that philosophy in the Middle Ages had become scholasticism, which supported church dogma and declared new ideas to be heretical. Descartes put the emphasis on ''reason rather than dogma'' and redirected philosophical attention to ''the analysis of human consciousness.''
Mr. Strathern's volume on Sartre begins, briefly, with Hume and continues, only slightly less briefly, with the creation of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl before going on to a gently mocking description of Sartre's existentialism. (Mr. Strathern finds Sartre a brilliant thinker, but also a pretentious windbag, which is reason enough to like his series.) Sartre, for example, spent 1933 in Germany studying the ''phenomena'' of existence. That was the year Adolf Hitler came to power, but Sartre was too busy pondering existence to take much notice of reality, a condition that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
It is easy to be dismissive of Mr. Strathern's efforts and, indeed, anybody who has more than a half-forgotten undergraduate education in the main currents of Western thought might well find his books elementary.
Others less informed may find the summaries of concepts so compressed as to be confusing. There are other questions to ask about his effort, philosophical questions as it were. Is it better to have a smattering of philosophical information than none at all? The old proverb, after all, reminds us of the dangers of a little bit of knowledge, the main danger being that we will forget how ignorant we actually are and form half-baked opinions.
Another question has to do with the point of reading philosophy in the first place. Philosophy is different from biography or polemics. One reads Kant or Descartes not merely for their ideas but for the play of great minds engaged in deep thought on torturously vexing questions. In this sense, several of the most satisfying moments in Mr. Strathern's 90 moments per volume come in reading the brief excerpts that he has chosen from the philosophers themselves.
''Since I desired to devote myself wholly to the search for truth, I thought it necessary . . . to reject as if utterly false anything in which I could discover the least grounds for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left with anything at all which was absolutely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was really as they led us to believe it was.''
In such fashion does Rene Descartes embark on his quest for the one indubitable truth on which his system was founded: I think, therefore I am. Or, here are a few immortal lines from Kant:
''Time has no objective reality; it is not an accident, not a substance, and not a relation: it is a purely subjective condition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind which coordinates all our sensibilities by a certain law, and is a pure intuition. We coordinate substances and accidents alike, according to simultaneity and succession, only through the concept of time.''
This is good stuff. In the best of circumstances, it might even lead one to read more of the original works. On the other hand, not very many of us are going to spend the next few weeks poring over the 800-plus pages of ''The Critique of Pure Reason.'' I have Mr. Strathern to thank for the snippet of Kant, this jot of erudition, that he has added to my meager store as well as for his reminder of how little I know. Mr. Strathern's books are good enough for them to provide genuine education, even if thin education, and I am prepared in this case to believe that a thin education is better than no education at all.
This article was very interesting to me because it seemed very true. While people like philosophy and want to learn more about it, it is hard to really take it all in because of how long all the philosopher's works are. We live in a fast paced world and reading any of the philosophers works are interesting, but are hard to read in a short amount of time. I still believe though that people should read more philosophy because it is a important part of our history and it is neat to see what people's views are on what life is. I think that those short novels on philosophy would be nice to read because although it wouldn't give the full view on what certain philosophers thought, it still gives the idea that the audience would like to read about. I think that as long as I can learn about other philosophers views, books like that would be cool to read.
What to do? Shortcuts to philosophical understanding have existed for decades in the form of such books as Bertrand Russell's ''History of Western Philosophy'' (which is sometimes so dense that only another philosopher could understand it) or the works of Will and Ariel Durant. These books satisfy a need, even though they represent a kind of secondhand knowledge. We feel that to be educated persons we ought to know at least the main lines of thought of the seminal minds from Socrates to Wittgenstein. But their works are long and difficult, and who has the time?
Now, into our world of short-lived thirsts for knowledge comes a series of attractive little paperbacks by Paul Strathern with titles that perfectly capture the need. Mr. Strathern, an British writer who is not, it would seem from the dust-jacket description, a professional philosopher, has written a series of books called ''Plato in 90 Minutes,'' ''Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes,'' ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' and so forth, continuing with Descartes, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre and others. The books have been published by Ivan R. Dee in Chicago, which advertises a list of others for the near future.
I've read a few of Mr. Strathern's volumes, and, I find them hard to stop reading, in the way that potato chips are hard to stop eating. They are seductive; they satisfy a certain appetite; they can be consumed on the run; but they are so short of a full meal that one wonders about their ultimate values. In a world where many a scholar has spent decades studying every one of Plato's dialogues, the idea of Plato in a 90-minute, bite-size morsel seems a sacrilege, the intellectual equivalent of a flat stomach from just five minutes of easy exercise a day.
But no, that is going too far. Mr. Strathern's books are well-written, clear and informed; they have a breezy wit about them. Each of these slender volumes combines a quick, lively biography of a particular thinker, a summary of that person's main ideas and, perhaps most useful of all, a bit of historical contextualization, a few lines on where each person fits into the grand scheme of Western thought.
His ''Kant in 90 Minutes,'' for example, contains a very concise description of the radical skepticism of David Hume (whose own 90 minutes are on the list of future books), which Kant was trying to surmount in his ''Critique of Pure Reason.'' Mr. Strathern's first lines on Descartes tell the reader that at the end of the 16th century, ''philosophy had stopped. It was Descartes who started it up again.'' What Mr. Strathern means is that philosophy in the Middle Ages had become scholasticism, which supported church dogma and declared new ideas to be heretical. Descartes put the emphasis on ''reason rather than dogma'' and redirected philosophical attention to ''the analysis of human consciousness.''
Mr. Strathern's volume on Sartre begins, briefly, with Hume and continues, only slightly less briefly, with the creation of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl before going on to a gently mocking description of Sartre's existentialism. (Mr. Strathern finds Sartre a brilliant thinker, but also a pretentious windbag, which is reason enough to like his series.) Sartre, for example, spent 1933 in Germany studying the ''phenomena'' of existence. That was the year Adolf Hitler came to power, but Sartre was too busy pondering existence to take much notice of reality, a condition that stayed with him for the rest of his life.
It is easy to be dismissive of Mr. Strathern's efforts and, indeed, anybody who has more than a half-forgotten undergraduate education in the main currents of Western thought might well find his books elementary.
Others less informed may find the summaries of concepts so compressed as to be confusing. There are other questions to ask about his effort, philosophical questions as it were. Is it better to have a smattering of philosophical information than none at all? The old proverb, after all, reminds us of the dangers of a little bit of knowledge, the main danger being that we will forget how ignorant we actually are and form half-baked opinions.
Another question has to do with the point of reading philosophy in the first place. Philosophy is different from biography or polemics. One reads Kant or Descartes not merely for their ideas but for the play of great minds engaged in deep thought on torturously vexing questions. In this sense, several of the most satisfying moments in Mr. Strathern's 90 moments per volume come in reading the brief excerpts that he has chosen from the philosophers themselves.
''Since I desired to devote myself wholly to the search for truth, I thought it necessary . . . to reject as if utterly false anything in which I could discover the least grounds for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left with anything at all which was absolutely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I decided to suppose that nothing was really as they led us to believe it was.''
In such fashion does Rene Descartes embark on his quest for the one indubitable truth on which his system was founded: I think, therefore I am. Or, here are a few immortal lines from Kant:
''Time has no objective reality; it is not an accident, not a substance, and not a relation: it is a purely subjective condition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind which coordinates all our sensibilities by a certain law, and is a pure intuition. We coordinate substances and accidents alike, according to simultaneity and succession, only through the concept of time.''
This is good stuff. In the best of circumstances, it might even lead one to read more of the original works. On the other hand, not very many of us are going to spend the next few weeks poring over the 800-plus pages of ''The Critique of Pure Reason.'' I have Mr. Strathern to thank for the snippet of Kant, this jot of erudition, that he has added to my meager store as well as for his reminder of how little I know. Mr. Strathern's books are good enough for them to provide genuine education, even if thin education, and I am prepared in this case to believe that a thin education is better than no education at all.
This article was very interesting to me because it seemed very true. While people like philosophy and want to learn more about it, it is hard to really take it all in because of how long all the philosopher's works are. We live in a fast paced world and reading any of the philosophers works are interesting, but are hard to read in a short amount of time. I still believe though that people should read more philosophy because it is a important part of our history and it is neat to see what people's views are on what life is. I think that those short novels on philosophy would be nice to read because although it wouldn't give the full view on what certain philosophers thought, it still gives the idea that the audience would like to read about. I think that as long as I can learn about other philosophers views, books like that would be cool to read.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Fashion
I'v always loved clothes, hair, makeup, and etc. Taking this humanities class though has made me realize how much fashion does relate to this subject. We just went over the art section where we talked about modern art and watched a documentary on Pablo Picasso. What I really noticed in both the assignments is the beautiful creativity in Picasso's and many other artist's work. It could be realistic or it could be completely dream like. I believe fashion is just like that--like an art. I've seen crazy outfits in some fashion magazines that you could never wear in public without being stared at, but the point of those outfits are to show the creativity of the designer themselves. Then of course there are more realistic outfits that people look at and just like buying a painting and hanging it up on a wall in their home, they buy the clothing and wear it because they like it. Even fashion can be a part of photography which is an art as well.
Just like art serves a purpose to people in the world because it keeps everything creative, fashion does that as well which is why people greatly enjoy it.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
New York Times Article
The Letter
To the Editor:
While Frank Bruni is certainly right that college is too expensive and that we need more people to study science, math and engineering, I disagree with him about the lack of value of a humanities degree. Perhaps as a history professor at a liberal arts college, I am being defensive. But while a specific degree in communications or accounting may land you a well-paying job sooner, a liberal arts degree better equips students for the ever-changing job market they face.
Many of the jobs today are in fields that hadn’t been invented 10 years ago. Most workers today will change not just jobs but careers several times in their lives. What does one need to succeed, even flourish, in such a market? The ability to think creatively, read critically, construct effective arguments using persuasive evidence, write clearly, remain flexible and look at issues with an open mind. These are skills taught best in broad liberal arts settings — even in majors like philosophy or zoology.
One can still go on from a liberal arts base to become a teacher, a programmer or any other specialized professional, and probably be more effective thanks to those skills. And a liberal arts degree equips students with skills needed to be active world citizens, something important even for baristas.
So yes, let’s find ways to help more students gain access to higher education. But let’s not confuse first jobs with satisfying careers, or dumb down nursing, accounting or other fields by assuming that training, rather than education, is the best way to go.
CHERYL GREENBERG
Hartford, May 1, 2012
Hartford, May 1, 2012
I found this article to be very interesting in the New York Times. The title of it is called "Studying the Humanities" and the author, Greenberg, thought it was very important that humanities and other arts remain on college campuses because they are just as needed as other degrees. I thought that was really cool because it reminded me of the article we read the first week of class about a writer that wondered about that as well. It is neat to see how some people have different opinions about humanities being still as important to the world as it once was.
From reading this article, I agree with Greenberg. It seems as though a humanities or any other degree like that will help any graduate look for a job and be well prepared for it too just like any other degree because the job market is always changing. Like the writer said, it will also help them adjust to the changing market because you never know if you will need to change jobs once or several times in your lifetime. So, after reading this article, I believe that humanities degrees are still very important in today's world.
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