Starting Anew

Here we are again. I will blog tonight. I should be reading, but instead..this.

A new class starts today and I hedged on starting, debated about taking a break and waiting until after the Hawaii trip. I think it's going to work out OK, I'm betting I'll get my big paper done the week before I go to Hawaii. But now that I've made a decision, I'm having doubts. This is a philosophy class and I know VERY LITTLE about philosophy. In fact, I just forced myself to read 18 pages (chapter 1) of the first of 8 books (8 BOOKS???) This stuff is UGH! Dreadful! I'm highlighting text as I read and then jotting notes on words (and phrases) I have to look up because if the author uses them once, I'm going to see it again. The words I looked up today are:

epistemology
Cartesian
veritistic epistemology
social vertitistic epistemology
invidious
purveyor
putative
ontological

So that's 8 things I'm trying to learn tonight. The reading tonight really didn't mean much to me. It was about...what....what is truth? Is truth something more than what we believe to be true? Just because everyone believes something is true this does not make it true. I think that was the gist of what I read...but I'm really not sure what I read. Studying philosphy is sort of mind-bending. With computers, things are zero and one, black and white. The beauty of a system like that is that when you arrange the zeros and ones in the right "patterns" (I'm using that term loosely), things work miraculously well (or not..in some sad cases). Philosophy is like disassembling all the structure of what you think. Or, maybe not disassembling, but looking at each step of a process. I should be good at this. So why is it so hard for me???