EMT's Eng1A Weblog

Aristotle: To be or not to be….

ericamarie22 — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:26:37 +0000

In this weeks reading, Aristotle acknowledges that rhetoric can be either helpful or harmful, depending on how it is used. He believes that rhetoric inherently favors moral and just arguments because “things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites.” He classifies different kinds of arguments, appeals, and tools that can form the basis for persuasive arguments. For instance, he talks about how in a court room during a trial the primary focus for the attorneys is to try and persuade the person, whether is be the judge or the jury who will be making the decisions on the case, to believe what they are saying about the person being convicted is true or not. He claims that persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated. That’s why in many cases the attorneys will demonstrate what it is they are trying to prove with witnesses or arguments that will back up what they are saying.

In my own opinion and by my own experiences I have to agree with this. Recently a girl knocked on our door and was advertising what my husband thought was a carpet cleaning service and asked us when was the last time we had our carpet cleaned and if we would be interested in getting a demonstration. She stated it was free of charge with no obligation to by the product but soling wanted to do a demonstration since they were just opening up a store nearby and wanted to get her credits for promoting the product, so of course we said yes. So she said ok that she would be right back with the guy that would be doing the demonstration, and about 20 minutes later she came back with the guy who was caring along with him a Kirby vacuum. Right then and there we new exactly what it was and knew we had just been trapped into something that was going to be hard to get out of because those Kirby people are persistent. We were also very familiar with the vacuum and what it could do because my grandmother had one and my parents bought one about 5 years ago that we always borrowed to shampoo the carpet and it works great not to mentioned it still worked, but we let him do the demonstration anyway. So anyway to make a long story short after about and hour of the guy demonstrating to us how this “magnificent” Kirby vacuum worked and after seeing first hand how it worked we were convinced it was a good buy and purchased the vacuum. Now I can’t say that it wasn’t pricey, because it was, but the bottom line was in the end the guys persuasive manner in demonstration the vacuum to us convinced us it was a good buy.

Educated Slaves

ericamarie22 — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:17:14 +0000

I have to agree with Douglas’ theory on why it was not allowed for slaves to be educated. In the following passage taken from this weeks reading it states: “Douglass is keenly aware of his story’s great irony: that the white masters who tried to prevent slaves from being educated on the grounds that it would make them unfit for slavery were absolutely correct.” Douglas insisted that education went hand in hand with freedom; therefore the only way to keep people enslaved was to prevent them from learning and acquiring knowledge. If slaves were given the same opportunities as other people to be educated and learn how to read and write along with learning of issues within society they would have come across the same issues that Douglas found when he started reading the book The Columbian Orator. In this book which had a collection of great speeches, poems, soliloquies, and occasional pieces used to teach rhetoric and public speaking, Douglas learned of a perplexing truth – that the same country who had enslaved him had also fought a revolution in the name of freedom, which in turn lead him to call attention to the hypocrisy of slavery in a nation founded on principles, as he states, of “justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence.” As Douglas becomes more and more educated he starts to realize all the bad stuff that is going on and at one point almost wishes he had still been as naive as other uneducated slaves because then he wouldn’t have had to actually experience and see what he was learning first hand. As he quotes, “I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.” In the time of slavery it was such a common thing for wealthy people to have slaves – it probably would have been a like a slap in the face for a slave to be more educated then their master.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

ericamarie22 — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 01:36:12 +0000

One of eighteenth century’s most influential liberal writers, Jean-Jaeques Rousseau, had great faith in humanity’s goodness and believed that society and government corrupted people’s innate nobility. In his novel Emile, or on Education, Rosseau makes his most famous statement: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” He believed that humans naturally care for each other through an inborn sense of compassion, but that the mechanisms of society work against their natural inclinations and makes people self-interested and uncaring. In Book 1 of his novel he states that everything a person lacks at birth is eventually given to them through education.

I think that the fact that Rousseau believed that society and government are responsible for corrupting the goodness in people could somewhat be true. A lot of what people decisions are based on come by examples of the people around them and the society they live in. For example, as a small child growing up you will learn by the examples of others around you whether it’s good or bad, that is something you don’t know for sure or even understand – but the only thing you know for sure is that is what is told to you and how everyone else around you is acting so you follow it thinking that’s how you are supposed to act too.

Simone de Beauvoir

ericamarie22 — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:50:45 +0000

Simone de Beauvoir was a feminist and one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Her along with another group of French philosophers developed the philosophy known as existentialism, which denies that human beings have an inherited “nature” that constrains there choices. She claims that moral choice is free and unforeseeable, therefore a child does not hold within him the man he will become but he will decide what he wants to be on the basis of what he has been. Basically what she claims is that as a child you enter a world that is already set up with rules and guidelines of what is right and wrong and how you are supposed to live in it. You do what is told because you know nothing different and assume that’s just the way it’s supposed to be. Then as you get into your adolescent years you start to question those things that you were taught and you rebel against that. When you reach adulthood you start making your own choices which in many cases is the opposite of what was taught to you as a child to be right or wrong.

Good vs. Evil

ericamarie22 — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:04:18 +0000

Two famous Chinese philosophers, Mencius & Hsun Tzu both had very different theories on whether the human nature of man was essentially good or evil. Mencius believed that people were born good and that both love and respect stemmed from internal feelings that form part of human beings’ nature. Mencius used a lot of analogies to try an prove his theory that by nature man is essentially good and that the events and circumstances of his surrounding environment is what caused one to because evil. On the other hand, Hsun Tzu’s theory is that mans nature is evil and that goodness is the result of conscious activity. He claims that man is born with evil desires and if he follows his nature and indulges on these desires his emotions will become involved in ciaos and stray away from the forms and rules of society and will end up as a criminal. Therefore, man must be instructed by a teacher and guided by ritual principles in order for him to follow the rules of society and achieve order.

However Kao Tzu, who was another famous philosopher, believed that human nature was neither inherently good nor inherently evil but that is was a “blank slate” that could be conditioned in both directions.

I lean more towards Kao Tzu’s theory in the sense that I believe that people aren’t necessarily born neither good or evil but that what they grow up to become comes from what they learn is right and wrong. What they are taught growing up is what shapes them and it is by no ones choice nor nature but their own whether they chose to be righteous or evil.

About Me…

ericamarie22 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:59:59 +0000

To keep it short and simple – I am currently taking courses to fulfill my G.E. requirements and then continue with courses towards getting my A.A in Business Administration.