Just a quick one...

The foray in academia is weird. At ever turn and connection of idea, we are threated by other seemingly more interesting ideas, fallacies and naysayers. Now the most important thing when attempting to hash out the questions that appeal to us, as I see it, is to always remeber the origional question asked. I wonder how much more interested and interesting we would be as a people if we stopped jumping from notion to notion and decided that we would rather take to its omega point any idea that we chose to actaully begrudge. Sort of a put up or shut up of ideas.

For the lifestyle that we lead does not allow for this type of endeavour. I would imagine that very few people perform the mental equivalent of stopping and smelling the roses, unless their fuel and inspriation were buds of beer and stems of salted pretzel sticks. I want to give a new notion of philosophy, one that I hope would appeal to any person who looks beneath the surface, and that is the idea of philosophy as a complete thought.

Now a complete thought does not take the form of "All x are y" or "If y then z", yet that seems to be the social minimum for a thought. Instead, like a good philosophical argument, we should endeavour to give, in any of our thoughts, the following: our assumptions (those things that we are holding as true, or at least indubitable for our purposes), our logical framework (these are the rules by which we manipulate our assumptions to create more assumtions, in a way tha would hold up to other points of view; thus it does not make sense to think "If I take a day off, then my manager will think less of me," only make moves with your assumtions which create more conclusions that sit on the same solid ground as your original assumptions), and then our conclusion(s) which will further follow from the prior two items, and will stand to all atacks except for "it's my opinion," or "just because."

While this is not a strict formula for a philosophical argument, what I hope it does is force you, my good readers, to actually think about the words coming out of your mouths and the ideas that run through your minds. It is in the ambiguity of words and ideas that our thought can become like a computer virus, spreading evil as a partciular dogma gathers force based not on rational opinion, but on emotional weight alone. Just think the next time you call someone worthless, or say you hate Dubya, or think that someone else is ruining their lives, really ponder the what and why and how of the idea, make sure it stands up to argument.

And when you can say that you have only ideas that stand up to all the views and all of the arguments that you can fathom, then you can fully appreciate what has been running around my head all day, a quote by my man Frederick Douglass, freed slave and one of the coolest dudes to rock the early United States: "The man who right is the majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe. If he does not represent the present state, he represents the future state. If he does not represent what we are, he represents what we ought to be." Enjoy.