Philosophy for Dinner

P. I am glad to hear you say it. My teacher Socrates suffered for insisting on serious conversation, but time has vindicated his view that the unexamined life is not worth living.

I. That is why I want to ask you this: What is worth knowing? As great thinkers, surely you must have the answer. Help me with my question.

F. We could all do worse than go back to the Sybil's injunction to know thyself--an injunction famously inscribed on the temple at Delphi. Now. What is the self? I believe it is human psychology--nothing if not vexed. It has a component of self-destruction or inward preoccupation on one hand, and an aggressive/constructive component on the other (Freud 25).

I. If you ask me, the inward and outward components of that pursuit cannot be reconciled.

F. Then I should put it a different way. Aggression, which is an aspect of instinct for self-preservation, is a result of the feeling produced because of the anxiety connected with impulse toward self-destruction. But there is also a human impulse for life--extension and self-preservation that is enacted by means of love, sexuality, reproduction, or by means of the libido (and the self-interested ego) projected both into the world in general and onto the love/sex/erotic object in particular. "Neurosis," I have explained, "was regarded as the outcome of a str

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and distinct. We know we can't trust our senses, even though it is more difficult for the mind to grasp an idea of its own essence than to grasp an idea of extended (sensory) reality. I use the example of a lump of wax. It changes shape, form, and texture because of the application of heat. The immediate perceptions of phenomenal reality may change, but the understanding of that reality will in a core sense remain constant, and in another sense may be more perfectly or complexly understood. Imagination alone could not "reveal" the nature of the wax "but is perceived by the mind alone" (470). In other words, imagination, related to mind activity though it is, is not the same as having a clear idea of what is being thought about. The understanding proceeds from an intuition, or "mental scrutiny" (470). And that goes to the issue of method as a mechanism of knowing. H. Nonsense. If the scale of doubt you envison were "ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as plainly it is not) [it] would be entirely incurable; and no reasoning could ever bring us to a state of assurance and conviction on any subject" (Hume 723). I. You're saying what we cannot know. What is worth knowing? Can you be positive? H. Excuse me, I must st
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Approximate Word count = 1496
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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