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Calculating Final Grades

Your Final Averages will have 102 pts of which 2 are an overage (basically extra-credit) and on your Final exam you will have an additional 2 point extra credit assignment. So basically your maximum score is 104/100. That means 4 points extra credit are built in all together, which can also cure a missed nightly writing or two...or a total of 8 missed questions on the MT and Final! According to the most recent BC Bulletin, I must assign grades as follows: A+ [97-100]; A [93-96]; A- [90-92]; B+ [87-89]; B [83-86]; B- [80-82]; C+ [77-79]; C [73-76]; C- [70-72]; D+ [66-69]; D [63-65]; D- [60-62]; F = below 60 PLEASE BE SURE TO CHECK THE CLASS BLOG ONE LAST TIME - ON THURSDAY - I WILL ANNOUNCE THE WINNER OF THE 2017 GINI BOOK PRIZE FOR HIGHEST OVERALL SCORE!!

From Cave to Cave - The Vision of Er, the Sibyl, and Sustainability

It may seem jarring to transition from Plato’s Republic , written sometime before 348 BCE, and Vergil’s Aeneid, written , at the very least, three hundred years later. We have to move from a waning democracy in Athens, where the threat of Macedonian power was growing unchecked, and the dominance of King Philip was becoming a foregone conclusion, to Rome, about 650 miles westward, where in 348 BCE the city was still relatively small and angling for local superiority against its central Italian neighbors. We must cross the divide between the extensive domain of Greek culture -- all the way from Sicily to the Indus river, where it had been seeded under Alexander the Great and his generals -- to the hinterlands of Europe where illiterate nations lived a mostly nomadic existence. By Virgil’s time, Greek dominion of the East  --  Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Egypt -- had passed into Roman hands. Rome’s Republican institutions were already gutted in Vergil’s youth, and that century was a

Aeneid Outline, etc.

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FOR THURSDAY: Read Aeneid Bk 12 and Ovid Metamorphoses Bk 1 Shield of Aeneas (from Mandelbaum, tr): https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5198/7099936439_2072d31b7b_b.jpg Aeneid Outline: http://latinresources.homestead.com/outline_of_the_aeneid_-__colaizzi.pdf Sustainability - Plato's anticipation (Republic Bk 2): http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2009/04/the_kindest_cut.html (if you want to understand Socrates' anxiety about meat, etc) 1. "cow and panoply 2. hecatomb Hopping from Cave to Cave: Phaedo (jail) >> Republic (Beginning and End) >> Aeneid 6 Death of Socrates: http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105 Plato Republic Schema:

Writing Day 17 - My Attempt (be sure also to read the section from the Republic, linked separately)

Plato, Republic Bk. 7 (Socrates speaks to Glaucon) ( Question: Do you find the allegory here troubling or inspirational? Why? Does it apply to your own life here and now?) The opening scene is one which I have to say I find pretty depressing: prisoners with chained necks, and the rest, in lifelong bondage. I think the most depressing part of this scene is the fact that somewhere on the planet, right now, people are still more or less being held in these or similar circumstances, and about two and a half millennia have elapsed since Plato first dreamed up this nightmare. The second component of the scene which frightens and appalls me is the idea that the real world can be reduced to a “puppet show” -- not only because this is such a partial truth from the point of view of the oppressed viewers, but also because it is never fair (think of Kant’s Categorical Imperative) to think of the real world, and real people, as a “show” for anyone else’s benefit or entertainment. After this

Reading for Wednesday Night

Plato - The Spindle of Necessity and the Choice of Souls SOCRATES Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in fr

Day 17 addendum

cave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_(dialogue) divided line- https://osopher.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/plato-divided-line.gif?w=504&h=360 tripartite soul http://www.stjohns-chs.org/general_studies/philosophy/images/plato.gif