Yesterday was an odd end to my break. I skipped church to go with SaraJean to the airport to pick up Christopher. SaraJean had recently seen some Civil War (or “War Between the States,” or “War of Northern Aggression”) battlefields on her trip up from South Carolina, and she really wanted to see Gettysburg some time. So when we picked up Christopher, knowing that Gettysburg is only about one hour and thirty minutes away from BWI, we decided to take an impromptu road trip there. Christopher, much more so than SaraJean, is a Civil War (WBtS/WoNA) fanatic! We had a good time, and there’s lots of neat stuff to see. It was odd, though. In these open fields, presumably very similar to their appearance over a century ago, there are enormous obelisks and statues and monuments dispersed. Some of them are humbler:
But some of them are a little more gaudy and immense:
But some of them are a little more gaudy and immense:The overall landscape was surreal; it should’ve looked like the farmland near my hometown, but instead it looked like the ruins of an ancient city that had been either cleaned up or displaced from their original environment.
It was a fun trip. Now it’s back to classes. I’m excited about my language tutorial in an hour. We’re studying Thomas Aquinas’s theories of language. The first reading selection that Mr. Tomarchio chose was one of his lectures on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. He talks about how spoken sounds are indirectly representative of things; the mediator between the sounds and the things is a particular “affection of the soul” (Aristotle’s term) or “conception of understanding” (Aquinas’s). So the conception of understanding is a likeness of the thing, but the significant spoken sound is not a likeness at all but only something associated by human convention. The spoken sound is not the reality of the thing or the natural ability of the perceiving soul to receive its form. Or something. All this is in relation to how we use significant spoken sounds to convey abstract ideas, as opposed to the simple sensory affections that can be represented by sounds only pertaining to the present sensory information—for example, a sick person groaning in pain is not communicating any conception of understanding but only knowledge of his senses. It’s all implicitly founded on the notion that there are absolute truths and objective reality for what we would call “ideas.” Cool stuff.
It was a fun trip. Now it’s back to classes. I’m excited about my language tutorial in an hour. We’re studying Thomas Aquinas’s theories of language. The first reading selection that Mr. Tomarchio chose was one of his lectures on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. He talks about how spoken sounds are indirectly representative of things; the mediator between the sounds and the things is a particular “affection of the soul” (Aristotle’s term) or “conception of understanding” (Aquinas’s). So the conception of understanding is a likeness of the thing, but the significant spoken sound is not a likeness at all but only something associated by human convention. The spoken sound is not the reality of the thing or the natural ability of the perceiving soul to receive its form. Or something. All this is in relation to how we use significant spoken sounds to convey abstract ideas, as opposed to the simple sensory affections that can be represented by sounds only pertaining to the present sensory information—for example, a sick person groaning in pain is not communicating any conception of understanding but only knowledge of his senses. It’s all implicitly founded on the notion that there are absolute truths and objective reality for what we would call “ideas.” Cool stuff.
1 comment:
cool stuff. =D
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