Commentary -Nate Strum

From Thursday's reading: "No one wants to be asleep all the time, and the sane judgement of everyone judges it better to be awake. Yet often a man defers shaking off sleep when his limbs are heavy with slumber. Although displeased with himself he is glad to take a bit longer, even when the time to get up has arrived."(VIII, v, 12) I guess some things never change. *Insert Ecclesiastes 1:9* 

IX, ii, 2 is the part, which some condemn him for, where Augustine doesn't immediately resign from his rhetoric teaching position. His response was that he didn't resign immediately because he didn't want to seem arrogant. The summer before his public resignation, the worst happened: he suffered breathing difficulty and chest pain, which he thought would cause people to think that he was lying about the reason of his resignation! But he also said later that having people think that he was making an excuse was a relief because it made them less irritated by him, so I'm not sure Augustine thought this one through--he doesn't seem to answer what's worse, having people irritated at you or thinking that a servant of God is a liar? He ultimately decides to give both reasons--conversion and health difficulties--for resigning.(IX, v, 13)

According to footnote 17: The evidence for Augustine's Mistress's Catholicism is the following sentence: "You and no one else inspired us to educate [Adeodatus] in your teaching."(IX, vi, 14) I like knowing where historical knowledge comes from--something that annoys me about history textbooks.

Augustine's mother had an affinity for wine!(IX, viii, 18) The power of habit...just say no kids! Go play basketball or something (for lack of a better joke referring to footnote 30)!(IX, xi, 28) 

"...light and all colors and bodily shapes enter by the eyes."(X, viii, 13) Wait, what about the blind kid who uses echolocation? Pretty sure he perceives "bodily shapes." I guess Augustine never got around to watching the nightly news.

"When I hear that there are three kinds of question, viz. 'Does P exist? What is P? What kind of a thing is P?'"(X, x, 17) This reminds me. Classification is useful because what is true of a dog isn't necessarily true of all animals. We can't effectively communicate without breaking words up into more specific words (moved, ran; human, male; planet, Earth), but to suppose that there is some metaphysical reality to classes, like "the world is composed of four substances," is silly nonsense--we can always keep dividing the classes, so what gives us justification for calling some classes more fundamental? What makes these types of questions more fundamental than Aristotle's suggestions, which are mentioned in the footnote? Maybe I'm missing something here, but that's how I currently see it.

Nate

P.S. I commented on Owen's and Eliza's posts.