PHIL 101: Time Edition

 This is a photograph (of a photograph) of me as kid, wading in the water where conch were being kept in little coral corrals next to a pile of discarded shells off the coast of Carriacou. Carriacou is a small island that is part of Grenada, where my mother conducted research for her graduate work in geography. We visited several times when I was growing up and I have many distinct memories from those visits. I remember making kites with my friends, laying in the bottom of the sailboat feeling sea sick, being gifted a beautiful mango, drawing ruins, playing make-shift cricket and getting sunburned on my 13th birthday, making drinking chocolate, another kid (a family friend) standing in front of the crashing surf yelling "Peace and love! Peace and love to all the world!", a friend arriving with a pet cat in a sack for us (with a piece of bread that had a bite taken out of it), which we named Professor McGonagall, watching my brother lose a footrace to some very fast girls, wat...

  Plato thought that doing philosophy prepares human beings to face their own deaths. He thought that in death, the human soul would be freed from the prison of the body and apprehend the true nature of things, rather than the dim shadow reality to which embodied beings are limited. During our lives, Plato argues that it is in doing philosophy that we can get the closest to truth. By following through with philosophical inquiry we can begin to see the vague contours of things as they really are, even if their true nature ultimately remains inaccessible to us while we are living. We see Plato's views on the relationship between philosophy, death, and reality in his portrayal of the death of Socrates. Socrates is not afraid of death, indeed he welcomes it. The attitude Socrates has towards death is not straightforwardly suicidal. Rather, at least in Plato's rendering, he looks forward to death as union with truth. I don't personally think about the relationship between death ...