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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Cruddy
I've thought about it... go on, email or PM me a copy if you want an opinion. |
As if the kind of writing that suits philosophy papers would count as creative writing. I don't have a scanner handy to convert such literary gems as "Plato's Treatment of Weakness of Will in The Laws, or "Knowledge and Belief in Republic V".
Here's an excerpt from something else (a draft proposal - somewhat unedited).
quote:
I said that I will claim that Plato is, at root, an anti-representationalist philosopher - a philosopher for whom the notion of representation presents a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to solve other problems. This would place Plato, somewhat incongruously, alongside a number distinguished 20th Century philosophers working in the Analytic tradition. I mean by this such philosophers as W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Philosophers who do not work in the area of ancient philosophy often say to me that they have to deal with the philosophical baggage left behind by confused thinkers such as Plato: such entities or quasi-entities as, eyes of the mind, blank tablets, faculties and mental representations of reality. Whatever the accuracy of other charges, I do not agree that Plato is a naοve representationalist, and so I will show that there is ample evidence to the contrary. However, it must be noted that, unlike the other distinguished thinkers I mentioned above, Plato does not, I believe, completely abandon the notion of representation. I will contend that, like them, he believes that if there is such a thing as knowledge, it cannot be a representational state; but unlike them, he believes that representation does have a legitimate place in an account of the world, which is that it is characteristic of non noetic modes of cognition. Furthermore, I want to suggest that Plato?s peculiar views on knowledge are the result of his acceptance of a certain type of anti-representationalist argument combined with his desire to formulate a coherent and plausible epistemology. Although, the foregoing might make it sound as if the thesis will be taken up with comparisons of Plato?s views with those of these other philosophers. I want to point out that this will not be the case: the views of other philosophers will only be invoked where their ideas make some worthwhile and unique contribution to understanding the Platonic position. |
Bored yet? 
Last edited by Agathon on 23-06-2003 at 18:27
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:29
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I used to "hate" HP without reading it, for many of the reasnons stated here. Then, in my unemployment, I ran out of reading material, an my sister hapened to won the four books, so I said, why not? I finished the 4 books in the next 3 days.
Is HP great literature? No, and Rowling does not make any great insightfull comments or discoveries, nor does she experiemnt with no narrative styles or anyting else. But she is a excellent story teller and creates a well defined world that fuly surrounds you, is fully fleshed out. HP is like Star Wars, it ain't one of the "greats" based on its artistic value, but rather that it captures something almost universal and grips the audience.
But if you need ot be special by hating HP, go ahead Agi. We can;t deny you your chance ot be special, now can we?
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Imran Siddiqui
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The Potterverse
Jan 1970
time: 00:29
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To the haters... the NY Times review:
quote:
Near the beginning of the fifth and latest installment of "Harry Potter," one of Harry's former teachers performs a "Disillusionment Charm" on him. It's a means of disguising his appearance and making him less visible to prying eyes, but it also serves as a metaphor for Harry's loss, in this volume, of his boyish illusions and for his teenage immersion into the ambiguities and perils of the grown-up world.
Already shorn of much of his innocence in his earlier battles with Lord Voldemort, this 15-year-old wizard is compelled, in "The Order of the Phoenix," to confront even more unsettling revelations about his relationship with that evil lord, as well as some uncomfortable truths about his own parents and the role that fate has chosen him to play.
This Harry Potter is less Prince Hal than a budding Henry V; less the callow boy in "The Sword in the Stone" and more of the young King Arthur.
A considerably darker, more psychological book than its predecessors, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" occupies the same emotional and storytelling place in the Potter series as "The Empire Strikes Back" held in the first "Star Wars" trilogy. It provides a sort of fulcrum for the series, marking Harry's emergence from boyhood, and his newfound knowledge that an ancient prophecy holds the secret to Voldemort's obsession with him and his family.
Though Harry is still the brave, decent boy we've met in the earlier novels, he's a much angrier character in these pages, beset not only by the pressures of trying to save the world from Voldemort and his Death Eaters, but also by ordinary adolescent frustrations and the burden of fame that his exploits at Hogwarts have placed on his skinny shoulders a burden not dissimilar, in some respects, to the fame that his creator, J. K. Rowling, has experienced herself with the extraordinary popularity of this series. Harry is trailed by reporters, gossiped about by schoolmates and constantly told that he is special.
Because Harry is often in an irritable mood and spends much of the opening chapters brooding about his problems, "The Order of the Phoenix" gets off to a somewhat ponderous start.
There is also less humor in these pages than in the earlier books, and fewer Quidditch games; magic has become less of an art and more of a means of war. The benevolent headmaster of Hogwarts, Dumbledore, is curiously absent or distant for large portions of the book, and so, for that matter, is Harry's Falstaffian friend, Hagrid, the school's gamekeeper. Instead, Harry and his pals, Ron and Hermione, must contend with the noxious omnipresence of Dolores Jane Umbridge, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and a government spy, who conceals beneath her fluffy pink cardigan the cold heart and bureaucratic soul of a Grand Inquisitor.
Harry finds himself subject to a series of alarming, Kafkaesque dreams filled with long corridors and closed doors while the grown-up members of the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society organized by Dumbledore to combat Lord Voldemort, find themselves battling incompetence, denial and cover-ups by the Ministry of Magic. Dread hovers over the novel, as everyone awaits the next move of He Who Must Not Be Named and ponders the loyalties of others, like Ron's brother Percy; Sirius's petulant house elf, Kreacher; and the perennially nasty Potions professor, Snape.
What Ms. Rowling is trying to do in the novel's first half is to delineate both the increasingly grim world in which her characters find themselves after the return of Lord Voldemort in the series' previous installment (Year 4: "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") and the awkward emotional changes her characters are going through as they grow up, something rarely addressed by this sort of children's story, which usually leaves its heroes frozen in a single snapshot in time. The themes of self-sacrifice and betrayal sounded in previous volumes are amplified here. New light is shed on Harry's relationship with his awful Muggle (i.e., nonmagical) relatives the Dursleys, and as Ms. Rowling has said in recent interviews, a character close to Harry dies.
Although it takes a while for the gears of this immensely long novel to mesh fully, the author's bravura storytelling skills and tirelessly inventive imagination soon take over, braiding together the mundane and the marvelous, the psychological and the allegorical with consummate authority and ease. Even as Harry discovers that his teachers and mentors are fallible, he must question how his own weaknesses anger, pride and ambition may be leading him into Voldemort's clutches. Even as he tries to comprehend the terrible fallout that Voldemort's return could have on the world, he must search the past for answers as to how to thwart him. And come to understand, as his beloved godfather, Sirius, tells him, that the world "isn't split into good people and Death Eaters," that there are more ambiguities to grown-up life than he imagined.
One of the things that has made the Potter books so appealing to children and many adults is Ms. Rowling's magpie ability to take archetypes and plot points from myriad sources myths, fairy tales, children's classics and movies and alchemize them into something new. The Potter novels are, at once, detective stories (with Harry and his friends playing the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew all at the same time), moral fables, coming-of-age chronicles and action adventure epics. Harry has been written to embody a daunting gallery of associations (including Luke Skywalker, Telemachus and even Jesus), while Voldemort vibrates with the auras of Darth Vader, Hitler and Milton's Satan, among others.
Although Voldemort, who is trying to get his clammy hands on a powerful new weapon in this volume, can seem a bit cardboardy at times, like a silent-movie villain, Ms. Rowling has made Harry such a flesh-and-blood character that the reader has an instant sense of recognition. It's as if the boy next door had been miraculously transported from the Muggle world we all know to a magical realm where dementors and thestrals lurk, a world where people can pour their extra thoughts into a "Pensieve" or whisk themselves from one place to another with a Portkey.
As this volume, like its predecessors, attests, Ms. Rowling has imagined this universe in such minute and clever detail that we feel that we've been admitted to a looking-glass world as palpable as Tolkien's Middle Earth or L. Frank Baum's Oz. The wizards, witches and Muggles who live there share complicated, generations-old relationships with one another and inhabit a place with traditions, beliefs and a history all its own a Grimm place where the fantastic and fabulous are routine, but also a place subject to all the limitations and losses of our own mortal world. |
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23-06-2003 17:55
, was buying the Goblet of Shite or whatever the latest one is called.
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