For each of the four response papers, you must write at least three typed and double spaced pages on a topic of your choice that concerns the material we have covered in the class so far. Do not spend time summarizing the material, but rather focus on your own thoughts and questions. You are welcome to use your own life experiences as well as fictional and nonfictional material from outside class. While you are welcome to reflect on anything you have found interesting, the following are possible topics for your response.
1) Pythagoras and later thinkers influenced by him, including Plato, believe that the forms of things can be understood through the use of mathematics, while skeptical thinkers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Zeno and Democritus argue that things always remain unknown to us. In what way and to what extent can we understanding the forms of things via mathematics?
2) Parmenides argues that difference and motion are an illusion, and Zeno argues that these things can not be understood without paradoxical problems. Anaxagoras and Democritus both argued that Parmenides was half right about difference being an illusion, but the two completely disagree on whether the unity or difference of things is an illusion. What do you make of the Eleatic challenge? Do human efforts to comprehend things as distinct or changing necessarily result in contradictions? If so, or not, why?
3) Diogenes rejected the conventions of society and chose to live like a dog. Is his simplicity and obscenity noble or foolish? Heraclitus says people are mere apes, and should seek wisdom. Diogenes believes that living as a dog allows us to live by reason rather than passion. Would living as dogs make us less like apes?
