Socrates Caf
Kevin Chrisayrton Purnomo
Brian Weydemuller
English 1A Section 28
5/5/2013
Evolving Through Ignorance Socrates Café, a book written by Christopher Phillips that unfolds his story on facilitating lots of free discussion forum in a lot of different places. But what is Socrates Café itself? It is a place; a place for people who wonder, a place for people with different backgrounds to immerse their own self into questions and ideas and dogmas through Socratic Method. Phillips made an effort to revive the condition of what Socrates more than two millennia ago did in Athens. He went through a lot of hard time in order to establish this and to start this out of nothing, which includes abandoning his occupation as a journalist. In this essay I would like to peel in a deep more into one section of the book in which Philips cited Richard Tarnas belief. According to Richard Tarnas, Socrates believed that “the discovery of ignorance was just the beginning of the philosophical task”, not the end (201) [1]. People believe that being ignorant is a bad thing, as a human being we have to be conscious of everything we do and take responsibilities of our actions. How can we know that we are being ignorant? To discover about our own ignorance to certain things is a stepping-stone for us to improve ourselves, that’s what Socrates believed and I do agree with him. After we are conscious about our own ignorance, we can start to inquire our own self and dig deeper to overcome our assumption about what it takes to be a human being – that’s what philosophical task is about for me.
Over the last 10 decades, the Earth average surface temperature has rose by 0.8 ± 0.2 ̊C, especially over the last 5 decades, the rise had been significant [2]. This kind of improvement tends to create serious problem, globally, not only in particular place. What caused this global warming to happen? The answer is the inhabitants itself, humans had been more and more ignorant about what crisis they face, we
Brian Weydemuller
English 1A Section 28
5/5/2013
Evolving Through Ignorance Socrates Café, a book written by Christopher Phillips that unfolds his story on facilitating lots of free discussion forum in a lot of different places. But what is Socrates Café itself? It is a place; a place for people who wonder, a place for people with different backgrounds to immerse their own self into questions and ideas and dogmas through Socratic Method. Phillips made an effort to revive the condition of what Socrates more than two millennia ago did in Athens. He went through a lot of hard time in order to establish this and to start this out of nothing, which includes abandoning his occupation as a journalist. In this essay I would like to peel in a deep more into one section of the book in which Philips cited Richard Tarnas belief. According to Richard Tarnas, Socrates believed that “the discovery of ignorance was just the beginning of the philosophical task”, not the end (201) [1]. People believe that being ignorant is a bad thing, as a human being we have to be conscious of everything we do and take responsibilities of our actions. How can we know that we are being ignorant? To discover about our own ignorance to certain things is a stepping-stone for us to improve ourselves, that’s what Socrates believed and I do agree with him. After we are conscious about our own ignorance, we can start to inquire our own self and dig deeper to overcome our assumption about what it takes to be a human being – that’s what philosophical task is about for me.
Over the last 10 decades, the Earth average surface temperature has rose by 0.8 ± 0.2 ̊C, especially over the last 5 decades, the rise had been significant [2]. This kind of improvement tends to create serious problem, globally, not only in particular place. What caused this global warming to happen? The answer is the inhabitants itself, humans had been more and more ignorant about what crisis they face, we
Cited: Phillips, Christopher. Socrates Café. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.201-206. Print. Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia. 2006. Wikipedia Community. 7 May 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming Jakarta Globe. Taufik R. Indrakesuma. 2011. Postgraduate Student. 7 May 2013. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/slums-in-jakarta-where-needs-of-the-poor-mismatch-the-needs-of-the-city/ Gallup. Gallup Administrator. 2013. 8 May 2013. http://www.gallup.com/poll/157073/corruption-continues-plague-indonesia.aspx#1