Water

Water

I’m 17 and 18 and 19 and 20 and I’m in all the UCLA philosophy classes.

I see Lesley and I in our first and her last philosophy class. She had trouble with spending hundreds of pages on an argument that seemed based on a misunderstanding that intransitive verbs exist and that, after the argument is completed, we now have to prove to ourselves that the universe is not all tofu. She did learn something very important. That water is the “RK” and now, if she remembers, she’ll pick up water, look at me with deep, ancient knowledge, announce “water is the RK” before taking a sip and smiling.

I see an amazing person, Philippa Foot, away from her home country, as a prim and proper English lady. She then put people on railway tracks on each side and killed them repeatedly in front of us. When that finished, well, it was time to carve people up and put their organs in sick people to maximize life. I see the basis of every moral decision I make for the rest of my life, and I won’t stuff organs into you.

I see Alonzo Church, the founder of everything in modern computing, give four students his time at the end of his life. We learn why words work at all and if you like to write densely, well, you should start there.

I see Kit Fine’s disappointment as 85% of his students drop his class between sessions because his Metaphysics of Modality failed to include an Elvis, Big Foot, or alien-dinosaur-cyborgs etc. I watch him, after ten weeks of discussion, have to convince a student to write philosophy, the actual thing he was teaching, instead of a book report.