First "WIMUT" Update

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has welcomed me into “The Fold” thus far. Your encouragement is very encouraging.

I promised you a What Is Martinez Up To update for today. I’ve spent all day so far today working on my research paper for my government class. That wasn’t exactly fun, but it could have been worse.

There’s really not too much to update. I’m still really enjoying Basic Reasoning. Learning about conditionals (or “statements of material implication”), disjunctions, modus ponens and modus tollens, validity and soundness, truth tables…good stuff.

I put The Brothers Karamazov on hold for a while, and have started reading The Great Conversation. This book, which is the introduction to The Great Books of the Western World, is basically about the value of a liberal education. By “liberal education,” we mean an education that teaches you how to “be human,” not just how to earn a living. Take the following excerpt:

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.
The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.

So far, it’s pretty good stuff. Once I’m done with that, it’ll be back to Dostoevsky for me.

That’s about it. Maybe I’ll go play with formatting or something. Or maybe I’ll get back to work.