Emily Jane Bronte

Emily Bronte, born July 30th 1818, is a 19th century writer who comes from a family of writers, she is the 5th child of Patrick Bronte. Emily's work and life stood out as very inspring, she lived most of her desolate life in her families home, Haworth Parsonage, near the Yorkshire Moors in northern England. She loved this bleak and stormy landscape and much of her writing was inspired by her home. As you may know, she was very young when her two eldest sisters and her mom fell due to tuberculosis and died. She was deeply affected by the deaths of her siblings, but soon would have the halcyon of 2 more that were coming with her. The start of her career was when she was a child, her father's gift of toys, out of this she and her sisters made the paracosmic world of Angria which were their juvnilia writing. After her sisters would outgrow this phenomena, Emily continuted the trend with her own paracosmic world named "Gondal" a place where she would hide herself and could be herself, in this world Women strictly had many peculiarities. Emily was a very quite, shy and reserved person, she would never be swayed by public opinion or would it transmute her countenance and personality. She saw the good and flaws in people, she saw the solution to human suffering was to stand by our own spiritual faith. Emily's vision would soon come alive in her Magnum Opus Wuthering Heights, It exemplifies to each of us, no matter who we are, that we are often left alone in the world, and that we all long to be a part of something more than ourselves, but that it is only through love of ourselves that we can truly find love with others. We see this novel still widely read and sadly widely ridiculed by some critics. Emily taught us how one person's voice can reveal to us what the world really is, we see the surface break and the reflections fade, finding the naked truth about humanity. Emily was strong and corageous and lived up to her vision even to her last breath when she had lung infection her strength pulled through, her exceeding the limits did not last long as she soon died on that cold afternoon on December 19th  1848 in her home. She taught us that in a world of prejudice and labels we can find the faith and strenght to pull through with our vision. She was a blessing to literature and to all of us and we will meditate on her memory on this day July 30th 2011 her 193rd Birthday! Happy birthday, Emily. May your rest in peace.

                                                                         ~Christopher A.P.~

Daily devotions to Shakespeare's sonnets

Intro- This will be my blog of admirable regularity where we will interpret each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. 

(1) "From fairest Creatures"

Summary: Beauty that does not reproduce itself by producing offspring is both cruel and wasteful. Take pity on the world or else be regarded by it as selfish.

Nomenclature to pay attention to:

Harbinger-  (noun) A thing which forshadows a future event. 

Plantinga's Modal argument against materialism

Now, when we speak of materialism, I don't mean the view that the universe as a macroscopic whole is not a material object and that there is no immaterial things such as numbers and sets and propositions. This is an argument against materialism that says that human beings like me are just material objects there is not immaterial soul. The view that there is a immaterial self supported by a material body is substance dualism and this argues for that. This argument argues from possibility, what we mean by possibility is possibility in a logical sense, it is a modal operator like necessity. a necessity would be something which exists in all possible worlds and a necessity would be like the truths of mathematics although they are not part of logic strictly speaking. There are two kinds of truths that tell us about our world, categorical and modal. Categorical saying what something IS and Modal is what Possibly, Could be, etc. So, I have the modal property of "possibly 27 years old" it may not need to be actualized, but it is still a property I got. So his argument goes like this.


That if I were a material object I would have to be my body, but it seems perfectly conceivable that I can exist when my body doesn't. There is this short-story by Franz Kafka which is called Metamorphosis, in which this fellow wakes up in the body of a beetle, I can imagine all this happening to me waking up in a beetle body while my other body is destroyed, so here I exist, but B does not.   So, lets name our body B just for the moment. It seems possible that I can exist when B doesn't. So, I have the property of possibly existing when B doesn't, but that is the modal property that B doesn't have. So me and B are not the same thing, because there will be something true of me that isn't true of B namely, possibly exists when B doesn't. This proof is justified by Leibniz's law in predicate calculus, that whatever is true of A is also true of B, so whatever property A has B has one conversely, so among the properties are modal properties, like I said earlier, possibly such and such. So if it is for A that it is possibly such and such, but it is not the case for B that it is possibly such and such than Me and B are not the same thing. I am not the same thing as my body.

Any thoughts?

Modus Operandi for this blog

Thank you for visiting my blog, I hope that the content in the myriad of topics in this blog will stimulate penetrating dialectic. The topics will consist of philosophy and Literature, philosophy of religion, philosophy of the mind, epistemology, philosophy of literature, topics in Literature and analysis of many types of texts. Here are some rules and guidelines if you do decide to contribute to said topics:


1: You cannot use profanity

2: You shall not make pejorative remarks or vituperative, invective or derogatory labels to anyone or use any racist terminology or you will be out.

3: This blog is open for discussion only to age 18 persons or older.

4: Any links to non-academic sites will not be tolerated, any links to pornographic sites, than you will be off of here.

I hope you abide by these rules and enjoy your stay

- Chris A. Powell