Forms

I listened to a lot of my lectures (Odyssey of the West II; a Classic Education through the Great Books: From Athens to Rome and the Gospels) today and covered the section on Plato and Aristotle. I have taken philosophy courses before but I had forgotten how much I enjoy them.
One of the ideas I like most discusses how we recognize anything. Every time we leave the house we see an entirely new world. The trees we see are not the same trees that were there the day or even the hour before. Cells have died and fallen away, branches have broken, leaves have moved, there are different animals in or around them, but we still deal with it ok. We do not have to reevaluate our world and our understanding of it every time we encounter something new.
I took a class on Immanuel Kant and we spent a lot of time reading about Kant's attacks on empiricism, or the idea that you can only gain knowledge from experiences. If you could only know what you have experienced, then you could never anticipate anything, because any sort of anomaly is given the same weight as what we would consider a natural law. There could be no natural laws because physical sensation does not prove any natural law, it only confirms what is happening.
The example I liked best was one where my teacher dropped his pen and said that if we were true empiricists we could not be surprised if the pen stayed in mid-air or even shot to the ceiling, because we would have no other knowledge to create shock. I thought that was kind of cool.
A little off topic, but the reason I wanted to write about the lectures, was the presentation I was listening to about imagination. I don't remember what the big idea behind it was, but the professor said that people go to the Grand Canyon (a big hole) to be astounded. I haven't ever been but I would like to go because of this example and a West Wing episode. The speaker said that when you look at the Grand Canyon it is impossible to take it all in. It is such a huge spectacle that when you close your eyes or turn away, you cannot recreate what you have seen because it is too massive- it is too immense to comprehend.
In West Wing, Toby Ziegler said "You know when you go out West how they
say, don't miss the Grand Canyon, it's one of the few things in life that when you see it, it doesn't disappoint? That's Roy Ashland." I think Roy Ashland was a senile Supreme Court Justice in the show, but I hope that it is true for the Grand Canyon.
If I go and am disappointed, I will give up on nature and probably get engrossed in video games or something. Nature, that is a threat.