nudie girls

Ninety-four is a solid A and is the grade I received on my PHI/HUM mid-term. Exams were returned (at the end of) class this evening.

Shall I share a comment from the prof on my essay portion of the exam? Yes I shall: "Your analysis of Brecht by way of Lyotard works very well. In initial ¶s on Ly. your understanding comes off fuzzy, but it's clear in paper overall that you do 'get' Lyot. quite well."

Well, well, well.

Lyotard was also the subject of a short answer part of the exam. My response was:

Lyotard traces the history of the modern American university back to the founding of the University of Berlin between 1807 and 1810 in which Wilhelm Humboldt declared the University should be scientifically based but also "the spiritual and moral training of the nation." According to Lyotard these two seemingly conflicting goals of science and ethics became unified in "a language game that links them in a rational narration, or rather meta-narration." (p.33) This meta-narration, or universal truth, treats knowledge as a science which is then institutionalized in the education system. Knowledge becomes learning and the university acts as a sort of knowledge machine. The knowledge is "composed of reported statements that are incorporated into the meat narrative of a subject that guarantees their legitimacy." In this sense, the education system is like a closed circle which uses itself to justify and legitimize itself, a process of "self-exposition." (p.35) Like all meta-narratives, Lyotard finds this homogeneous system inadequate and overly dominated by scientific discourse. He also seems to suggest, like Marx, that the education system has become a commodity and alienated from those for who it should serve, the students.

Of course you didn't really read this, but there is a joke within it. I wrote "meatnarrative" instead of "metanarrative." The prof gave me ten out of ten points anyway.

Why is this text appearing as double-spaced--I have no idea. Just one of those not-so-charming formatting quirks of my blog host. In my yearning for a clean, consistent aesthetic I am given double spaced text instead.

Four is the number of weeks left of this term's semester. I may stop blogging about dead French philosophers then.

Subject matter will shift to amoebas and--what--proto-something-or-others because I am very likely to take a biology course over the summer. My excitement over this prospect is equal to that of the random re-formatting of this text.

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