Paper: A rough draft

So I handed in the final paper for my epistemology independent study just now. It's a piece of crap with some good ideas stuck on it, a few good moments, many, many gaps. But I learned something in the sense that I feel like there's a new space been hollowed out inside me for all those thoughts. I guess that's a good feeling. Just yesterday as I was trying to write the little concluding paragraph on the paper...i was like yeah i'll have this wrapped up in like 15 maybe 20 minutes. I wanted to make a comment on some thing that this guy in a book had made a comment on. I was flipping through the book, went to the first chapter, lo and behold, there was a few pages of critique on some of the parts of the Meno i had talked considerably about and used to develop basically my whole theory. I was only slightly scared at that point. Then i read on and discovered that the guy who wrote the book was critiquing some other philosopher who had used the same portions of the Meno to develop a theory similar to mine as far as the basic intuitions are concerned. I was like...hmmm should've looked back at the first chapter. I read that chapter like back in September so I forgot clean about what it was about. Long story short...I think i was able to recover from the critiques since the theory of the other philosopher wasn't exactly the same...like I said, just the same basic intuitions. Mainly I think I discovered that the guy who wrote the book and was making these nasty critiques was using one big assumption for all his critique of the other guy...and it is an assumption that both I and the other guy reject...so really the critiques aren't so much critiques as good analysis. So i think i was able to recover and not get blown away by the simplest of arguments. Unfortunately the three pages I had to add to my paper to show this were written all in the space of like an hour or so and in a sort of frantic haze, so it's bound not to be the best writing ever...need to think much more about those critiques and that big-ass assumption.

A Dispute

I have been reading the dispute which has arisen on a couple of blogs: My sister's blog and The blog of someone my sister knew in college. The issue about prayer having no "instrumental value" is that to which I refer. The argumentation on the latter's blog is misleading--asking for statistical evidence. This sort of request, of course, misses the whole point. And perhaps the proper response is unsayable, I don't know. But asking for statistical evidence isn't the way to go at all. I mean, you won't have any productive dialogue arguing that way. The whole thing about prayer is that it doesn't fit into all those nice analytical boxes one would like to use to analyze everything. I mean...that's the nature of prayer...if you could analyze it then it wouldn't be what it is. There is much more to say about this issue. This is only my first intuition: more thoughts later when I'm not writing papers and finals are over.