I'm exploring words again

I joined other residents on Friday as we watched our weekly movie.  This week, it was a documentary entitles "Barry."  That's the name Barack Obama was called when he was in college, and I noticed that one of his books was entitled Epistemology.  I am 100% sure no one else picked up on that title, but I took a class in epistemology in college.  So I grinned and jotted down "epistemology" to remind myself to write about it here.  (Yes, I take notes even though I'm retired).  I searched this blog to see if I'd written about epistemology before and found this information (HERE).  That's a bust of Plato in the photo:

Epistemology

1. Knowledge and Reason ~ Plato and the Ancient Greeks

2.  Theories of Knowledge ~ Plato and Aristotle

3.  Faith and Reason ~ Augustine

Word of the Day #1

e·pis·te·mol·o·gy / əˌpistəˈmäləjē,eˌpistəˈmäləjē / noun, philosophy = the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope.  Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.  Example:  "He grappled with metaphysics and epistemology in his writings."

Word of the Day #2

metaphysics = the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind.  It is one of the oldest branches of philosophy.  Example:  "They would regard the question of the initial conditions for the universe as belonging to the realm of metaphysics."

Can you tell that Philosophy was part of my double major for my first college degree?  Okay, I guess I really will have to re-read this tiny book that I reminded myself in January (HERE) that I wanted to re-read.

Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind ~ by Richard Maurice Bucke, 1900, consciousness, 121 pages

Bucke explores cosmic consciousness, which he defines as "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary [person]."