Hamlet Part 1

This week we focused completely on Shakespeare's book "Hamlet". One of the things that I had never known before was that going to one of Shakespeare's plays wasn't an elegant occasion or anything like I thought that it was. It was instead a casual event that the lower to middle class people attended.

The play started out with us learning that Hamlet's father had just died and his mother was marrying his father's brother. We then see the ghost of Hamlet's father tell Hamlet that his brother killed him by pouring poison into his ear. His father now wants Hamlet to avenge him by killing Claudius. To prevent people from catching on to what he is going to do Hamlet acts like he is mad. One of the things that people wonder about this is if by Hamlet acting mad he actually becomes mad. We finished the the first half by Hamlet sailing off to England where Clausius had sent notes to England to have Hamlet killed.

Overall, I rather enjoyed reading this book. It is pretty easy to read and has a good storyline, other than the fact that Hamlet and his mom have a little thing going on.

Montaigne's "On Repentance" and "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn How to Die"

Right now I am not really sure whether I liked these readings or not. Montaigne had a lot of interesting things to say, but he put it in a way that made it very difficult to read. In the reading "On Repentance" he basically said that we should not regret anything we do because it is part of our nature to do it, and because those experiences build us up to who we are today. Instead of just dwelling on our mistakes we should just look on them with indifference. Another cool thing that we learned during the lecture on this reading is that everything works according to nature by cause then effect. The thing is that in our experiences we experience the effect first and then identify the cause. In the second reading Montaigne was saying that rather than trying to exclude death from our lives we should actually embrace it and try to think about it every day. Death is also the one thing that no one else can do for you. So in conclusion I have to say that these readings gave me a very different way of thinking about these kinds of things.

Northern Humanism vs. Italian Humanism

Italian Humanism arose with the fall of Rome. Italian Humanists dealt mainly with the classics from first century BC to first century AD. As Italian Humanism spread northward it began to change. This was mainly due to big differences in the cultures. When Northern Humanism arose they focused on all the classics. Italian Humanists didn't feel that Christian writers should be counted among the classics, and Northern Humanists mainly focused on Christian writers. After seeing the way that the church used to be run the Northern Humanists sought to reform it to the way it once was. The main way of doing this was improving education so everyone could read about it and hopefully think the same way.