蘇菲的世界Sophie's World 讀後心得 (ㄧ)

寫給自己

一切就從哲學開始，開始了我不斷學習，自我挑戰的人生。

還記得自己讀的第一本哲學相關的書已經是高二那一年，從高一開始住到學校宿舍，開始擁有比家鄉附近更多的社會教育資源，尤其在文化中心書庫中發現了整整四樓的各式書籍，開啟了我廣闊的學習空間，除了課業，在能力所及的範圍內，常跑文化中心，有時利用晚自習的時間慢慢讀一些書，其中影響我最深的莫過於哲學概論這本書。高中生活對我來說就是人生向上發展的最大契機。

蘇菲的世界是我讀過寫得最清楚的哲學史，我用去年假期期間花了幾天讀完七百多頁的篇幅，作者Jostein Gaarder自詡能成為如愛麗絲夢遊仙境的經典，我說他辦到一部分了，這是寫得很好的書摘，也以受到國際認可翻譯成許多種語言，但因為是書籍摘要，自然沒有太多原創性，無法比擬 Alice in the Wonderland。

相較我所讀過得幾本哲學教科書或哲學家的原著翻譯書籍，較少邏輯性和系統性是必然的，所以我需要事先複習我自己所學的哲學系統再去作進一步的吸收與比較。這是自然的，我到現在仍然喜歡閱讀哲學性書籍，只要一本書就可以思考很久，從中發現許多不同的趣味。基本上，我對哲學的範圍是以知識論、形上學、價值論和宇宙論為基本元素，在加上邏輯方法與思考模式建構我的哲學學習方式，並經過哲學建構我的人生觀與世界觀。以上雖然只有一句話，可是卻道盡了我到目前的人生中最重要的生命與生活元素，一輩子永無止境的學習與思考。從第一本哲學書籍到現在當然其中有些東西已經被我放棄或修正了，例如不再學習所謂的宇宙論，那還是交給科學家與天文學家來破解宇宙的奧秘，找出宇宙與生命的基本元素。其餘部份，似乎還是一直在學習並融入生活之中，可以這樣做，感覺自己是個幸運的人。

回到蘇菲的世界這本書，這是值得大家閱讀的哲學普及書，由智庫文化出版，蕭寶森翻譯，也有幾個大學教授推薦，其中之一是我在高中時代就聽過他演講的傅佩榮教授，原文版本在1991年出版，1995年正體中文版，2006年再版，手上的是再版書籍，不過在就讀大學期間就有看人拿過這本書，所以這會市場長銷版本，十年後再看也無損其價值吧。上下兩冊含索引共733頁，份量不算輕，在許多資料都可由網路下載的時代，我還是買了慢慢閱讀。在加上去年購買閱讀的不到200頁由究竟出版社所出版的哲學的歷史一書，讓人讀後回味無窮，當然哲學史一定會有許多更好的書籍出版，這樣的份量較適合我罷了。

這本書除了使我回憶起閱讀的樂趣之外，其中最有意義的地方是我對作者的話有共鳴，如最後一個段落取名為「人生如星塵」，把天地宇宙萬物皆為宇宙星塵的一部分，人隸屬於其中，也可以去思考做為其中一分子的意義，而且哲學家這種人生本是從無開始，之後有了這短暫的一生，最後又復歸於無的觀點，不受某一宗教與文化的侷限就是生命中思想的真自由，即使生命有限，人們受到外在環境與身體上的能力限制，人可以是自由與寬廣的，我喜愛與尊敬人生可以是自由寬廣的感覺。這樣的感覺每每在庸碌與繁忙的人生中予以反思，重新定位獲得力量，其功效我想不輸給宗教的救贖力量，可以在困難險阻時不斷地提醒自己，我是有福的，生而為人是一件該高興的事，可以在有限的人生中做出一些有意義的事吧。（其餘感想日後再分段發表了，加入標題一）

預計今年較有時間寫blog。

Blog申請了這麼久，一直沒時間多寫些什麼，至少研究所的課已經修完了，日後該有時間寫一些東西，至少研究語言文化與教學的東西也超過十年了，可以整理或寫些東西做紀錄，也練練打字，中打實在太慢了。

If I Were a Freshman Again

If I Were a Freshman Again
Thomas Arkle Clark

It is the habit of age to give sage advice to youth. One of the pastimes in which everyone periodically indulges is the pleasant hallucination that if he were given the opportunity to live his youth over again he would do it differently and more successfully. We are all of us, even though we have no more than reached middle age, given to regretting our neglected opportunities and our lost youth. It gives one a virtuous feeling in imagination to dodge all error, but it is extremely doubtful if many of us, even if we had a second chance, would avoid many of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, or follow a straighter path than that by which we have so far come. If it is merely pleasant for us to conjecture what we should do if we had a second try at it, it may be profitable for those whose who are younger to listen. If only foresight could be as accurate as the backward view!

If I were a freshman again I should not work so many hours as I did. I put in enough hours with my books in my hands, but I did not accomplish much. I had little concentration. Many students whom I know, and I was one of this sort, spend a great deal of time in getting ready to work. With a book in hand they look out of the window at the clouds or at the pretty girls passing along the street, and all the time they deceive themselves with the idea that they are working.

Many an evening, when the work was heavy, I would determine to begin early and get it over with, but I could spend half an hours in arranging my books and getting myself seated in a comfortable chair. All this time I imagined I was working. I spent as much time in goading myself no to duties that I should have liked to shirk or in getting ready to work as I did in actual labor. If I were a freshman I should plan my work, I should try to develop concentration – I should work harder but not so long.

I should learn to work with people about me. As it was, I lived a somewhat isolated life. I did my reading and my studying alone, and though there were some advantages in this method, there were serious objections. Now I must often work under different conditions from those by which I was surrounded.in college; there is work to be done where there is no quiet, and I do it with difficulty. As I tried on a crowded ocean steamer to put these wandering thoughts on paper I was constantly annoyed by the confusion about me and by the spasmodic attempts at conversation made by a well-intentioned but misguided young man at my side. If I had learned to work under different conditions I might have turned the conversation aside as a steep roof sheds the rain. I believe it is a great advantage for a young man to do his work himself, but he should not subject himself to the slavery of doing it alone.

I should take as a a freshman, if I had my work to do over again, more work that I have no special fondness for or that I find difficult. I like an easy time as well as any one, and I do not wish to give the impression that I think it an error for a student to follow the profession he enjoys or to do the work he likes. In point of face, I believe that a student should choose those lines of work along which his tastes lead him. I think it very likely that those things we do most easily we shall do best; but I have found that training comes through struggle, and that people are developed most who resist most, or who struggle against difficulty and opposition and overcome. I have known a good many geniuses, but they generally had the most commonplace careers because they never learned to do difficult or disagreeable things.

Students come into my office every day who want to get out of work or to drop a subject, or to cut a class exercise for no better reason than that they find the duty difficult or the instructor or the subject is dull. Much of the work of life is not pleasant. Half the things I am forced to learn to give these things and things I dislike doing. I have been forced to learn to give these things my best attention whether I like them or not, I wish I had learned in my freshman year to do more such things.

Just yesterday as I was sitting at the breakfast table talking to a young freshman, in whom I have a rather vital interest, as to next year’s course, I suggested a subject which I thought good for him to take. “Is it easy?” was his first question, and when I answered in the negative his interest waned. In the world in which we must in time work there are few easy road, few snap courses. We shall be forced to do a great many hard things. If I were a freshman I should learn to do such things early.

Like a great many people, I suppose I am not now doing the work that as a college student I planned to do. I am in no sense a fatalist, but I am convinced that men have their work chosen for them quite as often as they themselves choose it. If I had supposed that I should be called upon to speak on the most unforeseen occasions and upon the most unfamiliar topics, I should have given myself while in college the practice which I believe is the method everyone must employ if he is to become a ready speaker. I have learned that, sooner or later, every intelligent man is called upon publicly to express his ideas, and no matter how abundant these thoughts may be, he will suffer much pain and have little success unless he has had pretty regular and persistent practice.

I ran across an old classmate last spring, an engineer of no little repute, whom I had not met since the day of our graduation. “How would you change your course,” I said to him, expecting that he would long for more mathematics, “if you had it all to do over again?”

“I should learn to write and I should learn to speak,” he answered, “and I should begin as a freshman. As it was, I avoided every opportunity to do either, with the idea that only ministers and lawyers have need of such practice, and I suffer for it every day. My boy is to be an engineer, but I am going to see that he does not make the mistake that I made.”

When I am called upon unexpectedly to speak and my knees shake and my voice falters, and the word that I long for comes with difficulty, or fails to come at all, I agree with my classmate, and I feel sure that if I were a freshman again I should learn to speak correctly and without notes.

I wish that as a freshman I had learned to play well some athletic games. It is not entirely for the pleasure that I should have derived or should be able to derive from the fact that I feel as I do, though that would mean much. If a man succeeds, as all hope to do, he gets into a business which is likely to be cruelly exacting, and he demands some relaxation in which he finds pleasure. For me there is no pleasure in hitting a bag that simply bounds back to struck again, or in pulling up a weight that drops stupidly and inertly down to be raised the second time. I would rather hoe in the garden, saw wood, or beat a carpet hanging on a clothes’ line in the back yard. I find no virtue in any of the machinery or in any of the “system” devised by shrewd inventors for keeping the human system in ideal working condition. If I am to have pleasure in exercise, and I will not take it from a sense of duty only, it must be in a physical contest where something definite can be accomplished where I have a goal to attain or an opponent to beat. I would rather play a good game of tennis than agitate all the exercisers in Christendom. I think there are few things that help more to keep men young and strong, and ready for the aids materially in bringing about the condition. One may learn, of course, late in his college career or even after he is out of college; but pride and awkwardness, and the manifold duties of the day come in and prevent one’s doing so. If one does not develop some skill while a freshman he is very unlikely to do so later.

If I were a freshman I should determine to do some one line of work well. As I remember, I was principally concerned in “getting through.” I think I was not quite so modest in my scholastic ambitions as the young fellow who told me not long ago that a “pass” was as good as one hundred per cent to him, but as least I was not so much concerned about doing my best in some one line of work as I wish now I had been. Practically every college man, freshman included, is rushed with his work. He takes more “hours” than he should, or he neglects to prepare the assignments at the proper time, so that when his work is done it is done hastily. Nine out of ten freshmen are behind with assigned work. I have known fellows even to go as far as to argue that it is an excellent practice to get behind, for of one is to catch up he must then force himself to do a large amount of work in a short time. I grant that this may be a good thing, but work done under such conditions usually shows all the earmarks of slovenliness and superficiality. There are many subjects in which I think it would be sufficient to merely do good work, but at least in one subject I wish I had made it a point to take time to give the matter careful thought, and to do it as well as it was possible for me to do. One has to rush through work far too often later in life; it would be a comfort to remember that at one time at least I had deliberately taken time enough to do an assigned task well.

I should make more of an effort that I did to get acquainted with my instructors. The conception of the average freshman is that the college instructor is a somewhat abnormal mortal full of knowledge – sometimes – but without much understanding of the individual or sympathy for him. Some are; and some of this sort expended their time on me when I was a freshman. I thought as a freshman that the less I bothered my instructor the better, and if by some good fortune he was ill or out of town I put it down at the end of the day as one of the blessings for which to return thanks. I came in the end to see that my instructors – even those who at first had seemed most impossible – were pretty human creatures, with a wide knowledge and a generous willingness to help. The trouble was with me quite as much as with them. I count it the greatest pleasure and benefit of my college course. How much more it might have meant had I come more closely into contact with the real lives of the other men and women with whom I worked.

If I were a freshman I should not lose an opportunity to see and to hear the prominent men and women in public life who for one reason or another come to every college town. I was often hard up or “broke,” and I could easily find an excuse for not going to lectures, or the theater. Now I regret that I miss opportunities which never came again. I had always wanted to hear Henry Ward Beecher, but when he came to town the dollar that was required to get into the lecture hall seemed big to me, and I decided to wait until the next time. But the next time never came, for Beecher died soon after, and it is one of the regrets of my college life that I missed my chance to hear and see so great a man.

I am wont to say when giving advice to young men just enter college that one thing a freshman should give his time to is study – all other things are relatively unimportant; yet if I could be a freshman again I should try to be more interested in general college activities. Social matters such as connect themselves with young women I think the freshman may very safely postpone until later in his college course. The affairs of the heart can easily wait. Studies are the main thing, but not the only thing, and the freshman who fails to develop some outside interest is usually making a mistake. The mere bookworm is not so likely to be successful as the man who gets out among his fellows. Valedictorians often have very commonplace careers because their interests are too narrow and their knowledge of human nature lacking. If I were a freshman I should have at least on avocation – one thing that should give relaxation from my every day work and bring me into close contact with men.

What this side interest should be depends, of course, upon the individual freshman. It may be athletics if he shows any skill in this direction; it may be religion, or oratory, or politics; but I believe he will be better off if he goes into something that helps him to study men as well as facts.

It is a delightful experience and a great opportunity to be able to spend four years in college, but it is one I may not have again. I made some mistakes, I missed some opportunities; but after all I am not sure but that the things I got are better than the things I missed, and if I had it all to do over again who knows but that I might lack sense to do it as well as I did it before? I am content to let things be as they are.

Of Studies

Of Studies
Bacon Essays 1625Version
Studies serve for pastimes, for ornaments, and for abilities. Their chief use for pastime is in privateness1 and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability; is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men2 can execute, and perhaps judge of particular, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshaling of affairs, come best from those that are learned.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor3 of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and study themselves do give forth direction too much at large, except they be bounded by experience.

Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them, for they teach not their own use; but that4 is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously5; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy and extracts made of them by others, but that would be only in the less important arguments and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled water6, flashy things.

Reading maketh a full man, conference7 a ready man, and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit8; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that9 he doth not.

Histories make men wise; poet, witty10; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy11, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to content. Abeunt studia in mores.12 (Studies culminate in manners) Nay, there is no stond (difficulty) or impediment in the wit but may be wrought out by fit studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins13, shooting for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the head, and the like. If his wit be not fit to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen, for they are cumini sectores14. If he be not apt to to beat over matters15 and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyer’s cases. So every defect of the mind may have a special receipt16.


1. Private life 2. Men of experience. 3. Mannerism
4. I.e., the knowledge of how to use them. “without”: outside.
5. Attentively.
6. Infusions of herbs, etc., used as home remedies- without real value.
7. Conversations, meetings. 8. Lively intelligence. 9. That which 10. Clever
11. Science. “Moral”: i.e., moral philosophy.
12. “Studies culminate in manners” (Ovid, Heroides). “Stond”: difficulty.
13. Gallbladder and kidneys.
14. “Dividers of cuminseed,” i.e., hairsplitters. “Schoolmen”: Scholastic philosophers
15. Discuss a subject thoroughly
16. Cure, prescription.

The Aim of University Training

The Aim of University Training
John Henry Newman1801-1890

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works, indeed, of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it had before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist to the engineer, though such, too, it includes within its scope.
But a University training is the great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end: it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. it is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments , a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.
It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently , and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he had a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He had the response of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which had resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortunes is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm. The art, which tends to make a man all this, is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its result.

This is my first blog article.

I 'm going to discuss some language and cultural issues in this blog.