Thursday, October 24 - AM Advanced

We began with a Halloween-inspired opening discussion involving a thought experiment of a killer snail. Imagine someone showed you a briefcase with a million dollars inside and said, “This is yours… under one condition. If you take this money, a killer snail will be dropped on the globe somewhere and will pursue you for the rest of your life. It will never stop moving. If it touches you, you instantly die.” We shared our opinions: would we take the money? Most students in the class said no.

We then continued reading chapter 7. We learned about Samuel Johnson and the creation of dictionaries in the 18th and 19 centuries. We practiced both learning objectives. 

We then played a conversation game, a game intended to help students with our second learning objective: inferring opinions of participants in a conversation. Students were grouped into twos and given a notecard with a subject for conversation. Each group carried out this conversation in front of the class, which then inferred the opinions of the participants in the conversation. From this game, we learned that the best actors in class are Maimuna and Mohammed, who presented to us a hilarious conversation on the subject of spicy foods. 

We concluded class with a discussion of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. We decided we would discuss some of these arguments after our last foray into philosophy. We learned what the argument is and what some of the critiques of it are.