Friday 8 November 2013

Spinoza's Ethics, Research Papers, and Audiobooks, again


During my undergraduate degree I took a course on Spinoza where we spent the whole semester talking about Spinoza's Ethics, which is a short book of about 200 pages that was written in geometrical order. By geometrical order I mean that in every section Spinoza would number some definitions, explicate them, list some axioms, and then set out numerous propositions that were followed by proofs. As I was falling in love with Spinoza's philosophy throughout this course, I was also growing tired and confused by his dense writing style. My classmates and I only had to read about 6 pages a class but I had to read those 6 pages multiple times because, like in geometry, each proposition was based off of previous definitions, axioms, and/or propositions. After weeks of frustration I had an ah ha moment where I thought: I bet Spinoza's ethics is on LibriVox! From then on, I would read my 6 pages and listen to those 6 pages on my walk to class. This duality provided me with a different perspective on Spinoza's Ethics and it made my experience of that class much less stressful.

The point of this story is to give you, the reader, a understanding of where I am coming from when I make the following claim: I think that there should be audiobook versions of research papers, with some exceptions for papers that are heavily laden with pseudocode, mathematical expressions, and graphs. Currently, this idea seems more like a wish than a thought but in my dreams I imagine clicking on the audiobook and nonfiction facets in the library catalogue, and getting results that aren't just self-help books and biographies.

References

Spinoza, B. (1632-1677/1992). Ethics: Treatise on The Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters(Shirley, S. Trans.). Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett.

Tak, K. (2011, January 20). LVx-CC-4-1-o1 [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/kai-tak/

3 comments:

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  3. I also learn Spinoza's philosophy. You write this writing style very strange ans i use this philosophy make my research papers. Spinoza writing style is very different. Meantime these types of philosophy can't found. But i have some resources for students if they want to write ethics research paper topics and interested in reading this writing style philosophy.

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