I decided to answer the following questions for my Philosophy finals in my blog. I'm quite certain nobody will try to directly use the answers I'll be giving, simply because Mr. Bulaong knows my URL already, to begin with :laughs:. Here's the list of questions...

Pardon the corny jokes I'd end up giving. I didn't want to bore you people to death, though I edited a few things, for fear that a certain someone would see them... :impish grin:. Anyways, good luck to us all! :)

1. For Kierkegaard, despair implies the highest demand made on the human person, that he be spirit. Spirit is the self. The self is a relation that relates itself to its own self. The misrelation that issues forth from such relationality is the human condition that is despair. Thus, despair arises as a continuance in which every actual instant of despair is to be referred back to its possibility.

2. Despair regarded in such a way in which one reflects upon the factors of the synthesis:

2.1. Finitude and Infinitude
2.2. Possibility and Necessity

3. Despair viewed under the aspect of consciousness:

3.1. Despair that is unconcscious that it is despair
3.2. Despair that is conscious that it is despair:
3.2.1. In despair at not willing to be oneself,
3.2.1.1. Over the earthly or something earthly
3.2.1.2. About the eternal or over oneself
3.2.2. The despair of willing despairingly to be oneself, or defiance

4. The World of Eidos is the realm of perfect, universal, and unchanging forms. It is the absolute world of essences. Plato's Allegory of the Cave illustrates the World of eidos vis-a-vis the sensible world.

5. Consciousness is never wrapped up in itself, never solus ipse. Over and above the epistemological problem, Husserl reveals the intentional nature of consciousness, while Heidegger questions the problem itself, for the human being is In-der-Welt-sein.

6. The world in which we dwell is a system of intelligible meanings. The intelligibility is given expression by concepts. The concept is not a schematic image of the terminus encountered by one's knowing, for concepts are abstract and universal. Thus, we can make judgments- saying what is, that is. Any judgment then is either true or false and never both. Truth is the agreement of the judgment with the state-of-affairs. In this context, knowledge is becoming, for it is conditioned by one's mode of existence.

7. Heidegger believes that truth is preceeded by "something" far more fundamental, the open region (Lichtung) that has been left unthought in metaphysics. In the open region, the Being of beings, which "itself" is not a being, unconceals and discloses itself. This disclosure and unconcealment occurs in temporality. We call this Aletheia.

8. Aletheia encompasses both objectivism and subjectivism. This is why we claim that (1) truth is relative, but not "relativistic", and (2) truth is absolute, but not "absolutistic". For truth is both historical and transhistorical; it is "absolute" yet "unfinished". Its criterion, therefore, is its fruitfulness.

9. The "essence" of the human being comes-to-presence in temporality on a personal as well as a collective level. This is best understood in the interhuman realm, where one's self, as truth, emerges as a progression and evolution. Thus, the authentic interhuman encounter- or genuine dialogue- resists seeming, speechifying (reduction), and imposition.

10. After two semesters of philosophy, we have the privelege of retrospect in asking this question: What is Philosophy? Lauer claims that Philosophy cannot be defined, for "the kind of reflection required for defining philosophy is itself philosophical. We can only know what philosophy is by doing it." In this case, we affirm; philosophy is an attitude that human beings bring with them in coming to terms with reality.

11. Philosophy is an "overarching rational reflection on experience, progressively revealing more and more of what experience implies, growing itself as experience grows, expands, as thinking affects the way we experience." (Lauer) The great philosophers serve as milestones or markers of the collective human experience, constituting a whole that is always evolving and never-finished.

Whew! That was a long one... imagine how long the answers would end up to be... Haha-haha!

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In other news...

See that little box at the bottom of the blog? That's a guestbook... I've no idea how to fix it up to make it look good, though... *shucks*

Likewise... protocols of war first. I'll give someone time, before having to decide what I ought to do next. I gave a distinct warning to never cross the people who matter to me, and it seems someone wasn't listening... ignorance is no excuse.