Socrates And The Self Defense Clause Essays - Philosophy, Ethics

Socrates And The Self Defense Clause The question of Morality and what it means: Throughout the recorded history of man, there has been a series of questions continually asked by each generation. ?Who are we? Where are we going? Why? Is there a God Are just a few of the questions that continue to engage the minds of so many today. But perhaps the most difficult one to really grasp has to do with the theories of ethics and morality, or in layman?s terms, ?What is good and bad, and how do we live our lives to uphold the good while shunning the bad As time has gone on there have been many theories and ideas proposed, ranging from the divine hand theory (dealing with how organized religion handles the matter of ethics), from utilitarianism (short version maximizing pleasure while minimizing pain, ethical egoism on a grander scale really), to the vague theories of Immanual Kant, (who stressed the theory of universal law, categorical imperatives, and what would happen if we applied it, supposedly). With all these great philosophical minds over the course of eons workin g on the problem with ethics, I find it rather ironic that no one pays heed to what one of the greatest minds in history, Socrates ( circa 470 B.C. to 399 B.C.) had to say concerning this question of morality. Socrates, seemingly was able to create a whole ethical theory based on a single statement, ?One must never do wrong, even for wrong received.? Words he uttered literally on his death bed just days before his execution took place in Athens. Simple words, yet with such magnitude and underlying meaning that we must examine this further in order to fully understand it. The statement, ?One must never do wrong, even for wrong received? seems to be a predecessor to the Judo-Christian philosophy ?treat others as you would have them treat you? or more commonly referred to as the golden rule. A first glance we seem to have all we need laid out for us right there. This statement calls for us to be honest, not to kill or maim anyone, and creates a world where life is more simple. Or does it? What about situations where some one is violating you, trying to harm you? May you defend yourself, and in fact is self defense a legitimate moral justification in this case? Looking at the literal text in ?One must never do wrong, even for wrong received? seems to imply that you may not. Even if our life is at stake, since attacking them would be doing wrong, we must not do so.? So in other words, Socrates must hold that self defense cannot be a legitimate moral justification for your actions. Ah but does he really ? Is it wrong to defend your life? I think not, in fact it is one of the highest goods possible. Not only are you saving a life by doing so (your own) you are also reaffirming to the public that human life is indeed sacred, and more so should be defended against all evils. In fact your self-defense appeals to the Athenian virtues of justice. One must recall that Athenians hold six virtues up above all others, and that these should not only be followed, but are indeed the highest qualities one could have. In this example, by defending your life your showing giving a shining example of justice (namely its wrong to kill). Since you are showing justice (knowing what is right and what is wrong) your making an example of our initial maxim ?One must never do wrong, even for wrong received.? You can also defend yourself in a nonlethal way, which by then doing so you are appealing to the Athenian virtue of piety (knowing what is sacred, or holy if you will). By saving your life and sparing your attackers, you are showing that life is a sacred thing, which further promotes your own piousness. For the vast majority of us, it hold true that we value life above all else, that defending it is a good in of itself, and based on Athenian virtue it seems the same here. Also by knowing what is pious

Nahuatl - The Lingua Franca of the Aztec Empire

Nahuatl - The Lingua Franca of the Aztec Empire Nhuatl (pronounced NAH-wah-tuhl) was the language spoken by the people of the Aztec Empire, known as the Aztec or Mexica. Although the spoken and written form of the language has substantively changed from the prehispanic classical form, Nahuatl has persevered for half a millennium. It is still spoken today by approximately 1.5 million people, or 1.7% of the total population of Mexico, many of whom call their language Mexicano (Me-shee-KAH-no). The word Nahuatl is itself one of several words that mean to one extent or another good sounds, an example of encoded meaning that is central to the Nahuatl language. Mapmaker, priest, and leading Enlightenment intellectual of New Spain Josà © Antonio Alzate [1737–1799] was an important advocate for the language. Although his arguments failed to gain support, Alzate vigorously objected to Linnaeuss use of Greek words for New World botanical classifications, arguing that Nahuatl names were uniquely useful because they encoded a storehouse of knowledge that could be applied to the scientific project. Nhuatls Origins Nhuatl is part of the Uto-Aztecan family, one of the largest of the Native American language families. The Uto-Aztecan or Uto-Nahuan family includes many North American languages such as Comanche, Shoshone, Paiute, Tarahumara, Cora, and Huichol. The Uto-Aztecan main language diffused out of the Great Basin, moving where the Nahuatl language probably originated, in the upper Sonoran region of what is now New Mexico and Arizona and the lower Sonoran area in Mexico. Nahuatl speakers are first believed to have reached the Central Mexican highlands sometime around AD 400/500, but they came in several waves and settled among different groups such as Otomangean and Tarascan speakers. According to historical and archaeological sources, the Mexica were among the last of the Nhuatl speakers to migrate from their homeland in the north. Nhuatl Distribution With the founding of their capital at Tenochtitlan, and the growth of the Aztec/Mexica empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, Nhuatl spread all over Mesoamerica. This language became a lingua franca spoken by merchants, soldiers, and diplomats, over an area including what is today northern Mexico to Costa Rica, as well as parts of Lower Central America. Legal steps which reinforced its  lingua franca  status included the decision by King  Philip II  in 1570 to make Nahuatl the linguistic medium for clerics to use in religious conversion and for the training of ecclesiastics working with the native people in different regions. Members of the nobility from other ethnic groups, including Spaniards, used spoken and written Nahuatl to facilitate communication throughout New Spain. Sources for Classical Nahuatl The most extensive source on Nhuatl language is the book written in the mid-16th century by friar Bernardino de Sahagà ºn called the Historia General de la Nueva Espaà ±a, which is included in the Florentine Codex. For its 12 books, Sahagà ºn and his assistants collected what is essentially an encyclopedia of the language and culture of the Aztec/Mexica. This text contains parts written both in Spanish and Nhuatl transliterated into the Roman alphabet. Another important document is the Codex Mendoza, commissioned by King Charles I of Spain, which combined a history of the Aztec conquests, the amount and types of tributes paid to the Aztecs by geographical province, and an account of Aztec daily life, beginning in 1541. This document was written by skilled native scribes and overseen by the Spanish clerics, who added glosses in both Nahuatl and Spanish. Saving the Endangered Nahuatl Language After the Mexican War of Independence in 1821, the use of Nahuatl as an official medium for documentation and communication disappeared. Intellectual elites in Mexico engaged in a creation of new national identity, seeing the indigenous past as an obstacle to the modernization and progress of Mexican society. Over time, Nahua communities became more and more isolated from the rest of Mexican society, suffering what researchers Okol and Sullivan refer to as a political dislocation arising from the lack of prestige and power, and a closely-related cultural dislocation, resulting from modernization and globalization. Olko and Sullivan (2014) report that although prolonged contact with Spanish has resulted in changes in word morphology and syntax, in many places there persist close continuities between the past and present forms of Nahuatl. The Instituto de Docencia e Investigacià ³n Etnolà ³gica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) is one group working together with Nahua speakers to continue practicing and developing their language and culture, training the Nahua speakers to teach Nahuatl to others and to actively collaborate with international academics in research projects. A similar project is underway (described by Sandoval Arenas 2017) at the Intercultural University of Veracruz. Nhuatl Legacy There is today a wide variation in the language, both linguistically and culturally, that can be attributed in part to the successive waves of Nahuatl speakers who arrived in the valley of Mexico so long ago. There are three major dialects of the group known as Nahua: the group in power in the Valley of Mexico at the time of contact was that Aztecs, who called their language Nahuatl. To the west of the Valley of Mexico, the speakers called their language Nahual; and dispersed around those two clusters was a third who called their language Nahuat. This last group included the Pipil ethnic group who eventually migrated to El Salvador. Many contemporary place names in Mexico and Central America are the result of a Spanish transliteration of their Nhuatl name, such as Mexico and Guatemala. And many Nahuatl words have passed into the English dictionary through Spanish, such as coyote, chocolate, tomato, chili, cacao, avocado and many others. What does Nahuatl Sound Like? Linguists can define the original sounds of classical Nahuatl in part because the Aztec/Mexica used a glyphic writing system based on Nahuatl that contained some phonetic elements, and the Spanish ecclesiastics matched the Roman phonetic alphabet to the good sounds they heard from the locals. The earliest extant Nahuatl-Roman alphabets are from the Cuernavaca region and date to the late 1530s or early 1540s; they were probably written by various indigenous individuals and compiled by a Franciscan friar. In her 2014 book Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory, archaeologist and linguist Frances Berdan provides a pronunciation guide to classical Nahuatl, only a small taste of which is listed here. Berdan reports that in classical Nahuatl the main stress or emphasis in a given word is almost always on the next-to-last syllable. There are four main vowels in the language: a as in the English word palm, e as in bet, i as in see, and o as in so. Most consonants in Nahuatl are the same as those used in English or Spanish, but the tl sound is not quite tuhl, it more of a glottal t with a little puff of breath for the l. See Berdan for more information. There is an Android-based application called ALEN (Audio-Lexicon Spanish-Nahuatl) in a beta form that has both written and oral modalities, and uses homemade illustrations, and word search facilities. According to Garcà ­a-Mencà ­a and colleagues (2016), the app beta has 132 words; but the commercial Nahuatl iTunes App written by Rafael Echeverria currently has more than 10,000 words and phrases in Nahuatl and Spanish. Sources Edited and updated by K. Kris Hirst Berdan FF. 2014. Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory. New York: Cambridge University Press.Dakin K. 2001. Nahuatl. In: Carrasco D editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p 363-365.Garcà ­a-Mencà ­a R, Là ³pez-Là ³pez A, and Muà ±oz Melà ©ndez A. 2016. An Audio-Lexicon Spanish-Nahuatl: Using technology to promote and disseminate a native Mexican language. In: Bradley L, and Thouà «sny S, editors. CALL communities and culture – short papers from EUROCALL 2016: Research-publishing.net. p 155-159.Maxwell JM. 2001. Languages at the Time of Contact. In: Evans ST, and Webster DL, editors. Archaeology of Ancient Mexico and Central America: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. p 395-396.Mundy BE. 2014. Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Ethnohistory 61(2):329-355.Olko J, and Sullivan J. 2014. Toward a comprehensive model for Nahuatl language research and revitalization. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berk eley Linguistics Society 40:369-397. Sandoval Arenas CO. 2017. Displacement and revitalization of the Nahuatl language in the High Mountains of Veracruz, Mexico. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 16(1):66-81.Various authors. 2011. Los Nahua. Cultura Viva, Arqueologà ­a Mexicana 19(109, May-June)

What can we learn about the structure of the traditional indian Essay

What can we learn about the structure of the traditional indian society from the Ramayana story - Essay Example For instance, respect for teachers and elders are an important traditional value amongst the Indian families. A sage is about to arrive at the palace of King Dasharatha, and this incident reflects something profound about the Indian society. R. K. Narayan writes, â€Å"On a certain afternoon, messengers at the gate came running to announce â€Å"Sage Vishwamitra.† When the message was relayed to the King, he got up and hurried forward to receive the visitor.† (7) A King going all the way to receive a sage. Seems incredible, but that was the value system and even today sages command immense reverence. What it is to be an ideal human being and what is an ideal society? One will not be able to find a better work than Ramayana to find the treasure-house of values. Those are not mere ideals for practicing sitting on the ivory tower! Every value described and defended in the Ramayana stands the test of practicability. That which is not practical, can not be noble or spiritual either. An individual has to play different roles in different stages of one’s life. Donning the human body, Lord Ram has shown to the humanity how to live the divine life. His reign on this Planet Earth has been hailed as Ram Rajya, which means the ideal policy that the human beings can aspire for. The impressionable minds of the youngsters need to be given the correct values. The Sages are embodiments of truth and love. No extraneous considerations are taken into account, and the question of defending Dharma assumes supreme priority, and all other overriding factors are side-tracked. The slaying of demon Thataka illustrates the correct style of imparting the right values to Ram when SageViswamitra was on his way to his hermitage in the thick forest. The demon used to harass the sages performing sacred rituals and plunder the forest wealth. When Vishwamitra orders Rama to slay her, Rama hesitates for a while, whether it is proper to slay a woman! Women