High of 19?!

It's currently 17 degrees outside with a wind chill of 8.  The high for today? 19 degrees.  The low? 6 degrees.  Holy chills!  That's cold!

I am in no way used to this sort of cold.  I come from a part of the country where it's consistently 40-60 degrees and raining.  For a few months we either go down or up- so one month during the summer we might consistently be up in 70s-80s, a few days hitting the upper 90s.  And one month or so in the winter we'll go down to the 20s-30s, perhaps getting some snow.

This is ridiculous!

Okay, done complaining now.  Except that I actually have to go out in the cold.  Yuck.  All the way up to the Grotto, too, so I can go to Mass.  Then to Patriot (our dining hall) for lunch and working on my honors thesis.

On a random note, my econ professor started class yesterday playing a song from Les Mis and it made my day. Everyone stared at me relentlessly when I started singing along...  what can I say?  You learn the lyrics when you play in the pit for the musical and go through hours and hours of rehearsal.

Even more random...  I trying to figure out a good paper topic for my Moral Philosophy thesis.  But I'm honestly coming up pretty short on topics.  One of those cases where there are lots of good topics and I'm looking for the right one and nothing's going to sound good until "the one" hits me.  I'm toying around with doing a philosophical defense of chastity/celibacy.  But I don't know.  I want to do something that's important for the Church to defend philosophically, as well as theologically.  And I don't necessarily want to do any of the typical topics... homosexuality, abortion, death penalty, etc.

I went to a talk last night that did bring up a possible topic for me, although I'm not sure I have the scientific background to really get a good grasp of it.  Essentially, science has gotten to the point where they can take adult stem cells and insert them into something like an embryo of a goat.  So, they could take stem cells of a human liver and insert them into the embryo of a goat.  That goat will then have a human liver.  (They've done different sorts of experiments with "chimera's"-- literally two animals meshed together.  Say a goat and sheep. The hind legs might be goat and the head and brain a sheep.  And if you biopsied one part or the other, one biopsy will say sheep and the other goat.  And they can mate.  So weird.)  But back to the goat having a human liver.  Conceivably, we could see a time when people have put copies of their exact organs into these animals, and, when they need them, bring the goat into the hospital with them and do the transplant.  But what happens when it's not just a liver?  What if it's a brain?  What if it's 80% you and only 20% sheep?

It sounds like sci-fi to me, but honestly...  it's the type of questions we're going to have to talk about nowadays.

The talk last night was absolutely excellent.  It was hosted by the Institute of Psychological Studies (IPS) and the speaker was Fr. Kevin Fitzgerald, S.J. Ph. D.  I think we're going to continue going to the series.  One of our professors, who teaches the Body or Soul class, invited us along and our dean paid for tickets.

After the talk, the four of us Mount students and our professor got to speak with Father for a while.  I think we were the only philosophy folks around-- everyone else seemed to be psychology or science.  But, we got into an interesting discussion...  See, with the discovery of evolution, there have been many consequences on how we understand the natural world.  For instance, there is really no longer any concept of "species."  The science world doesn't think of things in terms of species at all.

This is somewhat troubling for us philosophers, in our conception of metaphysics.  How do we determine essence?  Genera + differentia = species.  Also...  consider the soul.  If we're using Aristotle as foundational to our concept of the soul...  what happens?  Aristotle didn't see evolution and his concept of the soul doesn't really account for the process of evolution.

From a human perspective, inside of time, it now seems that at some point during the evolution of the hominoid, God "decided" to give man souls.  But what exactly does that mean now?  Fr. Fitzgerald proposed that we need to rethink exactly what we consider a soul to be...  Could it not be possible that at some point during the evolution process, a being was born that had the capacity for a love relationship with God?  And that that relationship is possible by what we define as "soul?"

It's interesting.  But does that mean, when the first human received a soul or was born with the ability to have a relationship with its creator, that his "older brother" was not human?  Or his parents?  Just somewhere along the line?

Crazy stuff.  Again, I'm severely lacking in knowledge in the science realm.  So I still as though I'm at a point of observing and absorbing.  Major thoughts will have to wait until I understand more.

Man, I'm going to miss the world of academia.  I really am.  I love it so much.  I love philosophy and I love these types of questions.  I don't what I'm going to do without it when I graduate.