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Showing posts from May, 2021

Balkan Ethnicities

 The main idea here is the historical recounting of the conditions that lead to ethnic conflict between the Serbians and Titoists. The Titoists tried to do away with ethnic groups and instead tried to have everyone unified under one party but their social exclusion and disenfranchisement of the Serbian minority ultimately caused conflict to arise. 

Zeno

 The passage author talks about Zeno's arguments regarding the unity of everything. To highlight Zeno's argument, the author focuses on Zeno's view of motion and how there can't be such a thing due to the infinite amount of tasks that any movement can be temporally broken down into. The author seems critical of Zeno's arguments and in order to refute Zeno's argument, the author lays out Aristotle's argument against Zeno's theory of motion. There are two key arguments that the author focuses on in the second to last and last paragraphs. 

Animal Suffering

The central thesis of this essay is that we shouldn't underestimate the amount of suffering that non-human species can experience. While it does mention that humans likely suffer tremendously due to their increased ability to interpret situations, it also argues that due to their lack of understanding, non-human species can equally suffer and it is unfair to discount this suffering. The passage really centers around this idea of a "speciesist"-- someone who places greater weight on the interests of members of its own species.