The semester is almost over and I was just going over my Philosophy readings that had so many of my doodles. Some of them were about the philosophical concepts, some of them were bad puns, and the rest are just nonsense. (but I was listening! PROMISE!)

But again, this is a sketch blog so I guess posting the doodles is apt for sharing the inner workings of my mind.

The next three sketches were drawn when we were discussing Rudolf Otto's "Ideas in the Numinous" He explained that we experience the numinous as Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, a terrifying and fascinating mystery.

(If you know stat, you'll find this corny. XD)
According to Otto, the reason for its mysterious nature is in the fact that the numen is "Wholly other." Something being an "other" to us, at least in Otto's context, means that it is difficult to understand in the same way that other people are difficult to understand because we cannot really "put ourselves in their shoes" in an absolute way.
We moved on with St. Anselm and Gaunilon's argument... as in a literal argument... about Anselm's conceptual ontological argument, and then St. Thomas Aquinas' "The Five Ways"
I didn't doodle much there.
The Problem of Evil as written by H.J. McCloskey. We got to that in the middle of the semester.It confused a lot of people, but it was one of those readings that really made people react and discuss (and discuss furiously sometimes). I mean, heck... it's always something when it's about disproving God, one way or another with a lot of people. Without a doubt, the article was nothing short of heresy to a lot of people who aren't used to their faith being questioned in such a systematic way. But I thought it was okay... insightful... like this pineapple.

Haaanyway, after that topic, we moved on to a Sketch of a Phenomenology and Metaphysic of Hope, from Gabriel Marcel's Homo Viator.

Yeah. Before he discussed genuine hope, he described its opposite, despair. One of the characteristics of despair was spiritual autophagy, a feeling of the flame of life (analogy of a person's vitality) eating itself until there's nothing left but emptiness and death. And in the absence of that flame is the darkness where a person ceases to be able to see the future.
Time stops and cycles back where everything is expected to repeat. Desperation is giving up in the clutches of captivity and anxiously anticipating the return of something lost. The darkness of desperation keeps the person from seeing something else in the future whose shape is only distinguishable in the light of genuine hope.