Blog due 3-26

Asking Essential Questions

From a young age, I was told that asking questions is essential to learning. I remember always thinking of what kinds of questions I would ask. In elementary, I asked more general questions on the surface of  what was being taught. In middle school, I reasoned a bit more. In high school, some questions went into depth of the meaning and usefulness of the material. Now, in college, every question has some deeper relevance than I thought. It only seems realistic that big name philosophers focused on asking essential questions as well. As questions are asked, they get more and more specific. I could ask myself why I chose to study health sciences. I could continue to ask why, and what led me to each decision that concluded with me being here writing this entry. 

Before even reading each article, I knew that Hawking was a scientific philosopher. I myself am a science major, and have taken great interest in science since a very young age. Naturally, I agreed with most everything he stated in his entry. Hawking's essential questions were directed at the world's general theories. For every person on this world, there are millions of theories. For every action you take during a day, there is most likely a theory behind why you did that, or how. Hawking compares quantum mechanics, and the general theory of relativity. Within these two theories, the world is looked at from a general view, all the way to a microscopic view. An essential question being asked here is how to find a theory that relates both. From what I can infer, Hawking's essential questions grow from a general asking of how the world works. This is a general question that I can relate my paper topic to as well. My major is health sciences; therefore, most ultimately, my essential question is how the body works. My major has the same structure as Hawking's approach to theories in this world. 

Ruth Benedict's article has some relevance as well. Benedict focuses on essential questions about culture. She studied three different cultures and related their society to the individuals. She concluded that the individual and society are not antagonistic. We are led to believe that they are. Within each culture, they had different morals for different situations. Some cultures are more open to homosexuality, others are completely against it. In the health sciences and care field, there are many moral conflicts. Some do not believe that studying true dead bodies is ethical. But who determines that it is or isn't, and why does that person agree or disagree. These are essential questions that relate to culture. Benedict also mentions law in society, and how it has grown to manipulate our cultures and values. She makes a direct inference to land being owned. When land wasn't owned, the individual and society were not pinned against each other. Because of laws in the medical field, there are situations were society and the individual are looked upon as antagonistic even though they are not. 

In Thoreau's entry, he focuses on humanity. His essential questions are pointed toward our adaptations to nature. He spent a good amount of his time living off resources in the wild. He believed in borrowing and trading. He adapted morals and values, because of the environment that he was in. A question asked could be directly related to every type of environment and how it affects the humanistic ways of an individual.