Brandon’s post on the ideas and history of Socrates’ teacher, Diotima of Mantinea: Diotima introduced Socrates to a paradigm for finding and understanding beauty at higher and more abstract levels, starting with the physical world and going deeper into the realm of ideas.

Kristie LeVangie, creator of the Shades of K- podcast, writes to celebrate Margaret Fuller and educated, thinking, and hardworking women everywhere who balance the life of the mind with work and family responsibilities: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.viewcustom&friendId=458113705&blogId=496569695&swapped=true

Callisto’s post on Simone de Beauvoir…she included the Wikipedia link to provide a comprehensive overview of Beauvoir’s life and works in terms of existentialism/freedom of choice and her feminist ideas, such as how she believed women should not be objectified as ‘other’ and ‘mysterious’ and should just be thought of as regular people: http://callisto24.insanejournal.com/42036.html

Valeria Holtz’ comparison of the ideas of Margaret Cavendish and Alfred Whitehead, in terms of the active role of the mind in generating and understanding knowledge of the physical world, and in terms of looking at patterns that emerge over expanses of space and time rather than separating and reducing observations to certain discrete units. Holtz argues that Cavendish’s ideas resemble Whitehead’s more so than currently thought, and that she certainly laid the groundwork for many of his seminal concepts. http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgzwhsd5_0j64qh2ss

I will add more as they come in, and will create one myself later.

Music for Theano’s Day: Eneida Marta’s Mindjer Doce Mel (Woman Sweet Honey) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFWwuNoFR9U From Africa’s Guinea-Bisseau (northwestern coast), Marta sings accompanied by a calabash water drum – a gourd placed in water – and the video shows girls and women dancing, swinging, and reading. And there are plenty of men in the band too, having a wonderful time singing and thinking.