In this article, I’d like to share with you a mnemonic technique I’ve started using lately to prepare for my exams in psychology. The things you have to retain in psychology are usually more or less unsystematic lists of facts that don’t bear any strong logical relation to one another. This stands in contrast to other subject matters like philosophy, for instance, where the relevant knowledge is systematically structured such that the premises are presupposed by the thesis, the consequences follow from it logically, all relevant objections stand in the relation of logical contradiction to at least some of its implications and so on. Thus, once you remember the thesis itself, the rest comes to mind pretty naturally, and this is why philosophy students usually don’t do a lot of learning by heart. The technique I’m about to describe to you is a pretty efficient way of artificially creating associative links between logically independent pieces of information such that you can recall the w...
In this dialogue, Socrates and Diotima discuss the conflict between freedom and determinism.