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At the beginning of this semester, we looked at liberty, privacy and freedom of speech. I found this section quite interesting, especially since unlike first semester it applied flat to my life. Freedom of speech was a particularly interesting topic to me, because I couldnt work out my opinion on it. When I thought about the switch off in purely philosophical terms, I thought that there should be unrestricted freedom of speech and that censorship should be kept to a minimum. barely when I thought about the issue in relation to the authentic world, I wasnt so received. This is one of the frustrating things about philosophy - what appears to be philosophically sound in my mind turns out quite differently when applied to the real world. I theorize it is in finding a balance that the real difficulty lies. Throughout the course of the first essay, I found myself arguing views that I hadnt thought I believed in - and even now Im not sure if I do. I think sometimes what works philoso phically still cant apply to the real world for considerations that shouldnt have to have a bearing on the issue but do anyway. In the issue of freedom of speech, I found that philosophically hate-speech doesnt cause any significant harm. But when I think about it in the context of the outside world, I firmly believe that it does. This discrepancy is confusing to me.The unit we studied on eyewitness evidence I found to be rather dry - I couldnt really relate to a whole lot of legal stuff. When it was put in the context of the real-life fuck up victim I found it much more accessible. The essay topic that I chose seemed again rather dull, although it raised interesting side-issues, like the nature of our connection. I tried to think why science was regarded as the best way we have to gain knowledge, and came up with a rather dismay view of society - that it was matter oriented, money oriented, concerned with facts and figures, things that were able to be thought of in terms of quan tities. And that we tended to ignore the abstract, the indefinable, the unexplainable. This is why I find philosophy occasionally depressing - it forces me to look at the world in which I live, and not like what I see. And yet it is simultaneously liberating because I can see that through canvas philosophy, I can look at those other aspects and move beyond what society thinks.