From pajamas to knowledge to truth to...?

I love pajamas. I love wearing them, I love the comfort they give to me, I love being able to go right into nap-mode after all my classes are done. So naturally it was horrifying to hear that I could not wear pajamas to my 9:30 philosophy class. In pondering the reasons for this, I remembered the teacher saying that in Europe, education was taken seriously. “What does that even mean,” I asked myself. How can a process be serious or less serious based on my comfort level? Then I wondered, “What even is education?” I was semi-content with the idea that education is an acquisition of knowledge, at least generally speaking. Likewise, philosophy is a love/study/quest for knowledge.

So then I had to ask myself what knowledge is, and that’s when my head started to really go crazy. Knowledge is something in our minds, but still it has to exist for us to talk about it, right? I also wrestled with the idea that maybe knowledge is somehow tied to truth. But that means 1) everything we know must be “truth,” 2) I know what truth is, and 3) I STILL need to know what “knowing” means in order to “know” what the truth is.

In the midst of all this thinking I realized that I was doing exactly what this class was aimed at (at least I think I was). So after an hour or so of confusing myself with more and more questions to which the answers seem unattainable, I found myself more confused than ever--but more importantly, I was intrigued by the idea of philosophy. And this all happened because I wanted to know why pajamas were not allowed.