I just finished rereading Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. I read it for a philosophy course in college and returned to it at the urging of my book club.
One of the questions discussed during our meeting was what we got out of reading the book. I recognize the value of such a pragmatic criteria for book reading and use something similar more often than not. I’ve abandoned plenty of books because I didn’t think I’d get anything from them or felt like I’d learned enough from the pages I did read.
Every once in a while I notice a story about metrology, or the science of measurement, that reminds me how many of our concepts about the world are carefully constructed and contingent.
A few months ago I asked just how long ago the civil war was after hearing a story about a book stolen during the civil war and just recently returned. On the scale of a human life or generation the civil war is very recent history and yet America seems to have completely buried it in the past.
A note from a few months back when I was reading Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’m posting it as a reminder to my future self.
Reading Wittgenstein is a challenge. But toward the end of Philosophical Investigations it seemed to me that there were three spheres of argumentation going on in Wittgenstein.
There is the sphere of ordinary language. This is the source for the examples and cases which Wittgenstein builds his argument.
Is Twitter or any kind of technology killing poetry? That was the argument I listened to yesterday afternoon at a local Meetup group.
I shake my head, silently, every time these arguments come up because they capture something real about our crazy modern life but also leave so much behind.
To me poetry is just another form of technology - a linguistic one - which we use to communicate with each other.
Is there such a thing as an immoral work of art?
I attended a panel on this topic last weekend at Diversicon and have been thinking about the question since then. Opinion among the panelists and the audiences was divided, some clearly thought that a movie or a story could be immoral, others were less sure. There is not an obvious intuitive response to this question.
The major example on the panel was the film Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith.
I’m an occasional visitor to the local Socrate’s Cafe discussion group. Most of the time it frustrates me. It’s predominantly a white, middle-class group that never wants to talk about business or personal experiences with culture. The talk always returns to politics - usually national. And vague reifications about this culture does x, when it should be doing y.
Business is one of my ongoing obsessions that I wish more people would think about in a serious way.
A limited outline of philosophical methods and history. Being a partial summary from Philosophy’s Second Revolution by D.S. Clarke
Clarke divides philosophy into three eras. Classical, Cartesian, and Linguistic.
The classical Greek philosophy used rational intuition, “a direct apprehension of the basic structure of things,” to understand the world and do philosophy. Rational thought was a direct source of evidence for physics, metaphysics, ethics, etc. The goal was a rational cosmology that explained the world and everything in it.
I’m struggling to understand and explain a spectrum of opinions about the recession that I see exhibited by conservatives. I have three examples that seem to form a gradient around the idea of self-reliance and group action.
At the extreme is Charles Murray who recently delivered a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. I found the lecture via a link at Matthew Yglesias weblog.
Based on another long discussion about rationality and the goals of philosophy.
Claim:
Everyone is biased therefore a philosophical program to achieve agreement is nonsensical because the biases will never be overcome on philosophical questions. Mathematics has achieved greater agreement than philosophy because it has answered basic questions, such as 2+2=4, while philosophy has failed to answer basic questions of any kind - witness the continued argument about philosophical questions.
Watch this:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thxSlKVz3fo&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
I found this video at Presentation Zen. It’s one of the 34,000 60-second video applications that people all over the world submitted to the Queensland Tourism Board for the “best job in the world”, working as an island caretaker on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
Here’s another video, one of 50 that has been put on the short list:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vafzo53E6vg&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
After watching these videos I realized something about the paradox of talent in the contemporary world.