I thought that i would share my notes on the development of understanding of some texts - in particular, philosophy texts. A weblog seemed like a pretty good tool for keeping track of my updates - and a good way to share my interpretations with others - maybe even get some worthy comment from time to time. The American Bar Association is in town. They have a new president (the first African-American, notably) and are reviewing new rules under which lawyers would be ethically obliged to inform law enforcement of their client’s misdeeds. I have immense respect for the ABA as they even asserted an anti Bush Administration position on the ship-em-to-Guantanamo policies.

Notes for Chapters 1 and 2

Notes on After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

The choice between ethical and aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice to choose in terms of good and evil.

I really enjoyed reading After Virtue, although it took me quite a bit of time to work my way through it. A summation of the book would be this: We live in an era where we cannot rationally come to consensus about moral debate. We do this because we have symbols that relate to moral notions (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘unjust’) but the moral concepts that give ‘gravity’ to these symbols have been lost. Instead we manipulate their symbolic ghosts, without the weight of true referents. MacIntyre traces our modern conundrum to a breakdown in the Enlightenment era. The question that he asks, via Nietzsche, is whether or not moral societies ever existed (Nietzsche thought not).

HAL: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

Derrida was one of the lit-crit, Post-structuralist philosophy icons landmarks that defined English programs from the 80s to the present day. Derrida was consistently interested in finding out where what we see of the world came from. What are the filters that pre-evaluate our data for us? There are a whole lot of ivory tower buzzwords associated with Jacques and his interest but I’ll not play party to toying up my own pedantic sycophantic philo/lit-crit snob reputation by using them here. [Wikipedia Entry] Derrida, as he expresses in his biography/documentary, Derrida, became interested in how people see the world through filters as an French child growing up in Algeria.

Here’s a listing of some commonly used dirty rhetorical tricks – and a list of how to counter them!

In light of current research LINK it appears that 666 is not actually the number of the beast, it’s 616. Often when discussing the Bible with my father I took the position something like this: What’s so special about that book? It’s a collection of folk tales that happened to get on the most powerful broadcast medium of its day (the Roman news network). Had the Apache been in Judea, it might be in The Great Sprit we Trust. Pretty much every tribe has written a story about how they were the first, most beloved by God, deserve to have the good land, etc.

This evening I was in downtown MV and headed by the half-price bookstore, Book Buyers. While retrieving my bag from the counter (they didn’t have what I wanted) a harried woman came up behind me. She was having trouble locating the philosophy section and asked for a book by “Eee-manuel Can’t. K-A-N-T. I’m looking for it and I can’t find it.”. I had to restrain myself on two counts: She can’t find a book by Kant. h0 h0 h0! Being a bit harried I’m sure she wouldn’t have appreciated it. Butting in and asking which work she was looking for and trying to be of assistance.

Many people consider that the reason murder is so wrong is because you have deprived another being of all the potential in their future. Others feel that because a person has dependents, murdering someone causes a web of damage throughout the community. Both of these assertions lie at the heart of the liberal understanding of jurisprudence as pertains to homocide. But to see a dependent in the arms of the man you kill, to realize you will unalterably change their future, and to do it anyway - for no good reason. Then, my friend, what use has a society of one such as this?

“There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.” Andre Malraux (1901-1976)

Original Caption: Pakistani donkey owners take part in rally to condemn the publication of cartoons depicting Prophet in Karachi, Pakistan. Dear Fundamentalist World, We don’t care. In fact, we anti-care. We’re not really insulted, we’re somewhat bemused. Were this same activity done on the streets of Los Angeles we might call it performance art. This is what we call a free press. Try it out some time, it’s kinda fun. Yours, Western Liberal Society

“Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.” – Leonhard Euler I find this a very interesting attitude for a mathmatician. Why is this? Let us ask first, what is a mathematician? A mathematician is a person who practices the study of mathmatics. Well, bully for us. Gold stars all around. Let us then ask, philosophically: What is mathematics? Mathematics is the notational system that provides for the representation of

Some quasi-revolutionary thinking in a place where revolutionary thinking is rarely found: He [Brother Consolmagno] described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events. Brother Consolmagno is entirely correct. The human mind has sought to apply reason and narrative to the disorder of our world of experience since the very first humans. First we attributed the creation myths and the “why does X happen” myths to mysterious forces. We then structure those forces to have relationships to one another (The goddess of wisdom erupted whole and unborn outside of the ruler-god, etc.

In researching the religious opinions of the youth of England, the hoary CoE found that the youth are largely non-religious and don’t seem particularly bothered by the idea of there not being a spiritual life at all. Their creed could be defined as: “This world, and all life in it, is meaningful as it is,” translated as: “There is no need to posit ultimate significance elsewhere beyond the immediate experience of everyday life.” The goal in life of young people was happiness achieved primarily through the family.

“Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.” –Martin Amis “Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.”

What happens when you combine Bill Keane’s safe-as-mother’s-milk comic strip standard The Family Circus and cross it with the 19th century’s most aphoristic, volatile, and poetic thinker? I present to you The Nietzsche Family Circus.

You hear about those teachers, those classes, that just change the naive freshman’s ( or senior’s ) life in movies and stories. Bob Solomon did that for me, fundamentally, powerfully, and indelibly. While there was no “captain my captain” moment, Solomon was the kind of teacher that you learned so much from, it’s hard to imagine your life having been the same had he not been in it. To my great sadness, he has left this world. I left a comment over at Austinist with some surface recollections. I had the pleasure of taking 18th Century German Idealism ( Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, gateway to Nietzsche ) and his legendary Existentialism class while at the University.

Now that I re-read the title, I’m inclined to think I should change it because this is a very bold title. But we live in bold times, and bold times call for bold titles. Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations.

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

When I was in high school, I remember seeing this copy of The Stranger and being immediately blown away by the absolute weirdness of this stage troupe. Aside: Does anyone know what group this is, who took the photo, what it’s about? I think it’s the Bantam edition. I then proceeded to check the book out and I honestly can say I didn’t understand Mersault ( does anyone? ) and having read the book at least twice more and once in its native language, I’m still completely baffled by Mersault, his motivations, his identity. Mersault’s wedding plan, Mersault’s bliss over tablets of chocolate and cigarettes, his deadly flat attitude towards marriage, and ultimately his dispassionate choices standing on the sand.

“Hancock” is Will Smith’s summer vehicle: The notable attributes of Hancock are that he is: Homeless Surly Prone to intoxication I thought this was a bit of a predictable gag, the Juno-fication of the myth of the superhero. Instead of doing the right thing ( or, freaking the-hell-out when teenage daughter is pregnant ), witticisms will abound and the surly pregnant-teen ( or, superhero ) will grow on you. The Jason Bateman factor seemed all but to ensure this. But the other day I listened to the “In Our Time (Radio 4)” podcast with Melvyn Bragg on Kierkergaard and was reminded of the sheer terror and weight underlying the “Fear and Trembling” thesis and I thought: “How would you respond to the proposition if you were a superhero, that is, if you were objectively better than everyone else?

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” – Alexander Pope A recent Wikipedia article of the day sent along notice that the anniversary of the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” had just past. I thought I would take a look at the original text and see what my substantial investment in Latin education seine me of it. Google Books has a fine scan with the Le Seur commentaries. I was taking a look at De Mundi Systematae: Liber Tertius and saw several small postulates that were exceedingly brief and nowhere as complicated as the language in the rest of the text.

I just finished Daniel Everett’s “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.” This work records his years spent living among the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of living along the Amazon in Brazil. Everett was initially sent among them to convert them to Christianity. The modus operandi of his support organization was to study the target civilization and then give them the New Testament in their native language. Therefore, Everett’s background as a linguist made him an ideal missionary. In the end, however, it was the Pirahã who converted him to atheism. This reminded me of a story told to me by my AP English IV teacher in high school about a peer student who, the day before graduation, renounced his learning, renounced his faith, and left the seminary of Houston Baptist University.

I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs’ mangnum opus “The Death and Life of Great American Citites (1961)” which predicts ennui, relationship strife, social estrangement, and children run amok as side effects of adopting Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” model i.e. suburbanization and its concomitant social isolation. I was reading it on the plane next to a woman reading “50 Shades of Gray” and it got me thinking: could urban planning explain the wildfire outbreak of “stay at home moms” buying erotica en masse to the tune of “selling in Harry Potter-grade quantities?” One of the interesting parts quotes child-rearing mothers in suburbs speaking with Jacobs lamenting that the sanctioned park in the master-planned “fun zone” is dull, there’s nowhere to warm up or grab coffee with a stranger save the sanctum sanctorum of one’s own home, so the “park” is left empty and in time becomes a haven for underage drinking, graffiti and vandalism.