Philosophical notes…
Conversational Philosophy
“Western philosophy has its origins in conversation, in face-to-face discussions about reality, our place in the cosmos, and how we should live. It began with a sense of mystery, wonder, and confusion, and the powerful desire to get beyond mere appearances to find truth or, if not that, at least some kind of wisdom or balance.”
Nigel Warburton, "Talk With Me," Aeon Magazine - http://bit.ly/1b7dVcz
Excursus: The article begins with Wittengenstein's year in Norway, which remains an excellent model for deep thought. It echoes Heidegger's mountain hut and so many others. The key is to focus on the imagination and willingness to listen to others. Nonetheless, there are conversations that stay with us, questions asked that we can only answer after years tucked away in quiet places. Lastly, lest we forget, although Socrates disparaged writing in the Phaedrus, he did so within ear of his secretary Plato.
Teaching Ignorance
"Education is not about the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - W.B. Yates
Anselm after Wittgenstein
“We offer a reading of Anselm’s Ontological Argument inspired by Wittgenstein which focuses on the fact that the “argument” occurs in a prayer addressed to God, making it a strange argument since as a prayer it seems to presuppose its conclusion. We reconstruct the argument as expressive. Within the religious perspective, the issues are to be focused on the right object not to present an argument for the existence of God. While this sort of reading lets us understand much about the argument, it also opens new avenues of criticism, one of which is the problem of worship.”
Scott Aiken and Michael Hodges, "St Anselm's Ontological Argument as Expressive: A Wittgensteinian Reconstruction," Philosophical Investigations, DOI: 10.1111/phin.12036
The Pope On Mistakes
“Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing. … We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us… If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists — they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else — God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”
Full interview: http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview
On Genius
“I find it pleasing that science cannot account for genius. I do not myself believe in miracles, but I do have a strong taste for mysteries, and the presence, usually at lengthy intervals, of geniuses is among the great ones. Schopenhauer had no explanation for the existence of geniuses, either, but, even while knowing all the flaws inherent in even the greatest among them, he held that geniuses ‘were the lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless sea of error and bewilderment.’ The genius is able to fulfill this function because he is able to think outside himself, to see things whole while the rest of us at best see them partially, and he has the courage, skill, and force to break the logjam of fixed opinions and stultified forms. Through its geniuses the world has made what serious progress it has thus far recorded. God willing, we haven’t seen the last of them.”
Joseph Epstein, "I Dream of Genius," Commentary Magazine - http://bit.ly/17kpbAx
On Manichean Histories of Europe
“This persistent closed-mindedness—the insistence that any and every text and phenomenon be read back into one grand Manichean narrative—is not a problem unique to Gregory: indeed, the work that his resembles more than any other is Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, a clarion call for a robust secularity. Both of these books were written by venerable, erudite early modern scholars, convinced that the die of modernity were cast somewhere around 1650. They are both inordinately long—some of the longest nonfiction works published for mass consumption in the last few years. They are both obsessed with Spinoza. And both authors adopt the pose of a Cassandra, howling obvious truths into a world too blinkered by its iPhones to understand. Their great length, and unending cascade of details, stands in for a paucity of theoretical complexity. For both of them, the story itself is extremely simple: in the seventeenth century, there was a grand parting of the ways, and ever since then the children of light have been combating the children of darkness. Israel and Gregory are two sides of the same coin—and stamped on that coin we find the mark of a king.”
"An Intended Absence? Democracy and the Unintended Reformation," - http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=38996
Paper versus Pixel
“Our eyes tell us that the words and pictures on a screen are pretty much identical to the words and pictures on a piece of paper. But our eyes lie. What we’re learning now is that reading is a bodily activity. We take in information the way we experience the world—as much with our sense of touch as with our sense of sight. Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols... A recent experiment conducted with young readers in Norway found that, with both expository and narrative works, people who read from a printed page understand a text better than those who read the same material on a screen. The findings are consistent with a series of other studies on the process of reading. “We know from empirical and theoretical research that having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension,” wrote the Norwegian researchers. They suggested that the ability of print readers to “see as well as tactilely feel the spatial extension and physical dimensions” of an entire text likely played a role in their superior comprehension.”
Nicholas Carr, "Paper Versus Pixel" Nautilus Quarterly, issue 4, 2013 - http://bit.ly/15r5tWT
On Attention & Consciousness
“And so, whether or not the attention schema theory turns out to be the correct scientific formulation, a successful account of consciousness will have to tell us more than how brains become aware. It will also have to show us how awareness changes us, shapes our behaviour, interconnects us, and makes us human.”
Michael Graziano, "How Consciousness Works," Aeon - http://bit.ly/17R8jQL
Why Teach
“Mr. Edmundson strives to read and teach the authors who inspire him with what he calls ‘humane sensitivity.’ ‘The battle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths,’ he says. He went to college to see if there were possibilities beyond what others had defined as his limits. You sense that he still goes to the classroom each semester seeking new possibilities — for his students and for himself.”
"Mark Edmundson's Essays Ask 'Why Teach?'" - http://nyti.ms/17R5nn5
Gaming Ethics
“They were only an hour from the summit [of Mt. Everest], and they debated whether to abort their climb to try to save the man. Hall’s partner was distraught - he wanted to help even if that meant abandoning the climb. Hall had no such ambivalence. ‘I thought I would have reacted differently, but when I looked at him, I realized that there was just nothing we could do,’ Hall says. ‘I felt really sad, but I figured he was dead or he was about to die.’ Hall persuaded his partner to keep moving, and they scrambled past the dying man. ‘It was a Day Z moment,’ Hall says grimly. The man died, and his body was left behind, encased in snow and ice. An hour later, Hall reached the summit. ‘The sight was so breathtaking it was like being slapped in the face,’ he recalled on the bog. ‘I immediately started crying... I’ve thought a lot about how to summarize that feeling, and the best I can do is to say that if there is a God, then it’s like looking upon his face.’”
Joshua Davis, "Master of Zombies: One Man's Obsession Turns into a Blockbuster Game" - Wired Magazine, September 2013.