| Minutes Worked | 30 |
| Words/paragraphs Written | 1000 words |
| Type of Writing | typing notes and composition |
| Reflections on this writing | |
| Project | LLP |
| Goals for next time | 20 minutes. looks like this may be more than just a sprint |
Yeah, I know, if IU were doing NaNoWriMo, this would be nothing. But in a long term sort of a way, I think this is a good sign.
| Minutes Worked | 60 |
| Words/paragraphs Written | frankly, I’m not sure, but it sure felt good |
| Type of Writing | typing notes and composition |
| Reflections on this writing | This essay is FINALLY beginning to take shape |
| Project | LLP |
| Goals for next time | 20 minutes. I’m really hoping not to start out too fast and getting caught in a short sprint. This is for the long term. |
| Minutes Worked | 60 |
| Words/paragraphs Written | 323 words |
| Type of Writing | typing hand written notes |
| Reflections on this writing | what happened to October !?! |
| Project | LLP review |
| Goals for next time | coherence |
I don’t seriously expect that anyone is reading my writing journal entries. The idea behind the journal is just to record
Nonetheless, I have some responsibilities to my imagined audience. Most entries have included the abbreviation LLP which stands for Library of Living Philosophers.
The most recent volume of this prestigious series is dedicated to Jaakko Hintikka who was my dissertation advisor and mentor. (That’s us in the picture.) At his suggestion, I have been working on a review essay which compares his volume to the first in the series, which was dedicated to John Dewey.
Until today, this has been a frustrating exercise to say the least. I’ve read the entire Dewey volume. I do not recommend this exercise to anyone. If you’ve got an interest in specific issues of Dewey scholarship then selective reading might be interesting. Russell’s essay in particular, deserves to be read, albeit not very often.
According to the founder of this series, the Library of Living Philsophers has been to put interpretative questions to great philosophers before they die in hope of eliminating some of the more obvious debates over what the philosopher meant. This means that truly difficult interpretative debates can begin upon the philosopher’s demise.
Today I started working through Jaakko’s autobiographical essay. For the first time since I started can I claim to enjoy this project. Dewey’s essay was assembled by his daughter and lacks the immediacy that can be found in other volumes in this series. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I’ve known JH for over a decade and I was a witness to some of the episodes that he chronicles.
Both volumes illustrate the connection between the intellectual life of a philosopher and their philosophical projects. I don’t mean just in the simple fashion that Dewey’s rural boyhood influenced his practical theories of education, but by illustrating great minds engaged in serious issues. The LLPs volumes chronicle great philosophers wrestling with their central problems by providing both commentary on that philosopher but unpolished examples of the philosopher actually engaged in that work.
There aren’t many opportunities to really get at the fire that drives analytic philosophy. JH provides a model of what a philosopher is supposed to be or, at least, supposed to do. Sio does John Dewey. I’m working through this project at a moment when it seems very
likely that I’ll be leaving philosophy.
* This picture was an important motivator in my recent return to regular exercise.
| Minutes Worked | 45, two sessions |
| Words/paragraphs Written | 250/4 |
| Type of Writing | drafting paragraphs |
| Reflections on this writing | It feels good to get back into a productive mind set. Is that why I am constantly getting back into a productive mindset instead of just being productive |
| Project | LLP review |
| Goals for next time |
Ok. I admit that the last post was both dull and seemingly pointless, I admit that I hit the publish button primarily because I was becoming bored with my own reflection on the reception of NBC. I’ll be watching out not to do that in the future. One consequence of last week’s tag stunt is that I’ve acquired a readership. Not a large one by any measure but infinitely larger than the audience that some of my other writing experiments have attracted.
I’m not directly reading or responding to Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs (NBC), I did that rather awkwardly in a review to be published in Minds & Machines. Instead I’m taking a closer look at other folks who have taken the risk of commenting on this surprisingly slippering book in print. There’s certainly no lack of comment, the reviewers at Metascience weren’t satisfied by providing a single review. Their “review symposium” included 4 reviews and a response by Clark.
In the most recent issue of Janus Head, (Special Issue on “The Situated Body”, Evan Selinger and Timothy Engström respond to Clark’s book from a phenomenological position and Clark responds (I don’t expect Clark to respond to or even finish reading my own review when it appears, I can’t remember much about what I wrote except that it was pretty shallow.).
The Metascience and Janus Head approaches are on either end of possible responses to NBC. The Metascience reviewers are very taken with Clark’s optimistic techno-futurism and share his general belief in the great possibilities for the emerging cognitive technologies. They will not only increase our power over the natural world, but they will deepen our understanding of ourselves. The `active externalism’ presented by Clark contrasts with the position that we’re are spirits trapped in a cage of bone, rather we are collections of relatively processes centered in our skulls but also inextricably integrated with our environment. Building machines to enhance these processes requires a greater understanding, even if the machines become invisible in day to day practice. Selinger and Engström also focus on Clark’s futurism, but they’re more disturbed than excited by Clark’s optimistic approach. Clark’s arguments can be considered at least semi-phenomenological since he is both aware of the literature of the phenomenological tradition and focussed on the details of the lived environment. For a hardcore phenomenologist however, changes in the lived environment are not necessarily good. A change in horizons is bound to obscure as much as it reveals and the grounds for making an evaluation of the relative worth of the new horizon and the older horizons. Not only are things lost in the new horizon, but we may not be able to recall why they were valuable to begin with. Once the river has been put into the standing reserve, a Heideggerean might observe, it will seem as if that is the only natural way to consider the river.
One reason that my review was as uninteresting as it turned out is that I don’t think that NBC, or really any of Clark’s books, are technical treatises on ontology or such things. He writes in a vibrant tradition of popular scientific writing and thus has more in common with Carl Sagan than with Don Ihde.
The key to Clark is that his books (as opposed to papers and reports of research) have a strong element popularization. Wetware didn’t pretend to be anything else, and it was very successful in making complex material accessible to a non-specialist audience. (I used that particular book as a supplementary text in an undergraduate seminar on philosophy and cognitive science.) These books do not provide final answers so much as they synthesize and present more detailed, and thus more accurate work, written in journals for specialists.
| Minutes Worked | 25 |
| Words/paragraphs Written | 300 /4 |
| Type of Writing | drafting a paragraph |
| Reflections on this writing | The summer writing season finally begins. Getting the house on the market is going make this another difficult summer to get anything done. |
| Project | LLP |
| Goals for next time | get another 20 minutes done. |
I was tagged by caveblogem (see his 8 random factoids) and decided to give this a shot. Anyway, it turned out to be much more difficult then it appears at first.
1. My middle name is Jeremiah after my grandfather Jeremiah Fitzpatrick.
2. The other night I broke down and bought the Expanded Psionics Handbook.
3. Sometimes, when I can’t hear anyone else in my building at work, I run up and down the hallways with my arms outstretched making airplane sounds. This is a marked improvement from when I was working as an editor and I used to curl up under my desk in a fetal position.
4. The difference between the airplane and the hidden ball is 40mg of fluoxetine, breakfast of “best sport” award winners. Some people don’t think I should talk about this, but I find depression to be much like my allergies. I don’t bring them up unless there’s a reason, but then I have no issues about discussing them. Sometimes it’s good to know that even though my nostrils are running like faucets, I don’t have anything contagious. (Or they wonder why I’m spending the day staring at my shoes.)
5. I drink a lot of coffee.
6. I have a scar on my left knee. My parents’ backyard abuts a cemetery that goes back to early colonial times, this town was part of the original Plymouth Colony. They had this thing built into the side of the hill where they would keep anyone who died during the winter until the ground got warm enough for grave digging. I was jumping off of that and landed on a broken beer bottle. My father has a very similar scar on his left knee which he got when he was riding around Europe on a motorcycle. I think his scar is far cooler.
7. I have a very hard time stopping something once I’ve begun. From Eagle Scout to PhD to running distance this has been a defining characteristic of mine. Some think of this as a virtue, but really, I’m just too stupid to quit. Despite my best efforts, and a complete absence of belief, I have failed to become a lapsed catholic. For that matter, the boxes of comic books in my basement and the book mentioned in point 2 seem to indicate a difficulty quitting anything. However, since I have an 11 yo son, I’ve got a cover for these last two.
8. A large tree recently fell in my backyard and, in mere seconds, transformed the swing set into a metaphor for my career.
I note with relief that the rules call for tagging 8 “people” rather than the more difficult 8 “people who would be interested in continuing this chain letter” or, for me, nearly impossible 8 “friends”. While rockville doesn’t keep a journal he’d be a natural choice (note lack of reference to not going back there or wasting another year, you can thank me for that later). Since its not really possible for me to tag people who appreciate being tagged, I think that I’ll tag the following unsuspecting characters:
Phaidros,
mordicai,
jsebens,
wilzwife,
Alison Watkins,
Linda,
Zach, and
Sarah, who happened to wander by at an opportune moment.
And yes, I know that several of these blogs haven’t been updated anytime recently. But I didn’t link to any of my own blogs, so I think this is a sort of success. Also, considering the folks who make up this list, I’m fairly pleased about the mix.
Rules:
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their 8 things and post these rules.
3. At the end choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and to read your blog.
| Minutes Worked | 60 |
| Words/paragraphs Written | 165 |
| Type of Writing | drafting a paragraph |
| Reflections on this writing | This would have gone a lot easier if so much of it didn’t depend on a passage that may exist only in my flawed recollections. Finding the right point for comparison in the Hintikka LLP took up a lot of this hour. |
| Project | LLP |
| Goals for next time | edit blog paper |
