Sunday, 15 April 2007
The first 3 items are from my Bloglines backlog and are all also from the wonderful 3 Quarks Daily.
Smith, Justin E. H. “Selected minor works: Where’s the philosophy?” 8 May 2006
This is absolutely brilliant and if I start quoting it I’ll just have to reproduce the whole thing. So just go read it! It is brilliant and hilarious.
Now that I am a tenured professor of philosophy, and thus may resign from service in my profession’s pep squad without fear of losing my salary, I’m going to come right out and say it: after all this time as a student, and then as a graduate student, and then as a professor of philosophy, I still have absolutely no idea what philosophy is, and therefore what it is I am supposed to be doing.
…
There’s formal logic, but if I agree with Heidegger on anything it is that logic, like shortpants, is for schoolboys. In the good old days, when one learned anything at all at school, one learned the forms of argumentation, the fallacies together with their Latin names, etc. This is all really just advanced critical thinking, and if I can see that q follows from p on a symbol-dense page, I still don’t believe that counts as knowing anything. As Wittgenstein said, everything is left the same.
…
But Richard Rorty is at least right to say that what philosophy departments offer fails largely to live up to the sense that newcomers have that the discipline ought to be doing something rather more, well, important.
Bravo! [And, yes, I realize that I just contradicted myself.]
Huber-Dyson, Verena. “Gödel in a nutshell.” Edge 14 May 2006. At 3QD 19 May 2006.
This is a very short piece.
The essence of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition.
Harpham, Geoffrey. “Science and the theft of humanity.” American Scientist Online July-August 2006. At 3QD 9 July 2006.
Medium length article detailing the fall of the integrated thinker with the rise of the Modern university, the segregation of the disciplines, the beginning reintegration with the rise of interdisciplinarity, and the recent “plunder” of the humanities by the sciences.
Humanists, who have been only partially aware of the work being done by scientists and other nonhumanists on their own most fundamental concepts, must try to overcome their disciplinary and temperamental resistances and welcome these developments as offering a new grounding for their own work. They must commit themselves to be not just spectators marveling at new miracles, but coinvestigators of these miracles, synthesizing, weighing, judging and translating into the vernacular so that new ideas can enter public discourse.
They—we—must understand that while scientists are indeed poaching our concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the transformation of knowledge today. For their part, those investigating the human condition from a nonhumanistic perspective must accept the contributions of humanists, who have a deep and abiding stake in all knowledge related to the question of the human.
Guarino, Nicola and Christopher Welty. “Identity and subsumption.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 111-126.
This is an interesting but difficult article, heavy on logic. Builds on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence and the constraints they impose on the subsumption relationship (so-called is-a relationship) in the service of building “simpler, cleaner, and ultimately more reusable taxonomies” (124).
Sunday - Monday, 15 -16 April 2007
Green, Rebecca. “Internally-structured conceptual models in cognitive semantics.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 73-89.
Delivers a highly readable account of the basic cognitive semantic phenomena within cognitive semantics and establishes the prevalence of internal structure at all conceptual levels. Image schemata, basic level concepts, and frames are lucidly explained before moving on to mappings between these phenomena—metonymy, metaphor and blended spaces.
Highly recommended.
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
Khoo, Christopher, Syin Chan and Yun Niu. “The many facets of the cause-effect relationship.” In Green, Bean and Myaeng, eds. The Semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective. Information Science and Knowledge Management series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002: 51-70.
Provides an overview of the cause-effect relation from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology and linguistics. Focuses on causal inference in text comprehension by looking at explicit expressions of causation (causal links, causative verbs, resultative constructions, conditionals, and causative adverbs, adjectives and prepositions) and implicit causal attribution of verbs. Also considers types of causation and roles in causal situations.
Recommended.
Tuesday - Saturday, 17 - 21 Apr 2007
IFLA. Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model (Draft), 2007-04-01
Am most of the way through it; may finish it today. It looks like Kathryn and I (and perhaps Allen) will be leading a discussion on it for Metadata Roundtable in June or early July before comments are due.
Wednesday - Friday, 18 - 20 Apr 2007
Baggini, Julian. Atheism. A Very Short Introduction (series). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Read the 1st 2 chapters before and after the Andrew Bird show. Finished reading it Thursday and Friday during lunch.
Excellently written and argued. I only had one real issue.
On page 69, in a section on Death in the chapter on Meaning and purpose, Baggini writes:
Take the idea that life can only have a meaning if it never ends. It is certainly not the case that in general only endless activities can be meaningful. Indeed, usually the contrary is true: there being some end or completion is often required for an activity to have any meaning. A football match, for example, gains its purpose only because it finishes after 90 minutes and there is a result. An endless football match would be as meaningless as a kick around the park. Plays, novels, films, and other forms of narrative also require some kind of completion. When we study we follow courses that end at a determinative point and don’t go on forever. Take virtually any human activity and you find that some kind of closure or completion is required to make them meaningful (emphasis mine).
I understand the point he is trying to make and, in general, I agree with him. Also, part of the problem is that he never defines “meaning,” although he does define “meaning of life.”
But I still say WTF? Depending on the level of play, and perhaps other factors, a football match may very well serve a purpose (and this have meaning) whether or not it ends in 90 minutes. It may end early due to an injury or weather (non-pro), and does any game that goes into overtime not have a purpose?
And his equating a “kick around the park”—in essence, play—as meaningless is unconscionable. I get so very tired of bright—and not so bright—people claiming play serves no purpose and/or is meaningless! It may, in fact, be one of the highest forms of meaning attainable by humans.
And as for study always ending at a determinative point (at least to have any meaning), well, I imagine many of you can just about guess at the apoplectic fit that brought on.
Please realize that I am being particularly harsh on Baggini over this paragraph. This is a lovely little book that is overall quite well argued, despite the shortcomings of this paragraph. It is a wonderful read for the atheist, the agnostic and the religious. It is not dogmatic in any sense. He detests fundamentalism in any form.
Very highly recommended.