Reading Hegel about a form of consciousness he calls "unhappy", because not only does it define itself as a dichotomy, but it divides and separates the aspect of itself that it feels to be unchangeable and essential. This leaves a self that sees itself as a changing transience, and that strives to relate to the truth, i.e. to the unchanging aspect of itself which was divested, and Hegel sees this...
Three headlines selected from this week's Science/Nature journals: (1) Memory in the innate immune system, (2) water in extrasolar atmospheres, and (3) enhancing photosynthesis in crops. Herein I summarize these, highlighting what makes them interesting to this person.
Reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit for the first time. Here I've read the first part of section B "Self-consciousness", chapter IV "The truth of self-certainty", part B "Freedom of self-consciousness". That elaborate indexing adumbrates the topic matter: Hegel's studying a self-conscious entity, whose basis for truth is its certainty of its own self, and which (just now) is acquiring the...
Charles Taylor's reading of Hegel on "sense-certainty" is informed by his understanding of the intellectual ecosystem from which Hegel's philosophy grew, esp. the German Romantics. It can be simplified as a desire to provide an intellectual basis for human expression, and for a unity between man and nature. These ideas can be seen as goals paralleling the main thrust of "Sense-certainty".
The description of the early analytic philosophers is that of a methodology, namely to analyze the world in terms of logical propositions. This is really a methodology, but I extract a metaphilosophy from it: philosophy seeks to (1) discover a method for describing the world (and its subjects) in such a way as to be informative (i.e. not mere tautologies nor contradictions), and then (2) to apply...
Experiencing the history of philosophy Reading “Hegel” by Charles Taylor, about the ideas, beliefs, opinions and motivations that flowed and ebbed in western Europe between the time of the Enlightenment and Hegel’s philosophical career. As I read Taylor, and my mind emulates and empathizes with the various zeitgeists, I discover that this in itself is a peculiar and personally...
← Reading the Phenomenology of Spirit (via the translation of A.V. Miller), seeking sense, but also a way of extracting and explaining that sense into writing. In this entry I am planning an adjusted approach to this problem: I plan to extract the major concepts as I find them, and allow an explanation to develop organically around them, hopefully, as they are collected. What I want to avoid is...
Kill Em All was Metallica’s first studio album in 1983. At this point, the lineup was Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton, and Hammet. The last famously replaced Mustaine, who was too much of an asshole for the band who had to be talked down to titling their debut KEM. Their original title would have been Metal Up Your Ass with complementary album art showing a hand stabbing with a dagger out of a toilet...
There’s a great new study that shows how similar vertebrates’ and insects’ brains are. The scientists conduct molecular, developmental, genetic, and structural/morphological, neurochemical, neurological, and higher-order function tests! So maybe that’s cool1, but no real surprise2 1. It’s actually super amazing cool. 2. Well, not to someone with a reasonable education in biology. But I think this...
The Bible Nut, whose given name was Joseph, had recently found out that between 7:00 pm and 7:30 pm each day the café across the road would sell their muffins at the reduced price of two dollars. Joseph’s permit allowed him to speak until 7:30 pm but lately, he had been stopping a little early to catch the sale. ‘And Jehovah called unto Moses, and spake unto him out …’ The Lord would forgive him...
