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".
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...
← As consciousness proceeds into self-consciousness, it is forced into contact with another ego. The mediation of this contact is apparently necessary. Something to do with infinity and dynamic unities and the law of inversion and life. I am not convinced. For the in-itself, or the universal result of the relation of the Understanding to the inwardness of things, is the distinguishing of what is...
Editorial notes: In September 2014, Shai publishes his fifth blog entitled “M-III” (short for Meantime-III) and subtitled “The Traveller is the Journey” (not to be confused with a later blog entitled “The Traveller is the Journey”, published in 2015). In the ‘About’ page of the blog, Shai shares his observations on his place in the world: “So far most I can tell is that this...
An important principle I have absorbed is that while the edifice of philosophy have their values, unless one is viewing them as an historian then they are also merely tools and words; useful but not to be confused with philo-sophia: love of knowledge. Let’s raise the question, “Why read philosophical treatises?” First, it can inspire. But it can be valuable even when approached...
On these days, I ask myself what I’ve learned, and often that prompts me to write. Sometimes it’s lessons. Lessons like, “Don’t think (often) about what other people are thinking,” I believe such lessons help me grow. Growth means clarity of experience, a loosening of bonds, and a dispersal of questionable cargo. As I expand, I want to incorporate into my reality a...
Editorial notes: The article begins with a comparison between the ‘self’ and the ‘soul’. The ‘self’ is a term usually used in psychological dissertations and is the subject of several developmental theories. The ‘soul’, however, is a theological/philosophical term that is not subjected to the same pattern of developmental changes. As far as the ‘positivist identifier” and ‘legalistic in its...
