I Am The Anti-Plato

When one wishes to exercise the mind, one should lavish treats on the body.  I’m drinking soda, eating candy bars, and finishing with bourbon and valium tonight.

…Well, I do ascribe to the theory–since college started, I’ve always written papers with various tasty but unhealthy things on hand, but today only the soda has actually happened.  No candybars or valium in sight, and we’ll have to wait until much later to see about the bourbon.

Recently, my soda of choice has been Boylan Black Cherry, which is made with cane sugar.  The first time I tried it, it was like giving crack to an addict, but I’m no longer rocking back and forth when I go into withdrawal.  I highly recommend trying it.

I also highly recommend gawking at the list of colas in Wikipedia’s template for them (at the bottom of the Boylan Bottling Company page).  Andy Warhol said that in America, everyone drinks the same coke, but there appears to be an awful lot of variations.

Dum Dum Da Da

This Saturday, May 16th, I’m going to be getting married. I don’t know if I have a good, or at least short, way to describe what this means to me.  I think it’s enough for now to say that this will be the most important day of my life so far.  Perhaps the most important day ever.

So I’ll confine myself to commenting on how this event affects my blogging. I’ve set this entry to appear as I’m leaving for Raleigh, and leaving without my computer.  Instead I’ve settled on a few books and my kindle, all of which is pleasure reading–Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore being the highlight.  I’ll be gone until the 25^th and I won’t be posting during that time. On the other hand, after May 16th, I’ll consider myself, based on personal experience, to be an expert on any marriage related topic.

Keys to Happiness

These are not new years’ resolutions (I do have one small one) but rather keys to taking good care of your soul and a way of thumbing my nose at the lifehackers out there.  

1. Waste money
2. Be disorganized
3. Sleep in
4. Do a shit job
5. It doesn’t need fixed
6. When it’s the behavior of your loved ones, it really doesn’t need fixed
7. HUUUUUUGS
8. KITTTTTIES

Missive From the Future

I must say that the dinner with Professor Blank, despite the agreeability of the location, was quite awkward.  He insisted on communicating primarily in gutteral sounds, gestures and animal noises.  This amused the children, but even our eldest, at five, realized that this was not how adults conducted a dinner. (–unidentified diarist)

The Semester

I believe I now have a final schedule for this semester.  Since I’m not teaching I take four courses, and the theme of those courses is “careening back into theoretical philosophy.”  Three of the four courses are mathematical or logical in nature.  I’m perhaps most excited about Mark Wilson’s course on the philosophy of mathematics.  It’s primarily historical in nature, and aims to look at Frege in the context of 19th century mathematical developments.  Mark’s spin in the first course was that philosophers have lost track of the wider context of Frege’s work and failed to appreciate the ways in which Frege’s response was a conservative response to those developments.  Recontextualizing Frege could be a neat trick to pull off.  While Mark apparently knows everything there is to know about the history of math in that period, especially the applied math that philosophers largely don’t care for, but I don’t know that the students do.  Even in the cases where I know the math, I know it entirely divorced from its historical development.

I’m doing a proof theory class.  I’ve never studied proof theory before, so I don’t know what to expect–it’s primarily a way to improve my logical chops.  Also, did I mention that it’s with Nuel frickin Belnap? I’m secretly in this course just to improve my count of teachers with wikipedia entries (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7–Nuel’s entry is unreasonably short). Lastly, I’m doing a seminar on truth and paradoxes with Anil Gupta.  I’ve never previously thought about the paradoxes, but I suspect it will be relevant to my general grumbles with the field of semantics.

The fourth course is with Steve Engstrom on Kantian ethics.  I’m rather excited about this course, if for no other reason than that yesterday, Steve laid out a categorization of historical figures that was completely novel to me.  In it, the good guys included all of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant.  What’s more, there was actually a theme that connected all of them.

Side Note: This is as good a time as any to mention that I’ve been doing little status updates in the upper right hand corner of the blog.  They’re for content that’s too short to merit it’s own post (i.e. “I won’t be posting this weekend”).  So if you’re that obsessed with my actions, there’s more for you.  It strikes me that this is one weird thing about the architecture of most blogs: almost any information gets conveyed via posts, but there’s all this cruft that comes with a post: a title, a permalink, comments, possible categories, etc.  So I’ve shunted links that I want to share to a feed in the right hand side of the blog, and status updates to a corner.  If you want to see a genuinely elegant way of structuring information, check out John Gruber’s blog.  Short comments are treated entirely differently from essay length analytical posts.  Sadly, I’m not sure wordpress will let me easily do anything quite like that.

RYAN NORTH’S JOB IS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT SEEMS

Also, I’m bad at using the GIMP.  The above is based on a blank template for qwantz comics, but I didn’t send it to Ryan North.

Newspapers

Though the attendant irony of discovering the quotation in my friend Ed’s shared items on google reader can only be intensified by relaying on my blog, yet I was strongly affected by this:

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.
-Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle (1863)”

I doubt there are many points where my thoughts are similar to Thoreau’s, but he describes my reading habits of late.

If there is one thing in the passage which I most strongly disagree with, it is Thoreau’s valorization of the inward and the private.  If anything, I would have been better speaking with my neighbors on the 14th floor.

Chapel Hill

Along with the good friends that I’d jump out of a moving vehicle to accost, almost everyone is somehow familiar in some way.  I want to go up and greet each of them, but I forget that I’ve been gone for two years while they’ve stayed here.  They are in the same place they’ve been for years, and my presence is unsurprising.

Two Broken Computers

My macbook’s power cord is limping along, disconnecting each time it gets jostled.  That makes two dead power cords in recent years–a pattern I can easily explain.  I sit with my laptop in weird positions, bending the cord where it attaches to the computer.  Or I don’t pay attention, so I stand on the cord or put my chair leg down on it. So that’ll be a billion dollars at the apple store tomorrow.

So then I pulled out my ancient thinkpad, thinking I’d see if the new Ubuntu release made the wireless happy.  It won’t turn on–no noise from the hard drive or anything at all.

Lastly, there’s Amanda’s computer (she’s in NC this weekend).  It only runs windows, which displeases me.  But I’m also worried about striking a trifecta…

Bad Scholar!

Where is my hunched back when I need it?

I’m reading Clifford Geertz on ‘thick description’ because I’m interested in the notion of ‘thick concepts’ as they have been discussed by ethicists since Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Thick concepts are a magical knockout blow against non-cognitivism.  Williams got the concept from Geertz, who in turn was influenced by Gilbert Ryle’s work.

Only Williams didn’t.  Or at least, Geertz doesn’t appear in the index of the book, nor in the endnotes.  How the hell did I come up with the idea that these two authors are related? On the basis of testimony, Jonathan Dancy says Williams got the notion from Geertz, but I read Dancy on the subject after I’d picked up Geertz.  Best I can do is this rather unspecific footnote in the SEP.  Seems like everyone heard somewhere that Williams was on about Geertz, but no one ever actually had any evidence for that.

One suspects that Ryle was involved, since Williams and Ryle crossed paths at Oxford back in the good old days.  Even with Ryle’s diminishing influence later on, Williams was probably familiar with his ideas.

It’s probably not important that I be able to connect Williams to Geertz via direct citation, but it’s irksome not to remember whether there is a concrete link.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure I got the idea from a list that Scott Eric Kaufman made.

End of the Year

I’m hereby declaring victory over the semester. Unlike Shawn, I lack a direct entitlement to do this, but I fear I’ll never have the opportunity if I don’t seize it now. In fact, I’ll be working on finishing up several papers over the course of the summer. I’m in the middle of a paper for Kieran about silencing, and more generally the issue of whether reasons ever change their valence between situations. After that, there will be other papers which I won’t enumerate.

At the moment, I still don’t know what I’d like to focus on. To illustrate the range of topics I’m still actively interested in, I’ll merely cite ethics and the philosophy of Carnap. Perhaps having wrestled with a few paper ideas, I’ll be in a better place to decide by the end of the summer. If all goes well, I’ll start preparing for a prospectus (dissertation proposal) in the spring of next year.

Hiatus

I have another two weeks of class or so, during which I’m going to be quite busy, I suppose.  At the same time, I’m rather tired of blogging.  So don’t expect me back until around the 20th.

Sartorial Mores

Several academic bloggers are really irked about Erik Jensen’s call for better attire among the professoriat. They’re annoyed because it’s a really stupid article. Brad DeLong has the best reaction: he analyzes the effect of wearing a tie on different audiences. Tyler Cowen has remarks about dressing up as a form of signaling as well. My personal theory is that wearing a tie is probably a good thing for the people who think it is a good thing. If you’ve internalized the norms to the extent that you feel slovenly without your tie, you should wear it.

Me? I’m busy browsing expensive ties on the internet. There’s a $54 banana republic tie that I like, but that’s the cheap one. Moving into $100 territory, I think my favorites are the Ermenegildo Zegnas. Needless to say, I wear a tie perhaps twice a year (and I’m a grad student, so $100 is a lot of money).

This guy reversed his decision to support Clinton and endorsed Obama. But what I’m really struck by is that he’s wearing a nice tie.

Oh How Snobbery Beckons…

Pittsburgh is not quite the coolest city in the world, but I do quite like it despite its various drawbacks. After reading a NYTimes article on the $20,000 cup of coffee, I was surprised to find out that there’s a working Clover coffeemaker in Pittsburgh, housed at the 21st street coffee and tea shop. The Clover isn’t actually the $20,000 machine, but brews a single cup of coffee to order with exactly specifiable temperature between 180 and 210°. A pilgrimage is certainly in order.

Political Indecision

This reveals a great deal more anti-intellectualism than I’m comfortable with, but I’ve been coasting on Republican incompetence these past 5 years.  So long as they’re fucking everything up, there’s a whole lot of issues I don’t have to think about through 2008.  So long as they keep fielding candidates who believe in torture, senseless war, and violating civil liberties, I know where my vote goes, and I know that there’s a lot of issues that I can avoid.

New Year’s Resolution: Drink More

Tea, of course.  That cabinet is painfully full.  On a more serious note, I also resolve to stop making any political or goofy posts here (philosophy related things are ok) until I have, in my hand, a paper copy of my perception paper for Anil’s course.  Judging from the way things have gone with all previous papers I have submitted to anyone, ever, that will be 10:57 AM on Thursday the 10th.  I will have printed the paper from the 14th floor of the cathedral and rushed downstairs to grab the paper before giving my first lecture to a bunch of unfortunate logic students.

Halloween

If you want a scary movie that’s also good, I recommend Jacob’s Ladder.

Carbon Offsets

I read an interesting article on carbon offsets from the climate progress blog, the upshot of which is that they’re not a good idea the way they’re working now. I’ve spent a bit of idle contemplation thinking about carbon offsets, since I still drive too much, etc, so this article will preserve a sort of stasis.

Mean Things Said While Grading

“Wow, this is perhaps the stupidest thing a person could say while still getting the question right.”
(I swear I’m not always like this).

Treating Myself

I’m too busy to produce a real post, but I’ll note that in the future, all awkward realizations will come via the corporations that manage the copious data we produce during our everyday affairs. Today Amazon presented me with one such realization with a sidebar link:

“Treat Yourself

Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes“

I’ve heard very good things about Dretske’s book, and do intend to read it in due time. Nonetheless, I’m disturbed by the suggestion that my natural way of treating myself would be to purchase this book.