outgrowing Kantism

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This is a placeholder for an unwritten posting that another discussion links to, as a promise to explicate the imperative to “outgrow Kantism.”

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What can one expect from a star?

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updates at the end: Oct. 15, 2015 | Jan. 16, 2016

So, as reported yesterday in The Atlantic, the light-blocking pattern from a recently-noticed star (2011) is now certified as singularly strange:

When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations,

summer 2015

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September 22:

Eventually, I’ll distill all of my ephemeral excuses for not having an update (or not having a worthwhile update) into a discussion of Project development as being—and having been—part of the Project concept, analogously perhaps as Abstract Expressionism sought to hallmark its own processes of composition (e.g., Jackson Pollock), which is more than framing the character of the medium (e.g., loving linguistic relativity).

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close encounters of the sundry kind

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Look at a ruler scaled in millimeters (or think of one). Millimeters are relatively tiny. You can vaguely imagine a kilometer (or a mile, which is 1.6+ kilometers), maybe knowing something in your environs that’s exactly a kilometer away (more or less). But can you represent to yourself a million millimeters? You could have a nebulous visual notion of a lot of millimeters. (Have I done this routine?) But you won’t have an exact representation in mind of a million of them (unless you’re highly autistic). You might be adept at scaling such that you imagine mapping powers of 10 that gives you a feel for the million.

But anyway, a million of those little intervals is visually unimaginable for most persons. Maybe genetic engineering of intelligence will allow a person capacity to literally represent a million millimeters, such that one could look at an alleged kilometer of them (with a sweeping telescopic lens, let’s imagine) within several seconds and say how many millimeters are missing or are in excess. Would one want such a capacity for mental representation? I’ve known persons with so-called “photographic memory,” and I’m told that it’s largely a burden.

fourfolding

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Heidegger’s notion of fourfold (or fourfold figuration) is a conceptual scaffold that can have many analogs for conceptual prospecting—without ontologism or supernaturalization of conceptuality. He originated a flexibility of thinking that could have rigor without metaphysicalism (i.e., without concealing the historicality of metaphysics by ultimizing a metaphysics). His use of Hölderlin’s four (Earth, Sky, Mortality, Divinity) is symbolic of four dimensions of holism, quite apart from Hölderlin’s tropes, which I’ll exhibit.

Articulation of a version and/or working relative to a version can be aptly called fourfolding: applying or appropriating a sense of a tropical set to a given context (or relative to something).

Will Andrew Mitchell show great insight into fourfolding?

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I’ve long enjoyed Heidegger’s Hölderlinian notion of fourfold, which shows through several versions within Heidegger’s work, and I’ve created many varieties of it, over the decades. [The essence of this posting became “fourfolding,” August 3, a bit shorter than this one.]

So, I hope that Andrew Mitchell’s new book, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, is insightful (available any day now, but not yet) because I want good resources for referral to others—and I’d like a brother-in-scholarship.

differences

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One can be post-X, thus non-X, without in any way being anti-X. One can be trans-X without any view about what post-X would be, yet without in any way being anti-X.

For instance, let X = a particular ethnicity or religious life or anthropological lineage. Charging an other with being anti-X because the other’s stance is not yet recognizable as non-X or post-X is pathogenic.