Monday, December 7, 2015

autumn 2015


December 7:

I felt this morning so involved with developmental work that writing briefly here would be only about honoring an update promise. “I have so much to say that I have nothing to say.” So, the genuine thing to do is to not write here until I have something of worthwhile length to link from.

I easily get visions of long postings that morph into themes that become part of The Thing that is evolving. Its themology is a genesis, a themogeny. Isn’t that cute?

Monday, November 30, 2015

What do you want for your life?



Live well? Meaning? Fulfillment? Happiness?

All of that, naturally.

Do you live well and/or gain fulfillment better (or more likely) by seeking “happiness”; or do you gain happiness more/better by living well and/or gaining fulfillment? Do you gain fulfillment by living well; or live well by seeking fulfillment?

Monday, November 16, 2015

emancipatory interest as deconstruction



I spent the week trying to show a Heidegger scholar how he misreads (many emails between us). The result has been something that a psychotherapist would understand:

I don’t expect good arguments about another’s misreading (call him M) to be persuasive in the short run. There’s resistance (most easily in terms of discounting my endeavor to read carefully). There is displacement: Heidegger is at fault for being so complex; there must be something diabolical going on. And there is turning away (“I don’t have time for this”)—but not staying away long, I see.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

phenomenality and ontogeny



This is a placeholder for an unwritten posting that another discussion links to, as a promise to explicate the phrase “ontogenic ‘nature’ of things.”

See this: “individuation of the world.”



Saturday, October 24, 2015

outgrowing Kantism



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



Wednesday, October 14, 2015

What can one expect from a star?


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,

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

summer 2015


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).


Saturday, September 12, 2015

close encounters of the sundry kind



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.

Monday, August 3, 2015

fourfolding



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).

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Will Andrew Mitchell show great insight into fourfolding?


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.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

differences



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.

Friday, June 26, 2015

spring 2015


June 16:

happy trails” posted.


June 8: | I thought today: I’m too busy to do an elaborate update.

It’s the story of my life: I’m too busy to want a “play date” soon, but “your” initiative would be welcome. I do not cancel overt commitments. I do wrangle with guilt about not reaching out more than I do. But then, that’s because you’re the same way. We lose touch, for good reason—all the more to share later. So, a full life is bad and good.

Yet, here I am—and here’s a thought (June 8 blog posting): “disclosing mirrors.”


Monday, June 8, 2015

disclosing mirrors



Suppose emergence of points in a space is like lives making their light in a field of Time, such that adjacencies tend to constellate like friends (or distant points network like “Friend”ing), so that connection—Meaning—is like a set of lights seen in line together or composing a region, perception forming a gestalt that can’t be traced to any few, like that Dalmatian.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

questing for intelligibility of evolving situations continues



What keeps me from writing more online this past week:

An acquaintance who recently finished his PhD wants to do research on “intelligibility,” and can I help out? Sure, if he’ll be specific about what he wants to do. I wrote back briefly about my sense of intelligibility—which might have thrown him, since he’s wanting to understand something “transcendental” within a horizon of linguistic relativity. But intelligibility isn’t basically linguistic, e.g., regarding the mathematical plight of theoretical physics trying to grasp quantum foam (then translated into narrative about that).

Friday, March 20, 2015

winter 2015


March 20:

My March 8 web page “a trace of spirited time” resulted from notes that related to several home page postings, Feb. 8 through Feb. 23, that were made into one blog posting: “being a spirited democrat. But the web page was a very different kind of thing, even before I did major revision March 12.

The days following that were occupied with organization of notes from my entire winter, which gained tens of headers and sub-headers, looking “worse” than the table of contents of a Heidegger lecture course—not that I’m being Heideggerian; but there’s nothing like a Heideggerian course outline.


Saturday, January 31, 2015

theorizing research in the humanities



How can conceptual inquiry most fruitfully constellate or cohere qualitative research?—that is: to importantly bridge evidentiary research with cultivation of humanity? I asked this relative to Habermas, but the question belongs generally to philosophy—indeed, belongs to Habermas’s own sense of philosophy in higher education.

The future of philosophy is at least service to cohering interdisciplinary studies, at best in a leading way—to my mind.



Sunday, January 4, 2015

2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold—onefold?



2-fold: enacting the act: Acting is done and witnessable, by others and by oneself. But immanence of self-witnessing as one goes along in activity is essentially different from another’s continuing to witness the activity. Enactivity has a potential recursiveness (responsiveness, adaptability) that belongs solely to intentionality, not observation. Yet, interaction embodies both for each actor. So, a dyad of interaction is immediately a 3-fold of what “we” both share along with our psychally-separate engagements: two selves in a shared event that is also observable by a non-participant, which is less than being a participant in the mirrorplay of interacting time.

So, a heuristic 3-fold is easily associable with the presence of two 2-fold actors. This “lateral” or horizontal 3-fold has no ontic overtones. A “vertical” one might credibly be: “a 3-fold ambiguity of ‘cognitivity’.”