Of

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For an Eros of mathematics: So Edward Frenkel prospects. Contrary to him, I don’t prospect that The Universe may be a simulation. I’d love to elaborate (not now, yet...).

I would agree with him (and Leslie Valiant) that continua from mathematical physics into biology and beyond (e.g., human cognition) can be fruitfully modeled (e.g., cognitive computing—a.k.a “AI”). Yet, fulfillment of the Langlands Program (deep-structural homologies between number theory and harmonic analysis—so far beyond my capabilities of comprehension) would leave us still in wonder about the continua of life. They—the high, wondrous prospectors—are far from fruitfully prospecting even the computationality of a regulatory genome in simple life, let alone a neuroscience of such prospecting (e.g., a computational neuroscience of ordinary curiosity). It’ll never happen.

winter 2014

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March 18:

At the "new in site" space, “new” doesn’t necessarily mean recent. I have years of things I could upload (but I don’t plan to make this site primarily archival). I’ve found closure on some very difficult work that will serve me well, I hope, in coming years. Soon, I’m going to give good attention to the “Topics to be furthered” here. [That home page area was antedated in June.] The “Habermasian studies” area has grown. That will continue some more, but probably cease for a couple of years this spring because I have many other kinds of projects in mind. I’m excited.

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autumn 2013

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December 1:

I’m happily “lost” in some heights. The view is spectacular. I’ll do a good descent soon, I promise—first of the year. Or maybe next week. Anyway, I’m enthralled.

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November 17 | Keeping my promise to update here regularly is good. But developing work can’t be synopted like progress reporting. If side trips postpone arrival at an appointed place, so be it; that’s part of creative process—which is going well! I’m happy in my work. And I’m having fun.

The next update will be December 1—not that I can promise anymore than to continue a love of learning that’s endless for me (sans death); and hope by then I’ve got more to share.

I’ve got many years of free time ahead (I hope). But I do want to share more soon!

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Heidegger's lament and hope for Arrival

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from MIndfulness, 1939, pp.377-8

Heidegger is 50 years of age when he wrote the following, below, ending a retrospective sense of his career—as if anticipating that his life may end soon—and having a large body of work that is to remain unpublished while he’s alive.
Of course, he does live to work decades beyond this Moment in his pathmaking, which will antedate this Moment (especially his work of 1946 to the mid-'50s). But here, 1939, he anticipates that, in any event, he is likely to be misunderstood.

The worst that could happen to these efforts would be the psychological-biographical analysis and explanation, that is, the counter-movement to what is precisely assigned to us, namely, to [annul counter-movement, i.e., to] place everything “psychic-emotional”—however intimately this has to be preserved and enacted—at the service of that aloneness which is demanded by the work that strikes one as strange....

a note on the phenomenality of a text

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A given passage in the transcript of a Heidegger lecture is presumably expressive of what he intended to draw attention to. But that’s not always the case!

As he notes in the second Appendix of Mindfulness, 1939! (p. 373), “In all the lecture-courses, the occasional remarks about contemporary circumstances are factually without relevance....Occasional references are mostly responses to the queries from the audience.”

This is profoundly implicative for “scholarly” narratives that pull isolated, odd passages from various lecture courses and then proffer the lot as a constellation of symptoms.

the question of being now

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Writing at the New York Times on “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” doctoral student Roy Scranton notes that…

...the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?…

Well, the end has no shadow. And the question is thrilling, to me.

Yet, such is the scale of Heidegger’s calling, in the wake of WW-I and -II and the Holocaust and his mid-century position of “planetary thinking.”

This posting, that article, is just a tiny preface (for persons new to the scale of questioning that called philosophy into being, way back.) to a very long trek that will not mainly turn back.

So far to go—for me: happily.


This posting is associated with the “being in Time” area of gedavis.com.

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Framing Heidegger is just “doing business”

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[May 2016 note: This was written as part of the Facebook Project on Heidegger, for readers unfamiliar with Heidegger’s work and perhaps steered away from dwelling with his work because a hermeneutics of gossip feeds some academic careerism. It’s now part of my project on “Heidegger and political times.”]

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Integral to philosophy is reflecting on the basis for your views. Integral to teaching philosophy is evincing reflection on one’s views and situating that relative to good philosophical work. One can have very detailed views that are still invalid because they’re contrary to evidence or violate accepted norms or are motivated by phony interests, such as presuming bad faith by the other (i.e., the other is guilty until proven innocent, but the presumptuous person doesn’t have time to understand complexities that vindicate the other). This happens in the philosophy profession, too.