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This post is part of a new series, Friday images, in which I post a photograph I’ve taken during the week which may or may not have philosphical relevance.
And now, for something completely different:
Mondays I’ll try to post something related to politics, religion or gender, several topics that recur here frequently. On Wednesdays I’ll post a passage from a paper or book I’ve read, perhaps with a bit of commentary (or perhaps not). Fridays I’ll post an image from my Flickr photostream. And on Sundays I’ll roundup the links I’ve been collecting on del.icio.us during the past week.
The aim is that substantial philosophical posts will occur on Tuesdays, Thursdays, or in connection to one of those other posts. However, I won’t be aiming primarily for long posts with in-depth arguments. I’ve decided this for a few reasons:
1. I’d rather develop my arguments with my fellow classmates first. Perhaps then I’ll toss them out here, but my blog has acted as an in-between academic community and no longer needs to serve that primary function. At least for a while.
2. If anything, I’ll find myself having less time to think about the news and more about philosophical topics–having this as a (granted, still academically slanted) outlet for those other ideas will act as a “rounding out” effect.
3. To be honest, although some philosophy bloggers do spend a lot of time–or at least seem to spend substantial time–developing arguments, defending them and amending them online, I doubt that it’s the best use of my time as I begin my PhD. I’d much rather take my philosophical writing offline and develop it into a paper I can publish. Eventually, perhaps, offline and paper-development won’t be contradictory, so that I can develop online ideas. But at first, I think it’s the best strategy.
So there you have it, folks. The schedule for the fall, which I’ll start this Friday with an “image of the week.”
Here’s what I’ll be working on this semester:
If I have any free time (ha!) I may try to do some reading with Stephen Phillips and another graduate student also studying Indian philosophy. The reading we’ll do in my Sanskrit class (eventually) is the Ramayana, which, while interesting, isn’t what I’m aiming to study.
I’ve also discovered the amazing UT Austin rec center is directly across the street (okay, diagonally) from the philosophy building. This semester should see a leaner ck emerge from daily bikes to campus, coupled with swimming and weights! Er, if not leaner, more fit (I could hardly get more thin).
At this point, I haven’t decided what to do with Arbitrary Marks. I still want to keep it as a sort of writing journal, but I may be more selective about how much “free thinking” I do here. I have some ideas in mind, though, for a blog schedule that will augment my studies and prove enjoyable for those of you who pop by, so stay tuned.
As the school year starts (in two days), I’ve been reading a few books and articles on the subject of Indian philosophy as well as India in general. The first book is Jonardon Ganeri’s Philosophy in Classical India, which is an overview of some of the major strands of thought, with a particular focus on rationality and the dialectic environment in which ontological and epistemological arguments were formed. I’ll have more to say on his discussion of Jains at the end of this post.
The second book is a work of fiction by one of my favorite authors, Salman Rushdie: The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I have enjoyed every book by Rushdie that I’ve picked up–he fits nicely into my favorite constellation of authors which includes Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jeanette Winterson and Jorge Luis Borges. Yes, I’m a magical realism qua historical fiction fiend. Rushdie’s book is my “plane” book, which I’m reading on trips back and forth to Chicago, primarily. Accompanying that book is Sunil Khilnani’s 1997 book, The Idea of India. Granted, it’s substantially dated, but the writing is fantastic and I find India’s democratic struggles an instructive example for the United States.
Finally, I just read the draft of an article by Jay Garfield and Nalini Bushan at Smith College–it appeared in my RSS feed from the Online Papers in Philosophy link, so I’m not certain whether it’s been accepted somewhere or is being submitted. However, it is entitled “Can Indian Philosophy Be Written in English? A Conversation with Daya Krishna” and is a nice fit with the two books I mention immediately above. Read the rest of this entry »
The photographs I took throughout the conference are at my Flickr set, here. I took sparingly few, compared to most events I photograph, in part because I was giving my attention to the content rather than framing it aesthetically. Further, my Alpha 100 has a very loud shutter click, and I really didn’t want to distract others (as it was, I got a few curious looks when I started snapping pics of Ernest Sosa–no, I wasn’t that star struck–I volunteered to do this!)
Anyway, the conference was good, although tiring. I don’t have background in all of the topics covered, and certainly not in the depth that a few sessions required. I didn’t go to all of them, either, because injured muscles from the move were giving me some trouble by the end of the week. However, I felt like it was a good overview of some methodological issues I’ll want to keep an eye on, and also an introduction to the sociology of doing philosophy, e.g., certain standard forms of interaction, terminology and manners of presentation.
Image: E Sosa outlining his theory of how we are justified in using intuition in philosophy. He’s explaining the difference between experiences and seemings, the latter which involve an attraction to assent.
One of the questions that’s baffled me (quietly) during my time studying analytic philosophy is why so many otherwise sane individuals seem to think abstract objects exist. During the past week, I’ve heard more people say “Well, I don’t know what x is”, or “I don’t know what you mean by x”, so I’ll just go out on a limb and say that I don’t really get what people mean when they say things like propositions, relations and properties “exist.”
At least from my broadly physicalist/functionalist standpoint (I say “broadly” because I haven’t pinned down all the implications yet, nor have I quite discerned the connections with various strands of Indian philosophy), a proposition cannot exist. It doesn’t have any causal implications, isn’t spatio-temporal, so when you say it “exists”, I’m baffled.
And yet a substantial chunk of analytic philosophy is about these abstract objects. At least from where I stand, they seem to be a useful heuristic, a way of organizing talk about meanings and referents, but much of the (to my naive mind) unnecessary complexities of philosophy arise when we reify them as some kind of essential thing.
Richard Tieszen’s article “Consciousness of Abstract Objects” in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is one I’ve started, then put down, then started again numerous times. I haven’t quite gotten the theoretical underpinnings of the Incompleteness Theorem necessary to evaluate that section. But I do think there’s an interesting question of abstraction going on here, and one that perhaps may be generalizeable to other areas, such as perception. (When we perceive something blue, and say “x is blue”, aren’t we abstracting from the momentary existence of the thing to the existence of a type?) Tieszen is attempting to bring together a phenomenological and scientific account of how we can have intentional states towards abstract objects. They seem to be necessary for scientific and mathematic work, after all, so the physicalist should be interested in them.
Nothing of more substance tonight, other than to note that I’m excited about the start of the school year, which will involve Sanskrit, Wittgenstein and Kripke, an introductory seminar (ranging over Frege, Russell, phil mind stuff–all of which should help me with the above), sitting in on Indian Philosophy, and being a TA in some yet-to-be-assigned course. Radical claims will come later in the semester, when I have enough balls argumentation to back them up.
Arbitrary Chatter:
jacqueline: We just dropped our daughter off at... Colin Caret: Jeong, that’s why I... Jeong: Hi Colin, I just wrote something in your... Colin Caret: Well that failed miserably. Try... Colin Caret: I feel like we are verging on some...