Arbitrary Marks

We’ll see if my post can live up to the title I’ve just crammed into my Wordpress draft. I had a wide-ranging conversation today with a fellow student at the U of C about Empiricism & the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars. I was so disappointed that I didn’t have with me 1) the previous blog post and 2) the text itself. However, since Sellars has come up in several places recently, I made myself come back home to do some skimming and put together the puzzle pieces we were discussing.

Is knowledge “intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all?” This quote comes from a postscript to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and refers to “scientific” knowledge in the original. But social constructivists like Kenneth Bruffee, whose Collaborative Learning I just read, think the point applies to all [...]

Amazon.com just let me know they’re shipping Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience a few days early. Now I have something to replace Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow on my stack of “fun reading” (it is pretty pedantic, even at halfway through, so I’m putting it down).

Say it ain’t so, Ellen! Now that she’s taken over the number one spot for favorite daytime TV talk show host from Oprah, Ellen has decided it’s her turn to spout some feel-good mumbo jumbo from her media pulpit. Today she had Dr. Wayne Dyer on, and he was really wearing Birkenstock sandals with his long sleeve shirt and long pants! Ellen said that she believed in the “vibrations” that were sent out from her changed mental attitude. Or something like that. I switched the channel, even though it’s usually my post-Sanskrit relaxation show.

Sigh. Back to your regularly scheduled philosophy. Which, I might add, could make you feel better, but not because my blog is sending out quantum vibrational Daoist particles.

There is a great new site for finding UU blogs, which it turns out is syndicating Arbitrary Marks.  It’s called “Discover UU” and is modeled after the Huffington Post kind of webzine which aggregates a lot of voices together.
While I’m self-promoting here, the UU Blog Awards are open for nominations and I’d like to continue [...]

A month ago I had Andrew Simone guest blog here and he wrote a couple of posts about violence and truth. His conclusion is at his own blog, as are the links back to the context here.
I will admit great ignorance about Heidegger and Derrida, so I have difficulty following Andrew’s conclusion.

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Tomorrow I start teaching The Nicomachean Ethics for my class at Loyola. In order to get through Mill, Kant and then on to some moderns, I’ve assigned a single chapter per class period.  That means that in a 50-minute period, we’ll be working through twenty-some pages of dense Aristotelian virtue ethics.
I’m excited about it, though, [...]

Longtime readers, especially those who come here through UUpdates, may notice that I haven’t been writing much on specifically Unitarian Universalist topics. There’s a reason for that which I’d like to explore. No, I haven’t decided to return to Christianity or to convert to Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, I’ve just found a church in Chicago [...]

Yes, I learned on an electric typewriter in high school. I admit I tried three times to get this score (I swear I used to be around 120, I know my mom is), moving from 105 to 107 to 109. Now you know why my blog posts are so long!
109 words

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So, this semester is a relatively light one for me. As I’ve mentioned, I’m teaching a class at Loyola University (an ethics core requirement), another at the Newberry Library (which doesn’t start for a while, but is on religion and the mind), and taking another quarter of Sanskrit. Naturally, people think I’m insane when I [...]