Of all the obituaries I’ve come across on George Carlin, this one by Marty Beckerman in Reason hits the nail on the socio-philosophical head. Bravo!
Postscript: It drives me mad to hear airline staff preface announcements or propositions with “at this time . . .”
One of my favourite writers is Georg Christoph Lichenberg (1742-1799) to whose aphorisms I turn to when I need some light (though not trivial) mental relief. I list some of my favourites below (his ascerbic tone bound to upset several constituencies), culled from his notebooks and translated by the great Reg Hollingdale in Aphorisms published by Penguin (1990).
NOTEBOOK B:
#50 How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.
#57 It is a fault which the merely clever writer has in common with the downright bad one that he commonly fails to illuminate his actual subject but employs it only to show off. We get to know the writer but nothing else . . .
NOTEBOOK F:
#80 There are fanatics without ability, and then they are really dangerous people.
#84 There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
#88 Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams . . .
#97 It is just as easy to dream without sleeping as it is to sleep without dreaming.
#117 A pure heart and a clean shirt. (A pure heart is an excellent thing, and so is a clean shirt.)
#144 Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
NOTEBOOK G:
#30 To err is human in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
NOTEBOOK J:
#19 I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
#30 The true function of the writer in relation to mankind is continually to say what most people think or feel without realizing it. Mediocre writers say only what everyone would have said . . .
#33 Enlightenment in all classes of society really consists in correctly grasping what our essential needs are.
#87 He had learned to play a couple of little pieces on the keyboard of metaphysics.
#92 Most propagators of a faith defend their propositions, not because they are convinced of their truth, but because they once asserted they were true.
NOTEBOOK K:
#74 The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very bad or mediocre ones.
NOTEBOOK L:
#97 Is our conception of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?
This is a trailer to the soon to be released special double issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior
(abstracts will appear shortly on the JMB website)
I’d like to bring your attention to what promises to be a fascinating experiment, the brain-child of Richard Brown who has one of the most entertaining and provocative philosophy blogs around. The on-line consciousness conference pretty much follows the conventional conference format though with some small amendments. The papers are anticipated to be much shorter than usual which I think is a very good thing. I have participated in on-line symposia the modus operandi being an email correspondence circulated to those that signed up – I found this to be very awkward. An on-line consciousness course that I thought very successful was one held by the Center for Consciousness Studies at Arizona – I see that Bernie Baars is again running the phenomenology webcourse.
The only thing missing from these virtual events is the boozing and schmoozing! But, we can usually make up for it if and when we have the occasion to meet in person. Good luck Richard – I think it’s a terrific idea.
A rather belated plug for this book. The follow up is currently being edited.
This is sad, I know – it reminds me of when the “Top of the Pops” actually meant something to us 70s kids! Anyway, I was pleased to learn that 11 of the 13 articles from the themed double issue of Cognitive Systems Research (“Perspectives on Social Cognition“) have appeared in the top 25 most downloaded articles from Cognitive Systems Research over the first quarter. Indeed, 4 papers occupy the top 4 slots.
The Roger Koppl story that I’ve been plugging for a few months has been picked up by the New York Times.
There’s an article in The Australian taking Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to task for his rather crude take on Hayek. Oliver Hartwich does a good job in rebutting Rudd’s views. Of course we expect the vulgarization of first-order thinkers by politicians. There are still many in academic circles who fall into the same stance when it comes to Hayek.
I want to give a plug to the Scribd platform. I have papers listed with several document repositories and none are as flexible, easy to negotiate and as “good looking” as Scribd. It has some nice features including tracking traffic for each document and the ability to leave comments (which I’ve chosen to disable). I would highly recommend Scribd as part of a strategy to get your work out there – subject of course to the usual copyright restrictions. To see an example, check out my Scribd holdings.
Here’s an article in Slate “hot off the press” by Roger Koppl and Radley Balko. It makes for a nice follow up to the earlier Forbes story (and Koppl article) I drew attention to.
manwithoutqualities 