I ran across the following Ortega y Gasset quote today. I don’t know anything about Gasset, but I liked this quote a lot.
“The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and [...]
The Most Radical Division of Humanity
thinking about myself
I feel the need for a grounding experience. Through the chaos and stress of the semester, with the infectious ideas of a hundred philosophers taking successive residence in my mind, my idea of myself is blurred and forgotten. To teach well, these philosophers must live in my blood. But each one that takes up residence [...]
Learning
I don’t want kids, but this is persuasive.
A Very Important Day
Happy 375th Birthday to Spinoza, and Happy 150th Anniversary to “The Origin of Species.”
For those reading, it may be a couple weeks before anything is updated. There is an especially large number of papers to grade and social events to attend to in the coming weeks. This drains me. But who knows? A stress-induced insomia was responsible for the recent Darwin and philosophy posts, and were otherwise spontaneous. [...]
Reading List for Winter Break
Aristotle’s Politics
Virginia Held, Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory (From Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)
michaels, shape of the signifier
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, The Raft Is Not The Shore
W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk
Benjamin, Fanon, Brecht, Artaud
Darwin’s Principles: Natural Selection
For the record, the two previous posts, this one, and probably a few more are works in progress. I will be jumping around and updating them as I have time to write and as inspiration carries me. Again, I am discussing this ultimately to discuss the “multiple idea-streams” discussed in the Core Principles post of [...]
Darwin’s Principles: Species versus Varieties
I am going to run a short series on Darwinian concepts that I believe are most important to my philosophy. I am applying mechanical principles that Darwin saw amongst species to idea-streams (discussed in the previous post under the notes of #1). Although I have work to do, my hypothesis is that these mechanical principles [...]
Darwin Conference, Revisiting the Core Principles
This past weekend, I continued with my lecture-attendance trend and made my way to Hyde Park for a major Darwin conference at the University of Chicago. As you may know, 2009 is the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species original publication, and the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. For this reason, this year has [...]
My Visit to Hyde Park and the Plan it Creates
I love teaching. It is a worthy challenge to take the philosophers I love and present them to minds near the beginning of a higher education and participate in their reaction. However, one feature of teaching first and second year students is that I am usually unable to discuss those more subtle and sophisticated arguments [...]
